Speaker 1: Hey, you welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And it
Speaker 1: is time to go into the vault because it is Saturday,
Speaker 1: of course, and we're bringing you an episode that originally
Speaker 1: air January third, twenty nineteen. That's right, what's inside the vault?
Speaker 1: I don't know what's not inside the vault. The thing
Speaker 1: inside the vault could be alive, it could be dead.
Speaker 1: It's kind of in a quantum position until we open it. Right, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is our episode about thought experiments. Yeah, I remember
Speaker 1: we were asking the question, what can you really prove
Speaker 1: anything with the thought experiment? Yeah? I think you can. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think we You know, obviously we're we're pro thought
Speaker 1: experiment on this show. We devote whole episodes to particular
Speaker 1: thought experiments. But I remember this was when we were like, hey,
Speaker 1: let's stop and just actually discuss thought experiments, especially if
Speaker 1: we're going to keep uh invoking them on the show. Uh. Well,
Speaker 1: I say, let's get right into it. Welcome to Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind from how Stuffworks dot Com. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, Hey, Robert, what are
Speaker 1: we talking about today? Oh, well, we're talking about thought experiments,
Speaker 1: the things that make some people really mad and make
Speaker 1: other people talk for way too long into time. Well,
Speaker 1: the thought experiments can have both effects on an individual
Speaker 1: at the same time. That's the beauty of a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: I think. So now, we've discussed individual thought experiments on
Speaker 1: the show many times before, but I think today we're
Speaker 1: going to try to look at the idea of a
Speaker 1: thought experiment on the show. In the past, we've talked
Speaker 1: about specific thought experiments. We've talked about Stranger's Cat, We've
Speaker 1: talked about the Infinity Hotel, the ship of Theseus. Other
Speaker 1: times it comes up kind of informally. We might say
Speaker 1: that a particular paper we're talking about is more kin
Speaker 1: to a thought experiment. And I know that I've I've
Speaker 1: talked before about how I think of certain short stories
Speaker 1: as being more thought experiments than you know, true narrative.
Speaker 1: I think of Library of Babbel, Library of Babble, other
Speaker 1: works of a lot of the short stories of jor
Speaker 1: Haluis Borges, as well as a number of the short
Speaker 1: stories of Philip K. Dick they're a number of those
Speaker 1: where you know it's not really important who's doing what exactly.
Speaker 1: You know you're not you're not really invested in a
Speaker 1: story per se, but the story is there to make
Speaker 1: you think, to turn some sort of weird idea on
Speaker 1: its head, the concept driven more than character driven exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: I have to say that one of my favorite comical
Speaker 1: treatments of thought experiments is the humorous essay Shreddnger's Cat
Speaker 1: by Steve Martin, collected in his book Pure Drivel. And
Speaker 1: there's a wonderful audio book of this as well, because
Speaker 1: Steve Martin himself is reading it. Always great when you
Speaker 1: can get one read by the author. Yeah. Now, Martin
Speaker 1: begins this particularly essay by presenting the Streusenger's Cat thought
Speaker 1: experiment just pretty much as it is, and from there
Speaker 1: he proceeds through an increasingly ridiculous mix of thought experiments
Speaker 1: that he's made up himself, such as uh vitkin Stein's banana,
Speaker 1: Elvis's chart ol briquette, chef boy r ds, bungee cord,
Speaker 1: sakagaway is rain, bonnet, apollos, non apple, non strutal, Jim
Speaker 1: Dandy's Bucket of Goo, and the thinman dilemma. Since it's
Speaker 1: one of the shorter ones, I'd like to read Steve
Speaker 1: Martin's description of the thought experiment Elvis's charcoal briquette. A
Speaker 1: barbecue is cooking wieners in an air tight space. As
Speaker 1: the charcoal consumes the oxygen, the integrity of the briquette
Speaker 1: is weakened. An observer riding a roller coaster will become
Speaker 1: hungry for wieners, but will be thrown from the car
Speaker 1: when he stands up and cries, Elvis, get me a
Speaker 1: hot dog. Yeah, that's got the right mouth field. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's absurd, it's ridiculous and uh, but it's effective
Speaker 1: as comedy because it does have that feel of a
Speaker 1: thought of experiment, and and many of them are exactly
Speaker 1: this sort of absurd little logic problem or physical scenario,
Speaker 1: but it's utilized not for laughs, but to explore some
Speaker 1: sort of generally a complex topic. I thought this was
Speaker 1: going to be the seventh thought experiments. You can't say
Speaker 1: on TV. It does make me wonder what the most
Speaker 1: risk a thought experiments are. Oh, there are actually quite
Speaker 1: a few. Yeah, all right, well, let's we'll save that
Speaker 1: for the midnight Show. So let's let's talk about thought
Speaker 1: experiments just definition wise, like, what is a thought experiment? Well, yes, first,
Speaker 1: you could consult the idea of an experiment. An experiment
Speaker 1: is basically a test, like you have a condition and
Speaker 1: you you instantiate the condition and you see what happens. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that
Speaker 1: to merely think about an experiment is not a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: So if you if you say, for instance, think about
Speaker 1: the social psychology Stanford prison experiment, that's not a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: Um why not? Well, because you are you were thinking
Speaker 1: about an actual experiment that has been carried out. I
Speaker 1: mean this is kind of obvious, right, but but still
Speaker 1: it it it's worth going through. Now, if you if
Speaker 1: you think about an experiment you might conduct, say to
Speaker 1: see if movie goers who eat twizzlers are more likely
Speaker 1: to joy to enjoy sci fi films and those who
Speaker 1: eat red vines. Well, that's not a thought experiment either.
Speaker 1: That's something you could conceivably do. That's like imagining an
Speaker 1: experiment you could carry out. But thinking about the experiment
Speaker 1: doesn't really reveal anything right now, Very often the experiment
Speaker 1: in a thought experiment is exactly not the sort of
Speaker 1: thing that could be carried out in real life for
Speaker 1: a number of reasons. Maybe it's catastrophically dangerous or or involves,
Speaker 1: you know, in encountering some feature of the universe that
Speaker 1: is not readily accessible. That sort of thing. Very often
Speaker 1: thought experiments, as they apply to science, involved the the
Speaker 1: removal of things that you couldn't actually remove as variables,
Speaker 1: so like imagine a frictionless plane, or involve something that
Speaker 1: just simply does not exist, like a train going near
Speaker 1: the speed of light. We do do not have such
Speaker 1: a thing. We're probably not going to have such a
Speaker 1: thing anytime soon, but it's useful in the thought experiment.
Speaker 1: And then on top of that, they frequently are narrative
Speaker 1: in nature. There's a sequence to things in a way,
Speaker 1: they're they're almost like a joke in many senses. You know,
Speaker 1: it feels like the set up for a joke. It
Speaker 1: feels like there's going to be a punch line. Um.
Speaker 1: And I also I wondered to what extent like really
Speaker 1: successful and quote unquote successful thought experiments, like ones that
Speaker 1: really resonate culturally, if if there is a sense of
Speaker 1: counterintuitive elements to the narrative. I wonder if there's something
Speaker 1: about that as well. Well. Yeah, thought experiments are an
Speaker 1: interesting thing. So like a good thought experiment, what it
Speaker 1: should do is reveal something that is true simply by
Speaker 1: making up a story in your mind and working through
Speaker 1: the conclusions that would result from it. Now, often there
Speaker 1: are a lot of coincidental details of this story that
Speaker 1: do not matter. Uh, they don't have any effect on
Speaker 1: what this thought experiment reveals, if it reveals anything, and
Speaker 1: yet they can be enormously predictive of whether or not
Speaker 1: this is like a popular meme or not how well
Speaker 1: it spreads. Like cat as an example, Like if it
Speaker 1: were a dog, it would probably still resonate, but in
Speaker 1: a slightly different way. But if it were just a
Speaker 1: lizard or a slug, yes, people would be far less
Speaker 1: compelled by the idea of Shreddinger's bug, but they would
Speaker 1: be far more upset by the idea of Shreddinger's child
Speaker 1: or something. So like, if it's a cat, that's the
Speaker 1: bull's eye, that's right in the red zone. It's like
Speaker 1: interesting enough to be killing a cat that people are
Speaker 1: on board to to remember to pay attention, but it's
Speaker 1: not so troubling that you're turned off and you don't
Speaker 1: want to listen, right, And and then also the cat
Speaker 1: kind of makes it more palpable. Like if it was
Speaker 1: Shreddinger's um, let's say, basilisk, that would it would instantly
Speaker 1: sound a little more threatening somehow. How about Shreddinger's apparently
Speaker 1: conscious AI Yes, or that's the that's next level. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's pretty good. Now. Another or an aspect of
Speaker 1: thought experiments is that it's something that should generally be
Speaker 1: visualized in the mind as this, as the thought experiment
Speaker 1: has rolled out, you you're picturing it. Uh. It's in
Speaker 1: doing this it makes a concept more digestible, or it
Speaker 1: explains a you know, fundamental paradox, etcetera. And uh, and
Speaker 1: and and this again. It has a lot in common
Speaker 1: with jokes, It has a lot in common with riddles,
Speaker 1: and they just sort of the basic structure. But it's
Speaker 1: not necessarily bringing you to uh. It's not bringing you
Speaker 1: a punch line. It's not necessarily a correct answer at
Speaker 1: the end. But there is hopefully a deeper understanding of
Speaker 1: a concept via the thought experiment. Now that being said,
Speaker 1: a thought experiment is also not a pristine, blameless thing
Speaker 1: or something set in stone. So others may take issue
Speaker 1: with the thought experiment or just completely knock it down.
