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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • 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?


  • 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),


  • 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?




  • 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.












  • yes technically parrots can recognize, and recreate sounds, it’s not that they understand english, or words, or language. It’s that they’re capable of recreating vocal anomalies of human speech, pretty well. Likewise, i can also mimic someone else speaking in another language, or just individual words, but that doesn’t mean that i’m speaking the language.

    You’re repeating the age-old myth of “parrots just parrot, they don’t actually understand anything they parrot”.

    This is decidedly untrue, and there’s heaps of science behind that. A lot of which I have shown you. So that assertion is proved untrue, ie “wrong”.

    ethics, is an english word. It comes from the english language.

    This is also just plain wrong. It’s a Greek word that comes to English from Latin. So not an English word, actually. (See my first point about monolinguistic speakers often being a bit ethnocentric. Not your fault, one language is limiting in more ways than one.)

    Parrots can indeed speak, but to what extent do they actually understand the language, or have grammar? That’s the video I linked in my very first reply.

    This:

    Can animals grammar? – introduction to my animated series which goes deep in just what the capabilities are, because there is a lot of debate in the science world.

    Thoguht you might be interested, but guess you’re more interested in “winning” a conversation than actually having one.

    Edit lol replied to myself accidentally. Meant to put this at the bottom end of the thread.


  • yes technically parrots can recognize, and recreate sounds, it’s not that they understand english, or words, or language. It’s that they’re capable of recreating vocal anomalies of human speech, pretty well. Likewise, i can also mimic someone else speaking in another language, or just individual words, but that doesn’t mean that i’m speaking the language.

    You’re repeating the age-old myth of “parrots just parrot, they don’t actually understand anything they parrot”.

    This is decidedly untrue, and there’s heaps of science behind that. A lot of which I have shown you. So that assertion is proved untrue, ie “wrong”.

    ethics, is an english word. It comes from the english language.

    This is also just plain wrong. It’s a Greek word that comes to English from Latin. So not an English word, actually. (See my first point about monolinguistic speakers often being a bit ethnocentric. Not your fault, one language is limiting in more ways than one.)

    Parrots can indeed speak, but to what extent do they actually understand the language, or have grammar? That’s the video I linked in my very first reply.

    This:

    Can animals grammar? – introduction to my animated series which goes deep in just what the capabilities are, because there is a lot of debate in the science world.

    Thoguht you might be interested, but guess you’re more interested in “winning” a conversation than actually having one.


  • and it also probably helps when you’re classifying humans separately to animals for the purpose of a semantical argument

    Nice try but the implication of animals being distinct was quite clear. The point is that there was absolutely no need to add the extra “English” to the end of “animals don’t speak [English]”, and actually omitting it would’ve made the sentence more inclusive and less prescriptively wrong. Even less wrong would’ve been to say “animals don’t have language”, although we’re actually not a 100% on that, given that there are definite communications. We’re having a hard time defining what level we’re on ourself and where we came from to be able to understand a similar evolution happening on an entirely different branch of evolution.

    Along with the fact that it’s arguably hate speech to some degree to refer to certain groups of people as animals separately from others,

    Is it? Is it really? Because I don’t think it is in any way, unless it’s explicitly hate speech that you’re doing in the context, and then anything in that context is hate speech. So you think no-one should ever refer to “Finnish people” for instance, because they would be doing a hate-speech on me, eh? Or that you can’t talk about the differences between European and American cultures, as you can’t refer to people separately without it being hate speech?

    no, they don’t speak spoken languages, with semantic meanings, and rooted histories. The same way that humans do “english” for example.

    But see, they do. They do speak the same way, but language isn’t just about speech. Speech is only a part of language. You seem to be having trouble seeing those two concepts as different from each other. Animals can speak, ie remember and use words.

    yes technically parrots can recognize, and recreate sounds, it’s not that they understand english, or words, or language. It’s that they’re capable of recreating vocal anomalies of human speech, pretty well. Likewise, i can also mimic someone else speaking in another language, or just individual words, but that doesn’t mean that i’m speaking the language. In order for me to speak that language, i need to be able to communicate in some commonly understood and defined dialect, that other people can understand, such that i’m capable of understanding them as well. Parrots cannot do this.

    See, this is sort of my core point that came out very strongly from just you having had to use “English” in your sentence. You’re ignorant, but you don’t like to think of yourself as ignorant. You’re intellectually lazy, but you don’t like thinking about yourself that way. So you pretend you’re not.

    First off, I already gave you way more information on the subject, which clearly you didn’t even open let alone peruse although it’s a very in-depth dive to what properties of languages we’ve observed animals using and how much do we understand about how they understand their own understanding. And that sort of thing. Anyway, with just 30 secs in Google you’d find the most famous parrots on the matter:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_(parrot)

    Alex had a vocabulary of over 100 words,[17] but was exceptional in that he appeared to have understanding of what he said. For example, when Alex was shown an object and asked about its shape, color, or material, he could label it correctly.[15] He could describe a key as a key no matter what its size or color, and could determine how the key was different from others.[7] Looking at a mirror, he said “what color”, and learned the word “grey” after being told “grey” six times.[18] This made him the first non-human animal to have ever asked a question, let alone an existential one (apes who have been trained to use sign-language have so far failed to ever ask a single question).[19]

    Alex was said to have understood the turn-taking of communication and sometimes the syntax used in language.[14] He named an apple a “banerry” (pronounced as rhyming with some pronunciations of “canary”), which a linguist friend of Pepperberg’s thought to be a combination of “banana” and “cherry”, two fruits he was more familiar with.[18]

    You were saying that " i need to be able to communicate in some commonly understood and defined dialect, that other people can understand, such that i’m capable of understanding them as well. Parrots cannot do this."?

    This must be a deepfake then

    because i don’t know if you know, ethics, is an english word. It comes from the english language.

    I’ve more than likely been using English for longer than you have, and I’m sorry to say you got it wrong again.

    “Ethics” as word with the very same meaning it has today was spoken aloud long before English was a thing. It actually comes from Greek, through Latin.

    https://www.etymonline.com/word/ethic

    ethic (n.)

    late 14c., ethik “study of morals,” from Old French etique “ethics, moral philosophy” (13c.), from Late Latin ethica, from Greek ēthike philosophia “moral philosophy,” fem. of ēthikos “ethical, pertaining to character,” from ēthos “moral character,” related to ēthos “custom” (see ethos). Meaning “moral principles of a person or group” is attested from 1650s.

    You make bold assumptions which I don’t see have much scientific basis in them. Like yes, animals have their “own” ethics and one could make the argument that all ethics are subjective and no such thing exists as objective ethics. However, saying they’re “wholly independent” might be a reach, since we know that we share some of our most fundamental concepts of what is “unfair” with some of our close cousins.

    My point is that you should look question yourself a bit more and be open to other people actually knowing what your’e speaking about, and adding to it, instead of thinking everyone is always arguing against you.