So here’s the question. There’s a button in front of you that, when pressed, kills you. You have 5 minutes in which to push the button. At the end of those 5 minutes, if you haven’t pushed the button, kills a randomly selected group of N people.
You know absolutely nothing about those N people, so you’re limited to your knowledge of what average people are like, and how likely it is that some of those people are criminals, geniuses, etc.
How big does N have to be before you’d press the button? And more importantly, why do you pick that number? (Please, no retarded justifications about how if you don’t press the button you aren’t responsible for what happens - that’s clearly ridiculous.)
In the morning I’d press the self-desctruct button immediately, as an automatic response to by snooze button. Between 12 and 9 I might kill the others voluntarily. At night I don’t know what I would do. I’m scared at night. You can’t be scared if you’re going to kill someone, especially yourself. It wouldn’t be proper to include that in the experiment.
How much does the experiment pay? Can I sign up on your website? The people you choose aren’t really random, are they? I mean you go to poorly parts of town, you don’t get access to real people. I could be an exeption. Would my name be listed in the credits? I’d be somebody
Are we locked in a room or is the button just sort of on our dresser?
If I’m not locked in a room it would take me however long it would take to get a whole bunch of acid, weed or whatever and I would blast my living perspective into another realm of existence, letting my limp, now dissociated body fall onto the irrelevant button.
If I awaken locked in the room with your OP as a note and no way out I’d probably hum and haw over whether or not it was a trick and then push the button somewhere into starvation.
If I awaken in a locked room and there is human interaction with me I’d ask for a bunch of weed or acid of whatever to ‘aid in my moral thinking’ and execute plan ‘not locked room’. If they refuse this request I’d prolly try and manipulate them Hannibal Lector style for a bit and then just press the button.
But I mean… put in that situation, who knows what I would do.
Sau - that’s the problem with this question. Assuming that there is no collateral harm done - that I am not wiping out everything I value, I would push the button many times. I might get sick, or old, or weary of life at some point, as people do. But until then, I’d kill and kill and kill. “Average” has nothing to do with it.
Y’know, if I knew it was my Mom or something, that would be different. You’d have to write up the whole script. But countless soldiers have been in this same situation, very generally - kill or be killed. Most kill. There is, in the abstract, nothing unusual about my position here.
Fear of death is a strong emotion which may actually bipass reason or complex thought. People may actually press the button, not out of logic, but out of instinct protocol, if they did press the button.
Even if you were a threat to everything around you, you would still feel it was perfectly reasonable to preserve your own life, if you felt that it was perfectly reasonable to preserve your own life.
You see: emotional and instinctive perferance are the foundationalism of the organization of concept which becomes “reason”;
Not even “reason” is “the truth”…
To be sure. I make no claims to truth. But truth wasn’t part of the question I was answering. Except that it is true, to the best of my knowledge, that i would do as I say I would.
0 or infinity. Why? Because these concepts are each weird enough that it is wholly possible that I might wake up in Tahiti naked with nothing but a tamborine and an elephant gun for an arm.
In all honesty I’d never hit the button to off myself, as long as there is an upper limit on the number N of people killed. I would push the button if there was a chance it would kill everybody except me and Gilbert Godfrey…
I said what I did, because I wanted to appeal to your non-truth mentality. You see: I wanted to agree with you, and that’s why I explained how “reason” is not itself “truth”.
