Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It’s not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry’s decision doesn’t seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.
The clock is a gift from Dumbledore. On the one hand, it could be recording. On the other hand it could be transmitting. On the gripping hand, Dumbledore has a Time Turner.
If Dumbledore wanted to assure that any time he was the best pressure-release for a prophesy that pressure was released as easily and discretely as possible and less likely to be overheard, he would want to make it easy for the Prophesy Force to get that information to him.
So he gives her a clock and tells her to ask it for the time each time she wakes up in the middle of the night. The clock tells Dumbledore. Dumbledore gets invisible. Then it’s just a jump to the left and he receives any prophesy intended for him.
No. It’s just a clock. But it is there, so Dumbledore knows at which point in time he should jump back to (given the option of course) {all this is an interpretation of loserthree’s post}
I meant, if whenever she queries the clock for the time, Dumbledore will have arrived already, then there was no need for him to enchant the clock further to respond to the query—he could just answer it himself, since he’s already there.
That might explain the first sentence of Albus Dumbledore’s aftermath in Chapter 63: “It might have been only fifty-seven seconds before breakfast ended and he might have needed four twists of his Time-Turner, but in the end, Albus Dumbledore did make it.”
Or perhaps not, since there would presumably be more than 4 hours between 2am (when Trelawny heard the prophecy) and the end of breakfast.
Hmm. On first reading, I just took the premonitions as being an indicator of how close we are to the apocalypse, not necessarily being caused by Harry’s resolution. And yet you’re right; both the premonitions we’ve seen so far immediately followed Harry’s resolving something.
The first resolution was Harry saying that he would destroy Azkaban, whether it meant ruling Britain or summoning arcane magics to blow the building up, and that those who support Azkaban are the villains.
This resolution was Harry saying that if his war caused a single death, he would start killing villains as fast as possible.
So if these are all related, I guess all Quirrell needs to do is make Harry remember both those resolutions after someone dies and while he’s in his Dark Side, and then sit back and watch as Harry exterminates 90% of the British population.
Well, no, if we’re using the trial votes as the gauge, it’s probably like 70/30? Maybe? But I was thinking of not only those who would sentence Hermione to Azkaban, but all those who support Azkaban in general, which is surely a significantly higher percentage.
I wasn’t referring to the actual vote, but rather to the reaction to Harry’s speech.
Some of the members of the Wizengamot were looking abashed at the Boy-Who-Lived’s admonition, and a few others were nodding violently to the old wizard’s words. But they were too few. Harry could see it. They were too few.
And that’s just those who agree that Children shouldn’t be exposed to dementors, and it seems to be like it’s <20%. It’s probably only around .1% of the population who don’t want anyone of any age given to the Dead Things.
Eliezer seems to be taking a page from Alicorn’s book. In Luminosity Alice is plagued by differing visions as Bella constantly changes her mind about her future, and then the actual future snaps into place when a final choice is made.
Secondary source: I have seen the first 3 films, and Alice explicitly (and repeatedly, I think) states that “a decision has been made” when she has a vision. That decision needn’t be made by Bella specifically though.
Essentially? It has to happen at some point along the timeline, and whatever engine runs magic finds it simplest to give visions simultaneous to the decisions that cause them. (Or at least, contribute in some major way to them.)
Take the present state of the universe and use an imperfect tool to extrapolate likely future outcomes. Changing your mind causes the present state to shift towards predicting a certain future outcome more.
The only weird thing is that you can actually fool people by pretending. The prediction mechanism has to have some very specific flaws for that to work.
If you assume both free will and prescience, it’s natural. You cannot see the consequences of a decision that has not yet been made, but once it has been, then you can view it. Think of the visions in Dune, as one of the better-known examples—the visions that the seers see are infinite branches, not single facts, and the branch points are their decisions. (The analogy is not perfect—in Dune, the decisions of non-seers are taken as given—but I hope the idea is clear).
Free will as opposing “determinism” is a confused concept according to Eliezer’s opinion, and also according to mine—see Thou Art Physics
Basic points is that we’re part of the physical world—if free will means anything, it must mean the ability of our current physical state to determine our decisions. “Libertarian free-will” in the sense of people making decision that can’t be predicted from the current state; that’s inevitably just randomness, not anything that has to do with people’s character traits or moralities or cognitive-processes—nothing that is traditionally labelled “free will”.
