this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2023
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Just before death you are granted one truthful, understandable answer to one question. What would you want to know? (mander.xyz)
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Obviously a hypothetical scenario. There is no way to pass on the knowledge to anyone else. Time freezes for you only, and once you have your answer you are out of this world.

The question can allow you to see into the past, present and future and gain comprehension of any topic/issue. But it's only one question.

Edit: the point isn't "how to cheat death". You can't. Your body is frozen and there is nothing you can do with this knowledge other than knowing it, and die. So if you would rather be frozen in a limbo just thinking of numbers for eternity, be my guest.

Such a variety of replies, it's been really interesting to read them!

What would you want to know? Personally I'd want to see a timelapse or milestone glimpses of humanity's future until the end of Earth's existence (if we survive that long)

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[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

If you have the data to recreate the suffering, you can just move on to the paradise without repeating it.

It's a good point, but there's two caveats.

(1) That only works if individual lives are deterministic and have no free will, but not if you want the individuals born into historical circumstances have their own self-determination from there on out.

(2) What's the subjective experience of that recreation? In a cosmic sense, everything we are experiencing right now has already happened in a different reference frame. Even if some being snapped its fingers and recreated a historical timeline all at once, it might not feel that way to the individual consciousnesses getting up to speed. Even if everything is deterministic and was instantaneously recreated, we may just be having an illusionary experience of it as a continuous series of events from birth to death. A variation of Boltzmann's brain.