“But that can’t be right,” I said. “People get put out for surgery all the time. But only the patient is affected.”
“Yes,” said Vic. “That’s a special case, because it involves decoherence. When you are put totally under by anesthesia, you cease to be in quantum superposition and drop back to the classical-physics state—Penrose and Hameroff proved that—and so, by definition, if only classical physics pertains, you cease to be subject to entanglement.”
“And,” I said, “that means…?”
“It means,” said Kayla, “that you exit the collective if you truly lose all consciousness.”
“Okay,” I said.
“But,” continued Kayla, “everybody within the collective—all seven billion Q1s, Q2s, and Q3s; everyone who is not in the classical-physics state—could only conceivably change quantum state in lockstep, shifting en masse.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Kayla said. “It’s one for all, and all for one.”
“Homo sapiens—one big happy family,” Vic added.
Not so happy of late, of course, but I wasn’t going to ruin their moment of triumph. Still, I looked back at the TV screen. Funny: no monitor made since I was a kid had any sort of burn-in problem, and yet, as I gazed at the black rectangle, I could see the ghostly afterimage of the atrocities it had just shown me.
35
“Professor Marchuk?”
It was Veronica, in the third row, her hair in long cornrows. “Yes?”
“I get it. I mean, I really do. I get how all this utilitarian thinking can be a good thing. But, well…”
“Yes?”
“Well, it just seems so cold, is all. So calculating.”
I looked out at the students. Veronica appeared genuinely conflicted, but Boris had a smug expression, and his arms were crossed in front of his chest, as if his classmate had just detonated a nuke on my pet philosophy. He looked positively disappointed when I said, “You’re right, Veronica.”
And, for her part, Veronica looked surprised. “I am?”
“Yes, certainly. On the surface, being a utilitarian appears to mean embracing your inner psychopath.” I paused. “Do you guys know the Trolley Problem?”
A few nods, including Boris, but mostly blank faces.
“Well,” I said, “imagine a streetcar is barreling along the tracks, out of control. There’s a split in the tracks: one fork leads to where five people are standing and the other leads to where one person is standing. The trolley will hit and kill the five unless you throw a switch and divert it onto the other track, in which case it’ll only hit and kill one person. Do you throw the switch? Boris?”
“Yes, absolutely.”
“Exactly right, comrade. One dead instead of five; pure utilitarianism. But what if there’s only one track, and no switch, and instead it’s you and that exact same one guy, but the two of you are standing on a footbridge over the tracks, and you, you’re a little guy, but he’s a big fellow—so big, he’ll stop the streetcar for sure if you push him off the bridge so that he lands in front of it before it plows into the other five people. Do you push him off? Same utilitarian equation, isn’t it? One person dead instead of five? Veronica, do you push him off?”
“No.”
I smiled. “Nor would most people. In fact, when Bartels and Pizarro studied that scenario, they found it was mostly psychopaths who said they’d do the supposedly utilitarian thing and shove the big guy off the bridge; normal people couldn’t bring themselves to do it.”
“See,” said Boris, “you have to be a psychopath to follow strict utilitarianism.”
“That’s Doctor Psychopath to you, comrade.” A few laughs. “But, no, you’re missing the point. Pushing the guy off the bridge is an easy answer for a psychopath because psychopaths don’t give a damn. And not giving a damn is the opposite of utilitarianism.
“In the two-tracks scenario, there’s no room for second thought: I’m killing one guy instead of five. In the footbridge scenario, there’s lots to dither over: how do you know that the heavy guy will be big enough to stop the streetcar; yeah, someone told you that he will be, but do you believe that? Are you sure? And are you sure there isn’t a touch of prejudice here? How’d that guy get so fat, anyway? Is his life worth less than someone else’s? Oh, but what if his obesity is due to a glandular condition or genetics? And is it really true that jumping yourself wouldn’t be enough to stop the train? Who says so?
“If it turned out that pushing the fat guy didn’t actually stop the streetcar, so now six people died instead of five, a psychopath would shrug, and say, ‘Live and learn.’ But a utilitarian would be devastated by it. Having a conscience means agonizing over things, it means doing the right thing because you’ve weighed all the factors, it means caring so much it hurts. And that’s a feeling no psychopath will ever know.”
It was going to take another two days to fix my car, damn it all, and I needed to get back to Winnipeg. Although it would have been nice to have Star Trek’s transporter at my disposal, at least Captain Kirk was able to help me out: I got a bargain last-minute airfare from Priceline.com, and so was now at Diefenbaker, waiting for my plane.
Often when flying in Canada, I ran into people I knew at airports; Canada has only a handful of major cities, and academics travel a lot to conferences. So, I wasn’t really surprised to see Jonah Bratt arrive at the same gate I was at. The flight from here to Winnipeg continues on to Ottawa, and Jonah teaches psychology at Carleton—poorly, according to RateMyProfessors.com.
“Hey, Jonah,” I said, standing up to shake his hand. He was tall and cadaverously thin, with pockmarked skin and graying hair.
“Marchuk,” he said. His grip was almost nonexistent. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting a friend. You?”
“Attending a colloquium on Jung at U of S.”
“Ah,” I said.
It was a small gate area, and he sat down close to me, with one empty seat between us—leaving the space required by flocking rules, or just being a prick and making it awkward for someone else as the waiting area filled, I couldn’t say.
He pulled out a tablet and began to read what looked like a journal article. My attention was caught by the big TV hanging from the ceiling, which was showing CTV News Channel. “More on the horrific news out of Corpus Christi, Texas,” said the anchor, Dan Matheson. The image cut to what looked like a large natural sinkhole in the ground, and in it were human bodies, most clad in jeans and T-shirts, overlapping like jackstraws.
The anchor went on: “Work continues on the mass grave found here yesterday, about 350 kilometers south of Houston. Police are now removing the bodies and so far four of them have been identified by their next of kin: Miguel dos Santos, twenty-four; his brother José dos Santos, nineteen; Carlos Lobos, twenty-eight; and Juan Rameriz, twenty-two. Our Ben Pryce has more. Ben?”
The picture showed a man holding a microphone standing at the lip of the sinkhole, Texas State Troopers milling about on the far side.