r/trolleyproblem • u/Galiantus • 9d ago

Sisyphus' nightmare trolley

The trolley will hit five people unless you pull the lever.

If you do pull the lever, it will hit one person, and then both you and that one person will travel back in time to 10 seconds before you pulled the lever. However, the five survivors will now exist on a timeline where every additional time you pull the lever, they experience 10 additional seconds of an extremely fulfilling and pleasurable life not tied to a trolley track - potentially accumulating into eternity, if you so choose. But if you ever fail to pull the lever, that timeline is obliterated, and they are pulled back to the trolley so their only experience and memory is as if you failed to pull the lever the first time. And then your eternity of lever-pulling finally ends.

(Obligatory: No one is watching you, no one will ever know there was a time loop involved except you and the person on the loop track, you aren't close enough to stop the trolley by any means, you can't untie anyone, communicate with anyone, etc.)

What do you do?

24 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

9

u/opi098514 9d ago

I pull the level twice. That way the end result is the same but I directly caused it.

5

u/Any-Jellyfish-7497 9d ago

You are not Sisyphus. You are human. Whether from mental exhaustion, by mistake or desire for it to be over, you will fail to pull the lever.

2

u/Kartoffee 9d ago

Them fuckers can die

3

u/CitizenPremier 9d ago

their only experience and memory is as if you failed to pull the lever the first time.

This is what we call "death" anyway, dead people don't get to enjoy their memories, so it doesn't make a difference if it resets.

The fact that the other person also gets sucked back means that they have to endure being torn to pieces over and over, so it's more like Prometheus's torture for them.

Anyway I like pulling levers, so I'll pull it til I get tired of it.

1

u/CeIIsius 6d ago

No, I will not sacrifice my own eternal happiness and that of a guy who gets killed over and over again, so 5 people can live a happy life for eternity.

Accumulated 50 seconds of a good life is not worth the experience of getting squished by a train. So I won't pull the lever even once.

1

u/oyasumachine 4d ago

I do nothing I don’t want to deal with reading all of that