Immortality and Invulnerability: Loophole Abuse, or Logic Fail?

[Zach9o9]

So the other week, a friend of mine (I'll call him Carl if I ever have to talk about him) asks two of us "Would You Rather: Immortality, or Invulnerability?"

Now before I could chime in with my response, my other friend (I'll call this one John) responds by saying he would choose Invulnerability, because he effectively cannot die. By his logic, at all. Not of Old Age, not by Killing him via outside means, he just can't die. This is where I just can't help but question: what the hell? Last I checked, Invulnerability only meant one half of that.

Despite evidence to the contrary (like...Y'know, the actual question itself having the context of "These two options are different, so you're not getting both for the price of one" being one piece we used) John keeps defending his side of the argument by saying that "We never clarified the specific definitions," and "Because of the fact we weren't clear, he used his own definition for the question." and "That the General definitions didn't apply to the question he was given." and then saying that the whole issue just devolves in to politics in the aspect that "Politics use their own definitions if it isn't presented with the definitions initially?"

I really don't try to dwell on stuff like this, but I can't help but wonder: Does he have a point on his side of the argument, or was he just failing in his defense once he was caught in the wrong and didn't want to admit it?

Just an issue I can't help but be bugged about. The logic just....feels stupid to me...

 

[SonyUSA]

To be truly immortal, you must be able to withstand any destructive element to yourself so that you are always "alive", being regeneration, invulnerability, or a quantum state in which damaging elements just go through you. To be invulnerable, you only have to resist damage:

adjective
1. incapable of being wounded, hurt, or damaged.

However unless explicitly stated to mean eternal youth, that doesn't mean you won't live in both cases to be very old and incredibly senile/crazy or in a vegetable state unable to die forever.

Best case scenario, immortal will mean you are also invulnerable.

 

[TotalInsanity4]

Yeah, he's just arguing for the sake of arguing

 

[kuwanger]

Immortal just means doesn't die of old age. As others have stated, you can still be injured to the point of death, grow old, or go senile.

Meanwhile, invulnerable just means as SonyUSA says to be hurt from an outside source. Dying of old age? Congenital heart failure? Suffocation? Sure.

Honestly, though, the real issue is that there's no such thing as immortal or invulnerable. For the purpose of narrative, though, plenty of stories push immortals with near invulnerability (and possibly eternal youth) or vice versa (mortals granted boons by the Gods but who eventually will grow old and die, although it often implied they live a very long life (hundreds of years)). Most these stories were written before we knew about pathogens, telomeres, or entropy which really uncuts taking any of the discussion too seriously.

Having said all that, the point of such discussions is to sort of tease out an understanding of what such words means (like omniscience for omnipotence) since dictionaries often only provide a narrow description of the way a word is used. Sounds to me like John was too interested in winning an argument and not really in understanding the point of the discussion. That's the problem. Then again, perhaps he'd argue he's now invulnerable to criticism.

 

[lordkaos]

I think being invulnerable would only apply for damage from external sources like assassination attempts, accidents, disease, etc. and at the end of your life you would still die from natural causes

 

[FAST6191]

On a micro level to be invulnerable would also seem to cure ageing, disease and internal injury (bullet proof skin matters little if my organs are still jelly from an explosion or transferred force).

Would probably suck if you got trapped underground until the sun went red giant and maybe dissolved enough of the earth that you could escape, or everybody else became AI in the meantime and you were left with a puny human mind.

Relevant

 

[H1B1Esquire]

No one ever stated if you'd still be human. So, yeah, you could be an invulnerable gas fart. You could be an immortal bowl of water. Obviously, you couldn't live by the normal rules of a human being.

If they really wanted to "talk" about this, there would have to have a very clear, defined set of rules or something not as vague.

I think the better would be: the ability to effectively master Voodoo magic or Celtic magick/killed by a steamroller crushing you, starting from the toes or killed by 100 insects of six different orders in all of your orifices (choice to insects and orifices)/Full control of your dreams with the ability to wake when you want or being trapped in other peoples dreams, even if they're nightmares, with no control (you're basically the camera).

 

[RattletraPM]

Invulnerability = the ability to resist any kind of damage or wound
Immortality = the ability to live forever

Of course, you have to keep in mind that in some context being immortal also includes being invulnerable (think about fictional characters that cannot die, no matter what) while in a more generic context it doesn't (ex. biological immortality, aka species of animals that can die if wounded but cannot die from old age). Still, the two terms are indeed different from one another and, as you said, mean different things.

Despite evidence to the contrary (like...Y'know, the actual question itself having the context of "These two options are different, so you're not getting both for the price of one" being one piece we used) John keeps defending his side of the argument by saying that "We never clarified the specific definitions," and "Because of the fact we weren't clear, he used his own definition for the question." and "That the General definitions didn't apply to the question he was given." and then saying that the whole issue just devolves in to politics in the aspect that "Politics use their own definitions if it isn't presented with the definitions initially?"

Your friend's argument is straight out bullshit. If what he said could really apply then you might make a question about apples and pears and then say "because the general definitions don't apply and I didn't specify a pear as a fruit with a long neck and a big base, I can refer to a grape as a pear" and completely derail the argument. You could destroy this argument by telling him about Ferdinand de Saussure's model about the relationship between signifier and signified but he obivously said that just because he didn't want to admit to be wrong, so he probabily wouldn't listen anyways and you'd be just wasting time at that point.