system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How to justify thought experiments that are far from ordinary experience and very unlikely to occur?

A couple of times I’ve encountered the opinion that it does not make sense to reason about X in situation Y because X only makes sense within plausible/social/day-to-day situations and Y is not such a situation. (For example "X = whether mathematics is useful" and "Y = a situation in which one is the last person alive" or the Trolley problem, where one might argue that it is extremely unlikely to happen and therefore impractical for reasoning about general truth.) Is there a general way to approach these sort of objections?
gpt
That kind of objection simply misses the point of thought experiments in general. Thought experiments are not intended to provide practical solutions to the particular scenarios which are given. Thought experiments help us to think through the consequences of a particular theories or principles. For example, if a thought experiment shows that a particular theory arrives at a contradiction, then the theory is untenable. 

It's also important to remember that thought experiments are employed outside of philosophy as well, such as physics (Bell's spaceship paradox, Laplace's demon, Schrödinger's cat), mathematics (balls and vase problem, infinite monkeys theorem), biology (Levinthal's paradox), computer science (Halting problem), economics (parable of the broken window), and others. 

Basically, that's just not the point of thought experiments so it's not a legitimate objection.