This is somewhat likely, but in canon that’s a quotation from a fairy tale. Given the apparent attitude the Peverells had towards Death in MoR, I doubt things played out the same way in MoR as in The Tale of the Three Brothers, whether or not that’s how it happened in canon.
DanielH
Karma: 82
Dumbledore merely asked to borrow the cloak from James:
“You. You have guessed, I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. It explained much of his undetected wrongdoing at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I could not resist, could not help taking a closer look. . . . It was a Cloak the likes of which I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every respect . . . and then your father died, and I had two Hallows at last, all to myself!”
In canon, Harry has been without the Cloak, after taking possession of it, for much longer than three days: in Philosopher’s Stone, he left it at the top of the Astronomy Tower after giving Norbert to Charlie (I wonder if Norbert will appear in MoR...), and in Prizoner of Azkaban he left it in the Honeydukes secret passage. If being without the Cloak for a few days is enough to die, Harry should have died in his first or third year. If James hadn’t died, Dumbledore would only have been borrowing the Cloak, and he returned it to Harry at close to the first opportunity. It’s unclear, therefore, if he would have owned the Cloak for purposes of this theory, but if so I think he should have died well before he did.
I think I heard a Catholic person use those exact words seriously less than a month ago, about this very subject, but I might not remember correctly.
For those who are here and are unfamiliar with canon, I believe BT_Uytya meant this YouTube clip, or a similar one like it; as far as I know, none of them are authorized by Warner Bros. or J.K. Rowling, but may be short enough to qualify as fair use in many jurisdictions. I am not a lawyer.
That would, aside from being completely impossible in various ways, actually answer a few questions. Such as how the Defense Professor (don’t want to assign him an actual name when talking about who he might be) is able to do intricate and powerful magic in any body he wears. It would be, to use his word, inefficient to just be that powerful and that in control of his magic. We already know, from Tonks-as-Susan, that a Metamorphmagus can do amazing magic while Metamorphed (probably because they have no “natural” form and are equally comfortable with any humanoid body); this makes it likely that the Defense Professor is a Metamorphmagus somehow. Of course, that doesn’t explain why he needs to “rest”, which other theories do, so we’d need both this and a completely separate explanation of the resting, which are less probably by conjunction.
Also, on an out-of-world note, I doubt Eliezer Yudkowsky would have made the particular comment above if the Defense Professor were a Metamorphmagus; he would be more likely to say Sprout, McGonagall, or Hannah Abbott.
I’m not sure about the disappearing of Hermione’s body. I believe that Dumbledore believes that Harry did not take Hermione’s body. I’m not sure if I agree with that—Harry didn’t seem too worried about its disappearance despite taking the five Rs as his stages of grief—but I doubt he’d take Voldemort stealing the body as evidence that Harry wants to resurrect her.
It does seem that a large number of people (Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, and Hermione—all intelligent, but not all likely to credit random crackpot theories) all know about the Cloak, and Quirrell at least has heard of the Stone and credits if existence if not the standard explanation for its powers. There’s no evidence that many people know of the Wand, but the subject has never really come up so we wouldn’t know if that’s common knowledge. I expect that those who study wandlore would know about it, as in canon.
Probably all three artifacts’ existence is common knowledge, and that they are connected in some way (I think most people would notice, upon hearing The Tale of the Three Brothers, that all three exist; additionally, Hermione recognizes “the Charm which [...] would not reveal the Cloak, but would tell you whether it or certain other artifacts were nearby.”). However, even if people know about the Deathly Hallows as real objects, they may not know details (such as the sign, or the connection to the Peverells, or what “conqueror of Death” actually means). I doubt anybody today except Harry, Lupin, and possibly Dumbledore (who may have noticed it when taking Lily and James to the Hall of Prophesy) know about the prophesy; Harry and Lupin know the contents but not that it’s a prophesy, while Dumbledore may know there is a prophesy but not the contents.
I would definitely take the first of these deals, and would probably swallow the bullet and continue down the whole garden path . I would be interested to know if Eliezer’s thinking has changed on this matter since September 2009.
However, if I were building an AI which may be offered this bet for the whole human species, I would want it to use the Kelly criterion and decline, under the premise that if humans survive the next hour, there may well be bets later that could increase lifespan further. However, if the human species goes extinct at any point, then game over, we lose, the Universe is now just a mostly-cold place with a few very hot fusion fires and rocks throughout.