But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.
So maybe souls are immune to the normal patterns of time and causality, and a decision from the soul has special properties for prophecy. Only when all involved souls have chosen does the timestream become fixed enough for prophecies. I’m not sure what that means for time turners. Maybe people who have gone back are out of contact with their souls.
This would cost the story applicability, but it is a story, not a treatise.
But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.
It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:
the human mind is very compressible, so it’s not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)
Mere dualism isn’t enough to save libertarian free will. To the extent your decision is characteristic of you it is at least in principle predictable, at least probabilistically. The non-predictable component of your decision process is by necessity not even in principle distinguishable from that of Gandhi or Hitler in any way. So how can you call the result of the non-predictable component deciding with your free will?
If you assume both free will and prescience, it’s natural.
You mean libertarian free will, which already doesn’t make sense all by itself, and even then the combination doesn’t make sense for additional reasons, starting with that seeing anything would usually require that only main characters have free will.
Now that is a phrase I’ve never heard before. I follow neither the term nor the argument, and would appreciate elaboration.
Edit: And to address the one point I do follow, someone’s decision has to be the tipping point. Again, narrativium being what it is, that someone is likely to be a main character.
The problem is you stated “if you assume both free will and...” as though free will is a thing that exists.
See free will on the wiki. (This is supposed to be a kind of do-it-yourself exercise; the page I linked has spoiler alerts you might want to pay attention to.)
So my promised followup. In order for the world not to display absolute determinism(of the sort where you can project infinitely far ahead given sufficient computing power and knowledge of world-state), then there needs to be a point at which new information is added. Alternately, the limits on the computing power of the Source of Magic’s Precognition Engine impose a horizon on predictions. In the former case, some new information is added to the system—likely in the form of a quantum world-choice—that is sufficient to allow a prophecy to be made. In the latter case, the choice of timing is pure coincidence, which makes it very unlikely. It’s also possible that the Source simply cannot access all possible data, but only things that have explicitly been formed into conscious thoughts—not sure how accurate predictions could be without sufficient access to the physical world, but perhaps “macroscopic and consciousness” is sufficient? IDK.
In any case, “free will” is a convenient shorthand for the idea I was getting at, which people seem to have understood, but it is not strictly accurate. I think my thought process was quite fuzzy, and you’ve sharpened it significantly, for which i thank you.
It’s also possible that the Source simply cannot access all possible data, but only things that have explicitly been formed into conscious thoughts
I’d say partial Transfiguration is pretty strong evidence that the Source of Magic is paying very close attention to wizards’ conscious thoughts, whatever else its data-gathering abilities.
I had understood the intention of the free will solution here to be normalizing: i.e. we should end with the result that we have free will in every sense that’s important to us. In other words, we can make decisions from our own character and reasoning, we are responsible for those decisions, etc. etc.
If all that’s true, if free will is no less important and meaningful for all the findings of natural science, then why wouldn’t it likewise be important for seers and prophecy?
If all that’s true, if free will is no less important and meaningful for all the findings of natural science, then why wouldn’t it likewise be important for seers and prophecy?
Or to put it another way, your ominous decision can cause a prophecy at any time, past or future, so why should the prophecy happen soon after the decision?
My understanding would be that the future is in flux—until Harry made that resolution, he could have not made that resolution, but once the decision was made, the future switched over to the one that causes as those prophesies.
It occurred to me that I didn’t notice a prior omnious resolution each time Sybil Trelowney makes a prediction. Mayhaps some resolutions happened off-stage. It might be interesting to try and guess what resolution could have triggered each prediction?
Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It’s not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry’s decision doesn’t seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.
The clock is a gift from Dumbledore. On the one hand, it could be recording. On the other hand it could be transmitting. On the gripping hand, Dumbledore has a Time Turner.
If Dumbledore wanted to assure that any time he was the best pressure-release for a prophesy that pressure was released as easily and discretely as possible and less likely to be overheard, he would want to make it easy for the Prophesy Force to get that information to him.
So he gives her a clock and tells her to ask it for the time each time she wakes up in the middle of the night. The clock tells Dumbledore. Dumbledore gets invisible. Then it’s just a jump to the left and he receives any prophesy intended for him.
