Experiment: You are Given 5 Wishes But the Following Wishes Negate the Prior Wishes. What would you wish for?
[ul]
[li]you have 5 wishes you can use anytime in your life[/li][li]once you wish the next successive wish, your prior wishes revert to the way things were[/li][li]the wishes can only involve you and your life in some way[/li][li]the wish process is a secret, you can’t tell anyone about it[/li][/ul]
What would you wish for?
I’m not falling for that, dude. If I tell you, they won’t come true.
I dunno man, this just seems like you get 5 draft opportunities to craft the optimal wish. If you can’t figure out a way to make wish 3 a superset of wish 2, you just need a better wish-lawyer.
Slap some planning meeting on the front end of each wish, some retrospective meetings at the end, and set a time limit on each wish and you have modern software development processes.
Just make sure that “live forever” isn’t the last one, unless you enjoy witnessing the heat death of the universe all by your lonesome. . .
What the f? I think wish supersets have just blown my mind… if I can figure out how they work…
Not to mention the danger of ending up a grasshopper like Tithonus if you’re not careful about the phrasing.
What does it even mean to revert to the way things were?
If my first wish is for a Swiss bank account that is perfectly legal, only accessible by me, and contains 1 billion dollars. One week later I wish for a pony. The bank account vanishes but what about things I’ve bought with the money? Do I forget about experiences I’ve had using that money?
The bank account, the money and everything you bought vanishes. But your memories remain.
Does that spice up the possibilities for you?
So you could get a 100 hookers and a tonne of blow, have a party of your life (with your friends) and even contract crabs and HIV.
If you then make a new wish in the near future that hooker and blow party never happened. But the “hilight reel” stays in your head… HIV? gone. Crabs? Gone. But the memories last forever.
Move on to your next wish… but as you do you hear that your wife has breast cancer… with metastases.
Now what?
I wish to change the rules of the wishes.
So why not just make the one wish? One is plenty if you can elaborate the details, after all. I wish to be a demigod with the following super powers, blah blah blah. Of course, the question is what deity or cosmic computer is interpreting your wish details?
So if you wish to live for 500 years, then 499 years later make another wish, what, you drop dead? If I wish for a year’s supply of food, then make another wish, do I instantly starve to death? What if you make a wish that (indirectly) affects the lives of a great number of people, then make another wish? You jump into an alternate reality where it never happened and their lives have progressed in entirely different ways?
What a weird, ill-conceived thought experiment.
Well pretty much any kind of wishing situation is broken.
I wish I never clicked on this thread.
Now I wish for ice cream.
Damn.
My first wish is for the knowledge to get around the rules of the wishes.
… I think we’re supposed to say that we would wish to crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and to hear the lamentation of their women. But it’s possible this is a side effect of binge-watching Game of Thrones.
A smaller Johnson. It’s a hard life, men. Hard.
Yeah, I don’t get it. Why wouldn’t you just wish for omnipotence, and then remove the restriction on the wishes with your omnipotence? Or just ignore the final four wishes, since you’re omnipotent?
But when you hear the lamentation of their women, your enemies become un-crushed! You have to choose!
The last wish is to go all quantum leap on yourself back to before you made the first wish. :p