Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Iscah]

Yea I had more to say to that point, but I kind of realized that it would deviate from the point too much.
But what you gotta understand is that Cahciua is from the source, so ofcourse she thinks it's natural for the dead to go the the lifestream.
But that isn't necessarily what the Alexandrians believe, we barely know what the Alexandrians think of the system in the first place.

I could argue that the Aetherial Sea is just a different version of Living Memory, they just operate differently with different sets of beliefs.

Again, you're blurring concepts. It is unarguably natural for a soul to go to the aetherial sea upon the death of the body, in the same way that it's natural for gravity to make a dropped object fall or for heat to evaporate water. There is no cultural belief that can change these things from being how the world works.

I think it's significant that this specific argument is the one put to someone who works with the natural world and understands that natural flow of life and death in everything.

By contrast, the Alexandrian think it's culturally normal to artificially interfere with the natural behaviour of souls. That does not in any way make it natural for them, and their artificial soul-management system is not equatable to the natural process that the system is designed to keep souls out of.

The only viable solution is so obvious that it would be disingenuous to truly refer to this as any kind of trolley problem; you have a society made entirely of computer simulations on one track, and every life throughout the universe on the other. Which track should you switch the trolley onto? If we truly want to be ethical, there is a single right answer.

Isn't that the exact point of the trolley problem, though? Right now it is on a track that, if you do not interfere, will kill a large number of people. You can choose to do nothing or you can choose to save those people by choosing to instead kill/destroy an objectively "less bad" target on the other track.

Theoretically it's an easy choice, but it still involves you acting to cause what would in isolation be regarded as a tragedy.