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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 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) by Mothra@mander.xyz to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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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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[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

If you could recreate the universe, would you make people suffer? Forever?

Huh?

No, the posed scenario is where you would recreate the individual as accurately as possible to match the historical reality and then after death give them an effective eternity of relative paradise as best matches their individuality.

So an orphan could spend years and years of happiness with the parents they never really knew whereas someone with abusive parents might never see their parents at all and instead chose to erase traumatic memories or do whatever it is that gives them joy.

The recreation of suffering in the thought experiment is solely for the purpose of recreating people who suffered such that you can give them an afterlife absent of suffering as they see fit. Because without recreating the suffering and the sufferers you'd only be creating a false depiction of Earth and humanity where you'd effectively exclude the downtrodden from resurrection by way of recreation.

They don't suffer over and over - they only suffer once in reliving an accurately representative life to the original reality upon which they are based, and from then on its their relative paradise.

[–] Skankboot@sh.itjust.works 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I see what you're saying, but I still don't understand why the suffering has to occur here. If you have the data to recreate the suffering, you can just move on to the paradise without repeating it.

You've come up with this scenario, but it doesn't address my initial point that a god who created and allows suffering can suck it.

[–] kromem@lemmy.world 1 points 10 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.