You wait for the train to mangle him to bits, then you quickly run over and kick his body parts off the track and then he regenerates over there somewhere.
I’m picturing a bunch of little men regenerating from the separate parts
Phantasia
The Disney movie Fantasia? Did it happen in that movie? It’s been a while
10 seconds between rounds over the immortal? Easy fucking peasy to solve - let it over him once, stay in place for when you have 10 seconds to pull him out. Check-fucking-mate.
Besides, since the tram will be looping, it’ll be very easy to force it to stop somehow, like derailing or putting a concrete block on the track.
Also, if our immortal friend’s tissues and bones end up in the rails and the wheels, the chances of the tram failing to move increase with every trip, it might not even make it to loop 100. Also also, if, for whatever reason, one of the tram runs turns the fellow around, such that the chains end up on the track, the bump will derail the thing.
However, there is now an unkillable super hero who has gone through immense pain because of your choice. I hope you can find whomever put him in chains in the first place, before he finds you.
You think I would have to find that person, but it was I, DIO!
Hey I just thought of a new solution to the trolley problem. Instead of flipping the switch or not, stick an object on the tracks that derails the trolley. Guessing there’s a decent chance no one dies since trolleys generally don’t have the speed or intertia that a train has. The chaos option.
The true choice was the lever all along.
The utilitarian framework of ethics provides an answer in this specific case, if you make an assumption about the level of suffering the people will endure while being run over by the train. If the suffering of the one man when he gets hit by the train is equal to the suffering to any one of the five men when they get hit by the train, then is makes no difference that the one man will not die. Utilitarianism states that the greatest good is human pleasure, and the greatest bad is human suffering. In this case, the one man being immortal increases his capacity to suffer, while the five men can only experience the suffering once. This means that the one man will experience human suffering equal to the five men after five cycles of the tram, which will take 50 seconds. If I wasn’t sure that I could break the chain and free the one man within 50 seconds, then the correct course of action is to let the five men die because human suffering will be greater overall for this system after 50 seconds, at the cost of one unit every ten seconds. If the one man could be sedated and experience no pain until the chains could be cut, then we are effectively performing a kind of surgery on the one man, and long periods of sedation would be justified while his chains are being cut.
To counter: immortality means that this person must necessarily endure an infinite amount of suffering whether they get off the tracks or not (e.g. drifting through the cold void after the sun explodes)
The other people can be saved from an avoidable grisly death while the immortal’s suffering is merely delayed.
I appreciate this take on the concept of how this utility function would work. If we made the utility function different within our utilitarian framing, we might produce different outcomes given the same scenario. It seems that the differences in our utility functions are whether they are based on absolute or relative suffering. Also, death may be a type of suffering which is different from pain, as I assume most people would accept a large amount of pain to continue living. How many times of getting hit by the train would be equal to one death, I wonder?
Oh by gods, just derail the bloody thing!
Multi-track drifting!
Scenario 1: It is difficult, but not impossible to free the man from his chains or otherwise disrupt the functions of the trolley. You can eventually save him, so switching the trolley to his track is morally correct.
Scenario 2: The man cannot be freed from the track, the trolley will never stop running him over, and his suffering will never end. From a purely mathematical standpoint, he will eventually experience more suffering than the mortals tied to the track, so it would be more moral to allow the trolley to kill them and end their suffering immediately. ON THE OTHER HAND, if he’s immortal and can’t be freed, he will also experience infinite suffering just from being forever tied to an empty track, so it’s arguably no different if he’s being run over or not, so it would be more moral to give him the trolley and then let the other people go free so they can go out and enjoy their lives.
So infinite suffering is worse than taking 5 lives, but finite suffering isn’t.
Then, where’s the cutoff? Would it be fine if he can be saved after 1 week? A year? A millennium?
Not infinite suffering, as the trolley battery will only last for 10,000 years.
Sigh… unzips solar panels
Welcome to: sun swallow earth after become red giant.
I wonder how our immortal friend’s suffering will go once the Earth has been swallowed by the Sun
how much work will it take? who will organize it? who will pay for it? will my taxes go up?
ALOT. Me. You. Without a dbout, but it’s unrelated
well fuck it then, leave him on the track and sell tickets and t-shirts
The limit is 2016000 moments, give or take
The planet the trolly is on is not infinite. Earth will be consumed by our sun freeing his from his suffering. He can then live out eternity floating through the cosmos. Even if he is immortal, can he survive the heat death of the universe?
