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Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My

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Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it

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Speaker 1: is time to go into the vault because it is Saturday,

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Speaker 1: of course, and we're bringing you an episode that originally

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Speaker 1: air January third, twenty nineteen. That's right, what's inside the vault?

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Speaker 1: I don't know what's not inside the vault. The thing

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Speaker 1: inside the vault could be alive, it could be dead.

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Speaker 1: It's kind of in a quantum position until we open it. Right, Okay,

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Speaker 1: this is our episode about thought experiments. Yeah, I remember

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Speaker 1: we were asking the question, what can you really prove

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Speaker 1: anything with the thought experiment? Yeah? I think you can. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think we You know, obviously we're we're pro thought

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Speaker 1: experiment on this show. We devote whole episodes to particular

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Speaker 1: thought experiments. But I remember this was when we were like, hey,

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Speaker 1: let's stop and just actually discuss thought experiments, especially if

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Speaker 1: we're going to keep uh invoking them on the show. Uh. Well,

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Speaker 1: I say, let's get right into it. Welcome to Stuff

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Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey,

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Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

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Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, Hey, Robert, what are

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Speaker 1: we talking about today? Oh, well, we're talking about thought experiments,

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Speaker 1: the things that make some people really mad and make

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Speaker 1: other people talk for way too long into time. Well,

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Speaker 1: the thought experiments can have both effects on an individual

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Speaker 1: at the same time. That's the beauty of a thought experiment.

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Speaker 1: I think. So now, we've discussed individual thought experiments on

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Speaker 1: the show many times before, but I think today we're

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Speaker 1: going to try to look at the idea of a

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Speaker 1: thought experiment on the show. In the past, we've talked

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Speaker 1: about specific thought experiments. We've talked about Stranger's Cat, We've

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Speaker 1: talked about the Infinity Hotel, the ship of Theseus. Other

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Speaker 1: times it comes up kind of informally. We might say

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Speaker 1: that a particular paper we're talking about is more kin

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Speaker 1: to a thought experiment. And I know that I've I've

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Speaker 1: talked before about how I think of certain short stories

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Speaker 1: as being more thought experiments than you know, true narrative.

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Speaker 1: I think of Library of Babbel, Library of Babble, other

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Speaker 1: works of a lot of the short stories of jor

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Speaker 1: Haluis Borges, as well as a number of the short

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Speaker 1: stories of Philip K. Dick they're a number of those

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Speaker 1: where you know it's not really important who's doing what exactly.

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Speaker 1: You know you're not you're not really invested in a

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Speaker 1: story per se, but the story is there to make

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Speaker 1: you think, to turn some sort of weird idea on

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Speaker 1: its head, the concept driven more than character driven exactly. Now,

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Speaker 1: I have to say that one of my favorite comical

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Speaker 1: treatments of thought experiments is the humorous essay Shreddnger's Cat

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Speaker 1: by Steve Martin, collected in his book Pure Drivel. And

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Speaker 1: there's a wonderful audio book of this as well, because

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Speaker 1: Steve Martin himself is reading it. Always great when you

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Speaker 1: can get one read by the author. Yeah. Now, Martin

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Speaker 1: begins this particularly essay by presenting the Streusenger's Cat thought

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Speaker 1: experiment just pretty much as it is, and from there

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Speaker 1: he proceeds through an increasingly ridiculous mix of thought experiments

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Speaker 1: that he's made up himself, such as uh vitkin Stein's banana,

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Speaker 1: Elvis's chart ol briquette, chef boy r ds, bungee cord,

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Speaker 1: sakagaway is rain, bonnet, apollos, non apple, non strutal, Jim

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Speaker 1: Dandy's Bucket of Goo, and the thinman dilemma. Since it's

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Speaker 1: one of the shorter ones, I'd like to read Steve

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Speaker 1: Martin's description of the thought experiment Elvis's charcoal briquette. A

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Speaker 1: barbecue is cooking wieners in an air tight space. As

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Speaker 1: the charcoal consumes the oxygen, the integrity of the briquette

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Speaker 1: is weakened. An observer riding a roller coaster will become

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Speaker 1: hungry for wieners, but will be thrown from the car

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Speaker 1: when he stands up and cries, Elvis, get me a

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Speaker 1: hot dog. Yeah, that's got the right mouth field. I mean,

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Speaker 1: it's it's absurd, it's ridiculous and uh, but it's effective

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Speaker 1: as comedy because it does have that feel of a

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Speaker 1: thought of experiment, and and many of them are exactly

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Speaker 1: this sort of absurd little logic problem or physical scenario,

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Speaker 1: but it's utilized not for laughs, but to explore some

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Speaker 1: sort of generally a complex topic. I thought this was

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Speaker 1: going to be the seventh thought experiments. You can't say

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Speaker 1: on TV. It does make me wonder what the most

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Speaker 1: risk a thought experiments are. Oh, there are actually quite

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Speaker 1: a few. Yeah, all right, well, let's we'll save that

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Speaker 1: for the midnight Show. So let's let's talk about thought

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Speaker 1: experiments just definition wise, like, what is a thought experiment? Well, yes, first,

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Speaker 1: you could consult the idea of an experiment. An experiment

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Speaker 1: is basically a test, like you have a condition and

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Speaker 1: you you instantiate the condition and you see what happens. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that

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Speaker 1: to merely think about an experiment is not a thought experiment.

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Speaker 1: So if you if you say, for instance, think about

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Speaker 1: the social psychology Stanford prison experiment, that's not a thought experiment.

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Speaker 1: Um why not? Well, because you are you were thinking

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Speaker 1: about an actual experiment that has been carried out. I

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Speaker 1: mean this is kind of obvious, right, but but still

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Speaker 1: it it it's worth going through. Now, if you if

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Speaker 1: you think about an experiment you might conduct, say to

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Speaker 1: see if movie goers who eat twizzlers are more likely

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Speaker 1: to joy to enjoy sci fi films and those who

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Speaker 1: eat red vines. Well, that's not a thought experiment either.

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Speaker 1: That's something you could conceivably do. That's like imagining an

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Speaker 1: experiment you could carry out. But thinking about the experiment

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Speaker 1: doesn't really reveal anything right now, Very often the experiment

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Speaker 1: in a thought experiment is exactly not the sort of

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Speaker 1: thing that could be carried out in real life for

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Speaker 1: a number of reasons. Maybe it's catastrophically dangerous or or involves,

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Speaker 1: you know, in encountering some feature of the universe that

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Speaker 1: is not readily accessible. That sort of thing. Very often

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Speaker 1: thought experiments, as they apply to science, involved the the

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Speaker 1: removal of things that you couldn't actually remove as variables,

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Speaker 1: so like imagine a frictionless plane, or involve something that

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Speaker 1: just simply does not exist, like a train going near

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Speaker 1: the speed of light. We do do not have such

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Speaker 1: a thing. We're probably not going to have such a

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Speaker 1: thing anytime soon, but it's useful in the thought experiment.

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Speaker 1: And then on top of that, they frequently are narrative

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Speaker 1: in nature. There's a sequence to things in a way,

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Speaker 1: they're they're almost like a joke in many senses. You know,

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Speaker 1: it feels like the set up for a joke. It

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Speaker 1: feels like there's going to be a punch line. Um.

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Speaker 1: And I also I wondered to what extent like really

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Speaker 1: successful and quote unquote successful thought experiments, like ones that

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Speaker 1: really resonate culturally, if if there is a sense of

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Speaker 1: counterintuitive elements to the narrative. I wonder if there's something

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Speaker 1: about that as well. Well. Yeah, thought experiments are an

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Speaker 1: interesting thing. So like a good thought experiment, what it

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Speaker 1: should do is reveal something that is true simply by

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Speaker 1: making up a story in your mind and working through

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Speaker 1: the conclusions that would result from it. Now, often there

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Speaker 1: are a lot of coincidental details of this story that

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Speaker 1: do not matter. Uh, they don't have any effect on

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Speaker 1: what this thought experiment reveals, if it reveals anything, and

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Speaker 1: yet they can be enormously predictive of whether or not

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Speaker 1: this is like a popular meme or not how well

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Speaker 1: it spreads. Like cat as an example, Like if it

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Speaker 1: were a dog, it would probably still resonate, but in

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Speaker 1: a slightly different way. But if it were just a

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Speaker 1: lizard or a slug, yes, people would be far less

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Speaker 1: compelled by the idea of Shreddinger's bug, but they would

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Speaker 1: be far more upset by the idea of Shreddinger's child

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Speaker 1: or something. So like, if it's a cat, that's the

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Speaker 1: bull's eye, that's right in the red zone. It's like

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Speaker 1: interesting enough to be killing a cat that people are

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Speaker 1: on board to to remember to pay attention, but it's

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Speaker 1: not so troubling that you're turned off and you don't

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Speaker 1: want to listen, right, And and then also the cat

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Speaker 1: kind of makes it more palpable. Like if it was

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Speaker 1: Shreddinger's um, let's say, basilisk, that would it would instantly

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Speaker 1: sound a little more threatening somehow. How about Shreddinger's apparently

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Speaker 1: conscious AI Yes, or that's the that's next level. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's that's pretty good. Now. Another or an aspect of

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Speaker 1: thought experiments is that it's something that should generally be

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Speaker 1: visualized in the mind as this, as the thought experiment

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Speaker 1: has rolled out, you you're picturing it. Uh. It's in

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Speaker 1: doing this it makes a concept more digestible, or it

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Speaker 1: explains a you know, fundamental paradox, etcetera. And uh, and

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Speaker 1: and and this again. It has a lot in common

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Speaker 1: with jokes, It has a lot in common with riddles,

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Speaker 1: and they just sort of the basic structure. But it's

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Speaker 1: not necessarily bringing you to uh. It's not bringing you

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Speaker 1: a punch line. It's not necessarily a correct answer at

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Speaker 1: the end. But there is hopefully a deeper understanding of

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Speaker 1: a concept via the thought experiment. Now that being said,

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Speaker 1: a thought experiment is also not a pristine, blameless thing

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Speaker 1: or something set in stone. So others may take issue

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Speaker 1: with the thought experiment or just completely knock it down.

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Speaker 1: They may roll out their own thought experiment that attempts

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Speaker 1: to put your thought experiment to shame. And uh, and

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Speaker 1: there may be you know, additional interations off and we've

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Speaker 1: certainly explored that on the show before with things such

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Speaker 1: as the ship of Theseus. And then finally, one of

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Speaker 1: the really cool things about thought experiments is that it's

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Speaker 1: ideally this this chance to learn about reality, learn more

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Speaker 1: about reality by simply thinking about it. And that would,

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Speaker 1: on the surface of things, seem rather odd, right, because

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Speaker 1: it would be an exception to the empirical nature of

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Speaker 1: how we learn about the world by seeing it, by

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Speaker 1: touching it, by feeling it, by poking it, by dissecting

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Speaker 1: it and running, um, you know, more or less physical

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Speaker 1: experiments upon it. But to simply think about something and

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Speaker 1: the idea that that will reveal something that we had

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Speaker 1: not seen before it was not clear to us beforehand. Uh.

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Speaker 1: That that's rather curious, isn't it. Well, yeah, I mean,

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Speaker 1: a thought experiment is a type of logic, which means

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Speaker 1: it it lacks the empirical data gathering part of learning

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Speaker 1: about the world, so all it can do is draw

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Speaker 1: conclusions from what is already known or assumed, though there

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Speaker 1: have been plenty of cases where in fact, in the

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Speaker 1: history of science interest stuff has come to be known

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Speaker 1: without anybody going out and measuring anything new, but just

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Speaker 1: by applying what was already known in a logical way

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Speaker 1: to arrive at a new conclusion. We'll talk about examples

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Speaker 1: of that in a minute, all right, So I want

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Speaker 1: to mention one quick example. Uh, it's not so quick

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Speaker 1: in the original text, but Lucretius, who lived nine b

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Speaker 1: C b C. Wrote on the Nature of Things Sura, yeah,

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Speaker 1: and uh, and he has a fun little thought experiment

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Speaker 1: he rolls out. So um, Lucretious argues that space is

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Speaker 1: is infinite and what you say it isn't? Well, fine,

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Speaker 1: then let's march a soldier to the edge of the

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Speaker 1: finite universe and have him throw a spear at the edge. Wait,

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Speaker 1: what is the soldier's name? This is crucial. Oh I

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Speaker 1: see I skipped that part. What is the soldier's name? No,

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Speaker 1: I don't know. It's that we don't need to know

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Speaker 1: his name. It's just a soldier. We could we could

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Speaker 1: call him cat. I guess, but um, his original write

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Speaker 1: up of it is a bit longer. This boiled out. So, yeah,

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Speaker 1: march the soldier up to the edge of the universe.

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Speaker 1: Haven't throw a spear at the edge. Well, one of

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Speaker 1: two things is going to happen, he says, Well, if

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Speaker 1: it flies through, then there is something beyond and your

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Speaker 1: barrier is nonsense. Right, So the universe is not actually

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Speaker 1: bounded there, right, because you just threw a spear beyond

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Speaker 1: the edge. Now if the spear bounces off the barrier, well,

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Speaker 1: then the wall itself is proof of something beyond your

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Speaker 1: your your spear just bounced off of something. What is

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Speaker 1: that something? The wall is a thing? Yeah, so it

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Speaker 1: In looking at this, you can see that it illustrates

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Speaker 1: a conceived version of reality and lays out an experiment,

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Speaker 1: And of course it also illustrates one of the other

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Speaker 1: features of thought experiments you can pick at them. So

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Speaker 1: Lucretius may have presented this, as you know, as a

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Speaker 1: real sentence stopping comment on the nature of the universe

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Speaker 1: at the time, but certainly, if you if you think

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Speaker 1: back of even discussions that we've had on the show

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Speaker 1: about infinities and different types of infinities, and and some

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Speaker 1: of the arguments for you know, for exactly how I

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Speaker 1: find ie universe would work. Then you can see that

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Speaker 1: his argument doesn't quite hold up to modern cosmology well

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Speaker 1: as you've presented it here. This is actually a great

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Speaker 1: example of how thought experiments can seem brilliant but actually

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Speaker 1: produce flawed conclusions because they contain drum roll hidden assumptions. Here,

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Speaker 1: I would say one fatal hidden assumption is that Lucretius

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Speaker 1: Now again, I'm certainly not going to go and argue

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Speaker 1: that space is finite. That's not my goal here. But

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Speaker 1: my I would say there are ways in which space

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Speaker 1: could be finite that Lucretius is overlooking with this example,

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Speaker 1: because there are different ways you could imagine a finite universe.

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Speaker 1: One is a sort of closed three D space with

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Speaker 1: exterior walls like the inside of a box. And this

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Speaker 1: is sort of what Lucretius seems to have in mind here,

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Speaker 1: And of course it does seem somewhat absurd. How could

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Speaker 1: the universe be like that? It seems like it probably

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Speaker 1: couldn't be. But what if the universe is simultaneously finite

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Speaker 1: and without boundaries, like the length dimension of a mobius strip. Robert,

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Speaker 1: have you ever made a mobius strip, like in geometry

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Speaker 1: and school. Yeah. So you just take like one length

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Speaker 1: of a piece of paper and then give it a

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Speaker 1: half turn and then tape its ends together, and what

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Speaker 1: you have created is a piece of paper that has

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Speaker 1: one continuous side. You can start drawing a line and

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Speaker 1: it goes on the entire thing. So for instance, and

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Speaker 1: this this version, the soldier throws the spear and impales

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Speaker 1: himself in the back exactly as long as the spear

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Speaker 1: goes long enough. Yeah. So the idea, or it could

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Speaker 1: be another analogy here, could be that the geometry of

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Speaker 1: the three D universe is sort of like the two

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Speaker 1: D geometry of the surface of a sphere. It's not infinite.