Speaker 1: They may roll out their own thought experiment that attempts
Speaker 1: to put your thought experiment to shame. And uh, and
Speaker 1: there may be you know, additional interations off and we've
Speaker 1: certainly explored that on the show before with things such
Speaker 1: as the ship of Theseus. And then finally, one of
Speaker 1: the really cool things about thought experiments is that it's
Speaker 1: ideally this this chance to learn about reality, learn more
Speaker 1: about reality by simply thinking about it. And that would,
Speaker 1: on the surface of things, seem rather odd, right, because
Speaker 1: it would be an exception to the empirical nature of
Speaker 1: how we learn about the world by seeing it, by
Speaker 1: touching it, by feeling it, by poking it, by dissecting
Speaker 1: it and running, um, you know, more or less physical
Speaker 1: experiments upon it. But to simply think about something and
Speaker 1: the idea that that will reveal something that we had
Speaker 1: not seen before it was not clear to us beforehand. Uh.
Speaker 1: That that's rather curious, isn't it. Well, yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: a thought experiment is a type of logic, which means
Speaker 1: it it lacks the empirical data gathering part of learning
Speaker 1: about the world, so all it can do is draw
Speaker 1: conclusions from what is already known or assumed, though there
Speaker 1: have been plenty of cases where in fact, in the
Speaker 1: history of science interest stuff has come to be known
Speaker 1: without anybody going out and measuring anything new, but just
Speaker 1: by applying what was already known in a logical way
Speaker 1: to arrive at a new conclusion. We'll talk about examples
Speaker 1: of that in a minute, all right, So I want
Speaker 1: to mention one quick example. Uh, it's not so quick
Speaker 1: in the original text, but Lucretius, who lived nine b
Speaker 1: C b C. Wrote on the Nature of Things Sura, yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and he has a fun little thought experiment
Speaker 1: he rolls out. So um, Lucretious argues that space is
Speaker 1: is infinite and what you say it isn't? Well, fine,
Speaker 1: then let's march a soldier to the edge of the
Speaker 1: finite universe and have him throw a spear at the edge. Wait,
Speaker 1: what is the soldier's name? This is crucial. Oh I
Speaker 1: see I skipped that part. What is the soldier's name? No,
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's that we don't need to know
Speaker 1: his name. It's just a soldier. We could we could
Speaker 1: call him cat. I guess, but um, his original write
Speaker 1: up of it is a bit longer. This boiled out. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: march the soldier up to the edge of the universe.
Speaker 1: Haven't throw a spear at the edge. Well, one of
Speaker 1: two things is going to happen, he says, Well, if
Speaker 1: it flies through, then there is something beyond and your
Speaker 1: barrier is nonsense. Right, So the universe is not actually
Speaker 1: bounded there, right, because you just threw a spear beyond
Speaker 1: the edge. Now if the spear bounces off the barrier, well,
Speaker 1: then the wall itself is proof of something beyond your
Speaker 1: your your spear just bounced off of something. What is
Speaker 1: that something? The wall is a thing? Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: In looking at this, you can see that it illustrates
Speaker 1: a conceived version of reality and lays out an experiment,
Speaker 1: And of course it also illustrates one of the other
Speaker 1: features of thought experiments you can pick at them. So
Speaker 1: Lucretius may have presented this, as you know, as a
Speaker 1: real sentence stopping comment on the nature of the universe
Speaker 1: at the time, but certainly, if you if you think
Speaker 1: back of even discussions that we've had on the show
Speaker 1: about infinities and different types of infinities, and and some
Speaker 1: of the arguments for you know, for exactly how I
Speaker 1: find ie universe would work. Then you can see that
Speaker 1: his argument doesn't quite hold up to modern cosmology well
Speaker 1: as you've presented it here. This is actually a great
Speaker 1: example of how thought experiments can seem brilliant but actually
Speaker 1: produce flawed conclusions because they contain drum roll hidden assumptions. Here,
Speaker 1: I would say one fatal hidden assumption is that Lucretius
Speaker 1: takes on board without considering the geometry of a finite universe.
Speaker 1: Now again, I'm certainly not going to go and argue
Speaker 1: that space is finite. That's not my goal here. But
Speaker 1: my I would say there are ways in which space
Speaker 1: could be finite that Lucretius is overlooking with this example,
Speaker 1: because there are different ways you could imagine a finite universe.
Speaker 1: One is a sort of closed three D space with
Speaker 1: exterior walls like the inside of a box. And this
Speaker 1: is sort of what Lucretius seems to have in mind here,
Speaker 1: And of course it does seem somewhat absurd. How could
Speaker 1: the universe be like that? It seems like it probably
Speaker 1: couldn't be. But what if the universe is simultaneously finite
Speaker 1: and without boundaries, like the length dimension of a mobius strip. Robert,
Speaker 1: have you ever made a mobius strip, like in geometry
Speaker 1: and school. Yeah. So you just take like one length
Speaker 1: of a piece of paper and then give it a
Speaker 1: half turn and then tape its ends together, and what
Speaker 1: you have created is a piece of paper that has
Speaker 1: one continuous side. You can start drawing a line and
Speaker 1: it goes on the entire thing. So for instance, and
Speaker 1: this this version, the soldier throws the spear and impales
Speaker 1: himself in the back exactly as long as the spear
Speaker 1: goes long enough. Yeah. So the idea, or it could
Speaker 1: be another analogy here, could be that the geometry of
Speaker 1: the three D universe is sort of like the two
Speaker 1: D geometry of the surface of a sphere. It's not infinite.
Speaker 1: The surface area of a sphere is finite. There is
Speaker 1: a limit to it, but it has no boundaries. You
Speaker 1: never reached the edge. So yeah, that soldier, let's let's
Speaker 1: call him Tim. Tim throws the spear and it hits
Speaker 1: him in the butt. Yeah. Yeah. This also reminds, you
Speaker 1: know the idea of saying, well, hey, my soldier throws
Speaker 1: a spear at the edge of the universe and it
Speaker 1: keeps going, then your your argument is nonsense. It also
Speaker 1: kind of sounds like, oh, we had a really cold
Speaker 1: weather today, I guess there's no global warming. I guess
Speaker 1: there's no climate change. Using a far simpler model than
Speaker 1: the than the complexities of reality, try and make your argument. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it does also. I mean, I would say that
Speaker 1: this is a good argument against a certain type of
Speaker 1: idea of the bounded universe, because if if the universe
Speaker 1: were actually finite in that it had walls on the
Speaker 1: outside of it, at any place you approached the wall,
Speaker 1: you could test that condition, right. So I would say
Speaker 1: that highlighting absurdities in a single test case of the
Speaker 1: idea of a universe with walls on the outside of it,
Speaker 1: that I think that's a valid way to criticize the concept. Now,
Speaker 1: I do have to say at the same time, Lucretius
Speaker 1: is a little thought experiment here, even to modern readers
Speaker 1: it it still does something when you think about it,
Speaker 1: like it does force you to think about uh these
Speaker 1: ideas of the finite and the infinite. Uh So, just
Speaker 1: as like a simple thought experiment is kind of a
Speaker 1: logic puzzle, it still carries its own weight. Now, they're
Speaker 1: absolutely have been thought experiments that have been extremely useful
Speaker 1: and powerful in the history of the advancement of science,
Speaker 1: that have not just like made a clever seeming point,
Speaker 1: but have actually pushed science forward. And these happen a
Speaker 1: lot of time in the history of physics because physics
Speaker 1: experiments work best when you can tightly limit the variables.
Speaker 1: But in reality, it is very hard to tightly limit
Speaker 1: the variables on pure physics experiments. Uh there there's often
Speaker 1: just a lot of like more more friction and more resistance,
Speaker 1: more whatever than you actually want. But here's an example.
Speaker 1: Let's say you go up on top of the Washington
Speaker 1: Monument and you drop two objects side by side. They're
Speaker 1: the same shape, but one is heavier than the other.
Speaker 1: Let's say one, say, plastic DVD of Flubber and the
Speaker 1: other is the new Criterion edition of RoboCop two, which
Speaker 1: has a jewel case made out of lead. So which
Speaker 1: one hits the ground first, Well, ideally they're both going
Speaker 1: to hit the ground at the same time, right, And
Speaker 1: you know that because we live in a post Galileo age,
Speaker 1: the post Copernican post Galileo age. But this might have
Speaker 1: been kind of a shock to you if you lived
Speaker 1: in say, ancient Rome or in medieval Europe, where it
Speaker 1: might well have been assumed that the heavier object would
Speaker 1: hit the ground first because heavier objects fall faster. For
Speaker 1: hundreds of years, the conventional wisdom was along these lines.
Speaker 1: It followed our intuitions, like, it makes intuitive sense that
Speaker 1: a heavier object falls faster because let's say it's harder
Speaker 1: to push a heavier object up a hill, right, so
Speaker 1: it would seem that a heavier object should fall to
Speaker 1: the ground through the air faster than a lighter object.
Speaker 1: This was the dominant strain of thinking also in in
Speaker 1: the sphere of scholars who revered the physics of Aristotle.