The Kelly criterion is, roughly, to take individual bets that maximize the expected logarithm instead of expected utility itself. Despite the VNM axioms pretty much definining utility as that-which-is-to-be-maximized, there are theorems (which I have seen, but for which I have not seen proofs yet) that the Kelly criterion is optimal in various ways. I believe, though I don’t know much about the Kelly criterion so there’s a high probability I’m wrong, that it applies to maximizing total lifespan in addition to maximizing money.
So what happens if we try to maximize log(lifespan)? The article implies we should still take the bets, but I think that’s incorrect and we wouldn’t take even one deal (except for the total freebie before the tetration garden path). To see this, note that we only care about the 80% of the worlds where we could have survived (unless Omega offers to increase this probability somewhere...), so we’ll just look at that. Now we have to choose between a 100% chance of log(life) being 10,000,000 (using base-10 log and measuring life in years), or a 99.9999% chance of log(life) being 10^10,000,000 and a 0.0001% chance of log(life) being -∞. A quick calculation shows that E(log(life)) in this case is -∞, which is far less than the E(log(life)) of 10,000,000 we get from not taking the deal.
In short, even if you accept a small chance of you dying (as you must if you want to get up in the morning), if you want the long range maximum lifespan for the human race to be as high as possible, you cannot accept even the tiniest chance of it going extinct.
This is why existential risk reduction is such a big deal; I hadn’t actually made that connection when I started writing this comment.
It gets even worse than that if you want to keep your intuitions (which are actually partially formalized as the concept natural density). Imagine that T is the set of all Unicode text strings. Most of these strings, like “🂾⨟ꠗ∧̊⩶🝍”, are gibberish, while some are valid sentences in various languages (such as “The five boxing wizards jump quickly.”, “print ‘Hello, world!’”, “ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος·”, or “וקראתם בשם אלהיכם ואני אקרא בשם יהוה והיה האלהים אשר יענה באש הוא האלהים ויען כל העם ויאמרו טוב הדבר”). The interesting strings for this problem are things like “42“, “22/7”, “e”, “10↑↑(10↑↑10)”, or even “The square root of 17”. These are the strings that unambiguously describe some number (under certain conventions). As we haven’t put a length limit on the elements of T, we can easily show that every natural number, every rational number, and an infinite number of irrational numbers are each described by elements of T. As some elements of T don’t unambiguously describe some number, our intuitions tell us that there are more text files than there are rational numbers.
However, a computer (with arbitrarily high disk space) would represent these strings encoded as sequences of bytes. If we use a BOM in our encoding, or if we use the Modified UTF-8 used in Java’s DataInput interface, then every sequence of bytes encoding a string in T corresponds to a different natural number. However, given any common encoding, not every byte sequence corresponds to a string, and therefore not every natural number corresponds to a string. As encoding strings like this is the most natural way to map strings to natural numbers, there must intuitively be more natural numbers than strings.
We have thus shown that there are more strings than rational numbers, and more natural numbers than strings. Thus, any consistent definition of “bigger” that works like this can’t be transitive, which would rule out many potential applications of such a concept.
EDIT: Fixed an error arising from my original thoughts differing from the way I wanted to explain them
I had this theory before the current arc, but updated towards it once it became more important to Harry in chapter 89.
In Humanism, Harry thinks about vanquishing future death, but that would not help the majority of the world’s population (which has already died). What with the only known method of backwards time travel creating stable time loops, and with people already having died, this makes sense to a degree. But if he were to find a way to upload just prior to death, then technically everybody would have died, but in most ways that count they would not. As people have died more than six hours ago, this also seems impossible with known methods of time travel. However, Harry was (understandably) too distracted when learning about Time-Turners to notice that the six-hour limit could not possibly be fundamental. I believe I have a way around this limit, using only Time-Turners and Muggle understanding of physics. It does rely on the following assumptions:
Magic works very far away (many light-hours at least) from Earth
Time-Turners deposit you stationary w.r.t. Earth’s rotating frame of reference.
