I think it’s more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
“You don’t like science,” Harry said slowly. “Why not?” ″Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!” Professor Quirrell’s voice had grown louder. “They will end it! End all of it!”
Chapter 20
“HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.”
Chapter 89
“… If I have to brute-force the problem by acquiring enough power and knowledge to just make it happen, I will.” Another pause. ”And to go about that,” the man in the corner said, “you will use your favorite tool, science.” ”Of course.” The Defense Professor exhaled, almost like a sigh. “I suppose that makes sense of it.”
Chapter 90
I’m actually impressed with Quirrell’s control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He’s spent decades desperately trying to find a way to avoid death, and now he thinks he’s looking it straight in the face. And nobody in the story has even noticed that he’s concerned, although I’m pretty sure he was showing his fear a little at the end of 90 there. He must be gibbering on the inside, and holding it together out of sheer determination.
Of that much I’m fairly confident. This next bit is speculation on my part. I’m not going to give a percentage, it’s just a hunch, but it is my pet hunch which I’ve had for a long time.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality. Merlin was the last wizard to know that the universe was a sim and he patched it to stop people breaking it. Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of a whole lot of useful stuff which may very well have been grandfathered in.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality.
I doubt it, on the basis that this is something that’s unlikely to appeal to many audiences as a realistic application of rationality, and would probably cheapen the plot for a lot of readers.
HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn’t any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That’s a bit of a special case, though.
In book 2 of Don Quixote, book 1 is mentioned quite a bit and a lot of characters seem to have read it. I was actually surprised at how interesting and original Don Quixote was.
The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey.
Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I think it comes off a little awkward—more a reminder that Vonnegut was himself in Dresden than anything pertaining to the story.
The film ‘Adaptation’, by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had a lot of trouble adapting a certain book into a film… And so the film is about Charlie Kaufman having difficulty turning the book into a film.
I’ve seen obvious knockoffs of reality and other pseudoautobiographical material done well. There’s lots of those. But explicitly having the characters talking to the author, without any pretense, tends strongly towards ham-fistedness. And having the characters inside any other form of nested reality would simply be bizarre.
It’s still a fun theory, but I will be greatly surprised to see it, largely because I don’t think it can be made good enough to make EY think it’s worth printing. Maybe a standalone story with that premise, but not as a tacked-on bit at the end.
But that is almost entirely due to how hokey the books already were. (I read lots of Cussler when I was younger, and it was an example that came to mind of author inserts. It was not exactly a positive example, however. It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
Wait, that sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
It was within ten pages of the end of a very serious trilogy, full of interplanar warfare and dark moral decisions. Then that came right out of left field. It was possibly the most immersion-breaking thing I have ever seen in fiction.
The “author” in question was a relatively minor character, with the quirk of writing everything down as though it were a story. Near the end of the trilogy, he tells some others that he’s already written the ending, and the bad guys are going to win. They respond that if the bad guys win, there won’t be anyone around to read his book—so he changes his mind and frantically erases the ending as the bad guys close in around him. The character is never mentioned again.
Oddly enough, if you look at the Prophecy in terms of science fiction, it’s not too bad. Star-lifting is a thing, and a Singularity of any type would look awfully apocalyptic to a civilization in medieval stasis.
scary things which had heard of David Criswell’s ideas about star lifting.
Is long for “Harry James Potter Evans Verres”. Of course, he gave plausible explanation for why it couldn’t refer to him at the time, and all he had to go on was the letter s, so of course that hypothesis wouldn’t have elevated itself to his attention at the time.
I believe in general Internet parlance its usage is closest to A, and more rarely C. Obviously, since A could be made about pretty much anything, it is typically restricted to “the concept exists, and is acknowledged by a sufficient number of people” (e.g. “Rule 34 is a thing”).
And since the phrase “is a thing” is acknowledged by many people, we could say that “is a thing” is a thing. Unfortunately, “”is a thing” is a thing” is not yet a thing.
Saying “x is a thing” is a way of reminding people of a relevant concept that may have been overlooked. Whether it’s an actual physically existing thing or not depends on context.
