• Barbarian@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      The absurd is a result of the confrontation between human need and the unending screams of the victims being run over infinitely.

  • elrik@lemmy.world
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    2 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.

  • Maalus@lemmy.world
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    2 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.

  • Ultraviolet@lemmy.world
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    2 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.

  • Taako_Tuesday@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Infinite suffering for a small group of people in exchange for saving everyone else in existence is basically the story of the Heralds in Stormlight Archive

  • gandalf_der_12te@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    2 months ago

    I smell hilbert’s hotel:

    Let the trolley run on the top track, but before it can hit anyone, move everybody one to the right. Repeat the process infinitely. Nobody gets run over.

  • Funbreaker@lemmy.zip
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    2 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.

    • AlligatorBlizzard@sh.itjust.works
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      2 months ago

      This isn’t even an isolated thing, I was a physics math double major and I’ve got into discussions with friends, and the overwhelming consensus was that calc 2 was the worst. Possibly because it’s where sequences and series show up, whereas calc 3 is just calc 1 but in more dimensions.

      • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
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        2 months ago

        You can add me to the list of people that had a whole ass problem with calc 2. In addition to what you mentioned, my professor was the kind of guy who looked down on you if you didn’t know as much math as him and he had his doctorate in math. He laughed at people asking questions. His office hours was just him asking if you were too stupid to do math.

        I don’t know where he is now but I sure hope he’s stepping on a LEGO brick every morning when he gets out of bed.

    • marcos@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

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

  • Zozano@lemy.lol
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    2 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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      2 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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        2 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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        2 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.

        • Lemming6969@lemmy.world
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          2 months ago

          Given it’s infinity, an infinite amount of anything just becomes a mundane day to day thing.

          • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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            2 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…

  • mycodesucks@lemmy.world
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    2 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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      2 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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    2 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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      2 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?