Magic can reinforce Time-Turners and wizards to be able to withstand incredible accelerations (at least 2000 g)
Magic and science combined can maintain a space-worthy vessel at these accelerations
Time-Turners take you back the appropriate number of hours in whatever frame you happen to be in when you engage the Time-Turner.
Magic and science combined can create space suits that allow survival several light-years from Earth for extended periods of time OR devices that can maintain themselves in such conditions for extended periods of time and can operate Time-Turners.
Magic would allow the below scenario to play out (no DO NOT MESS WITH TIME notes). For safety, this should only be attempted after adding explicit protocols for those notes should they prove necessary; that’s better than conjuring arbitrary obstacles with Time-Turners.
The below calculations are approximations based on my incomplete understanding of special relativity, but could almost certainly be improved by somebody with a better physical understanding than mine.
Not all of these conditions are strictly necessary, but the details of the situation would need to be modified to suit them better. I will now illustrate how to prove to somebody that you can go back in time more than six hours (specifically, six hours and five minutes); extending this to allow for remote unobservable uploading is left as an exercise to the reader.
Create a space ship traveling at 88.5% of the speed of light in uniform circular orbit of the Earth, matching the Earth’s natural rotation direction and speed. This will require it to be 3.38 light-hours from Earth and accelerating at almost 2000 g, but we’re already assuming we can do that.
On that ship, have somebody/something capable of receiving messages, using a Time-Turner, and sending messages after using said Time-Turner.
Find somebody to agree to this experiment, and to agree on a protocol. Verification can include hashing (“I believe one cannot reverse an MD4 hash, even with magic, in less than 6 hours”), trusted third party (“I doubt that Chief Warlock Dumbledore would lie about what time you gave him a message”), or any other scheme that everybody agrees on.
On Earth, get a means to listen to a light-speed message sent by the person/thing in step 2. When it receives a message, tell the person from step 3 and prepare verification, but do not tell the person from step 3 what the message is.
Have the person from step 3 wait six hours and one minute before deciding on a message to send, and have them give you this message.
Complete verification that the message was received when claimed. The person from step 3 now believes you sent a message back more than 6 hours.
Send the person/thing from step 2 the message at light speed.
Over three hours later, the person/thing from step 2 receives the message, goes back in time six hours (local reference frame)/13 hours (Earth reference frame), and sends it. Over three hours later, step 4 completes.
EDIT: Fixed the link for acceleration calculation by escaping parentheses
I thought approximately the same thing, but along the lines of wanting the student to focus on the tone, meter, and rhythm (which apparently carry much of the meaning) so taking away the meaning of the actual words to remove distractions.
I recently started yet another re-read of HPMoR, and noticed something I don’t think has been discussed before.
In chapter 1, Petunia is talking about Lily making her pretty (which I believe she did using a potion of eagle’s splendor with the blueberries replaced by Thestral blood), and says
And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to—the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it.
I used to think that Lily just wanted to protect Petunia from the danger and possibly other reasons. However, after hearing the prophesy in Chapter 89, I’m updating in favor of Lily telling the truth as she understood it. Centaurs are, after all, great at divination, especially astrology (tangent: I’ve never understood how that can be used for predicting the future on Earth, because it seems like anybody for the last several hundred years could have then, in a vague way, predicted the entire course of human history at least until the Space Age) and may be able to see this coming. Usually astrology isn’t the precise, at least not in canon HP, but when it predicts the destruction of the “very stars in heaven”, it may be more precise (and the centaurs may care more).
In the top-right corner of the Hangouts window is a light-grey-on-white button of a gear (along with other similarly-colored buttons). The gear indicates settings, which in this case means webcam, microphone, and speaker settings. From there you can set up your microphone better.
In my experience (though I believe other people have differing experience in this regard), once you find this button, you can get Google Hangouts to properly use any audio equipment that your computer and OS can recognize and use.
I haven’t studied this in nearly enough detail to be sure of what I’m saying, but it is my understanding that we quite possibly ARE wrong about the observable universe’s size, simply given the newness of the science saying there is an “observable universe”. Newton was wrong about gravity, but mostly in edge cases (pun intended); could Hubble et. al. be wrong about the observable universe’s size? Could we find a way to send messages faster than light (there are several theories and only one need work)? Or could we possibly cram more people into the universe than seems possible now due to simulations, building smaller but equivalent brains, or otherwise?