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Speaker 1: The surface area of a sphere is finite. There is

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Speaker 1: a limit to it, but it has no boundaries. You

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Speaker 1: never reached the edge. So yeah, that soldier, let's let's

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Speaker 1: call him Tim. Tim throws the spear and it hits

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Speaker 1: him in the butt. Yeah. Yeah. This also reminds, you

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Speaker 1: know the idea of saying, well, hey, my soldier throws

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Speaker 1: a spear at the edge of the universe and it

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Speaker 1: keeps going, then your your argument is nonsense. It also

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Speaker 1: kind of sounds like, oh, we had a really cold

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Speaker 1: weather today, I guess there's no global warming. I guess

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Speaker 1: there's no climate change. Using a far simpler model than

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Speaker 1: the than the complexities of reality, try and make your argument. Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: but it does also. I mean, I would say that

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Speaker 1: this is a good argument against a certain type of

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Speaker 1: idea of the bounded universe, because if if the universe

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Speaker 1: were actually finite in that it had walls on the

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Speaker 1: outside of it, at any place you approached the wall,

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Speaker 1: you could test that condition, right. So I would say

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Speaker 1: that highlighting absurdities in a single test case of the

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Speaker 1: idea of a universe with walls on the outside of it,

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Speaker 1: that I think that's a valid way to criticize the concept. Now,

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Speaker 1: I do have to say at the same time, Lucretius

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Speaker 1: is a little thought experiment here, even to modern readers

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Speaker 1: it it still does something when you think about it,

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Speaker 1: like it does force you to think about uh these

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Speaker 1: ideas of the finite and the infinite. Uh So, just

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Speaker 1: as like a simple thought experiment is kind of a

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Speaker 1: logic puzzle, it still carries its own weight. Now, they're

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Speaker 1: absolutely have been thought experiments that have been extremely useful

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Speaker 1: and powerful in the history of the advancement of science,

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Speaker 1: that have not just like made a clever seeming point,

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Speaker 1: but have actually pushed science forward. And these happen a

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Speaker 1: lot of time in the history of physics because physics

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Speaker 1: experiments work best when you can tightly limit the variables.

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Speaker 1: But in reality, it is very hard to tightly limit

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Speaker 1: the variables on pure physics experiments. Uh there there's often

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Speaker 1: just a lot of like more more friction and more resistance,

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Speaker 1: more whatever than you actually want. But here's an example.

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Speaker 1: Let's say you go up on top of the Washington

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Speaker 1: Monument and you drop two objects side by side. They're

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Speaker 1: the same shape, but one is heavier than the other.

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Speaker 1: Let's say one, say, plastic DVD of Flubber and the

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Speaker 1: other is the new Criterion edition of RoboCop two, which

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Speaker 1: has a jewel case made out of lead. So which

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Speaker 1: one hits the ground first, Well, ideally they're both going

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Speaker 1: to hit the ground at the same time, right, And

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Speaker 1: you know that because we live in a post Galileo age,

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Speaker 1: the post Copernican post Galileo age. But this might have

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Speaker 1: been kind of a shock to you if you lived

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Speaker 1: in say, ancient Rome or in medieval Europe, where it

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Speaker 1: might well have been assumed that the heavier object would

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Speaker 1: hit the ground first because heavier objects fall faster. For

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Speaker 1: hundreds of years, the conventional wisdom was along these lines.

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Speaker 1: It followed our intuitions, like, it makes intuitive sense that

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Speaker 1: a heavier object falls faster because let's say it's harder

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Speaker 1: to push a heavier object up a hill, right, so

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Speaker 1: it would seem that a heavier object should fall to

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Speaker 1: the ground through the air faster than a lighter object.

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Speaker 1: This was the dominant strain of thinking also in in

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Speaker 1: the sphere of scholars who revered the physics of Aristotle.

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Speaker 1: Aristotle wrote in in his work on Physics that objects

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Speaker 1: have a natural motion, They have a nature, and they

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Speaker 1: have motions specific to their nature, and that part of

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Speaker 1: that nature is mass, and so heavier objects fall to

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Speaker 1: the ground faster than lighter objects. Now, Galileo Galilei was

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Speaker 1: reported by some biographers to have actually performed an experiment

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Speaker 1: of this kind by like dropping cannonballs of different weights

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Speaker 1: from a tower. But whether or not this story is

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Speaker 1: true about the physical experiment, Galileo definitely showed that you

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Speaker 1: don't even need an experiment to prove that there is

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Speaker 1: something wrong with the Aristotelian view of falling bodies. He

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Speaker 1: could show it was wrong just by dreaming up a

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Speaker 1: scenario in his head. As and as with many of

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Speaker 1: the great intellectual smackdowns in history, Galileo didn't just explain

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Speaker 1: his position. He wrote a fictional Socratic style dialogue, complete

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Speaker 1: with a slack jawed fool to represent the opinion he

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Speaker 1: was attacking. And that fool is named Simplicio. That's pretty good.

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Speaker 1: Then he's also he's got a smart guy named Salviati

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Speaker 1: to represent his own point of view. And this was

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Speaker 1: in Dialogues concerning two New Sciences. In so, first Salviati

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Speaker 1: and Simplicio argue about experiments concerning cannonballs and bird shot

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Speaker 1: and stuff, and Simplicio is not moved from the Aristotelian

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Speaker 1: position that objects fall through a medium with a speed

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Speaker 1: proportional to their mass. And so I've tried to reconstruct

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Speaker 1: the next moment in the dialogue, but sort of rewritten

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Speaker 1: in more modern English and simplified to the main points. Robert,

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Speaker 1: would you like to do a reading with me? Sure?

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Speaker 1: What kind of accents are we going for here, Robert,

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Speaker 1: you're gonna be the smart guy. How about you give

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Speaker 1: me a combination of like Gandalf wizard Saruman pronouncing from

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Speaker 1: from the top of the Tower of Knowledge, combined with

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Speaker 1: like Sam Elliott wise old cowboy. All right, I'll give

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Speaker 1: that a goiin. Now, look here, we don't even need

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Speaker 1: to do any experiments to prove that Aristotle is wrong

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Speaker 1: and a heavier body does not fall faster than a

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Speaker 1: lighter one. Let's take Aristotle's principles as granted for a minute.

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Speaker 1: What are those principles. Well, body falling in a fixed

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Speaker 1: medium like air has a fixed velocity, and that's determined

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Speaker 1: by its nature. And you can increase this speed unless

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Speaker 1: you add momentum, and you can't decrease this speed unless

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Speaker 1: you offer some resistance to slow it down. It's all there,

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Speaker 1: and its nature. It's a fixed velocity. Great, So imagine

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Speaker 1: two objects with different natural speeds, maybe a pebble which

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Speaker 1: falls very slowly and a great millstone which falls very fast.

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Speaker 1: Now time together. The fallen millstone will be slowed down

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Speaker 1: by being tied to the pebble, which is forced by

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Speaker 1: its nature to fall slower right right. You are, according

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Speaker 1: to Aristotle, that pebble is going to slow down the

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Speaker 1: bigger rock because it falls slower. Okay, okay, So by

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Speaker 1: by tying the two stones together, the slower falling pebble

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Speaker 1: should reduce the speed at which the millstone falls, making

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Speaker 1: its speed less than it would have been alone. But

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Speaker 1: at the same time, when you tie them together, their

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Speaker 1: combined masses greater than the millstone alone. So shouldn't they

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Speaker 1: together fall even faster than either one individually? From your

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Speaker 1: principles of motion, we are forced to conclude that by

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Speaker 1: tying the two stones together, the fallen speed of the

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Speaker 1: millstone is both increased and decreased. Well, dang it, I

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Speaker 1: am stumped, all right, So that that's this pretty fun

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Speaker 1: because it basically illustrates how he's created kind of like

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Speaker 1: a little political cartoon right here, right right. And I

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Speaker 1: also absolutely love that he makes the representative of Aristotle,

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Speaker 1: who was during the seventeenth century widely considered like the

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Speaker 1: smartest guy of all time. He names him simplicito, which

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Speaker 1: is like if somebody today wrote a dialogue trying to

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Speaker 1: refute Einstein's relativity and had the character representing Einstein's point

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Speaker 1: of view named like clet Us T. Dip Wad. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: Carl Popper apparently wrote of this thought experiment quote one

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Speaker 1: of the most important imaginary experiments in the history of

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Speaker 1: natural philosophy, and one of the simplest and most ingenious

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Speaker 1: arguments in the history of rational thought about our universe.

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Speaker 1: And as far as like imagining physical scenarios goes, I

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Speaker 1: think this is the equivalent of a reductio ad absurd

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Speaker 1: um argument. So reductio ad absurd um is one of

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Speaker 1: the most powerful logical tools we have. It's when you

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Speaker 1: combine premises that somebody holds to be true and you

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Speaker 1: demonstrate that when they're taken together, they force you to

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Speaker 1: conclude something absurd that cannot possibly be true, which means

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Speaker 1: at least one of the premises, even though you believe them,

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Speaker 1: actually cannot be right. And so here Galileo is basically

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Speaker 1: using two premises. One is that the the idea that

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Speaker 1: objects of different mass have different natural speeds at which

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Speaker 1: they fall, and the other is that you can add

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Speaker 1: the mass of two objects together to create a greater

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Speaker 1: combined mass. And so he constructs a scenario when it's

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Speaker 1: actually not implausible at all. To show that, when taken together,

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Speaker 1: these two premises implied something absurd and self contradictory. So

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Speaker 1: one of the premises has got to be wrong. And

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Speaker 1: since we accept the basic arithmetic of mass that you

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Speaker 1: can add the mass of two objects together to create

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Speaker 1: a greater combined mass, it showed that the idea of

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Speaker 1: a fixed falling speed determined by an objects mass had

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Speaker 1: to be wrong. So I would say this is absolutely

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Speaker 1: a case where a thought experiment actually did reveal something

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Speaker 1: useful about reality. Though of course it's it's helpful as

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Speaker 1: well that you could go out and test this with

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Speaker 1: physical objects later. You you know you do, so, even

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Speaker 1: if there's some hidden assumption that's guming up the conclusions

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Speaker 1: you're drawing from this thought experiment, you could do physical

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Speaker 1: experiments that would sort you out later. All right, Well,

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Speaker 1: on that note, let's take a break, and when we

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Speaker 1: come back we'll explore some more examples of thought experiments

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Speaker 1: before we just us a little bit a bit more

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Speaker 1: about what exactly that they are and how we might

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Speaker 1: categorize them than alright, we're back. So Joe is a

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Speaker 1: time for Jim Dandy's bucket of goose. No, let's do

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Speaker 1: Newton's bag of cheese sounds good okay, So Galileo's rocks, obviously,

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Speaker 1: are not the only famous imaginary falling objects to provoke

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Speaker 1: advances in physics. Uh The seventeenth and eighteenth century English

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Speaker 1: poly math Isaac Newton was also responsible for many famous

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Speaker 1: thought experiments that illustrated his revolutionary ideas. Probably the most

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Speaker 1: famous and enduring is what I'm gonna call ballistic Mountain.

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Speaker 1: So back in Newton's day and there was a lot

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Speaker 1: of confusion about different types of motion and what explained

427
00:23:44,280 --> 00:23:47,200
Speaker 1: the motion of objects in the heavens. A good example

428
00:23:47,200 --> 00:23:50,120
Speaker 1: would be let's say you drop a wool sack full

429
00:23:50,160 --> 00:23:53,800
Speaker 1: of goat cheese from a tower. Which direction does it travel?

430
00:23:54,160 --> 00:23:56,800
Speaker 1: Goes straight down right? You wouldn't want to be standing

431
00:23:56,920 --> 00:23:59,920
Speaker 1: under that goat cheese. And at the same time, skull

432
00:24:00,200 --> 00:24:03,680
Speaker 1: Is recognized that the Earth was spherical or roughly spherical,

433
00:24:03,920 --> 00:24:06,719
Speaker 1: as had been proved for many hundreds of years, and

434
00:24:06,840 --> 00:24:09,880
Speaker 1: it almost seemed as if objects were being pulled straight

435
00:24:09,920 --> 00:24:13,120
Speaker 1: down towards the center of the Earth, and the Earth

436
00:24:13,160 --> 00:24:16,000
Speaker 1: seemed to pull all objects toward it at a constant rate,

437
00:24:16,040 --> 00:24:19,400
Speaker 1: as Galileo had showed, regardless of the mass of that object.

438
00:24:20,160 --> 00:24:21,760
Speaker 1: And you see this all the time, even if you

439
00:24:21,840 --> 00:24:25,480
Speaker 1: throw an object horizontally. Let's say you are hurling a

440
00:24:25,520 --> 00:24:28,159
Speaker 1: wool sack full of goat cheese at your enemy, the

441
00:24:28,240 --> 00:24:32,639
Speaker 1: Royal astronomer John Flamsteed. A Flamsteed is too far away

442
00:24:32,680 --> 00:24:35,320
Speaker 1: when you throw the sack. Obviously the gravity is going

443
00:24:35,359 --> 00:24:37,320
Speaker 1: to pull the sack down to the Earth before it

444
00:24:37,359 --> 00:24:41,120
Speaker 1: hits him. Gravity always pulls down. But then contrast that

445
00:24:41,160 --> 00:24:43,120
Speaker 1: with if you look up at the heavens at night,

446
00:24:43,680 --> 00:24:46,159
Speaker 1: you will observe that the motion of the planet seems

447
00:24:46,200 --> 00:24:49,880
Speaker 1: to be governed by another force entirely. Instead of falling

448
00:24:49,960 --> 00:24:53,480
Speaker 1: straight into the Sun or into the Earth, the planet

449
00:24:53,520 --> 00:24:57,399
Speaker 1: seemed to travel through the heavens and smooth, roughly circular

450
00:24:57,480 --> 00:25:01,720
Speaker 1: elliptical orbits, just as the wound seems to travel in

451
00:25:02,040 --> 00:25:05,840
Speaker 1: a smooth elliptical track around the Earth. So how could

452
00:25:05,840 --> 00:25:08,520
Speaker 1: the motion seen in the heavens be so different from

453
00:25:08,560 --> 00:25:11,520
Speaker 1: the motion scene on Earth? Like was there a divine

454
00:25:11,600 --> 00:25:15,000
Speaker 1: hand guiding how the planets traveled through the void. So

455
00:25:15,080 --> 00:25:18,040
Speaker 1: Newton proposed a thought experiment in his Principia, and it

456
00:25:18,080 --> 00:25:21,040
Speaker 1: went roughly like this, Robert, imagine we're gonna get up

457
00:25:21,080 --> 00:25:23,560
Speaker 1: on top of the tallest mountain on Earth, the Gigantic

458
00:25:23,760 --> 00:25:26,639
Speaker 1: Monster Mountain. Maybe it's on the North Pole, all right.

