[Poll] Could you abandon a dying person?

the fun to sleep would be gone, bruh. if you do that, you would be unable to have a fun sleep.

 

1. No
2. No
3. Yes
4. No

In this scenario... I would likely make the doctor forget all about me and my ability... And then I would be a little bit "compassionate" towards the yet to be born children of that world... By creating a magic plague of my own... One that renders people infertile if they're incapable of properly providing for children for some reason... A plague that automatically blinks out of existence if the worlds population starts to drop to dangerously low levels, like some one billion or so...

Then, I might make my self invisible and leave the city and head out to some less populated area... Some mountain perhaps and start building a dungeon or my "fortress of solitude" or something, where I can experiment with my powers in peace... and once I am done with that...

I might conjure up some counter thing that shows the number of people in the world and then, adjust the flow of time inside the one meter bubble in relation to the outside, so that a day inside is a week or month or year outside or something, and see if the population is growing or shrinking... and maybe wait until the worlds population drops to something more... reasonable... before heading out... depends...

 

Couldn't you just summon a creature or item that can heal people at a fast speed?

 

Honestly, there has to be better ways to help people than to just cure people individually, which is highly inefficient. Addressing the root causes, whether they be a stratified society with major inequality, rampant overpopulation, etc is the best way to help people. And there are many ways to address these issues, even with only controlling one meter. For instance, you could create portals to alternate dimensions and worlds to help with over population, create automated healing devices for disease or create a revolution to overthrow the tyranny.

 

If that's the kind of logic we're going for, why stop there? Why not just become a god and turn the world into a paradise? Or even better, cast the infinite tsukuyomi and put the entire world into an illusion where they're in paradise.

 

it because of the limitation of one meter radius effective tho? and to build it to god level type of power, my answer was creating seeds which would grow into world tree, where it would be useas my catalyst to use my power. read my previous post please for full answer.

 

Does this still work in a world suffering from overpopulation of unimaginable proportions?

 

No, the limitation is one meter radius from your body. You just need to alter your body until it's capable of surviving in space and then increase your size until your hand is larger than the planet itself. Then, just grab the planet and accidentally crush it.

 

you cant say intentionally increasing your size to crush the planet as accidentally, you know?
and yes, but the only fun thing you might be doing would only be crushing planets, which is ill-suited to my fun styles. because if I died once without able to have what I want in my past live, why not I have it now? that kind of fun styles, probably up to my taste.
ps: goddamnit, typing in 'broken screen smartphone' are really hard.

 

I am not my redeemer, hence, these hands shall never save nor protect. Endure! They shall only endure until silent decay stops. Same applies to everyone else. Good or bad people die. They all die. Why save them? We can only save ourselves! If I had an OP hack, I would just make humankind experience an eternity in endless loops of reincarnation. I will have them feel, know, and die each life lived in the history of humankind. I wonder~ Will they cease to be a functional human, or will they seek death after rebirth? Haha... Enough! Hahahahahahaha! Humans are boring when the journey ends.

 

Going to play devil's advocate for a bunch of these responses.

So I would argue this is an excuse. If your mother (or a loved one) was dying openly on the streets, if you refused to use your powers out of the argument that it's troublesome if others know about your power -- many people would say that this is purely an excuse to shirk yourself away from a moral responsibility.

I sort of disagree with this statement. Self-imposed "moral obligation" is different from external "obligation". I would argue that many Saints were driven by highly consistent moral and ethical values -- to the point that from their perspective they would have likely seen many things to be a "moral obligation".

The consistency of standards is relatively important.

A saint wouldn't be seen as a saint if they only decided to save people whenever they whimsically felt like it -- like only saving loli's but refused to save ugly people.

Many saints do things that are very unpleasurable. I doubt that Saints wanted to get burnt at a stake, but they did so because their moral/ethical system is so strong that they are unwilling to sacrifice their values.

Many people say that even the process of going through medical school is incredibly desensitizing. With enough exposure to something unusual (e.g. death, war, incredible political power with the responsibility of the fate of millions of people), desensitization is more-or-less inevitable.

This is sort of like applying your world's values to another world.