If the answer to ANY of these questions could be less, then we could indeed be wrong about the size observable universe (if observable is defined in terms of light even after we develop FTL communication, travel, or observation, then that’s stupid (like the current definition of clinical death) and you can replace “observable universe” with some similar phrase).
Besides, it may in fact be worth considering what happens outside the observable universe. We can make some predictions already, such as similar laws of physics and the continuing existence of anything which we could previously observe but has since passed over the cosmological event horizon. If people eventually become one of the things that passes over this event horizon, I’ll still care about them even though my caring can not affect them in any way.
Note again that I don’t know much about this, and I may be babbling nonsense for most of these points. But I do know that Hubble may be wrong, that humans keep doing things that they’d previously thought scientifically impossible, and that without an observable universe boundary there are still things which are causally unrelated to you in either direction but that you still may care about.
This can help when a discussion is started, but it cannot really help start the discussion. It is useful, though, and I’ll remember it. Thanks.
If this post had the irony suggested by brilee, I wasn’t able to pick it up and am responding as though it is serious.
As I said in response to Alicorn, I refuse to use dark arts. Not only would I not be good at it, it violates my morality in many ways. You’d have better luck convincing EY to use the dark arts for Singularity talks, simply because that’s a bigger issue. If he’s not willing to use dark arts when it’s the entire world or more at stake, it’s his Something To Protect and he needs to Shut Up and Do The Impossible, then I have no excuse using them simply to save just one person.
As for my mom, I believe that is her true rejection. She readily admits that the technology is feasible, but doesn’t see why somebody would revive her and things it somewhat plausible that it will be illegal to keep frozen bodies around between now and then.
As others have said, that option is no longer available. I don’t find it as bad as you do though, for three reasons:
She’s a relative, not a stranger, so this kind of discussion would have happened anyway if I’d cleared my cryonics cache before six months ago
She has reasons to accept it that she accepts; the problem with a lot of religious conversions is that the only reason I should believe in the religion is because it says to and anecdotal evidence; for cryonics, the reason to believe in it is the standardly-accepted science and evident technological progress, both things most people at least claim to accept, but without any anecdotal evidence that it works.
I am disgusted by people who think that something is that important but don’t do anything about it. My standard example is vegetarians who believe that animals are conscious sentient beings whose death is as tragic as a human’s, but don’t attempt to persuade others not to eat meat. Of course, if they did persuade others, everybody else would be annoyed, but if they’re committing murder and you can get them to stop, you should. Similarly, if somebody is dying and you can potentially stop them, you should.
Edit: formatting
I considered this because of your article Light Arts, and rejected it because I disagree with that article in at least some cases, this being one of them. I could talk about it as I think about it—a good idea that people, even scientists who should know better, reject because of unwillingness to think about death and unwillingness to believe it isn’t final—and let him draw his own opinions on why it isn’t common knowledge (like I could prevent him anyway), but saying myself that it has a reasonable chance of being a conspiracy, or even implying it, is not something I could do.
With cryonics, if somebody messes up at any point (the cryonics company goes broke, the LN2 production company experiences unexpected problems and any local stores are running low, an employee mishandles your body, etc.) then you are unlikely to be revived. With plastination, there’s a lot less that can go wrong; even if the future caretakers of your brain don’t believe it will work, it is more effort to destroy your brain than to leave it be. They may decide to bury it in a graveyard, but that’s less likely to prevent revival than thawing from cryonics.
In either case, the probability that revival will be technologically and socially possible given it’s physically possible approaches 1 as time approaches infinity, and the probability that something bad and irreversible happens to you given that you aren’t revived also approaches 1 as time approaches infinity. In either case, you’re betting that the former happens before the latter. However, this seems a much better bet with plastination than cryonics because it’s a lot harder for something bad to happen to you.
In canon, Hermione says it means exactly as Lupin thought, and Harry believes her (and J.K. Rowling intended it like that). As some of J.K. Rowling’s quotes (no sources at the moment) about canon seem to imply that she does not see her interpretation of the books is just as valid as anybody else’s, the idea that a descendant of Harry’s could go to the graveyard of the Peverells, announce plans to defeat Death, and get HJPEV’s results is canon-compliant.