In the book Elantris by Brandon Sanderson, there are inhabitants of the city of Elantris who are demi-gods: very long lived, and regenerate almost instantly from wounds so pretty hard to kill. But a curse befalls the city and the inhabitants go from regenerating wounds to not being able to heal at all. The pain from the initial moment of a stubbed toe persists with you… forever or until the curse is lifted.
In one part of the book and it has been I think 20 years of the curse, some characters are considering how to relieve themselves of the pain. If the body was cremated, would that end it or would the pain of being created persist with whatever is left?
Your comment about the sun freeing the immortal from suffering made me think of this. What if the immortal isn’t freed from suffering by being engulfed by the sun?
Uncountable infinite then.
Who says being tied to the track is infinite suffering? How is it any worse than the absurd meaninglessness of our own existences? Could Track Guy not find joy in hearing the singing of nearby birds, or find freedom in his own thoughts? We could still talk to him, keep him company, maybe he would enjoy teaching or hearing stories, discussing philosophy. He could write a novel.
Even if he was being run over by the trolly every so often, couldn’t he find something worth living for in those moments in between? One must imagine Track Guy happy.
I choose to hijack the trolley and sell it at the local chop shop for beer money.
Since he’s immortal, some form of extreme violence like a concentrated explosion would destroy the chain quickly and free him with minimal separate regeneration cycles.
Since he’s immortal, why doesn’t he free himself after he gets severed the first time
His head and legs are crushed. He’s not really a (mobile) person post-crush.
Yeah, and his torso is still chained.
I’m hearing an awful lot of excuses.
Well he should have thought of that before getting chained to the tracks
Yes because while he’s dying again and again, I can find a way to derail the trolly.
I think the premise is that you can only try to break the chains.
I choose fuck those 5 people I guess. You eventually learn the value of pain and suffering, 10.000 years is more than enough to atone for any normal crime.
So if you saved the immortal would the immortal go onto suffer but in different ways
Everyone should read The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin.
Le Guin is honestly an absolute titan of a writer. Incredibly thought-provoking stuff.
Some people have never had to cut through chain quickly, and it shows.
Give me 10 minutes with my cordless angle grinder and a fresh pack of cutting discs and I’ll have every link cut from head to toe
Or 20 minutes with a hacksaw and I’ll at least have a link cut that allows me to unravel the chain.
Or just make the immortal person Jeff bezos and I’ll just call it a day?
He’s just wrapped in chains. Roll him so he goes groin first once, because fuck him for making me get out of my
chainchair, then roll him the rest of the way to safety. He can starve the rest of the way out of the chains.Well, since the train passes every 10 seconds, I’d say you reasonably have to batch this job in 5-second bursts, maybe shorter to be safe. Even if you focus on just one link per side on this “very heavy-duty chain”, I’d say this poor soul would die at least 30 times just while you’re working. Plus imagine all the blood you - and your tools - would be splattered in. What’s that going to do to your angle grinder and your fresh cutting disks?
Without getting into specifics, I’m 100% confident I can cut through up to 12mm of hardened steel in under 10 seconds with one, assuming I get the alignment right and the steel isn’t going to shift on me. Given it’s being called “heavy duty” chain, I’m going to assume a layman’s version of that and say 12mm is probably overkill, but let’s just go with that.
10 seconds of grinding. I’ll give myself 3 seconds to run in, 3 seconds to run away. 6 seconds to cut, we’ll go with 4 of those actually making contact. That’s 3 trips per half-link (you need to cut through both sides of a link to pull the chain apart) so 6 in total to break one strand.
I’d say 30 deaths is generous.
And again without getting into specifics, blood on brushless tools doesn’t do much, especially if I use some corrosion resistant coatings on the sensitive contacts.
Ultimately though, one would hope the immortal being is willing to accept the temporary trolley torture if it means the others can be rescued
Some of you don’t understand hypothetical situations.
The choice of options are: 1x infinite suffering or 5x finite suffering.
Every other option you come up with does not work.
And in this situation, I’d say that 5x finite suffering is better since infinite is a long time.
It’s only 10, 000 years of suffering, it’s not infinite. I say let 'er rip.
very difficulty
