Causality issues aside, yes I would. Makes a big difference if I found out I had 40+ years left vs 5 years left.
Dude you have like eighteen seconds
Quick, get this man gay sex and drugs
Wouldn’t have mattered either way then lol.
Probably, yes. Imagine how superhuman you’d feel skydiving without a parachute outside the day of your death knowing you couldn’t die. (plot twist: you spend 10 years in a coma afterwards and still die from doing it :/)
coma would be the universe being nice to you. Imagine a full body paralysis where you’re aware of every second passing and the only thing you can do is rot, and maybe hope twitter’s head clown puts a dodgy chip in your brain so maybe you could feel the joy of playing solitaire again.
Ok, you’re winning at monkey pawing :D lemme see if I can top that…
Yeah. Death doesn’t bother me since it’s fate. Knowing when would be handy for time management and something I could leverage. It’d be great to party at my own funeral too.
I mean, permanently or temporarily? Apparently my heart has been stopping on and off randomly all year. :(
Get this… I was in the hospital in January. I wake up, check my phone… Nurse comes in.
“Were you asleep about an hour ago?”
“Yeah, why?”
“Your heart stopped for 8 seconds.”
“. . . Um… ‘thank you’? I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do with that information…”
Apparently it happened a few more times in March. I have an implanted heart monitor now, always watching.
Amazing, from your “apparently” I take you were never awake when it happened. I wanted to ask how it feels. I have an arrhythmia that gets my heart either fluttering or skipping a beat but it happens like a couple of times a year. It feels super weird.
I’ve had a-fib and congestive heart failure, 2 heart attacks, and open heart surgery.
Each of the times my heart has stopped, I was asleep, no awareness of it until the doctors and nurses told me.
With the heart monitor, I can press a button when something feels “off”, and report symptoms like being dizzy or passing out. Doc says I’ve been getting extra heartbeats sometimes. Low blood pressure has been a problem too.
When I pass out from low blood pressure, the first thing is I get super dizzy. Then a ringing in my ears so loud I can’t hear anything. Then my vision closes in and turns red and I wake up on the floor.
Thanks for sharing!
Interesting, that’s my experience with anesthesia.
Yes, so I can probably plan for it.
Is it absolutely certain and nothing I can do to change it?
If so fuck yes I’m pretty much immortal tell that date.
oh just because you know when you’ll die doesn’t mean you can go yolo on everything. Getting into a horrific accident and becoming bed ridden for the rest of your life doesn’t count as dying. Imagine laying in bed, body paralysed, knowing that this is the place you’ll spend 30 years in.
You’d still be need to be as careful as usual, just with a painful awareness of how many seconds you have left until the end, and with a curse of not being able to go on your own terms if something terrible happens.
You could do fun stuff where if you die, you REALLY die, like testing new submarines.
YOLOO!!!.. WAIT, fuck your right. I reject my claim and now will live in a box scared of existing.
And what happens if you buy a literal ton of C4, cover yourself in the pile and detonate?
I have to survive somehow, right?
That relies on you being able to acquire this C4 without the authorities noticing and putting a stop to it.
C4 is the easiest for this example. I can definitely manage explosives. You can rather easily make things which blow up.
Let’s make this easier then, I go to the woods and set up a huge fucking boulder on an elaborate pulley system (don’t worry about me finding them, I live in Finland were boulders and rocky surfaces are a plenty. My cousins actually operate a gravel business, so they have lots of proper gear for breaking rocks into smaller rocks, and vehicles to do those things with. So let’s say there’s a pit. I lay a ton of harsh gravel on the bottom of it, a proper few meter layer. Then I take a loader full of massive boulders. And another. And a third one. Place them around the pit. Place myself in the pit, and remotely activate the loaders to drop all those boulders on me. Oh and I didn’t mention, but I put a bed in the pit with me. It’s a bed of extremely sharp knives, covered by a thin cardboard so I don’t get stabbed if I easy myself onto it. On top of that, there’ another bed, upside down, also loaded with insanely sharp swords. All of the boulders will fall into the pit, crushing the bed system, which stabs and slices me into pieces while the boulders to the rest of the work. (The bed frames are soft enough so that they can hold knives, but will be utterly deformed by the boulders so they won’t stay in the way.
Then I’ve also paid for a crazy cousin to empty both barrels of a shotgun to my face with a full metal slug right as the stones start dropping.
But… I’ll survive?
This again assumes you can successfully pull this off. Get into an accident on your way to the woods and get paralyzed from the neck down? Too bad, you live now. Crazy cousin has a sudden moment of clarity, recognizes the insanity of what you’re doing, then has you committed to an asylum? Too bad, you live. Spend a few hours toiling to set up your contraption, collapse in a puddle of exhaustion, then have a change of heart because why the duck are you putting so much work into trying to off yourself? Well, then you live.
