Or, Whenever I Read Somebodies Elses' "I Extremely Dislike This Behaviour" Posts Where They Direct Their Anger At Particular People WITHOUT NAMING SAID PERSON, My First Instinct Is To Think It's About Me And Offer To Grovel Vociferously (which is why I name the person I'm directing my anger against, in an Austenian or Brontëist manner)
Or, Sometimes I Feel I Deserved October Last Year (in a cosmically just &/or masochistic manner)
Or, Kick Dichotomies To The Curb And Go Beyond The Impossible! (in a manner that is an inverted & twisted parody of Tenga Toppen Gurren Lagann)
Or, Ethical Mad Scientists Are Not Oxymoronic (much like the content below the cut)
THIS IS OBVIOUSLY & BLATANTLY UNFINISHED BUT I NEED THE TAGS
Cut for a "meme" (well, the questions spread memetically...) shamelessly stolen from Shelley. Bolded italic text originally Shelley's, vanilla text mine.
Hidden Hypotheticals:
1. If you had a donkey, what would you name it?
2. One day your doctor gives you an X-ray and discovers that your brain is actually the size of a peanut... would this have any effect on you?
3. You are locked inside a metal cube with no way out. There is a locked door and the key is placed behind your eyeball. You are given a scalpel... will you gouge out your eyeball to retrieve the key, or will you wait five hours for the oxygen in the box to run out?
Death by suffocation has to be the worst way to go, period. So yeah, if I'm guaranteed that I won't hit my brain on gouging out my eye (it's possible!), I'd try it once I was desperate enough.
4. A random stranger gives you a box with a button. Inside the box is one trillion dollars and the only way to access the money is to press the button. However, the button, when pressed, causes the world to end the day after you've died. What do you do?
Define "the world ending". Or, no, actually, don't, because I highly doubt you could prevent all possible causes of the world ending starting with one trillion (even if I invested it) of an undefined "dollar" currency (it could be a trillion Zimbabwean dollars for all I knew, and that's doubly worthless). We can't even fix the USA's national sovereign debt (even if I wanted to) with it, only reduce it to a smaller ridiculously large number in the trillions. If I could prevent any and all possible causes of the world ending from causing the world to end with the one trillion (because the question says nothing about what you can't do with the money, including trying not to end the world), including moving the entire population of Earth to another planet in case Earth blows up, then yes, but in this scenario, the answer is an unequivocal NO.
5. You find a dog that is worth close to one million dollars and sell it on eBay (dunno if that's legal) to some 8-year old girl (million dollars?) who is sure to love and care for it properly. However, before you send it through Australia Post, you see a 'Lost' sign with an image similar to the dog you sold, with a reward of half a million. However, the person who lost it is dodgy and does not look like he cares about the dog at all, also he refuses to give proof that the dog is actually his. Who do you give the dog to?
6. Someone invents a way to record all your dreams that you have forgotten, however you are only allowed to watch it with your entire family watching along with you. Would you use this invention to view your dreams, knowing that all your most embarrassing and innermost thoughts may manifest themselves in your dreams?
Rugged Randoms:
1. Pick a number between 1 and 2 inclusive. It may not be a decimal.
One-and-a-half. You didn't mention fractions, nor irrational numbers, nor non-real numbers.
If 1 1/2 isn't allowed, then the square root of 3. That can't be adequately expressed as a decimal, by a sane person's definition of decimal.
2. In your opinion, what is the single largest problem that the world as a whole faces?
3. Do you have certain friends only for lack of options?
No. I am at least acquaintances, if not friends, with most everyone that I know of, because I want to be.
4. Everyone has a certain ratio of brains to effort needed in order to achieve. What would you say your ratio is?
5. Do you have a fake call application on your phone to get out of awkward conversations? If so, have you ever used it?
Apps? On my phone? Which is more than eight years old? Next you'll be telling me that Windows 3.1 can run Mozilla Firefox 4! The answer is, of course, no and no.
6. If you were to have a movie made about your life, which songs would you include in the soundtrack?
Fancy Philosophicals:
1. 'Prove to me that you are not figments of my imagination', says the solipsist. So prove it for them. How do you prove that the world as you know it is not a figment of your imagination?