That’s so obvious in retrospect, and Dumbledore is so meddling, that now I don’t think he’s allowed not to have thought of that.
So when the clock responds to her question, that’s actually invisible Dumbledore?
No. It’s just a clock. But it is there, so Dumbledore knows at which point in time he should jump back to (given the option of course) {all this is an interpretation of loserthree’s post}
I meant, if whenever she queries the clock for the time, Dumbledore will have arrived already, then there was no need for him to enchant the clock further to respond to the query—he could just answer it himself, since he’s already there.
That may fall under the don’t-mess-with-time injunction. Easier to just be silent and let the clock do its job.
That might explain the first sentence of Albus Dumbledore’s aftermath in Chapter 63: “It might have been only fifty-seven seconds before breakfast ended and he might have needed four twists of his Time-Turner, but in the end, Albus Dumbledore did make it.”
Or perhaps not, since there would presumably be more than 4 hours between 2am (when Trelawny heard the prophecy) and the end of breakfast.
it looks like it’s saying that Dumbledore used four twists of his time-turner to make it to breakfast.
Hmm. On first reading, I just took the premonitions as being an indicator of how close we are to the apocalypse, not necessarily being caused by Harry’s resolution. And yet you’re right; both the premonitions we’ve seen so far immediately followed Harry’s resolving something.
The first resolution was Harry saying that he would destroy Azkaban, whether it meant ruling Britain or summoning arcane magics to blow the building up, and that those who support Azkaban are the villains.
This resolution was Harry saying that if his war caused a single death, he would start killing villains as fast as possible.
So if these are all related, I guess all Quirrell needs to do is make Harry remember both those resolutions after someone dies and while he’s in his Dark Side, and then sit back and watch as Harry exterminates 90% of the British population.
More like 60%, I think.
Never mind, the “far too few” comment Harry makes during the trial means you’re likely correct.
Well, no, if we’re using the trial votes as the gauge, it’s probably like 70/30? Maybe? But I was thinking of not only those who would sentence Hermione to Azkaban, but all those who support Azkaban in general, which is surely a significantly higher percentage.
I wasn’t referring to the actual vote, but rather to the reaction to Harry’s speech.
And that’s just those who agree that Children shouldn’t be exposed to dementors, and it seems to be like it’s <20%. It’s probably only around .1% of the population who don’t want anyone of any age given to the Dead Things.
Eliezer seems to be taking a page from Alicorn’s book. In Luminosity Alice is plagued by differing visions as Bella constantly changes her mind about her future, and then the actual future snaps into place when a final choice is made.
That’s how it is in the canon Twilight (Eclipse).
Try not to take this as me being a big snobby snob, but did you actually read them?
Secondary source: I have seen the first 3 films, and Alice explicitly (and repeatedly, I think) states that “a decision has been made” when she has a vision. That decision needn’t be made by Bella specifically though.
Weirdly enough, I have read both the canon and the Alicorn’s fanfic.
And I already remarked in the Luminosity thread that that makes no sense. It makes even less sense in a universe with time turners.
Essentially? It has to happen at some point along the timeline, and whatever engine runs magic finds it simplest to give visions simultaneous to the decisions that cause them. (Or at least, contribute in some major way to them.)
Or, in other words, enforced narrative causality.
Take the present state of the universe and use an imperfect tool to extrapolate likely future outcomes. Changing your mind causes the present state to shift towards predicting a certain future outcome more.
The only weird thing is that you can actually fool people by pretending. The prediction mechanism has to have some very specific flaws for that to work.
If you assume both free will and prescience, it’s natural. You cannot see the consequences of a decision that has not yet been made, but once it has been, then you can view it. Think of the visions in Dune, as one of the better-known examples—the visions that the seers see are infinite branches, not single facts, and the branch points are their decisions. (The analogy is not perfect—in Dune, the decisions of non-seers are taken as given—but I hope the idea is clear).
Free will as opposing “determinism” is a confused concept according to Eliezer’s opinion, and also according to mine—see Thou Art Physics
Basic points is that we’re part of the physical world—if free will means anything, it must mean the ability of our current physical state to determine our decisions. “Libertarian free-will” in the sense of people making decision that can’t be predicted from the current state; that’s inevitably just randomness, not anything that has to do with people’s character traits or moralities or cognitive-processes—nothing that is traditionally labelled “free will”.