Several people have latched onto the idea that “in fact, harry is in a simulation [because it’s fiction]”. This is a deeply confused statement. [edit: I misread Argency; he’s just speculating—no [because it’s fiction] implied—I replied to the wrong comment]
A story can be about anything, and is exactly as meta as its author wants it to be. We’ve seen Harry use the idea that he’s like a hero in a story as an intuition pump, but that’s part of the very non-simulated [fictional] world he inhabits :)
I mean, the story events so far could turn out to have been simulated, or we could end up with a story where self-aware fictional characters negotiating with their creator, but I’ve seen no indication of that so far.
That prophecy is too easy to see the trick on from where I sit.
Harry will supercede most current mortality limits, do many of the soft science-fiction things (tear apart the very stars in heaven), but will fail to prevent the final end of the useful universe an eternity from now despite surviving it (he is the end of the world)
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
The biggest difference as regards fission is that fusion bombs use U-238 as a power source, which is capable of releasing energy from fission, but which doesn’t produce enough neutrons to sustain a chain reaction. But when fed excess neutrons from a fusion reaction, you get an immense energy release from a very cheap material that’s used as the bomb casing.
“Hm,” Harry said. “Suppose you threw it into the Sun? Would it be
destroyed?” ... “It seems unlikely, Mr. Potter,” Professor Quirrell said dryly. “The
Sun is very large, after all; I doubt the Dementor would have much effect
on it. But it is not a test I would like to try, Mr. Potter, just in case.”
Also, on Quirrell’s particular attitude toward the sun:
Harry had lost. There had been moments when the cold anger had
faded entirely, replaced by fear, and during those moments he’d begged
the older Slytherins and he’d meant it... “Is the Sun still in the sky?” said Professor Quirrell, still with that
strange gentleness. “Is it still shining? Are you still alive?
Harry lost, and Quirrell’s is basically asking “was it the end of the world to lose?”
I’d be very disappointed if this were actually plot relevant. The only hint that this might be where we’re going is in Chapter 14 and that rules it out:
You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN’T TURING COMPUTABLE! A Turing machine could simulate going back into a defined moment of the past and computing a different future from there, an oracle machine could rely on the halting behavior of lower-order machines, but what you’re saying is that reality somehow self-consistently computes in one sweep using information that hasn’t… happened… yet...”
Ironically Harry is wrong about this. In point of fact his world is a simulation, as are all novels and fictional universes (though I have to consider the possibility that Harry’s world is still not Turing computable. We don’t yet have an existence proof of a computer program that can write fiction.)
What we see of Harry’s world is a simulation and therefore (given a bunch of plausible hypotheses) computable. It doesn’t follow that there is any “completion” of Harry’s world, filling in all the stuff we don’t see, that’s computable, still less that there’s any “reasonable” completion with that property. So I’d be hesitant to say that Harry’s world, simpliciter, is a computable simulation.
A lack of a “reasonable” completion with that property I agree with. But one could easily construct a computable completion. Specifically, the null completion. In other words, everything that that we don’t see and is irrelevant to the story simply does not exist. (Until or unless it does at a future point have an effect on the story.)
In fact, you could argue that this completion is the “real” one: Until Eliezer includes something into the story, how can we say that it exists?
Harry’s universe may not be Turing computable in the absolute sense assuming that arbitrary time travel is possible, but with even minor limits you can come up with algorithms that largely work, or will work most of the time.
As an example, run the simulation forward taking snapshots at every point until a backward looking event occurs. Take the snapshots of the two time periods and brute force search for a solution (any solution) that can link the two time periods together without breaking constraints. If a solution is found, throw all the intermediate snapshots away and replace them with the found solution. Otherwise, keep the existing data and fail the time travel event in some fashion.
My understanding is that it is possible to find solutions to these kinds of problems (otherwise we wouldn’t know and busy beaver numbers.) It’s just not possible to find them via some general, easily computable algorithm.
I think it’s more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
I’m actually impressed with Quirrell’s control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He’s spent decades desperately trying to find a way to avoid death, and now he thinks he’s looking it straight in the face. And nobody in the story has even noticed that he’s concerned, although I’m pretty sure he was showing his fear a little at the end of 90 there. He must be gibbering on the inside, and holding it together out of sheer determination.
