The Prisoner's Dilema

There is a prisoner who will be hanged next week. However, if he guesses the day he will be killed, he will be free. So, which day will he be hanged? If they delay it until Friday morning, he will automatically know that day is the last day of his life, and thus be freed. Therefore, he knows they will not hang him on Friday. But there is another problem. If he is alive on Thursday morning, and he won't be hanged on Friday, he then knows that Thursday will be the day. The same thing happens on Wednesday, Tuesday and eventually Monday. The members of philosophy club talked about this paradox and shared their opinions freely even though no one could think of a correct answer.

The next topic was about life and death. I started talking about my insecurities of my future career. Some people suggested me to do what I’m good at and the others told me to do what I really like. We talked about why should we work hard and what is the essentials of life. Then, Martino came up with a wise statement which everybody agreed on: “We should take care about our own lives and contribute to the society and die. If you only care about your own life, the rest of the process will happen naturally”.

The third and last thing we discussed a very complicated situation of an imaginary man who can save lives but also kills people. The first question was ‘Can you be justified if you save 500 people and intentionally kill 10 people the next day?’. Even though there were some opposed opinions, most of used said that it cannot be justified. But if you must kill those 10 people in order to save the other 500 people, would that be justified? The conclusion we came up with, was that if those 10 people are more valuable to society, then you should save those 10 people and not save the other 500 lives. The guys strongly insisted on the importance of scientists because they thought they can actually make world a much better place by developing new scientific products and methods that can benefit the human beings. As a musical person, I disagreed them because I think science is not the only one field of studies that make the world better, but also, music.