8 thought experiments to get you thinking

The Riddle of the Blind

This thought experiment was born out of an argument between the philosophers John Locke and William Molyneux.

Imagine a person who has been blind since birth, who knows how a ball is different from a cube to the touch. If he suddenly wakes up, will he be able to visually distinguish between these objects? Can not. Until the tactile perception is associated with the visual, he will not know where the ball is and where the cube is.

The experiment shows that up to a certain point we have no knowledge of the world, even those that seem to us "natural" and innate.

The Infinite Monkey Theorem

We believe that Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Mozart are geniuses, for their creations are unique and perfect. And if you were told that their works could not but appear?

Probability theory states that anything that can happen is bound to happen in infinity. If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters and give them an infinite amount of time, then someday one of them will repeat, word for word, some play by Shakespeare.

Anything that can happen must happen - where does personal talent and achievement fit in here?

Ball collision

We know that morning will be replaced by night, that glass breaks with a strong impact, and an apple falling from a tree will fly down. But what gives rise to this conviction in us? Real connections between things or our belief in this reality?

The philosopher David Hume has shown that our belief in causality between things is nothing more than a belief that is generated by our previous experience.

We are convinced that evening will replace day, only because until that moment, evening always followed day. We cannot be absolutely sure.

Let's imagine two billiard balls. One hits the other, and we believe that the first ball is the reason for the movement of the second. However, we can imagine that the second ball will remain in place after colliding with the first. Nothing forbids us to do this. This means that the movement of the second does not logically follow from the movement of the first ball, and the cause-and-effect relationship is based solely on our previous experience (previously, we collided the balls many times and saw the result).

Donor lottery

The philosopher John Harris proposed to imagine a world different from ours in two things. First, it believes that letting a person die is the same as killing them. Secondly, organ transplant operations in it are always performed successfully. What follows from this? In such a society, donation will become an ethical norm, because one donor can save many people. Then a lottery is held in it, which randomly determines the person who will have to sacrifice himself in order to prevent several sick people from dying.

One death instead of many - from the point of view of logic, this is a justified sacrifice. However, in our world it sounds blasphemous. The experiment helps to understand that our ethics are not built on a rational basis.

Philosophical zombie

Philosopher David Chalmers in 1996 in one of his reports puzzled the world with the concept of "philosophical zombie". This is an imaginary creature that is identical to a person in everything. It gets up in the morning to the sound of an alarm clock, goes to work, smiles at friends. His stomach, heart, brain work in the same way as a human. But at the same time, he does not have one component - the inner experiences of what is happening. Having fallen and injured a knee, the zombie will scream like a human, but he will not feel pain. There is no consciousness in it. The zombie acts like a computer.

If human consciousness is the result of biochemical reactions in the brain, then how will a person differ from such a zombie? If a zombie and a human are no different on the physical level, what then is consciousness? In other words, is there something in a person that is not conditioned by material interactions?

Brain in a flask

This experiment was proposed by the philosopher Hilary Putnam.

Our perception is structured as follows: the senses perceive data from the outside and convert it into an electrical signal that is sent to the brain and decoded by it. Imagine the following situation: we take the brain, place it in a special life support solution, and send electrical signals through the electrodes in the same way as the senses would do.

What would such a brain experience? The same as the brain in the cranium: it would seem to him that he is a human being, he would “see” and “hear” something, think about something.

The experiment shows that we do not have sufficient evidence to assert that our experience is the ultimate reality.

It is quite possible that we are all in a flask, and around us is something like a virtual space.

Chinese room

What is the difference between a computer and a person? Can you imagine a future in which machines will replace people in all areas of activity? The thought experiment of the philosopher John Searle makes it clear that no.

Imagine a person trapped in a room. He does not know the Chinese language. There is a gap in the room through which the person receives the questions written in Chinese. He cannot answer them himself, he cannot even read them. However, there are instructions in the room for converting some hieroglyphs into others. That is, it says that if you see such and such a combination of hieroglyphs on paper, then you should answer with such and such a hieroglyph.

Thus, thanks to the instructions for converting characters, a person will be able to answer questions in Chinese without understanding either the meaning of the questions or their own answers. This is how artificial intelligence works.

Curtain of ignorance

The philosopher John Rawls proposed to imagine a group of people who are going to create a kind of society: laws, government structures, social order. These people have neither citizenship, nor gender, nor any experience - that is, when designing a society, they cannot proceed from their own interests. They do not know what role each person will play in the new society. What kind of society will they build as a result, from what theoretical premises will they proceed?

It is unlikely that they would have turned out to be at least one of the societies existing today. The experiment shows that in practice all social organizations act in one way or another in the interests of certain groups of people.