Of that much I’m fairly confident. This next bit is speculation on my part. I’m not going to give a percentage, it’s just a hunch, but it is my pet hunch which I’ve had for a long time.
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality. Merlin was the last wizard to know that the universe was a sim and he patched it to stop people breaking it. Unfortunately this resulted in the loss of a whole lot of useful stuff which may very well have been grandfathered in.
I doubt it, on the basis that this is something that’s unlikely to appeal to many audiences as a realistic application of rationality, and would probably cheapen the plot for a lot of readers.
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn’t any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That’s a bit of a special case, though.
In book 2 of Don Quixote, book 1 is mentioned quite a bit and a lot of characters seem to have read it. I was actually surprised at how interesting and original Don Quixote was.
http://www.undefined.net/1/0/
Animal Man by Grant Morrison Of course, that story eventually became exclusively about the character talking to the author.
Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five. I think it comes off a little awkward—more a reminder that Vonnegut was himself in Dresden than anything pertaining to the story.
Although only tangentially related,
The film ‘Adaptation’, by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had a lot of trouble adapting a certain book into a film… And so the film is about Charlie Kaufman having difficulty turning the book into a film.
I’ve seen obvious knockoffs of reality and other pseudoautobiographical material done well. There’s lots of those. But explicitly having the characters talking to the author, without any pretense, tends strongly towards ham-fistedness. And having the characters inside any other form of nested reality would simply be bizarre.
It’s still a fun theory, but I will be greatly surprised to see it, largely because I don’t think it can be made good enough to make EY think it’s worth printing. Maybe a standalone story with that premise, but not as a tacked-on bit at the end.
Clive Cussler manages to write a lot of books that don’t become more hokey when he shows up as a DEM.
But that is almost entirely due to how hokey the books already were. (I read lots of Cussler when I was younger, and it was an example that came to mind of author inserts. It was not exactly a positive example, however. It could be worse though, it could be the Apocalypse novel from Magic, where one of the characters blackmails the author into retconning the last twenty pages. Yes, really.)
Wait, that sounds like it could be pretty awesome.
It was within ten pages of the end of a very serious trilogy, full of interplanar warfare and dark moral decisions. Then that came right out of left field. It was possibly the most immersion-breaking thing I have ever seen in fiction.
The “author” in question was a relatively minor character, with the quirk of writing everything down as though it were a story. Near the end of the trilogy, he tells some others that he’s already written the ending, and the bad guys are going to win. They respond that if the bad guys win, there won’t be anyone around to read his book—so he changes his mind and frantically erases the ending as the bad guys close in around him. The character is never mentioned again.
More details.
What am I missing?
In Homestuck, gur fhcreivyynva xvyyf gur nhgube naq gnxrf bire gur pbzvp. Hasbeghangryl ur pnaabg qenj.
Oddly enough, if you look at the Prophecy in terms of science fiction, it’s not too bad. Star-lifting is a thing, and a Singularity of any type would look awfully apocalyptic to a civilization in medieval stasis.
Star lifting is not only a thing, it’s a thing that has been mentioned in HPMOR… by Harry… in response to Trelawney’s prophecy.
Chapter 21, after Trelawney says “HE IS COMING. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY—” and is whisked away:
Pointing out the obvious, but
Is long for “Harry James Potter Evans Verres”. Of course, he gave plausible explanation for why it couldn’t refer to him at the time, and all he had to go on was the letter s, so of course that hypothesis wouldn’t have elevated itself to his attention at the time.
Question: what does it mean to say “X is a thing”?
Does it mean:
A) The concept exists? (e.g. Unicorns are a thing)
B) The concept may not exist yet, but it could exist? (E.g. lunar colonization is a thing; but unicorns are not a thing.)
C) the concept actually exists (Space stations are a thing.)
I believe in general Internet parlance its usage is closest to A, and more rarely C. Obviously, since A could be made about pretty much anything, it is typically restricted to “the concept exists, and is acknowledged by a sufficient number of people” (e.g. “Rule 34 is a thing”).
