I was being really cheeky above, but I do see this as a rather outlandish example of how beings of very high intelligence seem prone to getting stuck in odd tho

I was being really cheeky above, but I do see this as a rather outlandish example of how beings of very high intelligence seem prone to getting stuck in odd thought loops. I recall an episode of STTNG where they attacked the Borg collective in this way: they gave it an idea for object that appeared geometrically valid but could not exist in three dimensional space. The collective thought about it and thought about it, devoting more and more resources to it, until it basically crashed. Personally I think the answer to the Basilisk riddle is computational irreducibility: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ComputationalIrreducibility.htm... Roko's Basilisk is impossible because to simulate the universe in such detail would require something that is the universe.