this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2024
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Asklemmy
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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.
YOLOO!!!.... WAIT, fuck your right. I reject my claim and now will live in a box scared of existing.
You could do fun stuff where if you die, you REALLY die, like testing new submarines.
And what happens if you buy a literal ton of C4, cover yourself in the pile and detonate?
I have to survive somehow, right?
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.
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.
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.
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?