A runaway trolley is heading down a track toward five workers who cannot escape. You stand beside a lever that would divert the trolley onto a side track, where one worker stands alone. If you pull the lever, the five live and the one dies. If you do nothing, five die and one lives.

Someone you love is hiding from a person who has stated they intend to harm them. The pursuer arrives at your door and asks where your loved one is. A lie would protect them. The truth would put them at serious risk.

After a natural disaster, the only generator vendor in the area raises prices five-fold. Some buyers can no longer afford one. Others, who can, get power back faster. The high price also incentivises distant suppliers to bring in more generators sooner.

A four-year-old gives spontaneous, specific, verifiable details about the life of a stranger who died years before the child was born — names, places, manner of death — and a careful investigator confirms the match.

During cardiac arrest, a patient reports a vivid life review: experiencing their own past actions from the perspective of the people they affected, without judgment but with full clarity. They return changed. Hospital staff confirm they had no measurable brain activity for several minutes.

An elderly relative with severe long-term dementia, who has not recognised family for years, becomes fully lucid hours before death. They name everyone correctly, recall recent events, say goodbye, and die soon after.

A dog whose lifelong companion has died refuses to eat for days, returns repeatedly to the spot where the companion slept, and shows behaviour that in a human we would unhesitatingly call grief.

You can take a high-paying job that bores you and constrains your time, or a lower-paying role that stretches you, scares you a little, and aligns with what you care about. Both are stable.

A long-term relationship is not abusive but is consistently difficult. You believe staying is teaching you patience, honesty, and the limits of your character. Leaving would also be reasonable and safe.

Suppose the block-universe view is correct: past, present, and future all exist equally, and what you will do tomorrow is already a fact about reality, fixed in the same sense yesterday is fixed.

Suppose the strict physicalist view is correct: consciousness is entirely produced by the brain, and when the brain stops, the conscious self ends.

Suppose reincarnation is real: the same continuous self moves between lives, carrying forward something from each — habits, lessons, perhaps debts.