459
00:25:27,320 --> 00:25:29,480
Speaker 1: I guess it wouldn't because there's no land there. But

460
00:25:29,840 --> 00:25:33,560
Speaker 1: maybe it could be the Mountain of Purgatory from from

461
00:25:33,880 --> 00:25:36,840
Speaker 1: Dante's Divine Comedy for all of Isaac Newton's sins, of

462
00:25:36,880 --> 00:25:39,240
Speaker 1: which there were many, because he was a jerk, So

463
00:25:39,280 --> 00:25:41,879
Speaker 1: that work off those piece. So he climbs up to

464
00:25:41,920 --> 00:25:43,800
Speaker 1: the top of the Mountain of Purgatory, Oh, which I

465
00:25:43,800 --> 00:25:47,000
Speaker 1: guess is earthly paradise, right, But but he gets up

466
00:25:47,040 --> 00:25:50,560
Speaker 1: there and he brings a cannon with him. Oh that's

467
00:25:50,600 --> 00:25:53,480
Speaker 1: that's that's already. I'm feeling it's probably breaking some rules,

468
00:25:53,480 --> 00:25:56,280
Speaker 1: but okay, yes, and it's an assault on the heavens already.

469
00:25:56,320 --> 00:25:58,800
Speaker 1: But it's an assault on the heavens in more ways

470
00:25:58,800 --> 00:26:01,800
Speaker 1: than one, more way than one, more ways than one.

471
00:26:01,920 --> 00:26:05,280
Speaker 1: I never know how to pluralize that correctly anyway. So

472
00:26:05,359 --> 00:26:06,800
Speaker 1: let's say you got the cannon up at the top

473
00:26:06,840 --> 00:26:09,520
Speaker 1: of the mountain. You shoot a cannon ball out parallel

474
00:26:09,560 --> 00:26:13,040
Speaker 1: to the ground at a hundred kilometers per hour. What happens, Well,

475
00:26:13,080 --> 00:26:16,680
Speaker 1: it travels in the familiar arc that any anybody who

476
00:26:16,680 --> 00:26:19,520
Speaker 1: has used a firearm like that will recognize. So it

477
00:26:19,560 --> 00:26:23,360
Speaker 1: goes horizontally at a hundred kilometers per hour while simultaneously

478
00:26:23,480 --> 00:26:27,280
Speaker 1: falling towards the ground at the normal acceleration, and eventually

479
00:26:27,320 --> 00:26:29,440
Speaker 1: it hits the ground with a thud. But let's say

480
00:26:29,480 --> 00:26:32,760
Speaker 1: you pack more gunpowder into the cannon and shoot the

481
00:26:32,760 --> 00:26:36,200
Speaker 1: ball out of the barrel faster, say two hundred kilometers

482
00:26:36,200 --> 00:26:39,240
Speaker 1: per hour. What happens, Well, it makes an arc again,

483
00:26:39,560 --> 00:26:42,159
Speaker 1: but the arc is a slightly different shape. It falls

484
00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:45,240
Speaker 1: to the ground at the same rate as before, but

485
00:26:45,320 --> 00:26:48,320
Speaker 1: this time it travels a lot farther horizontally before it

486
00:26:48,400 --> 00:26:52,080
Speaker 1: hits the ground. Now, imagine you just keep packing more

487
00:26:52,080 --> 00:26:54,720
Speaker 1: and more power into the cannon so that the ball

488
00:26:54,800 --> 00:26:58,159
Speaker 1: goes farther every time before it hits the ground. The

489
00:26:58,240 --> 00:27:00,760
Speaker 1: rate at which the cannonball falls is going to always

490
00:27:00,760 --> 00:27:03,800
Speaker 1: stay the same, but the horizontal speed and the horizontal

491
00:27:03,840 --> 00:27:08,199
Speaker 1: distance covered keeps increasing. And then combine this with the

492
00:27:08,240 --> 00:27:10,840
Speaker 1: idea that the earth is a sphere, which they knew

493
00:27:10,880 --> 00:27:13,840
Speaker 1: at the time of of Newton. This means that eventually

494
00:27:14,080 --> 00:27:16,919
Speaker 1: you will shoot the cannonball at a speed where it

495
00:27:16,960 --> 00:27:21,360
Speaker 1: travels so fast that it's falling arc is greater than

496
00:27:21,400 --> 00:27:24,760
Speaker 1: the curve of the Earth. So it flies and it falls,

497
00:27:24,920 --> 00:27:28,359
Speaker 1: but it never hits the ground. It travels around the

498
00:27:28,359 --> 00:27:31,600
Speaker 1: Earth in a continuous circle. So the cannonball is still

499
00:27:31,640 --> 00:27:34,560
Speaker 1: governed by the same two forces, gravity which wants to

500
00:27:34,600 --> 00:27:37,520
Speaker 1: pull the cannonball towards the center of the Earth, in inertia,

501
00:27:37,560 --> 00:27:40,480
Speaker 1: which wants to keep the cannonball traveling in a straight line.

502
00:27:40,800 --> 00:27:44,119
Speaker 1: But they these forces combine to cause the ball to

503
00:27:44,280 --> 00:27:47,640
Speaker 1: just keep flying around the Earth in a circle in space.

504
00:27:48,040 --> 00:27:50,840
Speaker 1: And Newton had a very famous illustration of this that

505
00:27:51,240 --> 00:27:53,320
Speaker 1: that sort of helped to make his point, where he

506
00:27:53,359 --> 00:27:57,320
Speaker 1: showed arcs of of cannonballs falling off and becoming longer

507
00:27:57,320 --> 00:28:00,760
Speaker 1: and longer until they just became a circle. And now

508
00:28:00,800 --> 00:28:04,280
Speaker 1: the crucial extrapolation is this is what planets due to

509
00:28:04,359 --> 00:28:06,840
Speaker 1: the Sun and what the Moon does to the Earth.

510
00:28:07,400 --> 00:28:10,960
Speaker 1: So Newton had used nothing more than an imaginary scenario

511
00:28:11,040 --> 00:28:15,040
Speaker 1: to demonstrate good reason for believing something shocking that the

512
00:28:15,119 --> 00:28:18,639
Speaker 1: forces that govern the heavens and the forces that govern

513
00:28:18,720 --> 00:28:21,720
Speaker 1: the movement of objects on the Earth like cannonballs or

514
00:28:22,000 --> 00:28:25,680
Speaker 1: wool sacks full of cheese are exactly the same this

515
00:28:25,760 --> 00:28:29,600
Speaker 1: is the unification of terrestrial and celestial forces. And this

516
00:28:29,600 --> 00:28:32,520
Speaker 1: this is a key principle in establishing the modern age

517
00:28:32,520 --> 00:28:35,399
Speaker 1: of physics. And it's rather brilliant to and then he

518
00:28:35,400 --> 00:28:38,280
Speaker 1: took something that was there was so so so much

519
00:28:38,320 --> 00:28:41,920
Speaker 1: more relatable in order to explain you know, the movement

520
00:28:41,920 --> 00:28:44,960
Speaker 1: of the spheres. Yeah, exactly. And of course this is

521
00:28:45,000 --> 00:28:47,840
Speaker 1: a case where a thought experiment, while revolutionary, was not

522
00:28:48,000 --> 00:28:52,480
Speaker 1: enough to prove the case. Fortunately Newton had conducted ingenious

523
00:28:52,560 --> 00:28:55,840
Speaker 1: real world experiments also, so in this case it was

524
00:28:55,880 --> 00:28:59,440
Speaker 1: the use of a pendulum combined with astronomical observations to

525
00:28:59,480 --> 00:29:02,560
Speaker 1: show that the Moon falls towards the Earth at about

526
00:29:02,640 --> 00:29:05,720
Speaker 1: the same speed as objects dropped on Earth fall toward

527
00:29:05,760 --> 00:29:09,080
Speaker 1: the ground, which is a funny thing to consider whether

528
00:29:09,120 --> 00:29:11,240
Speaker 1: you're dropping a bag of cheese out of an airplane

529
00:29:11,320 --> 00:29:13,480
Speaker 1: or watching the Moon fall towards the Earth. They followed

530
00:29:13,480 --> 00:29:16,600
Speaker 1: about the same rate, but the Moon's competing inertia and

531
00:29:16,680 --> 00:29:19,280
Speaker 1: position of course keep it in orbit. And there are

532
00:29:19,320 --> 00:29:22,480
Speaker 1: of course powerful implications that followed from Newton. These could

533
00:29:22,480 --> 00:29:25,240
Speaker 1: be put to use in rocketry, like ultimately we had

534
00:29:25,280 --> 00:29:28,040
Speaker 1: to figure out the delta V required to achieve lower

535
00:29:28,120 --> 00:29:30,920
Speaker 1: thorbit and to escape Earth's orbit entirely if we wanted

536
00:29:30,960 --> 00:29:34,200
Speaker 1: to say, send probes to other planets. Uh And and

537
00:29:34,240 --> 00:29:36,120
Speaker 1: by the way, I didn't make up the part about

538
00:29:36,120 --> 00:29:39,040
Speaker 1: the sack of cheese. But Newton did actually have enemies.

539
00:29:39,720 --> 00:29:42,200
Speaker 1: And just to tell one quick story, there was this

540
00:29:42,280 --> 00:29:47,000
Speaker 1: astronomer named John Flamsteed. I mentioned him earlier, and Newton

541
00:29:47,040 --> 00:29:50,880
Speaker 1: was pretty much a total jerk. Flamesteed was this English astronomer.

542
00:29:50,920 --> 00:29:54,120
Speaker 1: He was the English Astronomer Royal during Newton's time, and

543
00:29:54,240 --> 00:29:57,120
Speaker 1: he was working on a catalog of objects in the heavens,

544
00:29:57,400 --> 00:30:01,720
Speaker 1: and Newton wanted access to Flamesteed's catalog. Basically, he wanted

545
00:30:01,800 --> 00:30:04,160
Speaker 1: data so he could use it to prove his theories.

546
00:30:04,480 --> 00:30:08,239
Speaker 1: But Flamesteed wasn't done putting it together yet, believing it

547
00:30:08,280 --> 00:30:12,479
Speaker 1: wasn't ready for publication, so Newton constantly harassed and bullied

548
00:30:12,560 --> 00:30:15,640
Speaker 1: him to get this information. Eventually threw his weight around

549
00:30:15,640 --> 00:30:19,400
Speaker 1: with the English Royalty to get Flamsteed's catalog published early

550
00:30:19,520 --> 00:30:22,280
Speaker 1: before it was ready, which Flamsteed did not like at all.

551
00:30:22,440 --> 00:30:25,320
Speaker 1: There's also a story that Newton, as the president of

552
00:30:25,320 --> 00:30:28,760
Speaker 1: the Royal Society, went to the Royal observatory to inspect

553
00:30:28,840 --> 00:30:32,360
Speaker 1: Flamsteed's equipment, and they got into a fight, and Flamsteed

554
00:30:32,440 --> 00:30:36,080
Speaker 1: wrote that quote. Newton ran himself into a great heat

555
00:30:36,200 --> 00:30:40,360
Speaker 1: and very indecent passion, and he used Knavish talk and

556
00:30:40,560 --> 00:30:43,960
Speaker 1: called me all the ill names puppy, etcetera that he

557
00:30:43,960 --> 00:30:47,840
Speaker 1: could think of. So like Newton's out there like screaming

558
00:30:47,840 --> 00:30:50,920
Speaker 1: at other scientists calling them puppies, just thinking a real

559
00:30:51,360 --> 00:30:54,800
Speaker 1: real ass of himself. Yeah, anyway, shows that even some

560
00:30:54,840 --> 00:30:58,240
Speaker 1: of the smartest people ever can are not above, you know,

561
00:30:58,240 --> 00:31:01,120
Speaker 1: puppy calling. Well, it makes sense. Wasn't new In a

562
00:31:01,320 --> 00:31:03,760
Speaker 1: a more of a cat person, didn't he? Uh? Oh,

563
00:31:03,800 --> 00:31:06,720
Speaker 1: that might be for cats to move in and out

564
00:31:06,720 --> 00:31:09,000
Speaker 1: of the chambers of his house. I didn't look up

565
00:31:09,040 --> 00:31:11,680
Speaker 1: the usage history of that word, so I don't know

566
00:31:11,760 --> 00:31:14,080
Speaker 1: exactly what it meant to call somebody a puppy and

567
00:31:14,160 --> 00:31:18,160
Speaker 1: whatever year this was, but profanity scholars right in and

568
00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:21,120
Speaker 1: let us know, Yeah what does that mean? Did he

569
00:31:21,160 --> 00:31:24,120
Speaker 1: just literally mean like a young dog? I hope? So

570
00:31:24,240 --> 00:31:27,000
Speaker 1: that's the that's that's a funny interpretation. Well it sounds

571
00:31:27,040 --> 00:31:30,840
Speaker 1: like Navish talk either way, totally. So what are the examples?

572
00:31:30,840 --> 00:31:32,960
Speaker 1: Do you have for us, well, just a few quicker

573
00:31:33,000 --> 00:31:35,720
Speaker 1: ones in in physics, and of course one of my

574
00:31:35,760 --> 00:31:38,760
Speaker 1: favorites is that people dreamed up the concept of a

575
00:31:38,800 --> 00:31:41,960
Speaker 1: black hole as a mathematical thought experiment, long before any

576
00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:44,360
Speaker 1: evidence of such a thing had ever been detected. Like

577
00:31:44,600 --> 00:31:47,680
Speaker 1: we talked about this in our black Holes episode. But

578
00:31:47,880 --> 00:31:51,000
Speaker 1: around seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four, the English

579
00:31:51,080 --> 00:31:54,960
Speaker 1: natural philosophers John Michelle and Henry Cavendish dared to ask

580
00:31:55,000 --> 00:31:58,400
Speaker 1: a bizarre question. So they knew that light itself had

581
00:31:58,400 --> 00:32:02,640
Speaker 1: a speed, and they were armed with Newton's insights about gravity, inertia,

582
00:32:02,880 --> 00:32:05,920
Speaker 1: orbits and escape velocity, so they asked, what if there

583
00:32:05,960 --> 00:32:09,360
Speaker 1: were a star so massive with with such a great

584
00:32:09,400 --> 00:32:14,440
Speaker 1: gravitational attraction that escape velocity for this star was greater

585
00:32:14,520 --> 00:32:16,800
Speaker 1: than the speed of light. In other words, a star

586
00:32:16,920 --> 00:32:20,120
Speaker 1: so massive that even light could not escape it. And

587
00:32:20,160 --> 00:32:23,840
Speaker 1: this was perhaps the earliest formulation of the concept of

588
00:32:23,880 --> 00:32:26,240
Speaker 1: a black hole, which would later be developed by so

589
00:32:26,280 --> 00:32:31,600
Speaker 1: many other important astrophysicists Karl Schwartz, Shield Gander, Shaker, Oppenheimer

590
00:32:31,640 --> 00:32:34,160
Speaker 1: and others. And if you want more on that, we

591
00:32:34,280 --> 00:32:36,280
Speaker 1: have a whole episode about it from earlier. This year.

