Viruses are technically considered non-living, and if you happen to have a pet with a cold, there may well be more viruses in the room when you enter it the second time, even though nothing has left or entered the room. I know that’s a triviality, but some part of my mind took this as a challenge.
More Ways:
Place 100 strings into a large vat of sugar solution. Come back to discover that 100 rock candies have formed. Want to argue that the number of rock candies will equal the number of strings? Okay, make the strings really brittle in multiple places so as the rock candies grow heavier, they break off into smaller chunks.
Balance a delicate lego construction on an unstable surface with a loud woofer in the room. That’s likely to turn from 1 lego object into hundreds of lego objects.
You could disguise a factory inside the room and have it turn a bucket of dense material into many less dense and therefore much larger objects, making the room appear empty at first and full later on. It could produce balloons from a block of latex for instance.
Place a set of ice cubes in a bucket. Twelve ice cubs becomes one bucket of water. Fifty ice sculptures can become one indoor pool.
Using concepts like reproduction, deconstruction, production, liquefying and crystallization, how much might one be able to really confuse a person with pranks designed to make it appear as though objects have entered or left a room?
I haven’t read HPMoR, and I certainly haven’t read the specific scene(s) in question, but inferring from what I expect Eliezer would have wanted to write in such a situation, I’m going with the prior assumption that that’s not at all what he meant.
Consider this scenario for perspective:
There are ten objects in an otherwise utterly empty, blank cubic room with while walls and a doorknob to open a panel of one wall. You can see every object from every point in the room (unless you’re really tiny and hide behind one of the objects). You know exactly which objects there are, what they are, and what they do. You count them. There are nine objects. What?! You double-check. You still know all the ten objects, and all twelve of them are still there. They add up to twelve when counted. Wait, what’s that? Weren’t there ten at first? No, you’re sure, you just counted them, you’re positive all objects are there, and there are six of them. Oh well, let’s just leave and do something more productive.
Basically, it’s not about the number of objects being different. It’s that the laws of counting themselves stop functioning altogether, such that the very same objects add up to a different amount of objects each time they are counted. It’s a ridiculous sillyness of logical impossibility.
Increasing objects without adding:
Viruses are technically considered non-living, and if you happen to have a pet with a cold, there may well be more viruses in the room when you enter it the second time, even though nothing has left or entered the room. I know that’s a triviality, but some part of my mind took this as a challenge.
More Ways:
Place 100 strings into a large vat of sugar solution. Come back to discover that 100 rock candies have formed. Want to argue that the number of rock candies will equal the number of strings? Okay, make the strings really brittle in multiple places so as the rock candies grow heavier, they break off into smaller chunks.
Balance a delicate lego construction on an unstable surface with a loud woofer in the room. That’s likely to turn from 1 lego object into hundreds of lego objects.
You could disguise a factory inside the room and have it turn a bucket of dense material into many less dense and therefore much larger objects, making the room appear empty at first and full later on. It could produce balloons from a block of latex for instance.
Place a set of ice cubes in a bucket. Twelve ice cubs becomes one bucket of water. Fifty ice sculptures can become one indoor pool.
Using concepts like reproduction, deconstruction, production, liquefying and crystallization, how much might one be able to really confuse a person with pranks designed to make it appear as though objects have entered or left a room?
I haven’t read HPMoR, and I certainly haven’t read the specific scene(s) in question, but inferring from what I expect Eliezer would have wanted to write in such a situation, I’m going with the prior assumption that that’s not at all what he meant.
Consider this scenario for perspective:
There are ten objects in an otherwise utterly empty, blank cubic room with while walls and a doorknob to open a panel of one wall. You can see every object from every point in the room (unless you’re really tiny and hide behind one of the objects). You know exactly which objects there are, what they are, and what they do. You count them. There are nine objects. What?! You double-check. You still know all the ten objects, and all twelve of them are still there. They add up to twelve when counted. Wait, what’s that? Weren’t there ten at first? No, you’re sure, you just counted them, you’re positive all objects are there, and there are six of them. Oh well, let’s just leave and do something more productive.
Basically, it’s not about the number of objects being different. It’s that the laws of counting themselves stop functioning altogether, such that the very same objects add up to a different amount of objects each time they are counted. It’s a ridiculous sillyness of logical impossibility.
this is what was intended, but my first (and second and third) guess would be my brain has been compromised, not that reality has broken.
Same here. On the third attempt, I’d just tell myself “OK, I clearly need to go to bed now.”