Speaker 1: Aristotle wrote in in his work on Physics that objects
Speaker 1: have a natural motion, They have a nature, and they
Speaker 1: have motions specific to their nature, and that part of
Speaker 1: that nature is mass, and so heavier objects fall to
Speaker 1: the ground faster than lighter objects. Now, Galileo Galilei was
Speaker 1: reported by some biographers to have actually performed an experiment
Speaker 1: of this kind by like dropping cannonballs of different weights
Speaker 1: from a tower. But whether or not this story is
Speaker 1: true about the physical experiment, Galileo definitely showed that you
Speaker 1: don't even need an experiment to prove that there is
Speaker 1: something wrong with the Aristotelian view of falling bodies. He
Speaker 1: could show it was wrong just by dreaming up a
Speaker 1: scenario in his head. As and as with many of
Speaker 1: the great intellectual smackdowns in history, Galileo didn't just explain
Speaker 1: his position. He wrote a fictional Socratic style dialogue, complete
Speaker 1: with a slack jawed fool to represent the opinion he
Speaker 1: was attacking. And that fool is named Simplicio. That's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Then he's also he's got a smart guy named Salviati
Speaker 1: to represent his own point of view. And this was
Speaker 1: in Dialogues concerning two New Sciences. In so, first Salviati
Speaker 1: and Simplicio argue about experiments concerning cannonballs and bird shot
Speaker 1: and stuff, and Simplicio is not moved from the Aristotelian
Speaker 1: position that objects fall through a medium with a speed
Speaker 1: proportional to their mass. And so I've tried to reconstruct
Speaker 1: the next moment in the dialogue, but sort of rewritten
Speaker 1: in more modern English and simplified to the main points. Robert,
Speaker 1: would you like to do a reading with me? Sure?
Speaker 1: What kind of accents are we going for here, Robert,
Speaker 1: you're gonna be the smart guy. How about you give
Speaker 1: me a combination of like Gandalf wizard Saruman pronouncing from
Speaker 1: from the top of the Tower of Knowledge, combined with
Speaker 1: like Sam Elliott wise old cowboy. All right, I'll give
Speaker 1: that a goiin. Now, look here, we don't even need
Speaker 1: to do any experiments to prove that Aristotle is wrong
Speaker 1: and a heavier body does not fall faster than a
Speaker 1: lighter one. Let's take Aristotle's principles as granted for a minute.
Speaker 1: What are those principles. Well, body falling in a fixed
Speaker 1: medium like air has a fixed velocity, and that's determined
Speaker 1: by its nature. And you can increase this speed unless
Speaker 1: you add momentum, and you can't decrease this speed unless
Speaker 1: you offer some resistance to slow it down. It's all there,
Speaker 1: and its nature. It's a fixed velocity. Great, So imagine
Speaker 1: two objects with different natural speeds, maybe a pebble which
Speaker 1: falls very slowly and a great millstone which falls very fast.
Speaker 1: Now time together. The fallen millstone will be slowed down
Speaker 1: by being tied to the pebble, which is forced by
Speaker 1: its nature to fall slower right right. You are, according
Speaker 1: to Aristotle, that pebble is going to slow down the
Speaker 1: bigger rock because it falls slower. Okay, okay, So by
Speaker 1: by tying the two stones together, the slower falling pebble
Speaker 1: should reduce the speed at which the millstone falls, making
Speaker 1: its speed less than it would have been alone. But
Speaker 1: at the same time, when you tie them together, their
Speaker 1: combined masses greater than the millstone alone. So shouldn't they
Speaker 1: together fall even faster than either one individually? From your
Speaker 1: principles of motion, we are forced to conclude that by
Speaker 1: tying the two stones together, the fallen speed of the
Speaker 1: millstone is both increased and decreased. Well, dang it, I
Speaker 1: am stumped, all right, So that that's this pretty fun
Speaker 1: because it basically illustrates how he's created kind of like
Speaker 1: a little political cartoon right here, right right. And I
Speaker 1: also absolutely love that he makes the representative of Aristotle,
Speaker 1: who was during the seventeenth century widely considered like the
Speaker 1: smartest guy of all time. He names him simplicito, which
Speaker 1: is like if somebody today wrote a dialogue trying to
Speaker 1: refute Einstein's relativity and had the character representing Einstein's point
Speaker 1: of view named like clet Us T. Dip Wad. But anyway,
Speaker 1: Carl Popper apparently wrote of this thought experiment quote one
Speaker 1: of the most important imaginary experiments in the history of
Speaker 1: natural philosophy, and one of the simplest and most ingenious
Speaker 1: arguments in the history of rational thought about our universe.
Speaker 1: And as far as like imagining physical scenarios goes, I
Speaker 1: think this is the equivalent of a reductio ad absurd
Speaker 1: um argument. So reductio ad absurd um is one of
Speaker 1: the most powerful logical tools we have. It's when you
Speaker 1: combine premises that somebody holds to be true and you
Speaker 1: demonstrate that when they're taken together, they force you to
Speaker 1: conclude something absurd that cannot possibly be true, which means
Speaker 1: at least one of the premises, even though you believe them,
Speaker 1: actually cannot be right. And so here Galileo is basically
Speaker 1: using two premises. One is that the the idea that
Speaker 1: objects of different mass have different natural speeds at which
Speaker 1: they fall, and the other is that you can add
Speaker 1: the mass of two objects together to create a greater
Speaker 1: combined mass. And so he constructs a scenario when it's
Speaker 1: actually not implausible at all. To show that, when taken together,
Speaker 1: these two premises implied something absurd and self contradictory. So
Speaker 1: one of the premises has got to be wrong. And
Speaker 1: since we accept the basic arithmetic of mass that you
Speaker 1: can add the mass of two objects together to create
Speaker 1: a greater combined mass, it showed that the idea of
Speaker 1: a fixed falling speed determined by an objects mass had
Speaker 1: to be wrong. So I would say this is absolutely
Speaker 1: a case where a thought experiment actually did reveal something
Speaker 1: useful about reality. Though of course it's it's helpful as
Speaker 1: well that you could go out and test this with
Speaker 1: physical objects later. You you know you do, so, even
Speaker 1: if there's some hidden assumption that's guming up the conclusions
Speaker 1: you're drawing from this thought experiment, you could do physical
Speaker 1: experiments that would sort you out later. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take a break, and when we
Speaker 1: come back we'll explore some more examples of thought experiments
Speaker 1: before we just us a little bit a bit more
Speaker 1: about what exactly that they are and how we might
Speaker 1: categorize them than alright, we're back. So Joe is a
Speaker 1: time for Jim Dandy's bucket of goose. No, let's do
Speaker 1: Newton's bag of cheese sounds good okay, So Galileo's rocks, obviously,
Speaker 1: are not the only famous imaginary falling objects to provoke
Speaker 1: advances in physics. Uh The seventeenth and eighteenth century English
Speaker 1: poly math Isaac Newton was also responsible for many famous
Speaker 1: thought experiments that illustrated his revolutionary ideas. Probably the most
Speaker 1: famous and enduring is what I'm gonna call ballistic Mountain.
Speaker 1: So back in Newton's day and there was a lot
Speaker 1: of confusion about different types of motion and what explained
Speaker 1: the motion of objects in the heavens. A good example
Speaker 1: would be let's say you drop a wool sack full
Speaker 1: of goat cheese from a tower. Which direction does it travel?
Speaker 1: Goes straight down right? You wouldn't want to be standing
Speaker 1: under that goat cheese. And at the same time, skull
Speaker 1: Is recognized that the Earth was spherical or roughly spherical,
Speaker 1: as had been proved for many hundreds of years, and
Speaker 1: it almost seemed as if objects were being pulled straight
Speaker 1: down towards the center of the Earth, and the Earth
Speaker 1: seemed to pull all objects toward it at a constant rate,
Speaker 1: as Galileo had showed, regardless of the mass of that object.
Speaker 1: And you see this all the time, even if you
Speaker 1: throw an object horizontally. Let's say you are hurling a
Speaker 1: wool sack full of goat cheese at your enemy, the
Speaker 1: Royal astronomer John Flamsteed. A Flamsteed is too far away
Speaker 1: when you throw the sack. Obviously the gravity is going
Speaker 1: to pull the sack down to the Earth before it
Speaker 1: hits him. Gravity always pulls down. But then contrast that
Speaker 1: with if you look up at the heavens at night,
Speaker 1: you will observe that the motion of the planet seems
Speaker 1: to be governed by another force entirely. Instead of falling
Speaker 1: straight into the Sun or into the Earth, the planet
Speaker 1: seemed to travel through the heavens and smooth, roughly circular
Speaker 1: elliptical orbits, just as the wound seems to travel in
Speaker 1: a smooth elliptical track around the Earth. So how could
Speaker 1: the motion seen in the heavens be so different from
Speaker 1: the motion scene on Earth? Like was there a divine
Speaker 1: hand guiding how the planets traveled through the void. So
Speaker 1: Newton proposed a thought experiment in his Principia, and it
Speaker 1: went roughly like this, Robert, imagine we're gonna get up
Speaker 1: on top of the tallest mountain on Earth, the Gigantic
Speaker 1: Monster Mountain. Maybe it's on the North Pole, all right.
Speaker 1: I guess it wouldn't because there's no land there. But
Speaker 1: maybe it could be the Mountain of Purgatory from from
Speaker 1: Dante's Divine Comedy for all of Isaac Newton's sins, of
Speaker 1: which there were many, because he was a jerk, So
Speaker 1: that work off those piece. So he climbs up to
Speaker 1: the top of the Mountain of Purgatory, Oh, which I
Speaker 1: guess is earthly paradise, right, But but he gets up
Speaker 1: there and he brings a cannon with him. Oh that's
Speaker 1: that's that's already. I'm feeling it's probably breaking some rules,
Speaker 1: but okay, yes, and it's an assault on the heavens already.