592
00:32:36,320 --> 00:32:39,360
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we did a three parter on black holes. Uh. Then,

593
00:32:39,400 --> 00:32:42,920
Speaker 1: of course the thought experiments are huge in illustrating the

594
00:32:43,040 --> 00:32:46,400
Speaker 1: concepts of relativity in the speed of light. Like Einstein

595
00:32:46,600 --> 00:32:49,920
Speaker 1: is famous for influential thought experiments, But we shouldn't just

596
00:32:50,040 --> 00:32:53,200
Speaker 1: focus on the ones that have been very influential in physics, because,

597
00:32:53,240 --> 00:32:56,200
Speaker 1: of course, thought experiments are probably even more common in

598
00:32:56,360 --> 00:32:59,600
Speaker 1: philosophy than they are in physics, even more common. And

599
00:33:00,400 --> 00:33:02,360
Speaker 1: I don't want to be insulting to philosophy because I

600
00:33:02,480 --> 00:33:05,160
Speaker 1: value philosophy, but I would say even more common and

601
00:33:05,840 --> 00:33:10,960
Speaker 1: less often useful. Uh. They can still be illuminating, but

602
00:33:11,440 --> 00:33:14,600
Speaker 1: I think we need to realize that, especially in scenarios

603
00:33:14,720 --> 00:33:18,000
Speaker 1: where we can't actually test the conclusions of a thought

604
00:33:18,040 --> 00:33:20,840
Speaker 1: experiment in any kind of way, we should be careful

605
00:33:20,920 --> 00:33:25,400
Speaker 1: that thought experiments don't cloud are thinking more than they reveal. Well,

606
00:33:25,680 --> 00:33:29,200
Speaker 1: we don't encounter thought experiments to deal with things like morality, right, Uh,

607
00:33:29,680 --> 00:33:32,480
Speaker 1: and ultimately how do you measure those things? Yes? And

608
00:33:32,800 --> 00:33:34,959
Speaker 1: the I feel like those kinds of thought experiments are

609
00:33:35,160 --> 00:33:38,600
Speaker 1: especially prone to be confusing because they deal with the

610
00:33:38,680 --> 00:33:43,520
Speaker 1: lucretious problem we talked about bringing in unexamined assumptions that

611
00:33:43,600 --> 00:33:47,360
Speaker 1: are influencing our thinking without us realizing it. So I

612
00:33:47,440 --> 00:33:50,480
Speaker 1: think we should mention just one example of a prominent,

613
00:33:50,600 --> 00:33:55,680
Speaker 1: extremely controversial thought experiment in philosophy. There's been a mountain

614
00:33:55,760 --> 00:33:57,840
Speaker 1: of debate on this one, so I know we're not

615
00:33:57,920 --> 00:33:59,480
Speaker 1: going to be able to do it justice in the

616
00:33:59,520 --> 00:34:01,360
Speaker 1: time we have, we'll try to give it the best

617
00:34:01,640 --> 00:34:05,640
Speaker 1: quickest version we can. So this is John Searle's Chinese

618
00:34:05,800 --> 00:34:08,640
Speaker 1: Room thought experiment. Robert, I know you must have encountered

619
00:34:08,719 --> 00:34:12,640
Speaker 1: this one before. Yeah, So the question is, we know

620
00:34:12,800 --> 00:34:17,920
Speaker 1: we can program computers to mimic the intelligent behavior of humans,

621
00:34:18,280 --> 00:34:20,640
Speaker 1: but would it ever be possible for a computer to

622
00:34:20,760 --> 00:34:27,000
Speaker 1: truly understand something? Or can it only simulate understanding? And

623
00:34:27,080 --> 00:34:29,239
Speaker 1: this has often taken a sort of an analog of

624
00:34:29,280 --> 00:34:32,120
Speaker 1: the question of can machines be conscious? Right? And no,

625
00:34:32,320 --> 00:34:34,880
Speaker 1: we've we've discussed this quite a bit on the show before.

626
00:34:35,040 --> 00:34:38,279
Speaker 1: Maybe not specifically this thought experiment I don't recall off hand,

627
00:34:38,360 --> 00:34:42,120
Speaker 1: but just the idea that, yeah, if a robot may

628
00:34:42,200 --> 00:34:46,000
Speaker 1: know what it is to stub one's toe, but does

629
00:34:46,040 --> 00:34:49,560
Speaker 1: a robot really know what it's like to stub your toe? Like?

630
00:34:49,680 --> 00:34:52,080
Speaker 1: Does it? It doesn't doesn't. Does it have that experience,

631
00:34:52,160 --> 00:34:54,319
Speaker 1: does it have that knowledge? Can it? Can it sort

632
00:34:54,360 --> 00:34:58,360
Speaker 1: of hold the information in its hands and squish it around.

633
00:34:58,800 --> 00:35:01,480
Speaker 1: We know it can act like it understands what it

634
00:35:01,640 --> 00:35:05,000
Speaker 1: means to to feel pain, But does it really understand

635
00:35:05,120 --> 00:35:07,840
Speaker 1: what it means to feel pain? Uh so? The American

636
00:35:07,880 --> 00:35:10,759
Speaker 1: philosopher John Searle proposed a thought experiment to answer this

637
00:35:10,920 --> 00:35:13,040
Speaker 1: question in the early nineteen eighties. I think it was

638
00:35:13,120 --> 00:35:16,240
Speaker 1: first in the year nineteen eighty, and his work asked

639
00:35:16,280 --> 00:35:18,680
Speaker 1: us to imagine the following scenario. You already to go

640
00:35:18,800 --> 00:35:21,720
Speaker 1: there with me, okay, So imagine you are an English

641
00:35:21,760 --> 00:35:25,680
Speaker 1: speaker that does not understand a single word of written Chinese,

642
00:35:25,880 --> 00:35:29,640
Speaker 1: absolutely nothing. Then you are locked in a room with

643
00:35:29,800 --> 00:35:32,560
Speaker 1: a slot in the wall, a pencil and paper, and

644
00:35:32,680 --> 00:35:36,400
Speaker 1: a giant book of instructions written in English. Every now

645
00:35:36,480 --> 00:35:39,920
Speaker 1: and then someone from the outside slips a piece of

646
00:35:39,960 --> 00:35:42,160
Speaker 1: paper through the slot in the wall, and it has

647
00:35:42,280 --> 00:35:45,239
Speaker 1: a string of Chinese characters written on it. And then

648
00:35:45,320 --> 00:35:47,840
Speaker 1: you look at this piece of paper and you consult

649
00:35:47,960 --> 00:35:51,920
Speaker 1: your giant instruction manual, and the manual tells you given

650
00:35:52,040 --> 00:35:56,120
Speaker 1: certain Chinese character inputs coming through the wall, which Chinese

651
00:35:56,280 --> 00:35:58,799
Speaker 1: characters to write on a piece of paper and put

652
00:35:59,080 --> 00:36:01,160
Speaker 1: back out through the slot in the wall. So you

653
00:36:01,239 --> 00:36:04,280
Speaker 1: write down what the instructions tell you to write based

654
00:36:04,320 --> 00:36:06,400
Speaker 1: on what has come in, and then you slip the

655
00:36:06,440 --> 00:36:09,600
Speaker 1: output through the slot. Now, sarl says that in this scenario,

656
00:36:09,800 --> 00:36:13,440
Speaker 1: with a sufficiently powerful instruction manual, the person in the

657
00:36:13,520 --> 00:36:16,960
Speaker 1: room would be able to simulate being able to understand

658
00:36:17,040 --> 00:36:21,600
Speaker 1: the Chinese language despite not actually understanding a single word

659
00:36:21,680 --> 00:36:24,160
Speaker 1: of it. The person is just an operator. They're just

660
00:36:24,320 --> 00:36:27,960
Speaker 1: blindly copying symbols from a rule book. They don't understand

661
00:36:28,040 --> 00:36:31,239
Speaker 1: what any of the symbols mean. So in the same way,

662
00:36:31,760 --> 00:36:35,760
Speaker 1: Cearle says that this gets extrapolated to any computer program

663
00:36:35,880 --> 00:36:40,279
Speaker 1: that would supposedly pass quote pass the Turing tests, which

664
00:36:40,880 --> 00:36:42,880
Speaker 1: we've discussed the turning test on the show before. But

665
00:36:42,960 --> 00:36:46,120
Speaker 1: basically it means to be able to have a text

666
00:36:46,239 --> 00:36:49,759
Speaker 1: based conversation with the human such that the human would

667
00:36:49,760 --> 00:36:52,320
Speaker 1: believe that the machine they were chatting with was actually

668
00:36:52,440 --> 00:36:54,560
Speaker 1: human as well. Can you can you fool a human

669
00:36:54,600 --> 00:36:57,600
Speaker 1: into thinking you're a human by talking to them through text?

670
00:36:58,360 --> 00:37:02,080
Speaker 1: And Searle says, it doesn't matter how convincingly the computer

671
00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:05,960
Speaker 1: simulates being able to have a conversation in any language.

672
00:37:06,400 --> 00:37:10,359
Speaker 1: It's still like the non Chinese speaker in the Chinese room.

673
00:37:10,840 --> 00:37:14,080
Speaker 1: It can't really understand what it's doing. It's only blindly

674
00:37:14,160 --> 00:37:18,839
Speaker 1: following instructions that create an illusion of understanding where true

675
00:37:18,960 --> 00:37:23,520
Speaker 1: understanding is impossible. Now, there have been tons of responses

676
00:37:23,600 --> 00:37:25,560
Speaker 1: to this scenario over the years, and I think we'll

677
00:37:25,640 --> 00:37:27,759
Speaker 1: come back to this towards the end of the episode.

678
00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:32,239
Speaker 1: But the idea is the thought experiment of imagining the

679
00:37:32,320 --> 00:37:35,520
Speaker 1: person in the Chinese room leads you to new knowledge.

680
00:37:35,640 --> 00:37:38,719
Speaker 1: It should lead you to the correct conclusion that it's

681
00:37:38,760 --> 00:37:42,120
Speaker 1: impossible for a machine to understand something, or at least

682
00:37:42,200 --> 00:37:47,520
Speaker 1: a machine interpreting formal instructions. Robert, I, I could almost

683
00:37:47,600 --> 00:37:49,800
Speaker 1: detect by the way you're furrowing your brow that this

684
00:37:50,200 --> 00:37:54,080
Speaker 1: this one's filling you with venom. Well, the the Chinese Room, Yeah,

685
00:37:54,280 --> 00:37:56,239
Speaker 1: um no, I mean I love it. I keep that,

686
00:37:57,080 --> 00:37:59,880
Speaker 1: I keep wanting to say something kind of snarky about

687
00:38:00,400 --> 00:38:03,719
Speaker 1: like just the human experience itself being you know, like

688
00:38:03,840 --> 00:38:06,160
Speaker 1: the Chinese room, that where there's so much that we're

689
00:38:06,239 --> 00:38:08,719
Speaker 1: doing that that we're we're not really understanding, We're just

690
00:38:08,840 --> 00:38:12,920
Speaker 1: responding to stimuli and giving back what the instruction manual

691
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:15,560
Speaker 1: says we should give back. But then I do have

692
00:38:15,680 --> 00:38:18,759
Speaker 1: in a way articulated one of the main types of

693
00:38:18,840 --> 00:38:22,040
Speaker 1: responses to it. Yeah, but that it said yeah, but that,

694
00:38:22,200 --> 00:38:23,799
Speaker 1: in my opinion, like, this is the great thing about

695
00:38:24,000 --> 00:38:26,680
Speaker 1: a solid thought experiment and is in that it it

696
00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:31,000
Speaker 1: provokes conversation and subsequent sort of answers and critiques of

697
00:38:31,080 --> 00:38:33,680
Speaker 1: the thought experiments. Right, So, I guess in a minute

698
00:38:33,680 --> 00:38:36,239
Speaker 1: we are going to end up talking about sort of

699
00:38:36,400 --> 00:38:40,280
Speaker 1: formal classification systems for types of thought experiments and considering

700
00:38:40,320 --> 00:38:44,239
Speaker 1: how thought experiments might or might not be useful. But uh, there,

701
00:38:44,320 --> 00:38:46,440
Speaker 1: I can see that there are multiple ways that one

702
00:38:46,520 --> 00:38:49,040
Speaker 1: could be useful. Immediately, one could be useful in the

703
00:38:49,120 --> 00:38:51,799
Speaker 1: way it's intended, meaning it can prove what it sets

704
00:38:51,840 --> 00:38:55,280
Speaker 1: out to prove. Or it could also be inadvertently useful

705
00:38:55,400 --> 00:38:57,759
Speaker 1: in that even if it fails to prove what it

706
00:38:57,840 --> 00:39:02,759
Speaker 1: sets out to prove, it could make common misunderstandings clear. Right,

707
00:39:02,840 --> 00:39:06,000
Speaker 1: does that make sense? Yeah, like reveal ways in which

708
00:39:06,080 --> 00:39:09,520
Speaker 1: people's thinking is going wrong on a particular subject. Like

709
00:39:09,640 --> 00:39:12,719
Speaker 1: it's like saying, here is a scenario that illustrates a

710
00:39:12,800 --> 00:39:15,879
Speaker 1: way of thinking about this and then even if if

711
00:39:16,080 --> 00:39:19,080
Speaker 1: what it is presenting you with is incorrect, or has

712
00:39:19,120 --> 00:39:23,760
Speaker 1: some problems, or doesn't fully match up to um scientific reality,

713
00:39:23,960 --> 00:39:27,960
Speaker 1: or or just preconceived notions, then at least you have

714
00:39:28,160 --> 00:39:30,600
Speaker 1: you've created the model. You have, you have the model

715
00:39:30,640 --> 00:39:33,400
Speaker 1: on the table, and other people can come along and say, well,

716
00:39:33,440 --> 00:39:35,279
Speaker 1: you know, this is interesting, but what happens when we

717
00:39:35,320 --> 00:39:37,560
Speaker 1: put a hat on this guy, what happens when there

718
00:39:37,600 --> 00:39:40,600
Speaker 1: are two instruction manuals, what happens when you know the

719
00:39:40,800 --> 00:39:43,880
Speaker 1: ship of theseus also has a crew, etcetera. You know,

720
00:39:43,920 --> 00:39:47,279
Speaker 1: all the various complications are little tweaks that can can

721
00:39:47,440 --> 00:39:51,680
Speaker 1: change the model just a little bit. I think sometimes

722
00:39:51,800 --> 00:39:54,359
Speaker 1: thought experiments, even if they fail at proving what they

723
00:39:54,400 --> 00:39:56,680
Speaker 1: set out to prove, can be useful in the same

724
00:39:56,719 --> 00:40:01,040
Speaker 1: way that introducing terminology to a DISCUSSI can be useful

725
00:40:01,360 --> 00:40:03,800
Speaker 1: just because, like if you put an image to something

726
00:40:03,920 --> 00:40:06,280
Speaker 1: or put a name to something, that makes it easier

727
00:40:06,360 --> 00:40:09,920
Speaker 1: to understand what it is you're talking about. All right, Well,

728
00:40:09,920 --> 00:40:11,879
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take one more break, and when

729
00:40:11,920 --> 00:40:15,120
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna get more into this idea

730
00:40:15,120 --> 00:40:16,960
Speaker 1: of what is the thought experiment and indeed, where does

731
00:40:17,000 --> 00:40:22,080
Speaker 1: the term come from thank, alright, we're back. So in

732
00:40:22,200 --> 00:40:25,040
Speaker 1: looking at the history of thought experiments, you know where

733
00:40:25,080 --> 00:40:27,400
Speaker 1: you able to find the oldest one on a like

734
00:40:27,520 --> 00:40:29,960
Speaker 1: a like a cave wall. Uh No. But I mean

735
00:40:30,920 --> 00:40:33,200
Speaker 1: we kind of end up getting into a similar situation

736
00:40:33,280 --> 00:40:36,360
Speaker 1: when we started trying to think about this, because certainly

737
00:40:36,520 --> 00:40:39,239
Speaker 1: we know that thought experiments were employed by a pre

738
00:40:39,840 --> 00:40:43,640
Speaker 1: Socratic philosopher, so this has been before the life of Socrates,

739
00:40:43,760 --> 00:40:48,200
Speaker 1: before for seventy b c. And then thought experiments are

740
00:40:48,360 --> 00:40:50,840
Speaker 1: the things that were essentially thought experience were popular throughout

741
00:40:50,840 --> 00:40:53,040
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, and of course came into their own

742
00:40:53,239 --> 00:40:57,000
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century and the centuries to follow. The

743
00:40:57,200 --> 00:41:01,840
Speaker 1: term itself is often attributed one Ernst Mock, who lived

744
00:41:01,920 --> 00:41:05,560
Speaker 1: at eight through nineteen sixteen. He was an Austrian physicist

745
00:41:05,640 --> 00:41:09,640
Speaker 1: and philosopher. And they point this out because he used

746
00:41:09,680 --> 00:41:13,080
Speaker 1: the term, let's see, if I get this right, gadoncan

747
00:41:13,239 --> 00:41:16,759
Speaker 1: experimente uh. But it seems though that like it was

748
00:41:16,800 --> 00:41:19,320
Speaker 1: already in use by the time he used it, and

749
00:41:19,400 --> 00:41:23,319
Speaker 1: it may have derived from the Danish uh tunk experiment.

