Quantum Wave-Trolley Thought Experiment

A quantum wave-trolley approaches a plate with a double slit. On the other end of each slit is a crystal that will split the wave-trolley into an entangled pair of wave trolleys with half the energy of the original. You stand next to a lever that operates seven wave-trolley detectors. These detectors are placed on the tracks that the entangled pairs will go through. Right after the detectors, people are tied down to the track, placed inside a box transparent only to the trolley frequency of the EM spectrum (this means you can't know if they are dead or alive until the box opens). If you activate the detectors, you will force the trolley's wave function to collapse into a single trolley-particle by revealing which slit it went through. This would instantly kill one of the two persons in front of the detectors on one side, but also have a 50% chance of killing a single person on the other end, or a 25% chance of either killing 4, or none, depending the final direction that the particle-trolley goes through. If you do nothing, you might kill everyone or no one, or some in some worlds and some in others. But you don't know which is it, because you haven't figured out whether the correct interpretation is Copenhagen, or Many Worlds or Pilot Wave or any other. There is one last problem: You are a virtual ethicist, and so you are probably unaware of any developments after Aristotle, and you're only vaguely aware that the 20th century happened, because you might have read MacIntyre or Anscombe so you have no idea what any of this means or how to approach it. What do you do?

A deliberately overcomplicated diagram combines the trolley problem with quantum mechanics and competing interpretations of quantum physics. The punchline is that every possible choice becomes impossible to evaluate, while the “virtual ethicist” is portrayed as philosophically outdated and confused by modern thought. It is used as an absurd reaction to moral dilemmas, indecision, or explanations that make a simple problem impossibly complex.

• @profunctor_io / 4722 2020-06-05