Asklemmy

43833 readers

1188 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

102

If you were offered knowledge of exactly when and how you'll die, would you take it? Why or why not? (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

85 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Paralysed from the neck down.

Then how am I gonna run the marathon?

So you're saying you have no free will whatsoever, but despite whatever happens, the prophecy will be true?

That I could never drive an older car pretty much, because it's easy to kill yourself with one. Much less a motorbike without a helmet.

I can never hold anything sharp which could cut the jugular. Couldn't manage to go swimming, because diving deep and inhaling would somehow have to fail?

Either the prediction is bullshit, oooor it gives you magical plot armor (unless it's extremely vague, but that goes against OP's description),

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I don't think you understand how hypotheticals work. When someone says "suppose X happens", it doesn't means X can or will happen. They're asking you to imagine a scenario where it does happen. How the rules of the universe changes to allow it to happen can be up to you, and there's many ways that you do it, but some will lead to more interesting thought experiments than others. You proposed a rule change where knowing when/how you die with absolute certainty means being immune to all harm until that point. I don't think that's a very interesting scenario to think about, so I proposed an alternative that is closer to how our universe actually world and can simply be explained by very good (or bad, depending on perspective) luck.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

I don't think you understand how posting hypotheticals on forums works; they get elaborated and "tested" by asking questions or positing premises. Thought experiments, as you seem to be aware of the term at least.

OP used the word exactly.

That means you have exact knowledge of it.

Of course having exact foreknowledge of such a thing would affect your life. Would that effect then affect the thing being the exact time and date? If not, then it's utter gibberish, because by telling you about it, they've already changed history and thus it won't apply anymore.

If however it won't affect it, then you've gained immortality. You could play Russian roulette as much as you want and never have to fear dying. You can perhaps argue that maybe you survive a shot, but how would that be possible from a large calibre revolver aimed directly at the brainstem?