750
00:41:23,920 --> 00:41:28,200
Speaker 1: And then it turns out that Georg Lichtenberg through seventeen

751
00:41:28,280 --> 00:41:32,040
Speaker 1: ninety nine he discussed quote experiments with thoughts and ideas.

752
00:41:32,760 --> 00:41:35,720
Speaker 1: So funny, like all of these are coming after the advent,

753
00:41:36,040 --> 00:41:39,440
Speaker 1: you know, after Galileo, like Galileo and Newton, and people

754
00:41:39,480 --> 00:41:42,720
Speaker 1: had already been using these, As we said, they weren't

755
00:41:42,719 --> 00:41:44,440
Speaker 1: the first to use them, but they used them in

756
00:41:44,600 --> 00:41:48,799
Speaker 1: really profoundly influential ways in real science. Yeah, So it's

757
00:41:48,840 --> 00:41:50,799
Speaker 1: kind of like we're looking at three phases here. There's

758
00:41:50,800 --> 00:41:53,680
Speaker 1: the phase where people are actually calling it a thought experiment,

759
00:41:53,960 --> 00:41:57,160
Speaker 1: there's the phase where people are using them to great effect.

760
00:41:57,800 --> 00:41:59,920
Speaker 1: And ultimately, I think if we if you go back

761
00:42:00,200 --> 00:42:02,360
Speaker 1: further in time, you know, get lost in the mists

762
00:42:02,560 --> 00:42:05,880
Speaker 1: of of of earlier history. I think it's fair to

763
00:42:05,920 --> 00:42:09,240
Speaker 1: say that thought experiments are generally a more refined idea

764
00:42:09,280 --> 00:42:11,600
Speaker 1: of something that we just do as humans, and internal

765
00:42:11,640 --> 00:42:16,160
Speaker 1: simulation of of observed empirical data and processes, trying to

766
00:42:16,280 --> 00:42:19,560
Speaker 1: run an experiment in your mind given what you know, right,

767
00:42:19,640 --> 00:42:21,360
Speaker 1: and you know, I can imagine this is kind of

768
00:42:21,400 --> 00:42:23,920
Speaker 1: getting into the territory of our our other show, Invention,

769
00:42:24,280 --> 00:42:27,200
Speaker 1: which everyone can can learn about invention pod dot com.

770
00:42:27,320 --> 00:42:30,120
Speaker 1: It's a podcast about inventions and where they come from.

771
00:42:30,520 --> 00:42:35,080
Speaker 1: Subscribe now. Subscribe now, now, uh, seriously, stop and go

772
00:42:35,200 --> 00:42:38,279
Speaker 1: and subscribe. But but you know, you can imagine with

773
00:42:38,360 --> 00:42:40,080
Speaker 1: any of these inventions. This is even some of the

774
00:42:40,160 --> 00:42:43,080
Speaker 1: ancient ones that we've talked about, Like there is a

775
00:42:43,160 --> 00:42:47,160
Speaker 1: thought experiment level that is that is in play. But

776
00:42:47,400 --> 00:42:49,480
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a great stretch to imagine some

777
00:42:49,600 --> 00:42:53,719
Speaker 1: of these ancient inventors and inventive minds essentially engaging and

778
00:42:53,800 --> 00:42:57,000
Speaker 1: thought experiments. Oh well, yeah, I mean that's an interesting

779
00:42:57,040 --> 00:42:58,920
Speaker 1: way of putting it that you have to sort of

780
00:43:00,040 --> 00:43:02,960
Speaker 1: before you create a tool, you have to imagine what

781
00:43:03,120 --> 00:43:06,360
Speaker 1: would happen if you use something of a certain shape

782
00:43:06,400 --> 00:43:09,400
Speaker 1: in a certain way without having seen something like that

783
00:43:09,520 --> 00:43:11,520
Speaker 1: done before. Right. But then again, of course we go

784
00:43:11,600 --> 00:43:13,520
Speaker 1: back to what we said earlier about how just envisioning

785
00:43:13,520 --> 00:43:16,040
Speaker 1: an experiment you could carry out is not in in

786
00:43:16,160 --> 00:43:19,279
Speaker 1: and of itself a thought experiment, but it's still kind

787
00:43:19,280 --> 00:43:22,960
Speaker 1: of the roots of the thought experiment, right, Um, in

788
00:43:23,160 --> 00:43:26,239
Speaker 1: terms of thinking about like, well, what are some taxonomies

789
00:43:26,320 --> 00:43:30,200
Speaker 1: we can refer to for thought experiments. They're basically various

790
00:43:30,239 --> 00:43:33,600
Speaker 1: ways you could categorize thought experiments, but there's not really

791
00:43:33,640 --> 00:43:37,759
Speaker 1: a fully agreed upon standards so much obviously you can

792
00:43:37,840 --> 00:43:40,920
Speaker 1: categorize them by the discipline that they stem from. So

793
00:43:41,320 --> 00:43:43,920
Speaker 1: here's a bunch of physics thought experiments. Here's some quantum

794
00:43:43,960 --> 00:43:47,600
Speaker 1: physics thought experiments. Here's some some economic thought experiments. So

795
00:43:47,680 --> 00:43:50,120
Speaker 1: psychological thought experiments. You know, we could also break them

796
00:43:50,200 --> 00:43:52,960
Speaker 1: up based on their features, I guess, but I'm not sure,

797
00:43:53,280 --> 00:43:55,680
Speaker 1: really sure that does any good, because again, if it's

798
00:43:55,680 --> 00:43:58,160
Speaker 1: a cat or a dog or basilisk, it doesn't matter.

799
00:43:58,920 --> 00:44:02,680
Speaker 1: That's just some flavoring that's added to the little story

800
00:44:02,760 --> 00:44:05,600
Speaker 1: of the thought experiment. Well, I'm already seeing in the

801
00:44:05,680 --> 00:44:09,240
Speaker 1: examples we've discussed so far, one clear distinction that emerges,

802
00:44:09,520 --> 00:44:13,400
Speaker 1: which is the thought experiment that shows the absurdity or

803
00:44:13,560 --> 00:44:19,120
Speaker 1: contradictions inherent in some pre existing idea, versus the thought

804
00:44:19,200 --> 00:44:23,359
Speaker 1: experiment that demonstrates a new conclusion or show reveals new

805
00:44:23,440 --> 00:44:27,960
Speaker 1: knowledge based on premises you already accept. Right, And that's

806
00:44:28,080 --> 00:44:30,279
Speaker 1: that's where we come back to Karl Popper, who we

807
00:44:30,400 --> 00:44:35,000
Speaker 1: talked about briefly earlier. Karl Popper was an Austrian British

808
00:44:35,040 --> 00:44:39,279
Speaker 1: philosopher and professor who live nineteen o two through and

809
00:44:39,480 --> 00:44:42,040
Speaker 1: he this is this is basically how he divided up

810
00:44:42,360 --> 00:44:46,520
Speaker 1: thought experiments. He said, they're basically three types heuristic, in

811
00:44:46,640 --> 00:44:49,359
Speaker 1: other words, to illustrate a theory. Okay, so this would

812
00:44:49,360 --> 00:44:52,239
Speaker 1: be the kind that just helps clarify what you're talking about,

813
00:44:52,280 --> 00:44:56,040
Speaker 1: gives people something to picture. And you could argue that maybe,

814
00:44:56,320 --> 00:44:59,600
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm not quite sure how Newton's cannon

815
00:44:59,680 --> 00:45:02,719
Speaker 1: would fit in there. Was that just to illustrate or

816
00:45:02,800 --> 00:45:07,319
Speaker 1: did he actually prove something using the image of the canon. Well,

817
00:45:07,400 --> 00:45:09,600
Speaker 1: you could also argue that it falls into the next category,

818
00:45:09,719 --> 00:45:13,200
Speaker 1: right critical against the theory, because he's kind of playing

819
00:45:13,280 --> 00:45:16,440
Speaker 1: with preconceived notions about how these things would work. Right, Well,

820
00:45:16,480 --> 00:45:18,799
Speaker 1: I guess yeah, it does challenge the idea that they're

821
00:45:18,880 --> 00:45:22,160
Speaker 1: different mechanics at operation in the heavens than there are

822
00:45:22,239 --> 00:45:25,600
Speaker 1: on the Earth. And now the Carl Popper's third category

823
00:45:25,680 --> 00:45:29,239
Speaker 1: then is apologetic in favor of a theory. Okay, So

824
00:45:29,320 --> 00:45:32,839
Speaker 1: you've got the kind that illustrates, the kind that challenges,

825
00:45:33,040 --> 00:45:36,560
Speaker 1: and the kind that argues in favor of Now, on

826
00:45:36,640 --> 00:45:39,759
Speaker 1: a similar note, you have Canadian philosopher of science James

827
00:45:39,880 --> 00:45:45,480
Speaker 1: Robert Brown, still still alive and kicking as of this recording,

828
00:45:46,120 --> 00:45:50,920
Speaker 1: and he's divided thought experiments into two major categories similar

829
00:45:50,920 --> 00:45:55,200
Speaker 1: along similar lines, constructive and destructive. Okay, those are the

830
00:45:55,239 --> 00:45:58,640
Speaker 1: broad categories, and then there are some some sub types

831
00:45:58,760 --> 00:46:02,960
Speaker 1: to the destructive category. So there's contradictive, this is a

832
00:46:03,000 --> 00:46:06,560
Speaker 1: thought experiment that points out a contradiction to a given idea.

833
00:46:08,000 --> 00:46:11,560
Speaker 1: Then there's paradoxical, so you have a thought experimentment here

834
00:46:11,640 --> 00:46:14,239
Speaker 1: that shows how a given idea is conflicting with a

835
00:46:14,320 --> 00:46:17,560
Speaker 1: commonly held belief. Then you have the undermine, or a

836
00:46:17,600 --> 00:46:21,279
Speaker 1: thought experiment that actively undermines an idea. And then there's

837
00:46:21,320 --> 00:46:23,920
Speaker 1: the counter thought experiment, a thought experiment that serves as

838
00:46:23,960 --> 00:46:26,640
Speaker 1: a rebuttal to another thought experiment. You know, I think

839
00:46:26,680 --> 00:46:30,360
Speaker 1: I generally would find that thought experiments are more often

840
00:46:30,640 --> 00:46:35,239
Speaker 1: sound when deployed as destructive or critical tools than as

841
00:46:35,480 --> 00:46:39,400
Speaker 1: constructive or apologetic tools. And I think this is because,

842
00:46:40,160 --> 00:46:42,920
Speaker 1: of course, as we know, thought experiments do not provide

843
00:46:43,280 --> 00:46:46,640
Speaker 1: new data or new evidence of anything. They only illustrate

844
00:46:46,760 --> 00:46:50,680
Speaker 1: logical relationships between things that we already know or already believe.

845
00:46:51,360 --> 00:46:54,440
Speaker 1: So they can take existing knowledge and use that to

846
00:46:54,560 --> 00:46:57,640
Speaker 1: extrapolate to new knowledge. But it's much easier to use

847
00:46:57,760 --> 00:47:01,480
Speaker 1: them in a way that's reasonable to demonstrate a contradiction

848
00:47:01,880 --> 00:47:05,440
Speaker 1: between existing pieces of knowledge. Or principles that the extended

849
00:47:05,600 --> 00:47:08,759
Speaker 1: version of the reductive ad absurdom. These are I think

850
00:47:08,840 --> 00:47:12,480
Speaker 1: some of the most powerful uses of thought experiments when

851
00:47:12,520 --> 00:47:14,440
Speaker 1: they when they have the power to clearly show that

852
00:47:14,640 --> 00:47:18,080
Speaker 1: things that you already believe or accept or are you

853
00:47:18,160 --> 00:47:23,080
Speaker 1: know bound to accept, are in fact self contradictory. Alright,

854
00:47:23,160 --> 00:47:25,279
Speaker 1: so let's go. Let's get down to one of the

855
00:47:25,840 --> 00:47:29,440
Speaker 1: questions that has often discussed your regarding thought experiments. Uh,

856
00:47:29,800 --> 00:47:32,239
Speaker 1: people say, well, do they really tell us anything? Oh? Yeah,

857
00:47:32,320 --> 00:47:35,239
Speaker 1: some people hate thought experiments. I think it really just

858
00:47:35,560 --> 00:47:37,960
Speaker 1: just riled up because it's like, oh, you know, it

859
00:47:38,040 --> 00:47:40,239
Speaker 1: seems like this navel gazing kind of thing, like, if

860
00:47:40,280 --> 00:47:42,799
Speaker 1: you're not going to go out and do physical experiments

861
00:47:42,920 --> 00:47:45,960
Speaker 1: in the physical world, what are you even talking about?

862
00:47:46,080 --> 00:47:49,080
Speaker 1: Why you know, why are you wasting your time? Armchair science?

863
00:47:49,200 --> 00:47:52,239
Speaker 1: Is is one of the criticisms is often thrown out

864
00:47:52,280 --> 00:47:55,759
Speaker 1: regarding thought experiments. But of course thought experiments have been

865
00:47:55,840 --> 00:47:58,040
Speaker 1: really useful in the history of science. As we've talked

866
00:47:58,040 --> 00:48:01,960
Speaker 1: about before, a lot of important advances in the history

867
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:05,040
Speaker 1: of science have been before they were confirmed in fact

868
00:48:05,160 --> 00:48:09,360
Speaker 1: by physical experiments, were predicted by thought experiments. That this

869
00:48:09,560 --> 00:48:12,759
Speaker 1: is a very common feature, especially in physics. I mean

870
00:48:12,840 --> 00:48:14,799
Speaker 1: you could even say in fact that there there are

871
00:48:14,880 --> 00:48:17,799
Speaker 1: whole realms of physics today. It's probably what you would

872
00:48:17,840 --> 00:48:21,920
Speaker 1: call theoretical physics. You often hear this division of theoretical physics,

873
00:48:22,080 --> 00:48:25,960
Speaker 1: physics and experimental physics. Uh. There, there's all this stuff

874
00:48:26,040 --> 00:48:28,640
Speaker 1: in theoretical physics right now that we don't have a

875
00:48:28,719 --> 00:48:31,839
Speaker 1: way of testing with physical experiments yet. And you can,

876
00:48:32,400 --> 00:48:34,680
Speaker 1: you can kind of try to make your arguments one

877
00:48:34,719 --> 00:48:37,880
Speaker 1: way or another stronger about string theory or something like that,

878
00:48:38,040 --> 00:48:40,680
Speaker 1: but it just we we don't have a test for

879
00:48:40,840 --> 00:48:43,360
Speaker 1: it yet. So you could say that all of that

880
00:48:43,600 --> 00:48:47,480
Speaker 1: is in a way a type of mathematically elegant thought experiment.

