The questions to the hypothetical question

Warning: I’m going to get a little meta here. Not a usual thing for me but here it goes, nonetheless.

One of these weekends, I was trolling around the interwebs and came across a post by someone with a hypothetical (far-fetched) question along the lines of: “What would you do if you suddenly discovered that you could not die?”

Quite immediately the silly and equally far-fetched comments/answers started coming in. Some would do such things as walk into volcanoes, leap from buildings/planes and perform other generally mortal activities. However, others took a more cautious route by stating that they would not tell anyone for fear of scientific probing or media exposure. The answers said quite a bit about each commenter’s personalities, to say the least.

However, what I found most interesting were the follow-up questions to the original question. Some quite entertaining and others rather important, given the hypothetical situation.

“If I jumped from a building, would I get injured at all? If so, would I recover from my injuries or remain injured for eternity?”
“Although immortal, can I feel pain?”
“How did I discover that I could not die?”
“Do I grow old despite not dying?”

My inquisitive nature finds the questions to the original question far more enticing than the immediate comments made without further interrogation. They [the following questions] open up far more hypothetical answers to the original question. The necessity of specifics to provide a correct and conclusive answer to a question is so ingrained in my thought process that it sometimes leads an answer to be delayed until all scenarios are covered. Rambling a bit more, the answers to the various questions asked after the original question would further define my answer and therefore lead to a more specific hypothetical answer.

In short, if you had to answer the question above, would you answer as is or attempt to find out more about the hypothetical situation before answering?

I guess the easiest (and probably lamest) answer is “It depends.”

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