If humans in this world lived in apartment complexes 500 stories high (above and below ground) with 100 square feet cramped tiny rooms -- yet 90% of people have plenty of food -- what gives you the right to say that life your Earth is superior than life in this Isekai universe?

A medieval person from the 1600s could come to modern day Tokyo, Japan -- and their instinctive reaction could be that it is overcrowded. However, the absolute number of people does not necessary make the world a better or worse place.

For all you know, this isekai world could be 100X larger in size than Earth.

So under the prompt, your OP power can give you literally anything. You can make diamonds and jewels and plenty of stuff appear out of thin air. What could a person possibly give you that you couldn't simply just wish for yourself?

I definitely agree with this in principle, although the "give a man a fish / teach a man to fish" analogy starts to become somewhat problematic when you use it with sick people.

The analogy implies that a poor person's misfortune is a lack of their ability, and that teaching them "how to fish" will resolve the problem. When you apply this to healthcare, it's a little bit like saying a person who develops cancer is their own fault, and rather than taking care of them in the hospital you should teach them healthcare skills so they can take care of themselves at home without troubling other people.

If I lifted this to the real world... it would be like arguing to defund government support for all hospitals and instead use all that money to fund research programs to cure cancer.

...Most sane people would say that you need both, and there's sort of some degree of moral obligation to help people who show up at a hospital.

I didn't include this in the OP, but here's an extended explanation of the ability limitations.

1. You can literally make anything you want happen inside of the 1 meter radius.

2. If you want any change to persist after leaving the 1 meter radius, it must be compatible with the laws of physics of this world. Otherwise the change will evaporate into thin air.​

For example, you could create a small battery with the power of 10^9999999999 google quadrillion megatillion stars stored inside of it... within the one meter radius. You can also use it within the one meter radius.

However, if you threw the battery out of your radius of effect, it would likely disappear because such an existence is physically impossible, and it conflicts with the laws of nature in this universe.

Restoring a person's health state to normal would work (and persist).

However, some of the suggestions (e.g. the giant tree) may not work... if it conflicts with the universe's rules.

IMO, a single pill that could cure anything would be a physically impossible existence (at least in my personal opinion, coming from my general experience in biology), although you may be able to make a pill that cures malaria or a separate pill that cures breast cancer.

It would take a lot of experimentation to figure out what could potentially work -- especially since you don't know the laws of this universe and what sort of creations of yours can persist outside of the barrier.

That said, all of this extensible to the general prompt in the poll. If you have the unique ability to design a cure (nobody else in the world has this ability), would you feel any degree of moral imperative to dedicate your energy to doing this?

 

What excuse? Are you comparing helping a loved one to helping a complete stranger? Furthermore, who really cares about what "many people" would say? Why are you letting them think for you? Also, there's no so-called "moral responsibility" in this case since you have to endanger yourself to help.

 

The example with a loved one is supposed to be a situation where you do have an unquestionable moral responsibility.

If you do feel you have a moral responsibility, then stating it is potentially dangerous is just an excuse.

Under the rationale that you can expose yourself to any risk — then ambulance drivers should never drive an ambulance because there’s a risk they could get in a fatal car accident.

In either case, I don’t buy the excuse that “it’s dangerous” when you have an absolute one meter field. You can literally control everything in that field. Encase yourself in titanium and go to sleep. Create an autonomous defense robot. An anti-brainwashing magical device. Make your skin physically invincible and impenetrable. You are literally a walking cheat.

Moral responsibility has nothing to do with what other people think, and it has absolutely to do with your own morals. People can have different morals, and people tend to judge other people for the presence of lack of morals (although this is irrelevant to this subject at hand).

 

This...

 

What I meant is that poverty isn’t always a consequence of large population. Or at least, a large population does not inherently cause poverty.

Rather, other factors contribute to the poverty (eg. war, disease, severe income inequality, etc)

If you took 7 billion people and transmigrated them into medieval Europe, the conditions would be horrible because the technology at that time can’t support such a population.

However, this doesn’t mean that 7 billion is an arbitrary number that = overpopulation.