881
00:48:47,960 --> 00:48:50,279
Speaker 1: But but if you go back and look at you know,

882
00:48:50,400 --> 00:48:53,399
Speaker 1: Newton and Galileo and all this, and certainly Einstein, there's

883
00:48:53,440 --> 00:48:57,920
Speaker 1: no denying that thought experiments have been extremely useful and

884
00:48:58,040 --> 00:49:01,520
Speaker 1: productive in the history of physics. But thought experiments can

885
00:49:01,640 --> 00:49:05,279
Speaker 1: sometimes also, as we've acknowledged, be confusing and misleading, even

886
00:49:05,320 --> 00:49:08,200
Speaker 1: though there are other times illuminating. A favorite of ours

887
00:49:08,239 --> 00:49:10,440
Speaker 1: on here is, of course, Daniel Dennett. You know, he

888
00:49:10,560 --> 00:49:13,320
Speaker 1: likes to highlight the different kinds of thought experiments that

889
00:49:13,400 --> 00:49:17,560
Speaker 1: try to leverage our intuitions into new discoveries simply by

890
00:49:17,640 --> 00:49:21,680
Speaker 1: tightly controlling the variables of an imagined scenario. And some

891
00:49:21,800 --> 00:49:24,560
Speaker 1: of the most famous thought experiments in history. Actually, I

892
00:49:24,640 --> 00:49:28,239
Speaker 1: think maybe confuse more than they illuminate. I don't want

893
00:49:28,280 --> 00:49:30,400
Speaker 1: to put words in his mouth, but I think Dinnett

894
00:49:30,400 --> 00:49:33,640
Speaker 1: would say this about Donald Davidson's swamp Man, which we

895
00:49:33,760 --> 00:49:37,600
Speaker 1: discussed in our show Thesist episode, or Searle's Chinese Room,

896
00:49:37,760 --> 00:49:39,960
Speaker 1: which maybe we should come back to now. So we

897
00:49:40,200 --> 00:49:43,440
Speaker 1: explain Searle's Chinese Room earlier, with the person exchanging the

898
00:49:43,520 --> 00:49:45,920
Speaker 1: symbols in the room, and the question of does the

899
00:49:46,000 --> 00:49:48,799
Speaker 1: person in the room who doesn't speak Chinese but can

900
00:49:48,920 --> 00:49:54,960
Speaker 1: simulate perfect conversational output in Chinese by following this instruction manual,

901
00:49:55,280 --> 00:49:58,840
Speaker 1: does that person really understand Chinese? And a lot of

902
00:49:58,880 --> 00:50:01,800
Speaker 1: people have thought, yeah, this is a powerful disproof of

903
00:50:01,880 --> 00:50:06,480
Speaker 1: the notion that computers could ever think, understand, or be conscious,

904
00:50:06,800 --> 00:50:09,600
Speaker 1: and a lot of other thinkers have been incredibly critical

905
00:50:09,680 --> 00:50:12,000
Speaker 1: of this. An example of a reply to the Chinese

906
00:50:12,120 --> 00:50:15,080
Speaker 1: Room that makes sense to me is what if what's

907
00:50:15,160 --> 00:50:17,320
Speaker 1: true of the part might not be true of the

908
00:50:17,400 --> 00:50:21,360
Speaker 1: system as a whole. So imagine again this person in

909
00:50:21,400 --> 00:50:24,240
Speaker 1: the room. The person in the room doesn't understand Chinese,

910
00:50:24,280 --> 00:50:27,239
Speaker 1: and thus the responses they produce are not meaningful to them.

911
00:50:27,719 --> 00:50:30,799
Speaker 1: But you could argue that the room itself, the set

912
00:50:30,880 --> 00:50:35,400
Speaker 1: of instructions, combined with the memories and sensory experiences and

913
00:50:35,560 --> 00:50:39,400
Speaker 1: logic that went into the creation of the instructions, and

914
00:50:39,600 --> 00:50:43,440
Speaker 1: the human operator and the pencil and paper taken together

915
00:50:43,680 --> 00:50:48,839
Speaker 1: perhaps do understand Chinese. And Cyle rejects this line of thinking.

916
00:50:49,200 --> 00:50:50,840
Speaker 1: One of the reasons is he says, you know, this

917
00:50:50,960 --> 00:50:55,000
Speaker 1: is a kind of illicit externalizing of thoughts, saying that

918
00:50:55,160 --> 00:50:58,359
Speaker 1: like paper could think, or a book of instructions could think,

919
00:50:59,360 --> 00:51:02,120
Speaker 1: but but I think like he's the person who put

920
00:51:02,239 --> 00:51:04,880
Speaker 1: this system together. You know, you are the one who

921
00:51:04,920 --> 00:51:07,480
Speaker 1: put a human inside a room as the metaphor for

922
00:51:07,600 --> 00:51:11,120
Speaker 1: a computer. Computers do not actually have a tiny human

923
00:51:11,200 --> 00:51:16,000
Speaker 1: inside them that's performing operations with opportunities to understand or

924
00:51:16,040 --> 00:51:19,520
Speaker 1: not understand. Likewise, there is not actually a little human

925
00:51:19,600 --> 00:51:22,960
Speaker 1: sitting inside your brain with the job of understanding or

926
00:51:23,000 --> 00:51:26,960
Speaker 1: not understanding inputs and outputs. Your brain is a system

927
00:51:27,480 --> 00:51:30,040
Speaker 1: in many ways. You might say that system of your

928
00:51:30,120 --> 00:51:34,120
Speaker 1: brain that produces your mind is more comparable to the

929
00:51:34,360 --> 00:51:37,480
Speaker 1: entire system of the person in the room, the room,

930
00:51:37,640 --> 00:51:40,239
Speaker 1: the instructions and all that than it is just the

931
00:51:40,320 --> 00:51:43,759
Speaker 1: person inside. I think the evidence is pretty clear that

932
00:51:43,840 --> 00:51:46,719
Speaker 1: the mind is not one thing, and there's no evidence

933
00:51:46,800 --> 00:51:50,720
Speaker 1: of an observer within the observer. The mind is at

934
00:51:50,800 --> 00:51:55,080
Speaker 1: the very least a system of information processing but also storage,

935
00:51:55,280 --> 00:51:58,800
Speaker 1: inputs and outputs, all working together. There's not there's no

936
00:51:58,920 --> 00:52:01,600
Speaker 1: evidence of a pilot inside who does all of the

937
00:52:01,719 --> 00:52:05,080
Speaker 1: final understanding. Right. That's rights as simple as it would

938
00:52:05,120 --> 00:52:07,080
Speaker 1: be to imagine that, you know, because it would reduce

939
00:52:07,280 --> 00:52:09,279
Speaker 1: whatever we're trying to figure out, would reduce it to

940
00:52:09,320 --> 00:52:12,400
Speaker 1: a person would get back into that that that kind

941
00:52:12,440 --> 00:52:15,640
Speaker 1: of you know, neolithic mindset. And so I think this now,

942
00:52:15,800 --> 00:52:19,680
Speaker 1: I certainly don't want to say that that I'm not

943
00:52:19,840 --> 00:52:23,000
Speaker 1: like casting expersions on John Searle. I'm sure he is

944
00:52:23,880 --> 00:52:26,439
Speaker 1: a very brilliant man, much smarter than me. And there's

945
00:52:26,480 --> 00:52:28,799
Speaker 1: been a lot more you know, complex back and forth

946
00:52:28,880 --> 00:52:31,120
Speaker 1: on this, But just to somebody who's right about this

947
00:52:31,200 --> 00:52:33,160
Speaker 1: a good bit, it seems to me like this is

948
00:52:33,239 --> 00:52:37,279
Speaker 1: one of those thought experiments that needlessly turns up confusion

949
00:52:37,880 --> 00:52:41,080
Speaker 1: just by bringing in a lot of unnecessary assumptions and

950
00:52:41,160 --> 00:52:44,839
Speaker 1: the connotations of the imagery you use in the thing,

951
00:52:45,000 --> 00:52:47,560
Speaker 1: like we've got a person inside a room that that's

952
00:52:47,600 --> 00:52:51,080
Speaker 1: making you think of analogies to a person sitting inside

953
00:52:51,120 --> 00:52:55,719
Speaker 1: the computer or an observer inside the observer in the brain. Now,

954
00:52:55,800 --> 00:52:58,600
Speaker 1: I I do take the problem of consciousness seriously. I'm

955
00:52:58,600 --> 00:53:00,720
Speaker 1: not one of those people who you know, would handwave

956
00:53:00,760 --> 00:53:03,359
Speaker 1: and say, oh yeah, consciousness is easy to explain. It's

957
00:53:03,400 --> 00:53:06,920
Speaker 1: just a you know, systems theory or whatever. But I

958
00:53:07,080 --> 00:53:11,239
Speaker 1: don't think the Chinese room proves machines can't think, or understand,

959
00:53:11,640 --> 00:53:15,760
Speaker 1: or have intentional or meaningful internal representations or be conscious.

960
00:53:16,040 --> 00:53:18,160
Speaker 1: I think that's still an open question. And to my mind,

961
00:53:18,200 --> 00:53:21,520
Speaker 1: the Chinese Room experiment is one of these thought experiments

962
00:53:21,600 --> 00:53:24,680
Speaker 1: that creates a lot of confusion by the hidden assumptions

963
00:53:24,760 --> 00:53:27,560
Speaker 1: it imports with its central imagery. I don't know, am

964
00:53:27,560 --> 00:53:30,600
Speaker 1: I being unfair? No? I think you're being being very fair.

965
00:53:30,640 --> 00:53:34,480
Speaker 1: I mean again, I come back to to certainly like

966
00:53:34,560 --> 00:53:37,480
Speaker 1: political cartoons as as a reference, you know, not that

967
00:53:37,760 --> 00:53:39,960
Speaker 1: not to reduce the Chinese room to something so you know,

968
00:53:40,040 --> 00:53:44,479
Speaker 1: ultimately kind of base. But there is a boiling down

969
00:53:44,800 --> 00:53:47,440
Speaker 1: of of a process there's a boiling down of a

970
00:53:47,640 --> 00:53:50,240
Speaker 1: of a problem that takes place in a thought experiment

971
00:53:50,360 --> 00:53:52,400
Speaker 1: like this, and then you do have to ask, well,

972
00:53:52,680 --> 00:53:56,320
Speaker 1: in reducing it to this model, what of the necessary

973
00:53:56,400 --> 00:54:01,439
Speaker 1: complexity is lost that is necessary to understand what's going on? Yeah,

974
00:54:01,440 --> 00:54:03,640
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. And I would say for me,

975
00:54:03,840 --> 00:54:07,359
Speaker 1: crucially it's the image of the person in the room

976
00:54:07,520 --> 00:54:11,600
Speaker 1: that's the especially confusing thing in this thing here, Like

977
00:54:11,719 --> 00:54:13,719
Speaker 1: what if there wasn't a person there? What if you

978
00:54:13,840 --> 00:54:16,880
Speaker 1: just instead said the room is a machine that takes in,

979
00:54:17,800 --> 00:54:20,279
Speaker 1: that takes in symbols and puts out symbols, then you're

980
00:54:20,280 --> 00:54:22,799
Speaker 1: basically not really changing much. You're just saying, well, it's

981
00:54:22,840 --> 00:54:26,080
Speaker 1: a computer, and then that's what we're talking about originally.

982
00:54:26,640 --> 00:54:31,080
Speaker 1: But anyway, so we mentioned Daniel Dennet. He's written extensive

983
00:54:31,160 --> 00:54:33,719
Speaker 1: criticism of the Chinese Room. I think this was even

984
00:54:33,800 --> 00:54:37,200
Speaker 1: the context of his coinage of the term. Intuition pump

985
00:54:37,840 --> 00:54:39,960
Speaker 1: is the title of one of his books, Intuition Pumps.

986
00:54:40,440 --> 00:54:44,200
Speaker 1: Uh dinn It writes, quote, Intuition pumps are cunningly designed

987
00:54:44,280 --> 00:54:48,600
Speaker 1: to focus the reader's attention on the important features and

988
00:54:48,719 --> 00:54:51,440
Speaker 1: to deflect the reader from bogging down in hard to

989
00:54:51,520 --> 00:54:55,360
Speaker 1: follow details. There's nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed,

990
00:54:55,440 --> 00:54:58,760
Speaker 1: one of philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping

991
00:54:58,880 --> 00:55:01,240
Speaker 1: people see the four us did not just the trees,

992
00:55:01,840 --> 00:55:06,120
Speaker 1: but intuition pumps are often abused, though seldom deliberately. Of course,

993
00:55:06,200 --> 00:55:08,760
Speaker 1: dnn it himself has has played with thought experiments before.

994
00:55:09,440 --> 00:55:12,319
Speaker 1: Absolutely I'm instantly reminded of the it was almost kind

995
00:55:12,320 --> 00:55:14,320
Speaker 1: of a little short story he wrote about those that

996
00:55:14,360 --> 00:55:17,200
Speaker 1: are a robot with a human brain. Wonderful. Yes, the

997
00:55:17,680 --> 00:55:20,680
Speaker 1: where am I I think it was called? So dnn

998
00:55:20,719 --> 00:55:23,279
Speaker 1: it is as he says, they're certainly not opposed to

999
00:55:23,320 --> 00:55:27,120
Speaker 1: thought experiments, but he uh, he points out, I think

1000
00:55:27,200 --> 00:55:32,480
Speaker 1: quite correctly that sometimes they actually confuse more than they illuminate.

1001
00:55:32,680 --> 00:55:35,080
Speaker 1: Whether that's true of the ones he himself has put together,

1002
00:55:35,200 --> 00:55:37,280
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to say. I mean a lot of times.

1003
00:55:38,880 --> 00:55:41,959
Speaker 1: The benefits of these physics thought experiments, as we've been saying,

1004
00:55:42,080 --> 00:55:44,239
Speaker 1: is you can eventually go out and test and see

1005
00:55:44,280 --> 00:55:46,560
Speaker 1: whether they were on the right track or whether they

1006
00:55:46,600 --> 00:55:50,080
Speaker 1: were confused by some you know, hidden assumption taken on board.

1007
00:55:50,120 --> 00:55:51,839
Speaker 1: It's harder to do with a lot of these thought

1008
00:55:51,880 --> 00:55:56,200
Speaker 1: experiments about say, the physical location of consciousness or something

1009
00:55:56,320 --> 00:56:00,840
Speaker 1: like that. Uh So, one example from Dennett's book intuition

1010
00:56:00,920 --> 00:56:03,320
Speaker 1: Pumps that we talked about in our Ship of Theseus episode.