Speaker 1: But it's an assault on the heavens in more ways
Speaker 1: than one, more way than one, more ways than one.
Speaker 1: I never know how to pluralize that correctly anyway. So
Speaker 1: let's say you got the cannon up at the top
Speaker 1: of the mountain. You shoot a cannon ball out parallel
Speaker 1: to the ground at a hundred kilometers per hour. What happens, Well,
Speaker 1: it travels in the familiar arc that any anybody who
Speaker 1: has used a firearm like that will recognize. So it
Speaker 1: goes horizontally at a hundred kilometers per hour while simultaneously
Speaker 1: falling towards the ground at the normal acceleration, and eventually
Speaker 1: it hits the ground with a thud. But let's say
Speaker 1: you pack more gunpowder into the cannon and shoot the
Speaker 1: ball out of the barrel faster, say two hundred kilometers
Speaker 1: per hour. What happens, Well, it makes an arc again,
Speaker 1: but the arc is a slightly different shape. It falls
Speaker 1: to the ground at the same rate as before, but
Speaker 1: this time it travels a lot farther horizontally before it
Speaker 1: hits the ground. Now, imagine you just keep packing more
Speaker 1: and more power into the cannon so that the ball
Speaker 1: goes farther every time before it hits the ground. The
Speaker 1: rate at which the cannonball falls is going to always
Speaker 1: stay the same, but the horizontal speed and the horizontal
Speaker 1: distance covered keeps increasing. And then combine this with the
Speaker 1: idea that the earth is a sphere, which they knew
Speaker 1: at the time of of Newton. This means that eventually
Speaker 1: you will shoot the cannonball at a speed where it
Speaker 1: travels so fast that it's falling arc is greater than
Speaker 1: the curve of the Earth. So it flies and it falls,
Speaker 1: but it never hits the ground. It travels around the
Speaker 1: Earth in a continuous circle. So the cannonball is still
Speaker 1: governed by the same two forces, gravity which wants to
Speaker 1: pull the cannonball towards the center of the Earth, in inertia,
Speaker 1: which wants to keep the cannonball traveling in a straight line.
Speaker 1: But they these forces combine to cause the ball to
Speaker 1: just keep flying around the Earth in a circle in space.
Speaker 1: And Newton had a very famous illustration of this that
Speaker 1: that sort of helped to make his point, where he
Speaker 1: showed arcs of of cannonballs falling off and becoming longer
Speaker 1: and longer until they just became a circle. And now
Speaker 1: the crucial extrapolation is this is what planets due to
Speaker 1: the Sun and what the Moon does to the Earth.
Speaker 1: So Newton had used nothing more than an imaginary scenario
Speaker 1: to demonstrate good reason for believing something shocking that the
Speaker 1: forces that govern the heavens and the forces that govern
Speaker 1: the movement of objects on the Earth like cannonballs or
Speaker 1: wool sacks full of cheese are exactly the same this
Speaker 1: is the unification of terrestrial and celestial forces. And this
Speaker 1: this is a key principle in establishing the modern age
Speaker 1: of physics. And it's rather brilliant to and then he
Speaker 1: took something that was there was so so so much
Speaker 1: more relatable in order to explain you know, the movement
Speaker 1: of the spheres. Yeah, exactly. And of course this is
Speaker 1: a case where a thought experiment, while revolutionary, was not
Speaker 1: enough to prove the case. Fortunately Newton had conducted ingenious
Speaker 1: real world experiments also, so in this case it was
Speaker 1: the use of a pendulum combined with astronomical observations to
Speaker 1: show that the Moon falls towards the Earth at about
Speaker 1: the same speed as objects dropped on Earth fall toward
Speaker 1: the ground, which is a funny thing to consider whether
Speaker 1: you're dropping a bag of cheese out of an airplane
Speaker 1: or watching the Moon fall towards the Earth. They followed
Speaker 1: about the same rate, but the Moon's competing inertia and
Speaker 1: position of course keep it in orbit. And there are
Speaker 1: of course powerful implications that followed from Newton. These could
Speaker 1: be put to use in rocketry, like ultimately we had
Speaker 1: to figure out the delta V required to achieve lower
Speaker 1: thorbit and to escape Earth's orbit entirely if we wanted
Speaker 1: to say, send probes to other planets. Uh And and
Speaker 1: by the way, I didn't make up the part about
Speaker 1: the sack of cheese. But Newton did actually have enemies.
Speaker 1: And just to tell one quick story, there was this
Speaker 1: astronomer named John Flamsteed. I mentioned him earlier, and Newton
Speaker 1: was pretty much a total jerk. Flamesteed was this English astronomer.
Speaker 1: He was the English Astronomer Royal during Newton's time, and
Speaker 1: he was working on a catalog of objects in the heavens,
Speaker 1: and Newton wanted access to Flamesteed's catalog. Basically, he wanted
Speaker 1: data so he could use it to prove his theories.
Speaker 1: But Flamesteed wasn't done putting it together yet, believing it
Speaker 1: wasn't ready for publication, so Newton constantly harassed and bullied
Speaker 1: him to get this information. Eventually threw his weight around
Speaker 1: with the English Royalty to get Flamsteed's catalog published early
Speaker 1: before it was ready, which Flamsteed did not like at all.
Speaker 1: There's also a story that Newton, as the president of
Speaker 1: the Royal Society, went to the Royal observatory to inspect
Speaker 1: Flamsteed's equipment, and they got into a fight, and Flamsteed
Speaker 1: wrote that quote. Newton ran himself into a great heat
Speaker 1: and very indecent passion, and he used Knavish talk and
Speaker 1: called me all the ill names puppy, etcetera that he
Speaker 1: could think of. So like Newton's out there like screaming
Speaker 1: at other scientists calling them puppies, just thinking a real
Speaker 1: real ass of himself. Yeah, anyway, shows that even some
Speaker 1: of the smartest people ever can are not above, you know,
Speaker 1: puppy calling. Well, it makes sense. Wasn't new In a
Speaker 1: a more of a cat person, didn't he? Uh? Oh,
Speaker 1: that might be for cats to move in and out
Speaker 1: of the chambers of his house. I didn't look up
Speaker 1: the usage history of that word, so I don't know
Speaker 1: exactly what it meant to call somebody a puppy and
Speaker 1: whatever year this was, but profanity scholars right in and
Speaker 1: let us know, Yeah what does that mean? Did he
Speaker 1: just literally mean like a young dog? I hope? So
Speaker 1: that's the that's that's a funny interpretation. Well it sounds
Speaker 1: like Navish talk either way, totally. So what are the examples?
Speaker 1: Do you have for us, well, just a few quicker
Speaker 1: ones in in physics, and of course one of my
Speaker 1: favorites is that people dreamed up the concept of a
Speaker 1: black hole as a mathematical thought experiment, long before any
Speaker 1: evidence of such a thing had ever been detected. Like
Speaker 1: we talked about this in our black Holes episode. But
Speaker 1: around seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four, the English
Speaker 1: natural philosophers John Michelle and Henry Cavendish dared to ask
Speaker 1: a bizarre question. So they knew that light itself had
Speaker 1: a speed, and they were armed with Newton's insights about gravity, inertia,
Speaker 1: orbits and escape velocity, so they asked, what if there
Speaker 1: were a star so massive with with such a great
Speaker 1: gravitational attraction that escape velocity for this star was greater
Speaker 1: than the speed of light. In other words, a star
Speaker 1: so massive that even light could not escape it. And
Speaker 1: this was perhaps the earliest formulation of the concept of
Speaker 1: a black hole, which would later be developed by so
Speaker 1: many other important astrophysicists Karl Schwartz, Shield Gander, Shaker, Oppenheimer
Speaker 1: and others. And if you want more on that, we
Speaker 1: have a whole episode about it from earlier. This year.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, we did a three parter on black holes. Uh. Then,
Speaker 1: of course the thought experiments are huge in illustrating the
Speaker 1: concepts of relativity in the speed of light. Like Einstein
Speaker 1: is famous for influential thought experiments, But we shouldn't just
Speaker 1: focus on the ones that have been very influential in physics, because,
Speaker 1: of course, thought experiments are probably even more common in
Speaker 1: philosophy than they are in physics, even more common. And
Speaker 1: I don't want to be insulting to philosophy because I
Speaker 1: value philosophy, but I would say even more common and
Speaker 1: less often useful. Uh. They can still be illuminating, but
Speaker 1: I think we need to realize that, especially in scenarios
Speaker 1: where we can't actually test the conclusions of a thought
Speaker 1: experiment in any kind of way, we should be careful
Speaker 1: that thought experiments don't cloud are thinking more than they reveal. Well,
Speaker 1: we don't encounter thought experiments to deal with things like morality, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: and ultimately how do you measure those things? Yes? And
Speaker 1: the I feel like those kinds of thought experiments are
Speaker 1: especially prone to be confusing because they deal with the
Speaker 1: lucretious problem we talked about bringing in unexamined assumptions that
Speaker 1: are influencing our thinking without us realizing it. So I
Speaker 1: think we should mention just one example of a prominent,
Speaker 1: extremely controversial thought experiment in philosophy. There's been a mountain
Speaker 1: of debate on this one, so I know we're not
Speaker 1: going to be able to do it justice in the
Speaker 1: time we have, we'll try to give it the best
Speaker 1: quickest version we can. So this is John Searle's Chinese
Speaker 1: Room thought experiment. Robert, I know you must have encountered
Speaker 1: this one before. Yeah, So the question is, we know
Speaker 1: we can program computers to mimic the intelligent behavior of humans,
Speaker 1: but would it ever be possible for a computer to
Speaker 1: truly understand something? Or can it only simulate understanding? And
Speaker 1: this has often taken a sort of an analog of
Speaker 1: the question of can machines be conscious? Right? And no,
Speaker 1: we've we've discussed this quite a bit on the show before.