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),
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.
miraculous survival? world’s first talking head? depends on the exact wording and if you got your intro from a benevolent fairy or a genie
So a magical but injured life is possible, but a magical but non-injured one isn’t?
Cool. Cruel, but cool.
Plot twist. Going YOLO for this reason is exactly what starts the chain of events leading to your expiration.
Is that a knife you’re holding behind you?
Jokes aside this is a philosophical question, would knowing the answer let you change it? Would it be different if you didn’t know the answer? How do you know that knowing the answer isn’t part of the chain of events that leads to your death in such a situation?
What if the person offering was just scamming you and you lived thinking you’d die in 6 months but then it turns out it doesn’t happen?
I think just the fact that the answer could be something like: “2 more years, suicide” is a no-go for me. I’m not a suicidal person so hearing something like this would absolutely fucking terrify me. I think the more time I’d have left the more freaked out I’d get, constantly wonder when will it start? When will the hell that pushes me to take my own life begin?
I mean, on the bright side, only two more years until I can kill myself!
Yes. Be able to choose the right life insurance plan, investments, etc for my beneficiaries.
Also for deciding when to retire or how much money you can/should spend to maximally enjoy your life.
If the prediction cannot be altered I might. Because that way I basically have plot armor until I die.
If that information just reflects the current path I’m on but changes based on my actions I don’t want to hear it.
The latter is an obvious smart deal to take. Just make sure to check yourself for cancer, not walking on a red light etc. according to the thing that kills you. Otherwise do the same. Odds are you would gain more time with your loved ones.
I’m still assuming death is inevitable at some point.
If I get “death by plane crash” for example, I don’t necessarily have to fly for this to happen.
Yes. I think it would add more value to the time I have now and would help me best prepare for my passing.
I think it would make me procrastinate worse, then become apathetic at the end because “I only have X time left …”
Can I change it?
I got a scan that detected cancer which I was later able to get removed. That cancer would have probably killed me in five years.
If I get told that I’ll die of cancer in twenty years, I’m going to deal with it in ten years.
I don’t know, if such a thing existed it would imply that free will doesn’t exist, if you knew you would die in 10 hours of dehydration, what happens if you drank a bunch of water regularly?
In that scenario you can’t die of dehydration but you’re going to die of dehydration forcibly. So what’s going to happen?
I can’t process if I would do it or not because I don’t know what it would imply!
You can dehydrate yourself by drinking too much water. You flush the salts out of your system and get water poisoning and die of dehydration anyway.
It’s not dehydration, it’s hyponatremia. The danger is due to brain swelling.
It is dehydration, just a different type.
Losing mainly fluid is known as hypertonic dehydration – or hypernatremia. Losing mainly sodium is known as hypotonic dehydration – or hyponatremia
Yeah but my point was not drinking a huge amount, just enough not to have too much water or too little, like a glass of water every hour or something.
In that scenario you can’t die of dehydration but you’re going to die of dehydration forcibly. So what’s going to happen?
Youre going to die of dehydration, because you we’re simply unaware that drinking too much flushes the sodium out of your body which is what makes you able to retain enough water to function.
Ironically people in hot environments and drinking a ton of water can end up severely dehydrated (mainly if they don’t eat anything, as food has a sodium and other electrolytes).
Now if you drank mineral water (or sports drinks but they’re rather sugary nowadays) or just added a tiny bit of salt to the water you drink, then it would break the prophecy.
Similarly ironic is that a lot of people who aren’t used to cold environments and get lost in the woods or something usually end up suffering heat stroke, as they’ve only a massively thick puffy jacket and walking still generates heat, which the jacket traps and your body can’t cool down and overheats. (Layers and breathing materials underneath the top layers is good, as then you can open or remove a layer as needed to regulate your body temp.)
For the sake of the topic of the thread, I’d like to know what happens if I’m told I die in 50 years from a heart attack while running a marathon, and after hearing that I jump out of a window, try to blow my brains out or shove a block of C4 up my bowels and blow myself up? I should survive, yes? And in condition to (attempt to) run a marathon?
Because if it’s not locked like that and can be changed then it’s more of a guess than accurate foreknowledge.
I would 100% exploit this (insurance for family).
I would. I could better plan out my life if I knew when and why it would end. If it comes back and says oh you dying 3 years from a brain aneurysm, I can’t be stopped… Then why would I be trying to plan out for retirement? I can take everything I have and live happy for 3 years. Without knowing I feel like my last thoughts would be ‘fuck, I wasted my life’
I’m already dying of lymphoma but I’d like to know exactly when. The constant up and down of good days and bad days takes an emotional toll. If I knew I could relax completely and actually plan to do things.