1011
00:56:03,400 --> 00:56:07,080
Speaker 1: You remember the Swampman of course, because it's essentially swamp

1012
00:56:07,160 --> 00:56:09,400
Speaker 1: thing from the comic book, right. Yeah, So this was

1013
00:56:09,480 --> 00:56:12,640
Speaker 1: an example of you know, dinn It explaining how intuition

1014
00:56:12,719 --> 00:56:15,360
Speaker 1: pumps can go wrong. And again, intuition pumps are just

1015
00:56:15,400 --> 00:56:19,279
Speaker 1: thought experiments that that rely on our intuitions that don't

1016
00:56:19,360 --> 00:56:22,680
Speaker 1: like take specific data on board. Really, I'll try to

1017
00:56:22,719 --> 00:56:25,600
Speaker 1: do very very quick. The example was this guy named

1018
00:56:25,640 --> 00:56:28,760
Speaker 1: Donald Davidson. He was a philosopher. So he said, assume

1019
00:56:29,120 --> 00:56:31,600
Speaker 1: lightning strikes me while I'm out walking in the swamp,

1020
00:56:31,680 --> 00:56:34,400
Speaker 1: and it evaporates my body and I'm just gone. And

1021
00:56:34,480 --> 00:56:37,400
Speaker 1: then meanwhile, it also strikes a tree next door, and

1022
00:56:37,560 --> 00:56:40,800
Speaker 1: it rearranges that tree into an exact adom for Adam

1023
00:56:40,920 --> 00:56:43,919
Speaker 1: copy of me with all my memories, and he calls

1024
00:56:44,000 --> 00:56:47,840
Speaker 1: this creature Swampman, and so he asks, is that copy

1025
00:56:48,000 --> 00:56:51,880
Speaker 1: really me? Davidson says, you know, is it really friends

1026
00:56:51,960 --> 00:56:54,680
Speaker 1: with my friends even though it has never met them before?

1027
00:56:55,040 --> 00:56:57,839
Speaker 1: Does it really know what a banana tastes like even

1028
00:56:57,880 --> 00:57:00,680
Speaker 1: though it has never tasted or even touched one. This

1029
00:57:00,880 --> 00:57:03,799
Speaker 1: was offered, I think, to interrogate the question of how

1030
00:57:04,040 --> 00:57:08,400
Speaker 1: the history of an object is related to the identity

1031
00:57:08,480 --> 00:57:11,080
Speaker 1: of that object. Is a thing that is an exact

1032
00:57:11,200 --> 00:57:14,120
Speaker 1: copy of you, that behaves exactly like you, but hasn't

1033
00:57:14,200 --> 00:57:17,200
Speaker 1: been where you've been and done what you've done in

1034
00:57:17,360 --> 00:57:21,240
Speaker 1: what ways? Is that actually different from you? But didn't

1035
00:57:21,280 --> 00:57:23,800
Speaker 1: responds to this story by saying, you know, this thought

1036
00:57:23,880 --> 00:57:27,320
Speaker 1: experiment might not actually reveal all that much, And as

1037
00:57:27,360 --> 00:57:30,240
Speaker 1: a point of analogy, he asks us to consider the

1038
00:57:30,400 --> 00:57:34,400
Speaker 1: cow shark. So the cow shark again, is it's created

1039
00:57:34,440 --> 00:57:37,160
Speaker 1: when a normal cow gives birth to an animal that

1040
00:57:37,400 --> 00:57:41,000
Speaker 1: is adam, for Adam exactly like a shark that you

1041
00:57:41,040 --> 00:57:43,880
Speaker 1: would find swimming in the ocean. And he asks, now,

1042
00:57:44,080 --> 00:57:47,440
Speaker 1: is this newborn animal a cow or a shark? Oh,

1043
00:57:47,560 --> 00:57:50,640
Speaker 1: but also take on board that it has cow DNA

1044
00:57:50,960 --> 00:57:54,120
Speaker 1: in all of its cells. Now, a question like this,

1045
00:57:54,440 --> 00:57:57,680
Speaker 1: it might do something useful, like it might help us

1046
00:57:58,120 --> 00:58:01,960
Speaker 1: identify what features we think are important when we use

1047
00:58:02,080 --> 00:58:05,320
Speaker 1: words like cow and shark. But it really doesn't reveal

1048
00:58:05,440 --> 00:58:08,320
Speaker 1: anything about biology or about the world. You know, you're

1049
00:58:08,320 --> 00:58:11,120
Speaker 1: not going to get new information about reality from it.

1050
00:58:11,600 --> 00:58:13,880
Speaker 1: I think the best it could hope to do is

1051
00:58:13,960 --> 00:58:17,120
Speaker 1: help us figure out what we mean by words, and

1052
00:58:17,200 --> 00:58:18,840
Speaker 1: not to say there isn't value in that. But yeah,

1053
00:58:19,160 --> 00:58:21,240
Speaker 1: that seems to be about all that it does. Yes,

1054
00:58:21,880 --> 00:58:24,440
Speaker 1: so then it actually arrives at a claim. He says, quote,

1055
00:58:24,720 --> 00:58:28,760
Speaker 1: the utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to

1056
00:58:28,880 --> 00:58:32,439
Speaker 1: the size of its departures from reality. That's why he's saying.

1057
00:58:32,440 --> 00:58:34,840
Speaker 1: You know, Swampman just doesn't seem to be all that

1058
00:58:34,960 --> 00:58:38,200
Speaker 1: useful and understanding what what it means to be a

1059
00:58:38,240 --> 00:58:41,720
Speaker 1: physical object like a person, because something like that is

1060
00:58:41,880 --> 00:58:44,720
Speaker 1: never going to happen in reality. I also, and I

1061
00:58:44,760 --> 00:58:47,160
Speaker 1: felt this way before too. I also feel like swamp

1062
00:58:47,360 --> 00:58:51,840
Speaker 1: Man is just a little too complicated, Like just use

1063
00:58:51,880 --> 00:58:55,360
Speaker 1: Star Trek, just say Cat to Picard teleports down to

1064
00:58:55,720 --> 00:58:58,920
Speaker 1: planet X and then back up to the Enterprise. Like,

1065
00:58:59,120 --> 00:59:01,480
Speaker 1: is then what happened when he hangs out with his friends,

1066
00:59:01,560 --> 00:59:03,480
Speaker 1: what happens when he plays the flute, etcetera. Well, I

1067
00:59:03,480 --> 00:59:06,960
Speaker 1: guess it's the same problem either way. But to answer

1068
00:59:07,040 --> 00:59:10,600
Speaker 1: that question, you're using your intuitions, which are trained on

1069
00:59:11,360 --> 00:59:15,320
Speaker 1: a world where that never happens. So your intuitions just

1070
00:59:15,480 --> 00:59:18,960
Speaker 1: don't do much. They're there, they are not honed to

1071
00:59:19,160 --> 00:59:22,520
Speaker 1: solving this kind of problem. Your intuitions are much more

1072
00:59:22,680 --> 00:59:26,800
Speaker 1: useful in say, like combining premises about how things fall

1073
00:59:27,080 --> 00:59:30,760
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, because actually you're quite experienced with

1074
00:59:30,840 --> 00:59:33,840
Speaker 1: falling and you can combine that with observations about gravity

1075
00:59:33,920 --> 00:59:36,880
Speaker 1: and stuff. Now, I don't I don't think uh. Dennett's

1076
00:59:36,960 --> 00:59:40,040
Speaker 1: little proclamation there about the size of its departures from

1077
00:59:40,080 --> 00:59:44,080
Speaker 1: reality is then again like a solvent that will that

1078
00:59:44,120 --> 00:59:46,320
Speaker 1: will fix all the problems, because it can be very

1079
00:59:46,400 --> 00:59:49,800
Speaker 1: hard to measure the size of a departure from reality

1080
00:59:49,880 --> 00:59:53,320
Speaker 1: in any consistent way, Like does the Chinese room experiment

1081
00:59:53,440 --> 00:59:57,720
Speaker 1: depart more or less from reality than Einstein imagining a

1082
00:59:57,800 --> 01:00:00,600
Speaker 1: train traveling near the speed of light? Right? Because the

1083
01:00:01,120 --> 01:00:03,960
Speaker 1: Chinese room, you could do that, I mean, maybe somebody

1084
01:00:04,040 --> 01:00:05,680
Speaker 1: has done that. I mean, all you need is just

1085
01:00:05,800 --> 01:00:09,400
Speaker 1: a person in a room and an individual on the

1086
01:00:09,440 --> 01:00:12,240
Speaker 1: outside writing Chinese characters down right, I mean, you know,

1087
01:00:12,320 --> 01:00:15,320
Speaker 1: and also speaking and being able to being able to

1088
01:00:15,360 --> 01:00:17,840
Speaker 1: speak and write Chinese. Obviously you can't have just nonsense

1089
01:00:17,880 --> 01:00:20,480
Speaker 1: going in. But that's the only two components, and we

1090
01:00:20,520 --> 01:00:23,960
Speaker 1: could We could pull this off today if we needed to. Though,

1091
01:00:24,000 --> 01:00:26,960
Speaker 1: I would say that the problem with the Chinese room

1092
01:00:27,040 --> 01:00:30,280
Speaker 1: actually is not its departures from reality, as in, like,

1093
01:00:30,440 --> 01:00:32,680
Speaker 1: it's not plausible that you could make a room like

1094
01:00:32,800 --> 01:00:34,640
Speaker 1: this and put somebody in it, because you have a

1095
01:00:34,640 --> 01:00:39,360
Speaker 1: determined if it's illustrating anything about how a posed machine

1096
01:00:39,520 --> 01:00:42,040
Speaker 1: is thinking or not thinking. Right, the lack of its use,

1097
01:00:42,120 --> 01:00:45,120
Speaker 1: I think is it's in its departures from the thing

1098
01:00:45,240 --> 01:00:48,400
Speaker 1: it's supposed to represent. It's supposed to be an analogy

1099
01:00:48,560 --> 01:00:51,840
Speaker 1: for a computer, but it's actually not a good analogy

1100
01:00:51,960 --> 01:00:54,440
Speaker 1: for a computer because it's a room and a person

1101
01:00:54,640 --> 01:00:56,880
Speaker 1: and some pencil and paper. That's just like they're not

1102
01:00:56,960 --> 01:00:59,520
Speaker 1: the same thing. But with Swampman, yeah, they're all these

1103
01:00:59,680 --> 01:01:02,520
Speaker 1: fan hastic ideas in it that don't match up with reality.

1104
01:01:02,600 --> 01:01:05,440
Speaker 1: Whereas the ship of theseus is A is A is

1105
01:01:05,520 --> 01:01:07,720
Speaker 1: so brilliant and and as and as to the test

1106
01:01:07,760 --> 01:01:11,400
Speaker 1: of time because everybody can can associate with that, like

1107
01:01:11,480 --> 01:01:17,720
Speaker 1: the upkeep of physical structures and devices, the constant replacement

1108
01:01:17,800 --> 01:01:22,240
Speaker 1: of those things, the constant change to things that we

1109
01:01:22,400 --> 01:01:28,720
Speaker 1: think have autonomy, like like ourselves or or sports teams, clubs, buildings, etcetera. Well,

1110
01:01:28,760 --> 01:01:31,800
Speaker 1: the kind of chilling takeaway from from that distinction you

1111
01:01:31,880 --> 01:01:34,200
Speaker 1: make between the ship of Theseus and the ship of

1112
01:01:34,280 --> 01:01:38,880
Speaker 1: Theseus version as instantiated in Swampman is that maybe it

1113
01:01:39,000 --> 01:01:42,000
Speaker 1: makes more sense to have to answer questions about the

1114
01:01:42,080 --> 01:01:45,080
Speaker 1: meaning of identity as it refers to things than as

1115
01:01:45,120 --> 01:01:47,480
Speaker 1: it does refer to people. Yeah, in many ways, it

1116
01:01:47,560 --> 01:01:49,520
Speaker 1: is easier to think of people as things if you're

1117
01:01:49,560 --> 01:01:53,560
Speaker 1: just gonna doing these kind of computations. I also want

1118
01:01:53,600 --> 01:01:56,960
Speaker 1: to clarify that if you're more interested in the Chinese Room,

1119
01:01:57,000 --> 01:02:00,080
Speaker 1: they're like a billion other classes of responses to it

1120
01:02:00,200 --> 01:02:02,960
Speaker 1: you can go look up. Like one is that, you know,

1121
01:02:03,160 --> 01:02:06,320
Speaker 1: you should really maybe think about putting that computer inside

1122
01:02:06,360 --> 01:02:09,400
Speaker 1: a robot and then that would be more consistent with

1123
01:02:09,640 --> 01:02:11,960
Speaker 1: the type of experience that a human has. And so

1124
01:02:12,160 --> 01:02:14,560
Speaker 1: like what if you put the Chinese room in a

1125
01:02:14,680 --> 01:02:17,320
Speaker 1: thing that could go around and look with cameras outside

1126
01:02:17,440 --> 01:02:19,440
Speaker 1: and you know all that kind of So there are

1127
01:02:19,440 --> 01:02:22,480
Speaker 1: just tons of different responses. While I don't find it

1128
01:02:22,600 --> 01:02:25,680
Speaker 1: convincing on on what it tries to prove, I do

1129
01:02:25,800 --> 01:02:28,280
Speaker 1: think it's one of these things that is at least

1130
01:02:28,360 --> 01:02:32,360
Speaker 1: inadvertently useful for clarifying what people mean when they're talking

1131
01:02:32,400 --> 01:02:35,720
Speaker 1: about this subject, because usually if you start asking something

1132
01:02:35,800 --> 01:02:38,520
Speaker 1: like can a machine be conscious? You just don't even

1133
01:02:38,560 --> 01:02:41,120
Speaker 1: have a foothold to start reasoning. Just where do you go?

1134
01:02:41,240 --> 01:02:43,840
Speaker 1: It's just I don't know, yeah, because on one hand,

1135
01:02:43,920 --> 01:02:46,000
Speaker 1: it's hard enough to know what consciousness is for us

1136
01:02:46,080 --> 01:02:48,160
Speaker 1: and then to extrapolate what that would mean to a machine.

1137
01:02:49,040 --> 01:02:50,800
Speaker 1: There's just no like, how do you feel in the

1138
01:02:50,880 --> 01:02:53,240
Speaker 1: values on that equation? So I give it credit for that.

1139
01:02:53,480 --> 01:02:55,800
Speaker 1: It it I don't think it solves the question, but

1140
01:02:55,880 --> 01:02:58,760
Speaker 1: it does give you a first place to start climbing

1141
01:02:58,880 --> 01:03:01,040
Speaker 1: where you can even can employ what it would mean

1142
01:03:01,200 --> 01:03:03,400
Speaker 1: to solve this question. Now, to return back just the

1143
01:03:03,480 --> 01:03:05,200
Speaker 1: idea of what is the thought experiment? What is in

1144
01:03:05,240 --> 01:03:07,200
Speaker 1: a thought experiment? I do want to refer to just

1145
01:03:07,520 --> 01:03:10,320
Speaker 1: a few ideas that have been pointed out by Dan

1146
01:03:10,480 --> 01:03:14,080
Speaker 1: Falk and his Ian article Armshare science. Thought experiment played

1147
01:03:14,520 --> 01:03:16,280
Speaker 1: a crucial role in the history of science, but do

1148
01:03:16,360 --> 01:03:18,919
Speaker 1: they tell us anything about the real world? He points

1149
01:03:18,960 --> 01:03:22,360
Speaker 1: out that John Norton, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh,

1150
01:03:22,400 --> 01:03:25,160
Speaker 1: has argued that we shouldn't elevate thought experiments too highly.

