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this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2026
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Just the Wikipedia one. I absolutely admit that not having read the source material (and that the synopsis is crowd sourced and easily could be written through the lens of someone seeing what they want to see) I can't make a real assement.
But yes, death is the ultimate enemy... But, given the synopsis that appears to "rationally" entail that as such, any means justify the ends, and that if you accept the fantasy of a mechanic for resurrection then that gives broad latitude for moral justification for pretty much anything. Even one step further, a moral obligation to do pretty much anything.
I'd argue that Dr. Soran couldn't delineate the fantasy afforded by the nexus from reality: whomever he killed could be conjured back by him in the nexus. The problematic actions could be "morally deferred".
Regardless of any interpretation of the material, I (like Picard) reject the premise that death is the ultimate enemy. And, like Picard, I am very uneasy with any philosophy that claims to have simple derivable moral evaluations, especially if when you pull back the curtain the underlying mechanics boil down to "the ends justify the means".
If these dont apply to the source, then it was a bad synopsis. Or It was a good synopsis and I'm bad at reading.
I just read the Wikipedia synopsis. It's... accurate to the events but leaves out who is on-board with which decisions or what the characters know at the time of major events. Harry is horrified by Voldemort murdering Quirrel to give Hermione a Horcrux, for example. Harry is still the protagonist of the story and Voldemort is still the antagonist.
Dr. Soran is an absolute madman given he doesn't know or understand how the Nexus works. Even if we assume that the Nexus can actually bring everyone back perfectly, he's still a madman because his plan could fail. There's no world in which you could have enough certainty of the outcome to enact his plan.
On death: while I don't know if I would want to live forever, I'd like to have control over when I die.
Weirdly enough, the philosophy behind HPMoR doesn't claim to have any moral evaluations at all, since that's not in its domain. It's more of a framework for thinking about plans of action to take towards a desired outcome.
That's a fascinating observation about the synopsis, seems to lend credence to my musing that Wikipedia editors may drop or include key points which betray their own reading. Probably not a malicious act, but evidence that varied weighting of events can result in divergent interpretations.
That being said, a framwork for evaluating actions in the absence of moral evaluation is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. The explicit absence speaks just as loudly as any prescription. And I do think Picard would have my back on that one.
Which, I stress isn't a condemnation of the source itself: it's a warning that such a source can be hijacked for nefarious purposes; intentionally or otherwise.
Correct.
However, I want to point out that the framework just explores and evaluates actions based on how optimal they are for getting to the goal. It's up to your moral framework to determine which paths are unacceptable.
I find that full exploration of possible solutions is very helpful when dealing with other people, because they might be willing to pick a solution that you wouldn't. It can help to predict sociopathic actions so they can be preemptively countered.
There is a lot to unpack there, but it sheds a lot of light onto the popularity (and depending who you ask, the subversion) of the work.
I'll start by saying that people joke about how school doesn't prepare them for the real world, where was "doing my taxes" class, amirite?
Fundamentally I think that an even more critical and teachable skill missing is how to be empathetic. Not like "I have the capacity to feel bad for people", but a more general form of "I can abandon my own preconceptions to allow myself to accurately view the world through their eyes".
That relative illiteracy leads to exactly the longing you express: how to understand what are theople are going to do, and why.
This couples with another favorite observation: when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is going to look like a nail.
What you've described, roughly, is the concept of a breadth-first search. It's a general workable algorithm to establish the type of thing you want to do.
It's inefficient, and especially in the context of a human brain with finite working memory, still prone to suboptimal results. Still better than nothing, but suboptimal given the constraints.
So it's a solution. And, if you didn't have one before, the temptation is to treat that like the hammer.
Because it "works" without a moral evaluation, one might conclude that the moral evaluation isn't important.
And then it's a classic case of the inevitabilities of staring too long into the abyss