But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.
So maybe souls are immune to the normal patterns of time and causality, and a decision from the soul has special properties for prophecy. Only when all involved souls have chosen does the timestream become fixed enough for prophecies. I’m not sure what that means for time turners. Maybe people who have gone back are out of contact with their souls.
This would cost the story applicability, but it is a story, not a treatise.
It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:
the human mind is very compressible, so it’s not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)
Or the obvious one: space is compressed using the same method as every other bigger-on-the-inside object wizards use everywhere all the time.
Beetle-sized (of the beautifully blue sort), at least.
Note also that the body the mind wears apparently (according to quirrel) does have an impact on the mind.
Mere dualism isn’t enough to save libertarian free will. To the extent your decision is characteristic of you it is at least in principle predictable, at least probabilistically. The non-predictable component of your decision process is by necessity not even in principle distinguishable from that of Gandhi or Hitler in any way. So how can you call the result of the non-predictable component deciding with your free will?
You mean libertarian free will, which already doesn’t make sense all by itself, and even then the combination doesn’t make sense for additional reasons, starting with that seeing anything would usually require that only main characters have free will.
Now that is a phrase I’ve never heard before. I follow neither the term nor the argument, and would appreciate elaboration.
Edit: And to address the one point I do follow, someone’s decision has to be the tipping point. Again, narrativium being what it is, that someone is likely to be a main character.
The problem is you stated “if you assume both free will and...” as though free will is a thing that exists.
See free will on the wiki. (This is supposed to be a kind of do-it-yourself exercise; the page I linked has spoiler alerts you might want to pay attention to.)
So my promised followup. In order for the world not to display absolute determinism(of the sort where you can project infinitely far ahead given sufficient computing power and knowledge of world-state), then there needs to be a point at which new information is added. Alternately, the limits on the computing power of the Source of Magic’s Precognition Engine impose a horizon on predictions. In the former case, some new information is added to the system—likely in the form of a quantum world-choice—that is sufficient to allow a prophecy to be made. In the latter case, the choice of timing is pure coincidence, which makes it very unlikely. It’s also possible that the Source simply cannot access all possible data, but only things that have explicitly been formed into conscious thoughts—not sure how accurate predictions could be without sufficient access to the physical world, but perhaps “macroscopic and consciousness” is sufficient? IDK.
In any case, “free will” is a convenient shorthand for the idea I was getting at, which people seem to have understood, but it is not strictly accurate. I think my thought process was quite fuzzy, and you’ve sharpened it significantly, for which i thank you.
I’d say partial Transfiguration is pretty strong evidence that the Source of Magic is paying very close attention to wizards’ conscious thoughts, whatever else its data-gathering abilities.
Oh, is that all. Yes, free will is a meaningless term...unless you have time travel and/or prescience, in which case it suddenly becomes meaningful.
Edit: Upon further consideration, I’m not sure that’s true. I have to run to work, but I’ll ponder this and update later.
Edit 2: See http://lesswrong.com/lw/bto/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6ekb
I agree with your second thought. Those two don’t qualitatively change the meaningfulness of the term.
I had understood the intention of the free will solution here to be normalizing: i.e. we should end with the result that we have free will in every sense that’s important to us. In other words, we can make decisions from our own character and reasoning, we are responsible for those decisions, etc. etc.
If all that’s true, if free will is no less important and meaningful for all the findings of natural science, then why wouldn’t it likewise be important for seers and prophecy?
Isn’t that what my comment claims?
If so, we have no disagreement.
Or to put it another way, your ominous decision can cause a prophecy at any time, past or future, so why should the prophecy happen soon after the decision?
My understanding would be that the future is in flux—until Harry made that resolution, he could have not made that resolution, but once the decision was made, the future switched over to the one that causes as those prophesies.
It occurred to me that I didn’t notice a prior omnious resolution each time Sybil Trelowney makes a prediction. Mayhaps some resolutions happened off-stage. It might be interesting to try and guess what resolution could have triggered each prediction?
How many previous Trelawney predictions have there been?