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Don’t flip the lever. For the bus to kill the person in position 1, it has to kill the person in position 0.5 first. But before 0.5, it must run over 0.25. And before that, 0.125. Actually, this can be extended ad infinitum. Therefore, motion is not real, and nobody would die.
Stalin saved the world from fascism, but Zeno saved an infinite number of people from getting hit by a trolley… who’s based now, tankies?
the consequences of viewing infinity as a quantity and not as a process
(also cantor was using math to smuggle theology, change my mind)
The rate of death is constant for integers but infinite for reals, assuming a constant speed for the trolley. Much like real life I prefer humans having a longer lifespan, assuming a constant population.
the rate of deaths over time is certainly higher for reals, but you would never reach an infinite number of deaths in either case because there is not an infinite amount of time, an infinite amount of track, an infinite number of victims, or a trolley capable of operating forever. As always, the material reality places limits on us that is simply ignored for the sake of creating a thought experiment.
It doesn’t take an infinite amount of time to travel a finite distance. Let’s say it takes 1 second to travel to the integer 1 on the reals, you would have ran over an infinite amount of people because there is an infinite amount of real numbers between 0 and 1.
But you’d still need a physical, actually-Real, construction of infinite track to line up infinite people (tied down by infinite effort) with a train capable of doing infinite genocide in one second.
I fully support efforts to construct said train, however I am doubtful as to their success.
Furthermore, Goku could defeat Saitama.
Well yes, the density of people would even surpass that of a black hole. Of course its silly to take it seriously.
the real number track would gum up the wheels before the trolley got very far
It also would collapse reality if the people have nonzero mass.
But that would be happening regardless of your lever pulling or not. So I suppose everyone is trapped beyond the event horizon of an infinite black hole and your decisions do not really matter.
I guess I pull?
Move the second and third together, fourth, fifth and sixth together, and so on. I that way, the trolley is killing 1 + 2 + 3… killing a total of -1/12 people.
yeah but then someone will have to take care of the -1/12 of a dead person… who’s going to raise that orphaned child of abstract immaterial math?
No one dies, because we can demonstrate that the track is infinitely empty by moving the person in the first position to the second position (and second to third and so on) before the trolley hits them. Then just repeat the process before the trolley reaches the second position (and so on).
It also says nothing about scale. It could be that to get to the first integer it could take one second or until the heat death of the universe. The reals however are immune to your and my trick
Multitrack drifting will derail the train, only killing a finite number of people
multitrack drifting except it’s on both rails simultaneously and kills two infinities of people
Point out the contradictions in the concept of infinity, smirk, then turn away (if I don’t look back then neither option has fully materialized).
Don’t you dare collapse the wave function
As a compromise, I would simply construct a third track whose cardinality is strictly between that of the integers and the real numbers, and divert the train to that.
This solution feels extremely forced.
The solution is obvious. For the top track, Number each person that would be killed, and add a device to the front of the trolley such for each enumerated person reached, it will save them if the corresponding Turing Machine in standard enumeration halts. This has become an instance of the halting problem and thus the trolley cannot run.
Similarly, the bottom rail is even easier. Add a device that will save the person that is represented by the real number whose value can be decoded as the set of turing machines that halt. Once again we have an instance of the halting problem and, once again, the trolley cannot run.
I’m afraid the trolley conductor is a beaver
No, beavers are too busy.
The bottom one so that -1/12 people come back to life.
Isn’t that the sum of all the positive integers?
Yes, but you can group the infinite sum of ones to get the sum of positive integers. 1+(1+1)+(1+1+1)+…
finitism, the moral position. no communist use has been found for eliminating uncountably many people. the utterings of the absurd
Does the trolley run them all over instantly or does it take time to do so? If it doesn’t run them over what happens to them? Do they stay tied to the tracks until they die from other causes? If so I’d probably pick the bottom one because death by trolley is probably better than death by dehydration over 2-3 days.
real infinity, not integer infinity
it would take an infinite amount of time to even get around to stating the first real number, so nobody would die
alternatively, the above doesn’t work and instead everybody gets run over in a time span shorter than a nanosecond because there’s an infinite number of real numbers within even the smallest time interval. This also means the trolley is moving at faster than the speed of light, so suffering is minimized, and laws of physics are violated (a twofer)
In finite time the trolley would have killed infinite people already on the real track. On the integer track only a finite people are killed in that same time.
In finite time the trolley would have killed infinite people already on the real track
yes, which means the trolley would have to be traveling faster than the speed of light, or, we have a novel stacking method for fitting infinite numbers of people into a finite amount of train-track space
Okay, the chef at my work thought sharks were a type of dinosaur and me and another guy just spent several hours trying to make him understand that while physically things are generally finite the concept of infinity is in fact real. He explained the science, I went more philosophical and explained the concept is real because we’re discussing it. You know in Sci fi when they use a machine to go into someone’s brain and it’s conceptualized as a weird hallway or whatever? This is one I’m super intrigued to do that if possible and also deeply terrified.