1151
01:03:25,720 --> 01:03:29,760
Speaker 1: They are essentially quote elegantly crafted arguments that bring vivid

1152
01:03:29,840 --> 01:03:34,400
Speaker 1: pictures to the mind's eye. So the argument here is

1153
01:03:34,440 --> 01:03:37,479
Speaker 1: that the thought experiments, as we've been discussing, don't produce

1154
01:03:37,520 --> 01:03:41,880
Speaker 1: any new knowledge themselves, but rather constituted deduction of existing knowledge.

1155
01:03:42,480 --> 01:03:45,920
Speaker 1: And he maintains that all thought experiments are are simply

1156
01:03:46,080 --> 01:03:49,840
Speaker 1: restate can simply be restated. His arguments, like his challenge

1157
01:03:49,920 --> 01:03:51,840
Speaker 1: is sort of rough challenges. You can bring me a

1158
01:03:51,880 --> 01:03:55,480
Speaker 1: thought experiment, I'll just restate it as an argument, and

1159
01:03:55,520 --> 01:03:57,360
Speaker 1: that's all there is to it. Well, I think he's

1160
01:03:57,440 --> 01:04:01,200
Speaker 1: essentially correct that any good thought experiment can be restated

1161
01:04:01,280 --> 01:04:03,600
Speaker 1: as a deductive argument, you know, with the kind of

1162
01:04:03,760 --> 01:04:07,960
Speaker 1: the boring you know, logic class style logical premises. Right,

1163
01:04:08,160 --> 01:04:11,880
Speaker 1: but thought experiments are useful because they're easier to remember,

1164
01:04:12,040 --> 01:04:15,320
Speaker 1: they're easier to understand, and they give you pictures that

1165
01:04:15,400 --> 01:04:18,280
Speaker 1: you can wrap your mind around, right exactly. They change

1166
01:04:18,320 --> 01:04:20,480
Speaker 1: the way you think about something, and and that's ultimately

1167
01:04:20,520 --> 01:04:22,920
Speaker 1: I believe the point. The counterpoint that is made by

1168
01:04:23,280 --> 01:04:25,720
Speaker 1: James Robert Brown, a philoss for the University of Toronto,

1169
01:04:26,320 --> 01:04:28,960
Speaker 1: who points out there like Okay, yeah, Norton, you may

1170
01:04:29,000 --> 01:04:31,160
Speaker 1: be right, and he even says, I think Norton probably

1171
01:04:31,240 --> 01:04:34,880
Speaker 1: could restate all thought experiments as arguments, but we don't

1172
01:04:34,960 --> 01:04:37,280
Speaker 1: really work them out in our heads as arguments. We

1173
01:04:37,360 --> 01:04:40,000
Speaker 1: work them out in the form of these thought experiments.

1174
01:04:40,480 --> 01:04:42,840
Speaker 1: The cognitive process here because is much is much more

1175
01:04:42,880 --> 01:04:48,160
Speaker 1: intuitive and less analytical thought experiments. Therefore, they transformed the

1176
01:04:48,240 --> 01:04:51,880
Speaker 1: ad the analytical into the intuitive. What did we evolve

1177
01:04:52,040 --> 01:04:57,360
Speaker 1: thinking for? What was it useful for? I mean, can't

1178
01:04:57,440 --> 01:04:59,920
Speaker 1: be sure, but it really seems like what's likely is

1179
01:05:00,120 --> 01:05:03,720
Speaker 1: not that, say, our boreal primates were trying to work

1180
01:05:03,800 --> 01:05:07,240
Speaker 1: out analytical premises of an argument and say, you know,

1181
01:05:07,400 --> 01:05:11,240
Speaker 1: premise one is no. I mean they were imagining scenario.

1182
01:05:11,560 --> 01:05:15,040
Speaker 1: Is like thinking is useful for saying, Okay, if I

1183
01:05:15,160 --> 01:05:18,919
Speaker 1: went down on the ground right now, what would happen? Oh? Yeah,

1184
01:05:19,080 --> 01:05:21,680
Speaker 1: that's right. There was a leopard down there. So if

1185
01:05:21,840 --> 01:05:25,040
Speaker 1: leopard and me on the ground, that that's not good.

1186
01:05:26,120 --> 01:05:29,440
Speaker 1: Imagining scenarios is so much more natural and intuitive to

1187
01:05:29,560 --> 01:05:33,160
Speaker 1: us than than formal syllogistic arguments. Now. Falk also points

1188
01:05:33,160 --> 01:05:35,640
Speaker 1: out that there's a third possibility here. The third argument

1189
01:05:35,680 --> 01:05:39,960
Speaker 1: presented by cognitive scientists Nancy Nercessian of the Georgian Institute

1190
01:05:40,000 --> 01:05:43,040
Speaker 1: of Technology, As she argues that thought experiments are simply

1191
01:05:43,200 --> 01:05:47,680
Speaker 1: middle mental modeling. If Falk provides a quote for her

1192
01:05:47,920 --> 01:05:50,720
Speaker 1: from her in his article, quote, a mental model is

1193
01:05:50,760 --> 01:05:54,440
Speaker 1: basically a representation of the structure, function, or behavior some

1194
01:05:54,600 --> 01:05:57,800
Speaker 1: system you're interested in, some real world system that retains

1195
01:05:57,840 --> 01:06:01,200
Speaker 1: its sensory and motor properties they you get from perception.

1196
01:06:01,720 --> 01:06:04,800
Speaker 1: When we manipulate a mental model, she argues, we use

1197
01:06:04,920 --> 01:06:07,400
Speaker 1: quote some of the same kind of processing that they

1198
01:06:07,440 --> 01:06:11,000
Speaker 1: would use to manipulate things in the real world. So, yeah,

1199
01:06:11,320 --> 01:06:14,000
Speaker 1: the idea here, it's it's the example that has often

1200
01:06:14,040 --> 01:06:17,160
Speaker 1: put forth is if someone says, hey, how many windows

1201
01:06:17,200 --> 01:06:19,640
Speaker 1: are there in your house? And then how unless you

1202
01:06:19,760 --> 01:06:22,680
Speaker 1: just carry around that raw data in your head, the

1203
01:06:22,840 --> 01:06:25,720
Speaker 1: way you solve that is probably to form a mental

1204
01:06:25,760 --> 01:06:28,720
Speaker 1: image of your house or room by room, form the

1205
01:06:28,800 --> 01:06:31,240
Speaker 1: mental images and then count the windows. But you had

1206
01:06:31,320 --> 01:06:33,920
Speaker 1: to have looked at your house already, right, Yeah, you

1207
01:06:33,960 --> 01:06:38,200
Speaker 1: can't just have just you know, uh, you know, experimental knowledge,

1208
01:06:38,280 --> 01:06:39,800
Speaker 1: like you have to have some real knowledge. You have

1209
01:06:39,920 --> 01:06:42,560
Speaker 1: walked through your house, you've seen your house, and then

1210
01:06:42,640 --> 01:06:45,520
Speaker 1: and that's what you're using to reconstruct this this model,

1211
01:06:45,920 --> 01:06:48,840
Speaker 1: on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that just

1212
01:06:49,000 --> 01:06:53,040
Speaker 1: counting the windows in your house is probably a quicker way,

1213
01:06:53,160 --> 01:06:56,360
Speaker 1: essentially falling back on the sign on scientific invest investigation

1214
01:06:56,800 --> 01:06:59,240
Speaker 1: is going to be the clear cut method of solving

1215
01:06:59,320 --> 01:07:03,200
Speaker 1: that particular question. Yes, especially if you care about getting

1216
01:07:03,200 --> 01:07:07,240
Speaker 1: the right answer right. Yes, Uh, those sometimes, I mean,

1217
01:07:07,640 --> 01:07:11,080
Speaker 1: I thought experiments can be very useful, especially in scenarios

1218
01:07:11,160 --> 01:07:14,680
Speaker 1: where you're not super concerned with precision, but you're more

1219
01:07:14,800 --> 01:07:18,360
Speaker 1: concerned with like the directionality of an answer. Like a

1220
01:07:18,440 --> 01:07:22,360
Speaker 1: thought experiment can be quite useful in uh, just getting

1221
01:07:22,400 --> 01:07:26,040
Speaker 1: a guess about whether a quantity in reality is going

1222
01:07:26,120 --> 01:07:30,120
Speaker 1: to increase or decrease without knowing exactly how much it's

1223
01:07:30,120 --> 01:07:32,760
Speaker 1: going to increase or decrease, you know what I mean. Yeah,

1224
01:07:32,800 --> 01:07:34,120
Speaker 1: And then of course it to go back to black

1225
01:07:34,160 --> 01:07:37,280
Speaker 1: holes for instance. Like that's an example of counting windows

1226
01:07:37,280 --> 01:07:39,720
Speaker 1: in a house you haven't been to yet, by by

1227
01:07:39,800 --> 01:07:43,720
Speaker 1: your by your understanding of everything surrounding whatever that house

1228
01:07:43,760 --> 01:07:46,840
Speaker 1: should be, so that there there are cases where that

1229
01:07:47,080 --> 01:07:50,040
Speaker 1: is the best method for trying to count the windows

1230
01:07:50,080 --> 01:07:51,960
Speaker 1: in a given house. Well, it's almost like knowing like

1231
01:07:52,160 --> 01:07:54,960
Speaker 1: what is the what is the tension and support strength

1232
01:07:55,040 --> 01:07:57,640
Speaker 1: of glass? Now trying to imagine how big of a

1233
01:07:57,720 --> 01:08:01,080
Speaker 1: glass house could exist before it falls over. You know,

1234
01:08:01,240 --> 01:08:04,280
Speaker 1: you don't have to build that house. If you already

1235
01:08:04,360 --> 01:08:07,000
Speaker 1: know some things about glass, you can run that experiment

1236
01:08:07,120 --> 01:08:09,760
Speaker 1: on paper or in your head. But anyway, what I

1237
01:08:09,800 --> 01:08:12,040
Speaker 1: think this all means is that we should build two

1238
01:08:12,280 --> 01:08:15,480
Speaker 1: glass towers, one bigger than the other, and drop them

1239
01:08:15,600 --> 01:08:18,839
Speaker 1: both but tie them together, and then shoot a cannon

1240
01:08:18,920 --> 01:08:21,280
Speaker 1: off of them, and then drop a bag of cheese

1241
01:08:21,439 --> 01:08:26,000
Speaker 1: from them. And so you basically you're you're arguing for

1242
01:08:26,240 --> 01:08:29,920
Speaker 1: a shared cinematic universe of thought experiments. I mean, I

1243
01:08:30,000 --> 01:08:32,200
Speaker 1: think most of them are in the public domain, So

1244
01:08:32,320 --> 01:08:34,679
Speaker 1: this would be a great This would be a great

1245
01:08:34,760 --> 01:08:37,000
Speaker 1: franchise for somebody to to pick up and run with.

1246
01:08:37,439 --> 01:08:39,040
Speaker 1: You know, at this point, I think a good number

1247
01:08:39,040 --> 01:08:41,599
Speaker 1: of the most famous thought experiments have at some point

1248
01:08:41,720 --> 01:08:44,800
Speaker 1: had like an indie movie made out of them. You know,

1249
01:08:44,920 --> 01:08:46,800
Speaker 1: there's got to be. I would be shocked if there

1250
01:08:46,880 --> 01:08:50,760
Speaker 1: is not a Chinese room movie. Well, I'm sure we'll

1251
01:08:50,960 --> 01:08:53,000
Speaker 1: hear about it from the listeners if there is one.

1252
01:08:53,640 --> 01:08:57,080
Speaker 1: Uh So, there you have it, thought experiments, hopefully a

1253
01:08:57,160 --> 01:08:59,479
Speaker 1: nice overview of what they are what they are not.

1254
01:09:00,520 --> 01:09:03,680
Speaker 1: Some different ways of classifying them some different examples, both

1255
01:09:03,720 --> 01:09:06,960
Speaker 1: from past episodes and some that we haven't really picked

1256
01:09:07,040 --> 01:09:10,320
Speaker 1: up and looked at here on the show. But hopefully

1257
01:09:10,360 --> 01:09:12,320
Speaker 1: this will this will be useful moving forward as we

1258
01:09:12,439 --> 01:09:18,280
Speaker 1: inevitably encounter other thought experiments in our consideration of various topics.

1259
01:09:18,520 --> 01:09:20,280
Speaker 1: What I hope this allows us to do is to

1260
01:09:20,360 --> 01:09:25,280
Speaker 1: be more confident in dismissing the ones they're not useful, right, yes, yea,

1261
01:09:25,400 --> 01:09:27,800
Speaker 1: to realize that they are not you know, they're not

1262
01:09:27,920 --> 01:09:31,080
Speaker 1: holy scripture set in stone, that that that they can

1263
01:09:31,240 --> 01:09:34,320
Speaker 1: be flawed. There in many cases they are flawed and uh,

1264
01:09:34,840 --> 01:09:36,840
Speaker 1: but then that's also part of their usefulness is that

1265
01:09:37,120 --> 01:09:40,120
Speaker 1: the flawed model can be presented and someone can say, well,

1266
01:09:40,200 --> 01:09:42,240
Speaker 1: let's look at this, look at let's change something in

1267
01:09:42,280 --> 01:09:45,479
Speaker 1: this model and see what happens. All right. Well, hey,

1268
01:09:45,560 --> 01:09:47,240
Speaker 1: if you you want to check out more episodes of

1269
01:09:47,240 --> 01:09:49,200
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your mind, you want to check out, say,

1270
01:09:49,240 --> 01:09:51,280
Speaker 1: for instance, the episodes we did on black holes, the

1271
01:09:51,320 --> 01:09:54,519
Speaker 1: Ship of theseus, uh, any of these these various topics

1272
01:09:54,600 --> 01:09:56,680
Speaker 1: we've referred to in this episode, Well you can find

1273
01:09:56,720 --> 01:09:58,439
Speaker 1: them all. It's stuff to blow your Mind dot com.

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01:09:58,840 --> 01:10:01,040
Speaker 1: That's the mothership, that's where you'll find them all. That's

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Speaker 1: where you'll find links out to our very social media accounts.

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Speaker 1: We'll find a tab for our store place where you

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Speaker 1: can buy merchandise with cool shirt design, stickers, et cetera.

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Speaker 1: It's a cool way to support the show, and another

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Speaker 1: way to support the show is to simply rate and

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Speaker 1: review the show wherever you have the power to do so.

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Speaker 1: Big thanks, as always to our excellent audio producers Alex

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Speaker 1: Williams and Tory Harrison. If you would like to get

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Speaker 1: in touch with us directly with feedback on this episode

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Speaker 1: or any other, to suggest a topic for the future,

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Speaker 1: or just to say hi, you can email us at

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Speaker 1: blow the Mind at how stuff works dot com for

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Speaker 1: more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it

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Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Ty Ty twa three propert