Speaker 1: Maybe not specifically this thought experiment I don't recall off hand,
Speaker 1: but just the idea that, yeah, if a robot may
Speaker 1: know what it is to stub one's toe, but does
Speaker 1: a robot really know what it's like to stub your toe? Like?
Speaker 1: Does it? It doesn't doesn't. Does it have that experience,
Speaker 1: does it have that knowledge? Can it? Can it sort
Speaker 1: of hold the information in its hands and squish it around.
Speaker 1: We know it can act like it understands what it
Speaker 1: means to to feel pain, But does it really understand
Speaker 1: what it means to feel pain? Uh so? The American
Speaker 1: philosopher John Searle proposed a thought experiment to answer this
Speaker 1: question in the early nineteen eighties. I think it was
Speaker 1: first in the year nineteen eighty, and his work asked
Speaker 1: us to imagine the following scenario. You already to go
Speaker 1: there with me, okay, So imagine you are an English
Speaker 1: speaker that does not understand a single word of written Chinese,
Speaker 1: absolutely nothing. Then you are locked in a room with
Speaker 1: a slot in the wall, a pencil and paper, and
Speaker 1: a giant book of instructions written in English. Every now
Speaker 1: and then someone from the outside slips a piece of
Speaker 1: paper through the slot in the wall, and it has
Speaker 1: a string of Chinese characters written on it. And then
Speaker 1: you look at this piece of paper and you consult
Speaker 1: your giant instruction manual, and the manual tells you given
Speaker 1: certain Chinese character inputs coming through the wall, which Chinese
Speaker 1: characters to write on a piece of paper and put
Speaker 1: back out through the slot in the wall. So you
Speaker 1: write down what the instructions tell you to write based
Speaker 1: on what has come in, and then you slip the
Speaker 1: output through the slot. Now, sarl says that in this scenario,
Speaker 1: with a sufficiently powerful instruction manual, the person in the
Speaker 1: room would be able to simulate being able to understand
Speaker 1: the Chinese language despite not actually understanding a single word
Speaker 1: of it. The person is just an operator. They're just
Speaker 1: blindly copying symbols from a rule book. They don't understand
Speaker 1: what any of the symbols mean. So in the same way,
Speaker 1: Cearle says that this gets extrapolated to any computer program
Speaker 1: that would supposedly pass quote pass the Turing tests, which
Speaker 1: we've discussed the turning test on the show before. But
Speaker 1: basically it means to be able to have a text
Speaker 1: based conversation with the human such that the human would
Speaker 1: believe that the machine they were chatting with was actually
Speaker 1: human as well. Can you can you fool a human
Speaker 1: into thinking you're a human by talking to them through text?
Speaker 1: And Searle says, it doesn't matter how convincingly the computer
Speaker 1: simulates being able to have a conversation in any language.
Speaker 1: It's still like the non Chinese speaker in the Chinese room.
Speaker 1: It can't really understand what it's doing. It's only blindly
Speaker 1: following instructions that create an illusion of understanding where true
Speaker 1: understanding is impossible. Now, there have been tons of responses
Speaker 1: to this scenario over the years, and I think we'll
Speaker 1: come back to this towards the end of the episode.
Speaker 1: But the idea is the thought experiment of imagining the
Speaker 1: person in the Chinese room leads you to new knowledge.
Speaker 1: It should lead you to the correct conclusion that it's
Speaker 1: impossible for a machine to understand something, or at least
Speaker 1: a machine interpreting formal instructions. Robert, I, I could almost
Speaker 1: detect by the way you're furrowing your brow that this
Speaker 1: this one's filling you with venom. Well, the the Chinese Room, Yeah,
Speaker 1: um no, I mean I love it. I keep that,
Speaker 1: I keep wanting to say something kind of snarky about
Speaker 1: like just the human experience itself being you know, like
Speaker 1: the Chinese room, that where there's so much that we're
Speaker 1: doing that that we're we're not really understanding, We're just
Speaker 1: responding to stimuli and giving back what the instruction manual
Speaker 1: says we should give back. But then I do have
Speaker 1: in a way articulated one of the main types of
Speaker 1: responses to it. Yeah, but that it said yeah, but that,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, like, this is the great thing about
Speaker 1: a solid thought experiment and is in that it it
Speaker 1: provokes conversation and subsequent sort of answers and critiques of
Speaker 1: the thought experiments. Right, So, I guess in a minute
Speaker 1: we are going to end up talking about sort of
Speaker 1: formal classification systems for types of thought experiments and considering
Speaker 1: how thought experiments might or might not be useful. But uh, there,
Speaker 1: I can see that there are multiple ways that one
Speaker 1: could be useful. Immediately, one could be useful in the
Speaker 1: way it's intended, meaning it can prove what it sets
Speaker 1: out to prove. Or it could also be inadvertently useful
Speaker 1: in that even if it fails to prove what it
Speaker 1: sets out to prove, it could make common misunderstandings clear. Right,
Speaker 1: does that make sense? Yeah, like reveal ways in which
Speaker 1: people's thinking is going wrong on a particular subject. Like
Speaker 1: it's like saying, here is a scenario that illustrates a
Speaker 1: way of thinking about this and then even if if
Speaker 1: what it is presenting you with is incorrect, or has
Speaker 1: some problems, or doesn't fully match up to um scientific reality,
Speaker 1: or or just preconceived notions, then at least you have
Speaker 1: you've created the model. You have, you have the model
Speaker 1: on the table, and other people can come along and say, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this is interesting, but what happens when we
Speaker 1: put a hat on this guy, what happens when there
Speaker 1: are two instruction manuals, what happens when you know the
Speaker 1: ship of theseus also has a crew, etcetera. You know,
Speaker 1: all the various complications are little tweaks that can can
Speaker 1: change the model just a little bit. I think sometimes
Speaker 1: thought experiments, even if they fail at proving what they
Speaker 1: set out to prove, can be useful in the same
Speaker 1: way that introducing terminology to a DISCUSSI can be useful
Speaker 1: just because, like if you put an image to something
Speaker 1: or put a name to something, that makes it easier
Speaker 1: to understand what it is you're talking about. All right, Well,
Speaker 1: on that note, let's take one more break, and when
Speaker 1: we come back, we're gonna get more into this idea
Speaker 1: of what is the thought experiment and indeed, where does
Speaker 1: the term come from thank, alright, we're back. So in
Speaker 1: looking at the history of thought experiments, you know where
Speaker 1: you able to find the oldest one on a like
Speaker 1: a like a cave wall. Uh No. But I mean
Speaker 1: we kind of end up getting into a similar situation
Speaker 1: when we started trying to think about this, because certainly
Speaker 1: we know that thought experiments were employed by a pre
Speaker 1: Socratic philosopher, so this has been before the life of Socrates,
Speaker 1: before for seventy b c. And then thought experiments are
Speaker 1: the things that were essentially thought experience were popular throughout
Speaker 1: the Middle Ages, and of course came into their own
Speaker 1: in the seventeenth century and the centuries to follow. The
Speaker 1: term itself is often attributed one Ernst Mock, who lived
Speaker 1: at eight through nineteen sixteen. He was an Austrian physicist
Speaker 1: and philosopher. And they point this out because he used
Speaker 1: the term, let's see, if I get this right, gadoncan
Speaker 1: experimente uh. But it seems though that like it was
Speaker 1: already in use by the time he used it, and
Speaker 1: it may have derived from the Danish uh tunk experiment.
Speaker 1: And then it turns out that Georg Lichtenberg through seventeen
Speaker 1: ninety nine he discussed quote experiments with thoughts and ideas.
Speaker 1: So funny, like all of these are coming after the advent,
Speaker 1: you know, after Galileo, like Galileo and Newton, and people
Speaker 1: had already been using these, As we said, they weren't
Speaker 1: the first to use them, but they used them in
Speaker 1: really profoundly influential ways in real science. Yeah, So it's
Speaker 1: kind of like we're looking at three phases here. There's
Speaker 1: the phase where people are actually calling it a thought experiment,
Speaker 1: there's the phase where people are using them to great effect.
Speaker 1: And ultimately, I think if we if you go back
Speaker 1: further in time, you know, get lost in the mists
Speaker 1: of of of earlier history. I think it's fair to
Speaker 1: say that thought experiments are generally a more refined idea
Speaker 1: of something that we just do as humans, and internal
Speaker 1: simulation of of observed empirical data and processes, trying to
Speaker 1: run an experiment in your mind given what you know, right,
Speaker 1: and you know, I can imagine this is kind of
Speaker 1: getting into the territory of our our other show, Invention,
Speaker 1: which everyone can can learn about invention pod dot com.
Speaker 1: It's a podcast about inventions and where they come from.
