Don’t you just love it when some big philosophical deal can be summed up with a simple thought experiment?
It seems like we need a thread for people to post various thought experiments and maybe give some discussion about them.
Which ones do you like or dislike? Schrodinger’s cat? Plato’s cave?
Post up a thought experiment and tell me what it’s all about. And for Christ’s sake be creative. Don’t just post something like “yeah i agree with that guy”. Put some effort in people!!
Do it now!!
Noboby huh. I guess more people are interested in enforcing thier opinions here than they are in learning from one another. Go figure…
I’d care but the vat that my brain occupies doesn’t allow for that…
-Imp
Do the Plato’s cave bit every time I post here.
Me: “Owww my eyes… you guys are all sleep”
Siatd: “No one can be smarter than me… you’re wrong.”
Me: “Imp is poopy… someone ban me?”
That is probably Mencius’s most famous thought experiment for the innate goodness of human nature and how that goodness is rooted in us rather than imposed from without. Naturally, the situation is slightly more complex than he presented here, in no small part because people can become alienated from their fundamental humanity but as a basic set-up I think it does the job rather nicely.
Plato’s cave is effective as long as you realize that nobody is unchained, though some are better at inferring what the shadows mean.
I have trouble communicating the depth of my holistic understanding as my ego gets in the way – I don’t like talking to morons who think they are special because they have studied what they deem to to be philosophy.
I am working this – building a bridge so to speak.
Who here knows the allegory of the Prisoner’s Dilemma? It’s more like Game Theory, but still a thought-provoking situation nonetheless.
would you mind explaining Schrodinger’s cat. this way maybe I can learn something and you can participate in your thread.
because I looked it up and did not get the point of the cat being a live and dead at the same time. actually I did not understand any of it.
Plato’s Cave-
Imagine prisoners, who have been chained since their childhood deep inside a cave: not only are their limbs immobilized by the chains; their heads are chained in one direction as well so that their gaze is fixed on a wall.
Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which statues of various animals, plants, and other things are carried by people. The statues cast shadows on the wall, and the prisoners watch these shadows. When one of the statue-carriers speaks, an echo against the wall causes the prisoners to believe that the words come from the shadows.
The prisoners engage in what appears to us to be a game: naming the shapes as they come by. This, however, is the only reality that they know, even though they are seeing merely shadows of images. They are thus conditioned to judge the quality of one another by their skill in quickly naming the shapes and dislike those who play poorly.
Suppose a prisoner is released and compelled to stand up and turn around. At that moment his eyes will be blinded by the sunlight coming into the cave from its entrance, and the shapes passing by will appear less real than their shadows.
The last object he would be able to see is the sun, which, in time, he would learn to see as the object that provides the seasons and the courses of the year, presides over all things in the visible region, and is in some way the cause of all these things that he has seen.
(This part of the allegory, incidentally, closely matches Plato’s metaphor of the sun which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI.)[1]
Once enlightened, so to speak, the freed prisoner would not want to return to the cave to free “his fellow bondsmen,” but would be compelled to do so. Another problem lies in the other prisoners not wanting to be freed: descending back into the cave would require that the freed prisoner’s eyes adjust again, and for a time, he would be one of the ones identifying shapes on the wall. His eyes would be swamped by the darkness, and would take time to become acclimated. Therefore, he would not be able to identify the shapes on the wall as well as the other prisoners, making it seem as if his being taken to the surface completely ruined his eyesight.
Schrodinger’s cat-
One can even set up quite ridiculous cases. A cat is penned up in a steel chamber, along with the following device (which must be secured against direct interference by the cat): in a Geiger counter there is a tiny bit of radioactive substance, so small, that perhaps in the course of the hour one of the atoms decays, but also, with equal probability, perhaps none; if it happens, the counter tube discharges and through a relay releases a hammer which shatters a small flask of hydrocyanic acid. If one has left this entire system to itself for an hour, one would say that the cat still lives if meanwhile no atom has decayed. The psi-function of the entire system would express this by having in it the living and dead cat (pardon the expression) mixed or smeared out in equal parts.
-Wiki
Thoughts on Plato’s Cave-
I agree with it. I mean it seems to offer nothing of a paradox to me. What is there really to discuss about it?
On Schrodinger’s cat-
The atomic decay would either happen, or it wouldn’t. The cat could survive in one hour, just as much as it would not. If the odds are stated in this, then that’s what they are (50/50). Are there any factors that I’m overlooking?
If quantum particles are the precursors of determining the atomic decay in a chain-reaction of atomic parts, there is no way of knowing when decay would occur because as far as we know, quantum particles move in a chaotic fashon and cannot be predicted.
