If you take a thought experiment and replace all the thought with meaningless garbage, is it still a thought experiment?
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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So much work when all I want to do is run over people with a trolley.
After a few miles down the tracks, I won't see or hear the trolley anymore, therefore i can not be certain it even exists anymore. It may have run over someone, it may have derailed, it may have exploded, it may have run out of fuel and stopped, a black hole might have opened up in its path and swallowed it whole.
The lack of object permanence solution to the trolly problem.
Couldnt the person tied down escape by the time the trolley comes?
At the very least, if you throw the switch you then have a thousand miles to figure out a way to save them. Or to put the other person on the same track, depending on your style.
The trolly might not have but your choice did.
At that point you pretty much got a whole day to go and rescue the guy, assuming trolley is traveling around 40-50mph
Bold of you to assume there's a highway connection between you and the distant victim.
Just catch a faster train!
For the sake of the argument, the train takes the same tracks as the trolley and the trolley service otherwise has the same budget as the US DOD.
So it's going to cost 1000% more for half the distance?
Problems like this aren't unsolved, it's just that these problems have different answers depending on the context.
Is it the same trolley that kills the man? Yes because repairing the trolley doesn't change it's name.
Is it the same trolley that kills the man? No because it is physically not the same trolley.
Humans divide their cells until the original cells are gone. Are they a different person?
Yes they are.
No they aren't.
Depends on what you're measuring or what problem you're trying to solve. But both perspectives are simultaneously true. Wait until you get to math and find out there's different lengths of infinity. It's all tools used to solve problems.
depending on the context
This is exactly why these trolley problems don't work. When we strip away all context and ask simplified questions the nuance disappears and the question becomes almost meaningless.
The only way to win is not to play
You can also win sometimes by playing, depending on the context.
That's why I think these are mostly nonsense. These types of questions aren't philosophical, they're psychological. They don't teach anything, they just test what you value, and they're not the best types of questions for doing that either.
How does one replace the trolley's trucks (wheels and axles) without stopping it over 1000 mi?
Build an entire scaffolding around it, itself running on the same rail
Carefully
Was the trolley build by NEWAG?
In that case, no, and you’re not responsible anymore. Those people working on switching out the trolley parts had every available opportunity to fully stop the trolley, more-so than you. You diverted it to save a life immediately, that crew maintaining this Trolley of Death are the real murderers.
I detect a hidden analogy of capitalism.
How?
Capitalism is maintained by others, and all most of us can do in our day to day lives is make sure that the people in our immediate vicinity aren't killed by it.
Well it's like my grandmother always used to say: "Capitalism is like a death trolley barrelling down 1000 miles of track towards you"
Can't you just say the same thing about life in general?
They were told that for every part they replaced, they were diverting another trolley down a 1000-mile track
What if the maintenance crew themselves didn't know that the trolley was going to hit the tied down person 1000 miles away?
I blame the trolley company's CEO and shareholders for allowing a random person to divert the trolley's path in the first place.
Another fine example of a precision scheduled trollies.
I blame whoever tied the people down.
It was the CEO.
It was your mom.
You're definitely not guilty.
They couldn't have replaced the trolley parts had you not sent it.
My favorite trolley experiment is still the dad presenting it to the little kid, who proceeded to think outside the box and moved the one person to the other track with the second. And then ran them both over.