Speaker 1: Subscribe now. Subscribe now, now, uh, seriously, stop and go
Speaker 1: and subscribe. But but you know, you can imagine with
Speaker 1: any of these inventions. This is even some of the
Speaker 1: ancient ones that we've talked about, Like there is a
Speaker 1: thought experiment level that is that is in play. But
Speaker 1: I don't think it's a great stretch to imagine some
Speaker 1: of these ancient inventors and inventive minds essentially engaging and
Speaker 1: thought experiments. Oh well, yeah, I mean that's an interesting
Speaker 1: way of putting it that you have to sort of
Speaker 1: before you create a tool, you have to imagine what
Speaker 1: would happen if you use something of a certain shape
Speaker 1: in a certain way without having seen something like that
Speaker 1: done before. Right. But then again, of course we go
Speaker 1: back to what we said earlier about how just envisioning
Speaker 1: an experiment you could carry out is not in in
Speaker 1: and of itself a thought experiment, but it's still kind
Speaker 1: of the roots of the thought experiment, right, Um, in
Speaker 1: terms of thinking about like, well, what are some taxonomies
Speaker 1: we can refer to for thought experiments. They're basically various
Speaker 1: ways you could categorize thought experiments, but there's not really
Speaker 1: a fully agreed upon standards so much obviously you can
Speaker 1: categorize them by the discipline that they stem from. So
Speaker 1: here's a bunch of physics thought experiments. Here's some quantum
Speaker 1: physics thought experiments. Here's some some economic thought experiments. So
Speaker 1: psychological thought experiments. You know, we could also break them
Speaker 1: up based on their features, I guess, but I'm not sure,
Speaker 1: really sure that does any good, because again, if it's
Speaker 1: a cat or a dog or basilisk, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 1: That's just some flavoring that's added to the little story
Speaker 1: of the thought experiment. Well, I'm already seeing in the
Speaker 1: examples we've discussed so far, one clear distinction that emerges,
Speaker 1: which is the thought experiment that shows the absurdity or
Speaker 1: contradictions inherent in some pre existing idea, versus the thought
Speaker 1: experiment that demonstrates a new conclusion or show reveals new
Speaker 1: knowledge based on premises you already accept. Right, And that's
Speaker 1: that's where we come back to Karl Popper, who we
Speaker 1: talked about briefly earlier. Karl Popper was an Austrian British
Speaker 1: philosopher and professor who live nineteen o two through and
Speaker 1: he this is this is basically how he divided up
Speaker 1: thought experiments. He said, they're basically three types heuristic, in
Speaker 1: other words, to illustrate a theory. Okay, so this would
Speaker 1: be the kind that just helps clarify what you're talking about,
Speaker 1: gives people something to picture. And you could argue that maybe,
Speaker 1: I don't know, I'm not quite sure how Newton's cannon
Speaker 1: would fit in there. Was that just to illustrate or
Speaker 1: did he actually prove something using the image of the canon. Well,
Speaker 1: you could also argue that it falls into the next category,
Speaker 1: right critical against the theory, because he's kind of playing
Speaker 1: with preconceived notions about how these things would work. Right, Well,
Speaker 1: I guess yeah, it does challenge the idea that they're
Speaker 1: different mechanics at operation in the heavens than there are
Speaker 1: on the Earth. And now the Carl Popper's third category
Speaker 1: then is apologetic in favor of a theory. Okay, So
Speaker 1: you've got the kind that illustrates, the kind that challenges,
Speaker 1: and the kind that argues in favor of Now, on
Speaker 1: a similar note, you have Canadian philosopher of science James
Speaker 1: Robert Brown, still still alive and kicking as of this recording,
Speaker 1: and he's divided thought experiments into two major categories similar
Speaker 1: along similar lines, constructive and destructive. Okay, those are the
Speaker 1: broad categories, and then there are some some sub types
Speaker 1: to the destructive category. So there's contradictive, this is a
Speaker 1: thought experiment that points out a contradiction to a given idea.
Speaker 1: Then there's paradoxical, so you have a thought experimentment here
Speaker 1: that shows how a given idea is conflicting with a
Speaker 1: commonly held belief. Then you have the undermine, or a
Speaker 1: thought experiment that actively undermines an idea. And then there's
Speaker 1: the counter thought experiment, a thought experiment that serves as
Speaker 1: a rebuttal to another thought experiment. You know, I think
Speaker 1: I generally would find that thought experiments are more often
Speaker 1: sound when deployed as destructive or critical tools than as
Speaker 1: constructive or apologetic tools. And I think this is because,
Speaker 1: of course, as we know, thought experiments do not provide
Speaker 1: new data or new evidence of anything. They only illustrate
Speaker 1: logical relationships between things that we already know or already believe.
Speaker 1: So they can take existing knowledge and use that to
Speaker 1: extrapolate to new knowledge. But it's much easier to use
Speaker 1: them in a way that's reasonable to demonstrate a contradiction
Speaker 1: between existing pieces of knowledge. Or principles that the extended
Speaker 1: version of the reductive ad absurdom. These are I think
Speaker 1: some of the most powerful uses of thought experiments when
Speaker 1: they when they have the power to clearly show that
Speaker 1: things that you already believe or accept or are you
Speaker 1: know bound to accept, are in fact self contradictory. Alright,
Speaker 1: so let's go. Let's get down to one of the
Speaker 1: questions that has often discussed your regarding thought experiments. Uh,
Speaker 1: people say, well, do they really tell us anything? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: some people hate thought experiments. I think it really just
Speaker 1: just riled up because it's like, oh, you know, it
Speaker 1: seems like this navel gazing kind of thing, like, if
Speaker 1: you're not going to go out and do physical experiments
Speaker 1: in the physical world, what are you even talking about?
Speaker 1: Why you know, why are you wasting your time? Armchair science?
Speaker 1: Is is one of the criticisms is often thrown out
Speaker 1: regarding thought experiments. But of course thought experiments have been
Speaker 1: really useful in the history of science. As we've talked
Speaker 1: about before, a lot of important advances in the history
Speaker 1: of science have been before they were confirmed in fact
Speaker 1: by physical experiments, were predicted by thought experiments. That this
Speaker 1: is a very common feature, especially in physics. I mean
Speaker 1: you could even say in fact that there there are
Speaker 1: whole realms of physics today. It's probably what you would
Speaker 1: call theoretical physics. You often hear this division of theoretical physics,
Speaker 1: physics and experimental physics. Uh. There, there's all this stuff
Speaker 1: in theoretical physics right now that we don't have a
Speaker 1: way of testing with physical experiments yet. And you can,
Speaker 1: you can kind of try to make your arguments one
Speaker 1: way or another stronger about string theory or something like that,
Speaker 1: but it just we we don't have a test for
Speaker 1: it yet. So you could say that all of that
Speaker 1: is in a way a type of mathematically elegant thought experiment.
Speaker 1: But but if you go back and look at you know,
Speaker 1: Newton and Galileo and all this, and certainly Einstein, there's
Speaker 1: no denying that thought experiments have been extremely useful and
Speaker 1: productive in the history of physics. But thought experiments can
Speaker 1: sometimes also, as we've acknowledged, be confusing and misleading, even
Speaker 1: though there are other times illuminating. A favorite of ours
Speaker 1: on here is, of course, Daniel Dennett. You know, he
Speaker 1: likes to highlight the different kinds of thought experiments that
Speaker 1: try to leverage our intuitions into new discoveries simply by
Speaker 1: tightly controlling the variables of an imagined scenario. And some
Speaker 1: of the most famous thought experiments in history. Actually, I
Speaker 1: think maybe confuse more than they illuminate. I don't want
Speaker 1: to put words in his mouth, but I think Dinnett
Speaker 1: would say this about Donald Davidson's swamp Man, which we
Speaker 1: discussed in our show Thesist episode, or Searle's Chinese Room,
Speaker 1: which maybe we should come back to now. So we
Speaker 1: explain Searle's Chinese Room earlier, with the person exchanging the
Speaker 1: symbols in the room, and the question of does the
Speaker 1: person in the room who doesn't speak Chinese but can
Speaker 1: simulate perfect conversational output in Chinese by following this instruction manual,
Speaker 1: does that person really understand Chinese? And a lot of
Speaker 1: people have thought, yeah, this is a powerful disproof of
Speaker 1: the notion that computers could ever think, understand, or be conscious,
Speaker 1: and a lot of other thinkers have been incredibly critical
Speaker 1: of this. An example of a reply to the Chinese
Speaker 1: Room that makes sense to me is what if what's
Speaker 1: true of the part might not be true of the
Speaker 1: system as a whole. So imagine again this person in
Speaker 1: the room. The person in the room doesn't understand Chinese,
Speaker 1: and thus the responses they produce are not meaningful to them.