And since the phrase “is a thing” is acknowledged by many people, we could say that “is a thing” is a thing. Unfortunately, “”is a thing” is a thing” is not yet a thing.
“”is a thing” is a thing” is a thing in sense C.
Saying “x is a thing” is a way of reminding people of a relevant concept that may have been overlooked. Whether it’s an actual physically existing thing or not depends on context.
Context dependent, and possibly the distinction between the three is not really a thing.
Several people have latched onto the idea that “in fact, harry is in a simulation [because it’s fiction]”. This is a deeply confused statement. [edit: I misread Argency; he’s just speculating—no [because it’s fiction] implied—I replied to the wrong comment]
A story can be about anything, and is exactly as meta as its author wants it to be. We’ve seen Harry use the idea that he’s like a hero in a story as an intuition pump, but that’s part of the very non-simulated [fictional] world he inhabits :)
I mean, the story events so far could turn out to have been simulated, or we could end up with a story where self-aware fictional characters negotiating with their creator, but I’ve seen no indication of that so far.
That prophecy is too easy to see the trick on from where I sit.
Harry will supercede most current mortality limits, do many of the soft science-fiction things (tear apart the very stars in heaven), but will fail to prevent the final end of the useful universe an eternity from now despite surviving it (he is the end of the world)
-
Actually, the process in stars is fusion. The same as modern atom bombs, too.
Fission is used in nuclear power plants, and only really used to reach the conditions for fusion in bombs.
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
The biggest difference as regards fission is that fusion bombs use U-238 as a power source, which is capable of releasing energy from fission, but which doesn’t produce enough neutrons to sustain a chain reaction. But when fed excess neutrons from a fusion reaction, you get an immense energy release from a very cheap material that’s used as the bomb casing.
-
Also harkens back to:
Also, on Quirrell’s particular attitude toward the sun:
Harry lost, and Quirrell’s is basically asking “was it the end of the world to lose?”
Or material. Stars are great sources of raw matter, if you can get at it safely.
I’d be very disappointed if this were actually plot relevant. The only hint that this might be where we’re going is in Chapter 14 and that rules it out:
Ironically Harry is wrong about this. In point of fact his world is a simulation, as are all novels and fictional universes (though I have to consider the possibility that Harry’s world is still not Turing computable. We don’t yet have an existence proof of a computer program that can write fiction.)
What we see of Harry’s world is a simulation and therefore (given a bunch of plausible hypotheses) computable. It doesn’t follow that there is any “completion” of Harry’s world, filling in all the stuff we don’t see, that’s computable, still less that there’s any “reasonable” completion with that property. So I’d be hesitant to say that Harry’s world, simpliciter, is a computable simulation.
Harry’s world isn’t Turing Computable from within his world, because it relies on information that hasn’t happened yet.
However, in our world, Harry’s world doesn’t come into existence in the same order that it does in his.
A lack of a “reasonable” completion with that property I agree with. But one could easily construct a computable completion. Specifically, the null completion. In other words, everything that that we don’t see and is irrelevant to the story simply does not exist. (Until or unless it does at a future point have an effect on the story.)
In fact, you could argue that this completion is the “real” one: Until Eliezer includes something into the story, how can we say that it exists?
Harry’s universe may not be Turing computable in the absolute sense assuming that arbitrary time travel is possible, but with even minor limits you can come up with algorithms that largely work, or will work most of the time.
As an example, run the simulation forward taking snapshots at every point until a backward looking event occurs. Take the snapshots of the two time periods and brute force search for a solution (any solution) that can link the two time periods together without breaking constraints. If a solution is found, throw all the intermediate snapshots away and replace them with the found solution. Otherwise, keep the existing data and fail the time travel event in some fashion.
My understanding is that it is possible to find solutions to these kinds of problems (otherwise we wouldn’t know and busy beaver numbers.) It’s just not possible to find them via some general, easily computable algorithm.
This could explain the six-hour limit on Time-Turners—that’s the maximum lookback the Atlantis algorithm allows.