Assuming that at an exact hour of time has an exact 50/50 chance of such a thing. Also assuming the geiger counters both work identically (able to detect equally). The result would be a 50/50 chance of a dead cat.
I think this one is better than Schrodinger’s cat-
Quantum suicide and immortality-
A physicist sits in front of a gun which is triggered or not triggered depending on the decay of some radioactive atom. With each run of the experiment there is a 50-50 chance that the gun will be triggered and the physicist will die. If the Copenhagen interpretation is correct, then the gun will eventually be triggered and the physicist will die. If the many-worlds interpretation is correct then at each run of the experiment the physicist will be split into one world in which he lives and another world in which he dies. After many runs of the experiment, there will be many worlds. In the worlds where the physicist dies, he will cease to exist. However, from the point of view of the non-dead copies of the physicist, the experiment will continue running without his ceasing to exist, because at each branch, he will only be able to observe the result in the world in which he survives, and if many-worlds is correct, the surviving copies of the physicist will notice that he never seems to die, therefore “proving” himself to be immortal, at least from his own point of view.
Another example is where a physicist detonates a nuclear bomb beside himself. In almost all parallel universes, the nuclear explosion will vaporize the physicist. However, there should be a small set of alternative universes in which the physicist somehow survives (i.e. the set of universes which support a “miraculous” survival scenario). The idea behind quantum immortality is that the physicist will remain alive in, and thus remain able to experience, at least one of the universes in this set, even though these universes form a tiny subset of all possible universes. Over time the physicist would therefore never perceive his or her own death.
This is almost identical to Schrodinger’s cat, exept it involves parrallel realities with Quantum mechanics, and temporal probibilities.
Here´s a really silly thing I sometimes like doing. It´s no thought experiment, more of an artificial perception.
Look at a fairly distant object, start with say a square inch in the corner of your ceiling. You can´t magnify it like an eagle could, but you can, using your memory and imagination, conjure up an artificial magnification. Next, unleash your tool anywhere, from the coastline to a fit neighbour´s window.
Silly and inaccurate yes, but if you´re bored, what the heck.
Bump.
I’m not sure if this is a real thought experiment or if I’m just butchering someone else’s ideas here, but here goes.
Possible worlds. They’re causally isolated, and for every possibility there exists a world in which it holds true. The only things that we can identify across possible worlds are those things which are analytically true like math and logic. When confronted with a proposition, and you think you know what there is to know about it based on the informational content of your perception of it, you’re either right and you’ve placed yourself in the actual world, or you’re wrong and you’ve placed yourself in another possible world. If you’re wrong then you’ll eventually collide with some of those things in math and logic that will show you this. If you’re skeptical of what you’re presented with, then you categorize your knowledge of it into knowledge of it by description, and knowledge of it by acquantance. Then you can determine what it is,(the descriptive qualities), which are consistent across possible worlds, and categorize the contextual information surounding the instance of the observation into wide and narrow content, then you can eliminate certain possible worlds from the list of ones that you may be placing yourself in given the information of the object that you hold to be true. Eventually you will know everything there is to know about the objects that you encounter, and you’ll be back in the actual world, (of ises instead of oughts or speculation).
I just typed that out all at once and I’m a little sleepy right now. Someone talk to me about this.
Are you referring to parrallel worlds?
I’m not sure I get what you mean by actual world.
Like you tell me something that you believe that happens to be false. Then I say to you, “dude you must think you’re in another world or something”. Then I start pointing out undeniable things around us that are known from direct observational experience which couldn’t be possible in this world if what it is that you’re falsely holding to be true is in fact true. It’s not that you’re mistaken about some proposition that you’ve encountered, or that your counterpart in another possible world might be encountering, it’s that you’ve mistakenly categorized yourself as the counterpart you that’s in another possible world with the actual you who can only exist in the actual world. So it’s like you learn more about where you are in the conceptual multi-possible-world-verse ™, then the objective facts of existence, (logic, unity of perception or whatever you take them to be) become clearer. Since infinity sort of implies that everything is possible, it’s safe to say that there are an infinite number of possible worlds. I dunno man.
I’m a little um…sleepy right now. I’ll think about this more tomorrow.
So I could be you, and you could be me?
Not in the actual world as far as I can tell, but in another possible world most certainly. They’re infinite and causally isolated.
Like if my dad fucked your mom or something? I think I get the jist.
…I think. Tell me if I’m not. 
Honestly, this shit is like philosophically insane. I’ve been reading all this stuff from these two guys for a while now.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Kellogg_Lewis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaakko_Hintikka
Some of it’s pretty intense. It takes me back to when I first started reading philosophy and still got those “wow” moments where suddenly things become clearer. There’s a few articles on this sort of thing in the “post or request an article” thread. It gets way deep man.