Speaker 1: But you could argue that the room itself, the set
Speaker 1: of instructions, combined with the memories and sensory experiences and
Speaker 1: logic that went into the creation of the instructions, and
Speaker 1: the human operator and the pencil and paper taken together
Speaker 1: perhaps do understand Chinese. And Cyle rejects this line of thinking.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons is he says, you know, this
Speaker 1: is a kind of illicit externalizing of thoughts, saying that
Speaker 1: like paper could think, or a book of instructions could think,
Speaker 1: but but I think like he's the person who put
Speaker 1: this system together. You know, you are the one who
Speaker 1: put a human inside a room as the metaphor for
Speaker 1: a computer. Computers do not actually have a tiny human
Speaker 1: inside them that's performing operations with opportunities to understand or
Speaker 1: not understand. Likewise, there is not actually a little human
Speaker 1: sitting inside your brain with the job of understanding or
Speaker 1: not understanding inputs and outputs. Your brain is a system
Speaker 1: in many ways. You might say that system of your
Speaker 1: brain that produces your mind is more comparable to the
Speaker 1: entire system of the person in the room, the room,
Speaker 1: the instructions and all that than it is just the
Speaker 1: person inside. I think the evidence is pretty clear that
Speaker 1: the mind is not one thing, and there's no evidence
Speaker 1: of an observer within the observer. The mind is at
Speaker 1: the very least a system of information processing but also storage,
Speaker 1: inputs and outputs, all working together. There's not there's no
Speaker 1: evidence of a pilot inside who does all of the
Speaker 1: final understanding. Right. That's rights as simple as it would
Speaker 1: be to imagine that, you know, because it would reduce
Speaker 1: whatever we're trying to figure out, would reduce it to
Speaker 1: a person would get back into that that that kind
Speaker 1: of you know, neolithic mindset. And so I think this now,
Speaker 1: I certainly don't want to say that that I'm not
Speaker 1: like casting expersions on John Searle. I'm sure he is
Speaker 1: a very brilliant man, much smarter than me. And there's
Speaker 1: been a lot more you know, complex back and forth
Speaker 1: on this, But just to somebody who's right about this
Speaker 1: a good bit, it seems to me like this is
Speaker 1: one of those thought experiments that needlessly turns up confusion
Speaker 1: just by bringing in a lot of unnecessary assumptions and
Speaker 1: the connotations of the imagery you use in the thing,
Speaker 1: like we've got a person inside a room that that's
Speaker 1: making you think of analogies to a person sitting inside
Speaker 1: the computer or an observer inside the observer in the brain. Now,
Speaker 1: I I do take the problem of consciousness seriously. I'm
Speaker 1: not one of those people who you know, would handwave
Speaker 1: and say, oh yeah, consciousness is easy to explain. It's
Speaker 1: just a you know, systems theory or whatever. But I
Speaker 1: don't think the Chinese room proves machines can't think, or understand,
Speaker 1: or have intentional or meaningful internal representations or be conscious.
Speaker 1: I think that's still an open question. And to my mind,
Speaker 1: the Chinese Room experiment is one of these thought experiments
Speaker 1: that creates a lot of confusion by the hidden assumptions
Speaker 1: it imports with its central imagery. I don't know, am
Speaker 1: I being unfair? No? I think you're being being very fair.
Speaker 1: I mean again, I come back to to certainly like
Speaker 1: political cartoons as as a reference, you know, not that
Speaker 1: not to reduce the Chinese room to something so you know,
Speaker 1: ultimately kind of base. But there is a boiling down
Speaker 1: of of a process there's a boiling down of a
Speaker 1: of a problem that takes place in a thought experiment
Speaker 1: like this, and then you do have to ask, well,
Speaker 1: in reducing it to this model, what of the necessary
Speaker 1: complexity is lost that is necessary to understand what's going on? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's exactly right. And I would say for me,
Speaker 1: crucially it's the image of the person in the room
Speaker 1: that's the especially confusing thing in this thing here, Like
Speaker 1: what if there wasn't a person there? What if you
Speaker 1: just instead said the room is a machine that takes in,
Speaker 1: that takes in symbols and puts out symbols, then you're
Speaker 1: basically not really changing much. You're just saying, well, it's
Speaker 1: a computer, and then that's what we're talking about originally.
Speaker 1: But anyway, so we mentioned Daniel Dennet. He's written extensive
Speaker 1: criticism of the Chinese Room. I think this was even
Speaker 1: the context of his coinage of the term. Intuition pump
Speaker 1: is the title of one of his books, Intuition Pumps.
Speaker 1: Uh dinn It writes, quote, Intuition pumps are cunningly designed
Speaker 1: to focus the reader's attention on the important features and
Speaker 1: to deflect the reader from bogging down in hard to
Speaker 1: follow details. There's nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed,
Speaker 1: one of philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping
Speaker 1: people see the four us did not just the trees,
Speaker 1: but intuition pumps are often abused, though seldom deliberately. Of course,
Speaker 1: dnn it himself has has played with thought experiments before.
Speaker 1: Absolutely I'm instantly reminded of the it was almost kind
Speaker 1: of a little short story he wrote about those that
Speaker 1: are a robot with a human brain. Wonderful. Yes, the
Speaker 1: where am I I think it was called? So dnn
Speaker 1: it is as he says, they're certainly not opposed to
Speaker 1: thought experiments, but he uh, he points out, I think
Speaker 1: quite correctly that sometimes they actually confuse more than they illuminate.
Speaker 1: Whether that's true of the ones he himself has put together,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard to say. I mean a lot of times.
Speaker 1: The benefits of these physics thought experiments, as we've been saying,
Speaker 1: is you can eventually go out and test and see
Speaker 1: whether they were on the right track or whether they
Speaker 1: were confused by some you know, hidden assumption taken on board.
Speaker 1: It's harder to do with a lot of these thought
Speaker 1: experiments about say, the physical location of consciousness or something
Speaker 1: like that. Uh So, one example from Dennett's book intuition
Speaker 1: Pumps that we talked about in our Ship of Theseus episode.
Speaker 1: You remember the Swampman of course, because it's essentially swamp
Speaker 1: thing from the comic book, right. Yeah, So this was
Speaker 1: an example of you know, dinn It explaining how intuition
Speaker 1: pumps can go wrong. And again, intuition pumps are just
Speaker 1: thought experiments that that rely on our intuitions that don't
Speaker 1: like take specific data on board. Really, I'll try to
Speaker 1: do very very quick. The example was this guy named
Speaker 1: Donald Davidson. He was a philosopher. So he said, assume
Speaker 1: lightning strikes me while I'm out walking in the swamp,
Speaker 1: and it evaporates my body and I'm just gone. And
Speaker 1: then meanwhile, it also strikes a tree next door, and
Speaker 1: it rearranges that tree into an exact adom for Adam
Speaker 1: copy of me with all my memories, and he calls
Speaker 1: this creature Swampman, and so he asks, is that copy
Speaker 1: really me? Davidson says, you know, is it really friends
Speaker 1: with my friends even though it has never met them before?
Speaker 1: Does it really know what a banana tastes like even
Speaker 1: though it has never tasted or even touched one. This
Speaker 1: was offered, I think, to interrogate the question of how
Speaker 1: the history of an object is related to the identity
Speaker 1: of that object. Is a thing that is an exact
Speaker 1: copy of you, that behaves exactly like you, but hasn't
Speaker 1: been where you've been and done what you've done in
Speaker 1: what ways? Is that actually different from you? But didn't
Speaker 1: responds to this story by saying, you know, this thought
Speaker 1: experiment might not actually reveal all that much, And as
Speaker 1: a point of analogy, he asks us to consider the
Speaker 1: cow shark. So the cow shark again, is it's created
Speaker 1: when a normal cow gives birth to an animal that
Speaker 1: is adam, for Adam exactly like a shark that you
Speaker 1: would find swimming in the ocean. And he asks, now,
Speaker 1: is this newborn animal a cow or a shark? Oh,
Speaker 1: but also take on board that it has cow DNA
Speaker 1: in all of its cells. Now, a question like this,
Speaker 1: it might do something useful, like it might help us
Speaker 1: identify what features we think are important when we use
Speaker 1: words like cow and shark. But it really doesn't reveal
Speaker 1: anything about biology or about the world. You know, you're
Speaker 1: not going to get new information about reality from it.
Speaker 1: I think the best it could hope to do is
Speaker 1: help us figure out what we mean by words, and
Speaker 1: not to say there isn't value in that. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that seems to be about all that it does. Yes,
Speaker 1: so then it actually arrives at a claim. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: the utility of a thought experiment is inversely proportional to
Speaker 1: the size of its departures from reality. That's why he's saying.
Speaker 1: You know, Swampman just doesn't seem to be all that
Speaker 1: useful and understanding what what it means to be a
Speaker 1: physical object like a person, because something like that is
Speaker 1: never going to happen in reality. I also, and I
Speaker 1: felt this way before too. I also feel like swamp
Speaker 1: Man is just a little too complicated, Like just use
Speaker 1: Star Trek, just say Cat to Picard teleports down to
Speaker 1: planet X and then back up to the Enterprise. Like,
Speaker 1: is then what happened when he hangs out with his friends,
Speaker 1: what happens when he plays the flute, etcetera. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess it's the same problem either way. But to answer
Speaker 1: that question, you're using your intuitions, which are trained on
Speaker 1: a world where that never happens. So your intuitions just
Speaker 1: don't do much. They're there, they are not honed to
Speaker 1: solving this kind of problem. Your intuitions are much more
Speaker 1: useful in say, like combining premises about how things fall
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, because actually you're quite experienced with
Speaker 1: falling and you can combine that with observations about gravity
Speaker 1: and stuff. Now, I don't I don't think uh. Dennett's
Speaker 1: little proclamation there about the size of its departures from
Speaker 1: reality is then again like a solvent that will that
Speaker 1: will fix all the problems, because it can be very
Speaker 1: hard to measure the size of a departure from reality
Speaker 1: in any consistent way, Like does the Chinese room experiment
Speaker 1: depart more or less from reality than Einstein imagining a
Speaker 1: train traveling near the speed of light? Right? Because the
Speaker 1: Chinese room, you could do that, I mean, maybe somebody
Speaker 1: has done that. I mean, all you need is just
Speaker 1: a person in a room and an individual on the
Speaker 1: outside writing Chinese characters down right, I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: and also speaking and being able to being able to
Speaker 1: speak and write Chinese. Obviously you can't have just nonsense
Speaker 1: going in. But that's the only two components, and we
Speaker 1: could We could pull this off today if we needed to. Though,
Speaker 1: I would say that the problem with the Chinese room
Speaker 1: actually is not its departures from reality, as in, like,
Speaker 1: it's not plausible that you could make a room like
Speaker 1: this and put somebody in it, because you have a
Speaker 1: determined if it's illustrating anything about how a posed machine
Speaker 1: is thinking or not thinking. Right, the lack of its use,
Speaker 1: I think is it's in its departures from the thing
Speaker 1: it's supposed to represent. It's supposed to be an analogy
Speaker 1: for a computer, but it's actually not a good analogy
Speaker 1: for a computer because it's a room and a person
Speaker 1: and some pencil and paper. That's just like they're not
Speaker 1: the same thing. But with Swampman, yeah, they're all these
Speaker 1: fan hastic ideas in it that don't match up with reality.
