• elrik@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It really depends on the specifics of the top track. Are people added to the top track just in time to be run over by the trolley, or is the track pre-populated with an endless arrangement of people waiting to be run over.

    If it’s the later case, how do people further down the track survive for an unbounded amount of time while waiting to be run over? Do they wait, bound and screaming for an eternity? How do they survive long enough to be alive before being run over?

    I need to know if the top track reduces to running over an infinite arrangement of corpses. Or, if trolley time for the top track has some different meaning, such that the trolley brings an end to the finite life lived by each next person on the track.

  • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    For any randomly chosen person on an infinitely long track, the trolley will take an infinite amount of time to reach them. 0% of the people on the track are harmed at all.

  • Maalus@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    100 people hands down. Infinite people means infinite lives removed, infinite experiences etc. The 100 people will never truly die either, so if minimizing death is the goal, that’s best. It also is the choice that will happen without your input and those are usually better morally than actively changing and sentencing other people to death by yourself.

  • Funbreaker@lemmy.zip
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    5 months ago

    I pull the switch when the trolley is straddling the switching point, thus safely derailing the vehicle so it doesn’t kill anyone.

  • Zozano@lemy.lol
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    5 months ago

    I think ethically, you have to let 1 + 1 + 1… die.

    To let the same hundred people be tortured for eternity is basically hell.

    • Lemming6969@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      No. Reincarnation means they never really experience the consequence of death, so the latter is equivalent to no punishment at all. The more important consideration for both is how they exist between getting run over.

      • Zozano@lemy.lol
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        5 months ago

        I dunno man, seems like you’re presupposing death is worse than eternal torment, which is debatable.

        I believe OP is conflating reincarnation with resurrection. I believe the concept of reincarnation is incompatible with the hypothetical.

      • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        This assumes the amount of excruciating pain and horror of being run over by a trolley before death is zero, and while I haven’t been run over by a trolley personally, I’d have to imagine it’s not fun.

          • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Is this an “Eventually, Kars stopped thinking” supposition? Because that’s a valid possibility, but we can’t know it for CERTAIN - nobody’s ever been doing anything forever, and chronic pain seems to be painful at least on the timescales of decades…

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      And also, why are so many people traumatized by calc 2 and not by ordinary differential equations and complex analysis?

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    See, the thing about the 1+1+1 is that they can’t all die at ONCE. Even moving at a reasonable clip, let’s say that trolley kills say, one person a second. Two people per second already die anyway, so yes, we’re increasing the mortality rate, but humanity can survive that, and statistically a lot of people wouldn’t end up dying by trolley. It would SUCK that there’s a chance you might wind up on the trolley and dead at any time, but dying is already a natural part of life and it happens to everyone at some point anyway, so there’s nothing inherently STRANGE about adding a trolley death every second.

    The 100 reincarnating people will be suffering FOREVER, repeatedly, with no reprieve or redemption, and the real kicker is all the other people in the other lane are dying ANYWAY, just as people always have, so it’s not like you’ve really SAVED them - you’ve just not allowed the mortality rate to increase at the cost of eternal suffering for a few people. Doesn’t seem like a good trade.

    It’s a more interesting question if we change it slightly and all of the infinite people are Wolverine, bub.

    • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Spoilers for Deadpool and Wolverine.

      !Just throw down an infinite number of Deadpools, one between each Wolverine, have them all join hands and blast Madonna. Trolley is defeated.!<

  • driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br
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    5 months ago

    Easy, move the second and third together, 4th, 5th and 6th together, 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th, and so on. Killing 1 + 2 + 3… until infinite, having Killing a total of -1/12 person.

    • dQw4w9WgXcQ@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      That trolley problem is intense: would you direct the trolley onto a track as driving_crooner described or let the trolley run on an empty track?

  • saltesc@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Everyone overlooking the rigorous maintenance required on the trolley. There will need to be several seamless swap outs each day with cleaning and engineering crews to keep the trolley, tracks, and grounds around running in a fulfilling order. And probably some ovens.

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      We are overlooking it, because it isn’t part of the hypothetical.

      Otherwise we would also be discussing the logistics of tying infinite people to the train tracks, or the regeneration speed of human bodies.

      It is either finite suffering for infinite people, or infinite suffering for finite people. Which implies the train to keep working for infinity.

      • saltesc@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        “We”? Who’s “we”?

        All the other “experts” that failed to realise either option cannot occur indefinitely without a good limb clean out every now and then?

        You can imply what you like, but the meme diagram is very clear and should be taken light-heartedly very seriously. Especially since it’s the Trolley Problem scenario.

  • Mango@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Killing everyone once ends all suffering. It’s only the reanimation that’s evil.

  • excral@feddit.org
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    5 months ago

    Isn’t the main argument of Christianity that the second option was better than the first?

  • HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com
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    5 months ago

    I really not sure about that last paragraph of the premise shot. I think the top is finite suffering for finite deaths but infinite individuals and then the bottom is finite suffering for infinite deaths of finite individuals. Honestly it sorta seems like the deaths are the suffering or at least part and parsel with it so I think it finite suffering/death for infinite individuals or infinite suffering/death for finite individuals.