Big Big Question

Bill and Ted have loaned you their phonebooth. You can bring one person from the past to the present to show them around. (Assuming no time-space continuum stuff is messed up,) Who to you grab?

If you were given a chance to go back in your life with your current knowledge intact, would you? If so, to what age?

(You can take as a given that your current timeline would heal gracefully, that the people you currently know but might not given changes in the past will instead meet other people who will fill similar roles, etc. You can also assume that history will generally follow a similar track, as far as markets, world events and such go, though it’s not an absolute given, depending on who you are and what you might be able to accomplish.)

Even though we all know that the world is not going to end when CERN fires up the Large Hadron Collider on 9/10/08 at 700 GMT, what are your plans for your time between now and then? Is there anything you feel like you need to do before the world ends science begins?

(For the record, I read that they’ll just be accelerating some particles on 9/10- actual collisions will begin in the following weeks.)

Two epic guys with lots of respective canon. Both interested in peace. Both vilified by their contemporary powers-that-be.

Somewhat different methods and personal philosophies.

So what would the Christ and the Vigilante be able to get together on? What are the irreconcilables?

If you could ask one question, big or small, of (your preferred, for this exercise, conception of) God, and get a straight, thorough answer, what would it be? Why that question?

What superstitions do you have? What little things do you do, or not do, even if you think/know it probably won’t hurt you?

My friend’s couch is cursed, but only one side of it. The first time I laid with my head on the right side of the couch, a spider crawled along the back of the couch. The second time I laid there, a 2-inch-long moth was hanging out from behind the mirror above the couch (I’m severely lepidopterophobic.) The third time, I got a tick on my scalp. Three strikes and you’re out… I’m not laying on that side of the couch anymore until I know the curse is broken. I can lay on the other end of the couch or sit anywhere on it and nothing happens. How can we break the curse?

(Yes, this is meant to be in fun.)

To answer this question, it shouldn’t matter if you actually believe in free will or not. This is a counter-factual (though, personally, I don’t believe in free will).

Let’s say an entire world of people didn’t believe in free will (and that they were right). What would such a world be like?

Let’s say the world is otherwise like our world. If you’re temped to say, “That’s impossible. A world in which people don’t feel like they have free will would never wind up being anything like our world,” imagine this:

Super-intelligent aliens visit present-day Earth and explain to us that free-will doesn’t exist. They actually (somehow) prove to us that it doesn’t. Of course, some people don’t (or can’t) accept the proof, even though it’s iron-clad. So the aliens put something in our water — some chemical that forces us to see the truth. Suddenly, we all KNOW that there’s no free will.

What happens?

Say you were spending one night in a haunted inn that is located at the center of an ancient English stone circle. Supposing that ghosts, spirits, and so on exist, what would you do, say, or bring to provoke an encounter?

The question comes courtesy of the referrer logs; I hate to think that whoever was doing their metauniverse research came up empty-handed, so, okay:

What is it?  What isn’t it?  How many are there?  What colors do they come in?  Etc.

There’s a well-trod (if not exactly widely accepted) argument for the idea that the world we live in now could be not the real world but a simulation being run by far-flung descendents of what we think of as the modern human race. (Nick Bostrum is probably the foremost figure in this debate; but then there’s this angle on it, too.)

Settling the “if” and assuming that yes, we are in fact running on some post-singularity desktop in the year 3008, what are the hints available to us as simulated denizens in a superbly but not perfectly modeled reality? Where did they goof up? What are the gaps and the glitches in this simulation that should leave us wondering exactly what is going on?

An oldie but a goodie. Interpretations for different values of “God” welcome; personal belief not required, but personal/practical as well as philosophical/abstract takes would be great.

Okay, so let’s say that reincarnation as other species is real. What/who do you think you were in a past life, or think you were meant to be in this life?

For example, I think I was meant to be a penguin. I rarely get cold - it can be 30 degrees out and I’ll be driving down the road with my window down. When I was young, my mom thought I hated taking baths, but it’s not the bath I hated; I hated getting out and dried off! I could live in the shower, much like Kramer in one episode of Seinfeld.

So how about you?

If you could travel out of your body at will, where would you go first? Second, third, etc.?

Would you spy on anyone? If so, how would you use your new super fly-on-the-wall knowledge?

Would you spend the night in a haunted house? Let’s devise a scenario: the house is large, decadent, without electricity and notoriously thought of by the locals (none of whom live within three miles of the place) to be haunted. You can bring a flashlight and a sleeping bag but nothing else. I’d prefer you did it alone, but I suppose you can bring a friend if you’re really that big of a wimp. Would you do it on a dare or would it take the promise of a large sum of money? Or not at all?

Extra points: have you ever spent the night in a haunted house?

I’ve been in countless discussions about theism and atheism. But it just occurred to me that most (all?) of these discussions have been meaningless (or at least not as meaningful as they could have been) because the participants never defined “belief.” I say I don’t believe in God. Fred says he does. I ask him why he does. He asks me what sort of proof would make me believe… We’re circling around a word, but we never attack it directly. How can we be sure we’re even talking about the same thing?

Does belief mean “to feel like something is true”? To be unable to imagine it being false (completely unable or able only with a really strong effort)? To be unable to feel like it’s false (even if you can intellectually imagine it being false)? To generally live one’s life as if it’s true (even if you know it may be false — or that it is false)?

It seems reasonable for me to claim belief that my arm exists. But I’m not even sure what I mean by that. I know it’s POSSIBLE that I might be imagining it. Still, there’s a strong emotional/intellectual SOMETHING going on. It feels profound, and I call it “I believe.” What do I mean?

A question inspired by this story of Jewish children secretly baptized, the question arises:

When two (or more) religions have intersecting domains of spiritual jurisdiction, as it were, what happens?  What are the theological boundaries?  The social implications?  Are any religions in particular more (or less) “sticky” in their metaphysical persistence?

It’s an oldie but a goodie. You can go forward or backward in time just once for a set amount of time. Say one week. What point in time, past or future, would you travel to?

*Please ignore stuff like the possibility of dying at certain points in time, the grandfather paradox, etc.

Describe your choice of conditional immortality. The assumption here is that you can be killed, but you’ll live forever if no one manages to pull it off. You can have special powers, but you also have some sort of vulnerability.

Inspired by klangklangston’s MetaTalk comments describing his plan “to be a zombie reanimated by a hive of bees, which I could shoot from my hands” and “keep my body living forever as a hollowed husk of entomological evil.”

In today’s world, where technology (i.e., Photoshop and the
like) can be so deceptive, what ‘Proof’ would make you believe that extra-terrestrial life/a divine being had actually visited Earth?

What would you accept as proof of a bona fide “Miracle”?