Ooh, this'll be fun, in a cruel, sadistic and completely unethical way. First, I would show them a computer which the both of us agreed matched or exceeded the average processing power of his/her/its/[other possessive pronoun] brain, preferably exceeding the brain's capacity. Then, I would proceed to upload a copy of his/her/its brain into the computer, which would know that it was a program being run by the computer to simulate his/her/its/[other] brain, and thus was not responsible for the continued existence of the universe, as its universe has another person (if you so wish to define the computer) running it. Said simulation would also have several inputs which had previously agreed to have represented the universe. Then, I would proceed to destroy the physical version of the brain or imagination in a pre-arranged manner, to the pre-arranged extent that it could not possibly imagine a universe. If the simulation of the brain, which is a very good one and in fact a perfect simulation by modular computer programs, argued that this wasn't enough to prove it to him/her/it/[other], I would then shut down the simulated imagination regions while continuing the feed of non-simulated data from the real world, proving that sometimes you can't argue with a solipsist with logic.
If said solipsist continued to argue that their existence was necessary to the universe, I would simply destroy all copies of said person (clones being an extremely ambiguous area, but if clones then identical twins and other people with exactly the same DNA).
However, if the solipsist's universe was defined as his/her/their/its/[other] particular worldview, then we would crack open [containers] of [drinks of choice] and talk about worldviews, with a possible segue into striking up a relationship, as I personally think that a person's perception of things highly colour their views on what a certain thing is.
Needless to say, I predict a great downturn in solipsism after the invention of brain uploading. Actually, this would work for cryogenic freezing as well. {Fannish note: And if ever River Song* [/SPOILER REDACTED] was a solipsist, she wouldn't be, not after [/SPOILER REDACTED].}
{Also, I kinda want to make a Z-movie (here meaning an extremely, extremely low-budget movie) about solipsist P-zombies. There would be much philosophising and much SF technobabbling, and not much headshotting, compared to the normal zombie flick.}
2. Do you believe you have free will? Or is everything you do simply a pre-written reaction in your DNA to certain stimuli?
If that's your definition of determinism, it sucks. (Oh god, I thought of a possible etymology. Bad fangirl! No more slash fics for you!) In this scenario, I would choose free-will, with maybe a bit of programming. HOWEVER! If you were to say behaviour was a product of a hell of a lot of conditioning, I would agree, unequivocally, that free-will was a product of people's collective imagination but people pick the most appropriate learned behaviour but then awkward moment where my argument contradicts itself oops.
3. Is the idea of customising babies before they are born a bad one? If you could ensure a baby is born without any genetic defects, but could also change their hair and eye colour, level of intelligence etc?
4. You clone yourself one day with the clone having exactly the same memories as you. Can you prove to yourself that you are the original?
5. Is a positive attitude beneficial? Or is it lying to oneself about the nature of life?
6. What do you think would be the most useful wild animal to domesticate?
I thought elephant immediately but that's already domesticated isn't it? I would also have to say lion, how cool would that be!
{HAHAHAHA elephants. Money, sex, power and elephants indeed! [/referenceonlyoneotherpersonIknowgets]** Ahem. Sorry Shelley, I wasn't laughing at you.}
Interesting Inquiries:
1. Do you think of yourself as having a great insight into how the human mind works? ie, do you think you understand other people's motives well?
No. {Elaborate for the audience then, please.}
2. How long does it take for someone to work off a bad first impression for you? How about ruining a good first impression?
3. What is your favourite type of mollusc?
4. Do you have any type of phobia? (you have to name it too, not yes/no) If not, what is the most irrational phobia that someone you know has?
I don't think I do, but I have hypochondria {Wait no that's not a phobia, come back here!}, I think. I don't know anyone with a medically diagnosed phobia. Ah, that's right! I have an abiding terror {Not so much terror as a mild fear and obsession, methinks.} of heights, especially things and/or myself falling off them.
5. What would you name the autobiography of your life?
It would, of course be a several-volume (preferably three, or seven, for traditon) autobiography, with each volume being a pastiche of clichés of that age & time and of what I was reading or reading of. The first volume would be Volume 1: Not Your Mother's Values: How Not To Rebel Against Asian Authoritarians. I haven't lived the rest yet, so come back later {like, in several decades}.
6. If you were someone else, what would be the first impressions of yourself?
If they could see inside my head: "Holy fuck this person is weird and strange and has weird interests and strange beliefs and A STRANGE MIND. I am running the fuck away from here." Probably I would have a sad, but then again.
Otherwise: "Eh, this person looks like they're nice, probably intelligent too." Probably something about the strange mélange of accents and retro but nice style in clothing; and hopefully not so much about physical appearance as my mum would think.
Footnotes, Or, An Explanation of Fannish References:
*: The reference here is to Doctor Who, a television production by the BBC, and its creators can't exactly be any more quantified than that without tl;dr. River Song is a [/SPOILER REDACTED] character first introduced in Season 30/New!Series 4's two-parter
**: This reference is to the
Aucun commentaire:
Enregistrer un commentaire