You can’t say some place is overpopulated without considering the resource or economic situation of an area.

Rather the corollary is that improving the technological resource utilization of a location is an equally valid approach to the addressing poor conditions as is the “population control genocide” proposed by many people.

 

I think it is kind of obvious from my answers that I feel a moral imperative. Hedonistic, though, since the point is not that I have no choice but to do it, but that I obviously will feel better about myself doing something nice than failing to even attempt. (And yes, desensitisation is a huge problem.)

And there was a reason why I was specifically talking about a machine that makes a pill that cures that specific disease. A panacea is obviously incompatible with mathematics, and hence cannot exist in any universe. Include in this scheme things like pill-printer-printing machines, etc. Like, this is standard CS bootstrapping, so not even groundbreaking. If I need surgery robots, that is like free.

In fact, by your rules, I can just make a supercomputer within my radius and literally just compute all the laws of the new world (maybe with probes that goes outside and takes in data if needed), or try out all possibilities for medical cures to specific diseases. (My job isn't medical, but has something to do with these kinds of simulations.)

It also depends upon what kind of superpower you grant me. Technically, there are a lot of stuff we know is impossible not just in our universe, but rather ALL universes, since those are outlawed by mathematics itself. Unless you allow me to disregards maths, which is literally beyond a superpower, because I can then make inconsistencies that render your radius infinitely large. But even if we are restricted by consistency with mathematics, there are too many interesting things we can do with powers that great.

So, yeah, with that much power, even limited to consistent maths, I cannot think of a situation where my own enjoyment will be compromised. Y'know, just in a day's work of a scientist's imagination.

 

@lychee can i make a transportation like a motorbike or hover board to speed up the process?

 

I still don't understand what you're driving at. Risking yourself for a loved one and a stranger are clearly two different issues.

Ambulance drivers are paid to drive ambulance. If they don't want to drive an ambulance, they can always choose another job. Furthermore, they can refuse if they feel that certain work is too dangerous. I am not sure where you're from but employers in a lot of countries cannot force their employees to do something hazardous. This is a terrible example that you've given.

Uh, I think you've misunderstood something. I am not giving an excuse. I don't care the dying stranger at all. I was merely pointing out the stupidity of exposing your powers in a world you know nothing about, so you don't have to "buy the excuse". Right, and this walking cheat can't even solve poverty and has to work in a hospital? Just clone the doctor a million times and let him loose on the world. If he needs anything, just create it for him. There's zero need to work in the hospital.

The part about not caring about what people think was a response to this:

 

You see, the population you provided is too big to be systematically maintained (Whether it be based on resource, government, etc). A population approximately 4.5 quintillion? To put into scale, the estimated total amount of grains of sand in our planet reaches the Quintillion level. I doubt a planet 100× the size (I'm assuming that you were referring to volume) would not be used up in no time. Not to mention that population grows exponentially, not in a linear way. Just like in physics, what may work in a smaller scale may never work in a bigger scale...

But this is a completely new world, new laws, new everything. How can I possibly answer your question if the specifics aren't established?
Too much question need to be answered by you yourself before we can start properly assessing the problem at hand...

e.g
What's this world's governing system? What's its level in technology (In a more specific sense)? What form of energy and resources do they mainly use? What sort of laws does this world abide to? Etc...

Even the ability you've given is paradoxial. Any form of Omnipotence immediately faces the omnipotence paradox...

 

If you’ve seen people in this world using something similar, it should definitely be possible to replicate it.

I guess, the foundational premise is to start with anything that you consider to be a moral responsibility.

I can continue to try and list examples that many people might consider to be a moral responsibility, but without knowing you, I can’t name something that you would consider a moral responsibility.

My main point is that if you feel you have a moral responsibility of any kind, then appealing to the risks of the situation is literally an excuse, particularly when the risks are negligible.

Everything that you do has a risk, include getting in your car or walking across the street. If you’re unwilling to risk anything, then you might as well stay at home all day???

In my local area, many ambulance drivers are volunteers.

Of course nobody can force other people to do dangerous things. However, when we talking about moral obligation — then the motivating force is coming from inside of you.