Speaker 1: Whereas the ship of theseus is A is A is
Speaker 1: so brilliant and and as and as to the test
Speaker 1: of time because everybody can can associate with that, like
Speaker 1: the upkeep of physical structures and devices, the constant replacement
Speaker 1: of those things, the constant change to things that we
Speaker 1: think have autonomy, like like ourselves or or sports teams, clubs, buildings, etcetera. Well,
Speaker 1: the kind of chilling takeaway from from that distinction you
Speaker 1: make between the ship of Theseus and the ship of
Speaker 1: Theseus version as instantiated in Swampman is that maybe it
Speaker 1: makes more sense to have to answer questions about the
Speaker 1: meaning of identity as it refers to things than as
Speaker 1: it does refer to people. Yeah, in many ways, it
Speaker 1: is easier to think of people as things if you're
Speaker 1: just gonna doing these kind of computations. I also want
Speaker 1: to clarify that if you're more interested in the Chinese Room,
Speaker 1: they're like a billion other classes of responses to it
Speaker 1: you can go look up. Like one is that, you know,
Speaker 1: you should really maybe think about putting that computer inside
Speaker 1: a robot and then that would be more consistent with
Speaker 1: the type of experience that a human has. And so
Speaker 1: like what if you put the Chinese room in a
Speaker 1: thing that could go around and look with cameras outside
Speaker 1: and you know all that kind of So there are
Speaker 1: just tons of different responses. While I don't find it
Speaker 1: convincing on on what it tries to prove, I do
Speaker 1: think it's one of these things that is at least
Speaker 1: inadvertently useful for clarifying what people mean when they're talking
Speaker 1: about this subject, because usually if you start asking something
Speaker 1: like can a machine be conscious? You just don't even
Speaker 1: have a foothold to start reasoning. Just where do you go?
Speaker 1: It's just I don't know, yeah, because on one hand,
Speaker 1: it's hard enough to know what consciousness is for us
Speaker 1: and then to extrapolate what that would mean to a machine.
Speaker 1: There's just no like, how do you feel in the
Speaker 1: values on that equation? So I give it credit for that.
Speaker 1: It it I don't think it solves the question, but
Speaker 1: it does give you a first place to start climbing
Speaker 1: where you can even can employ what it would mean
Speaker 1: to solve this question. Now, to return back just the
Speaker 1: idea of what is the thought experiment? What is in
Speaker 1: a thought experiment? I do want to refer to just
Speaker 1: a few ideas that have been pointed out by Dan
Speaker 1: Falk and his Ian article Armshare science. Thought experiment played
Speaker 1: a crucial role in the history of science, but do
Speaker 1: they tell us anything about the real world? He points
Speaker 1: out that John Norton, a philosopher at the University of Pittsburgh,
Speaker 1: has argued that we shouldn't elevate thought experiments too highly.
Speaker 1: They are essentially quote elegantly crafted arguments that bring vivid
Speaker 1: pictures to the mind's eye. So the argument here is
Speaker 1: that the thought experiments, as we've been discussing, don't produce
Speaker 1: any new knowledge themselves, but rather constituted deduction of existing knowledge.
Speaker 1: And he maintains that all thought experiments are are simply
Speaker 1: restate can simply be restated. His arguments, like his challenge
Speaker 1: is sort of rough challenges. You can bring me a
Speaker 1: thought experiment, I'll just restate it as an argument, and
Speaker 1: that's all there is to it. Well, I think he's
Speaker 1: essentially correct that any good thought experiment can be restated
Speaker 1: as a deductive argument, you know, with the kind of
Speaker 1: the boring you know, logic class style logical premises. Right,
Speaker 1: but thought experiments are useful because they're easier to remember,
Speaker 1: they're easier to understand, and they give you pictures that
Speaker 1: you can wrap your mind around, right exactly. They change
Speaker 1: the way you think about something, and and that's ultimately
Speaker 1: I believe the point. The counterpoint that is made by
Speaker 1: James Robert Brown, a philoss for the University of Toronto,
Speaker 1: who points out there like Okay, yeah, Norton, you may
Speaker 1: be right, and he even says, I think Norton probably
Speaker 1: could restate all thought experiments as arguments, but we don't
Speaker 1: really work them out in our heads as arguments. We
Speaker 1: work them out in the form of these thought experiments.
Speaker 1: The cognitive process here because is much is much more
Speaker 1: intuitive and less analytical thought experiments. Therefore, they transformed the
Speaker 1: ad the analytical into the intuitive. What did we evolve
Speaker 1: thinking for? What was it useful for? I mean, can't
Speaker 1: be sure, but it really seems like what's likely is
Speaker 1: not that, say, our boreal primates were trying to work
Speaker 1: out analytical premises of an argument and say, you know,
Speaker 1: premise one is no. I mean they were imagining scenario.
Speaker 1: Is like thinking is useful for saying, Okay, if I
Speaker 1: went down on the ground right now, what would happen? Oh? Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. There was a leopard down there. So if
Speaker 1: leopard and me on the ground, that that's not good.
Speaker 1: Imagining scenarios is so much more natural and intuitive to
Speaker 1: us than than formal syllogistic arguments. Now. Falk also points
Speaker 1: out that there's a third possibility here. The third argument
Speaker 1: presented by cognitive scientists Nancy Nercessian of the Georgian Institute
Speaker 1: of Technology, As she argues that thought experiments are simply
Speaker 1: middle mental modeling. If Falk provides a quote for her
Speaker 1: from her in his article, quote, a mental model is
Speaker 1: basically a representation of the structure, function, or behavior some
Speaker 1: system you're interested in, some real world system that retains
Speaker 1: its sensory and motor properties they you get from perception.
Speaker 1: When we manipulate a mental model, she argues, we use
Speaker 1: quote some of the same kind of processing that they
Speaker 1: would use to manipulate things in the real world. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the idea here, it's it's the example that has often
Speaker 1: put forth is if someone says, hey, how many windows
Speaker 1: are there in your house? And then how unless you
Speaker 1: just carry around that raw data in your head, the
Speaker 1: way you solve that is probably to form a mental
Speaker 1: image of your house or room by room, form the
Speaker 1: mental images and then count the windows. But you had
Speaker 1: to have looked at your house already, right, Yeah, you
Speaker 1: can't just have just you know, uh, you know, experimental knowledge,
Speaker 1: like you have to have some real knowledge. You have
Speaker 1: walked through your house, you've seen your house, and then
Speaker 1: and that's what you're using to reconstruct this this model,
Speaker 1: on the other hand, it's worth pointing out that just
Speaker 1: counting the windows in your house is probably a quicker way,
Speaker 1: essentially falling back on the sign on scientific invest investigation
Speaker 1: is going to be the clear cut method of solving
Speaker 1: that particular question. Yes, especially if you care about getting
Speaker 1: the right answer right. Yes, Uh, those sometimes, I mean,
Speaker 1: I thought experiments can be very useful, especially in scenarios
Speaker 1: where you're not super concerned with precision, but you're more
Speaker 1: concerned with like the directionality of an answer. Like a
Speaker 1: thought experiment can be quite useful in uh, just getting
Speaker 1: a guess about whether a quantity in reality is going
Speaker 1: to increase or decrease without knowing exactly how much it's
Speaker 1: going to increase or decrease, you know what I mean. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And then of course it to go back to black
Speaker 1: holes for instance. Like that's an example of counting windows
Speaker 1: in a house you haven't been to yet, by by
Speaker 1: your by your understanding of everything surrounding whatever that house
Speaker 1: should be, so that there there are cases where that
Speaker 1: is the best method for trying to count the windows
Speaker 1: in a given house. Well, it's almost like knowing like
Speaker 1: what is the what is the tension and support strength
Speaker 1: of glass? Now trying to imagine how big of a
Speaker 1: glass house could exist before it falls over. You know,
Speaker 1: you don't have to build that house. If you already
Speaker 1: know some things about glass, you can run that experiment
Speaker 1: on paper or in your head. But anyway, what I
Speaker 1: think this all means is that we should build two
Speaker 1: glass towers, one bigger than the other, and drop them
Speaker 1: both but tie them together, and then shoot a cannon
Speaker 1: off of them, and then drop a bag of cheese
Speaker 1: from them. And so you basically you're you're arguing for
Speaker 1: a shared cinematic universe of thought experiments. I mean, I
Speaker 1: think most of them are in the public domain, So
Speaker 1: this would be a great This would be a great
Speaker 1: franchise for somebody to to pick up and run with.
Speaker 1: You know, at this point, I think a good number
Speaker 1: of the most famous thought experiments have at some point
Speaker 1: had like an indie movie made out of them. You know,
Speaker 1: there's got to be. I would be shocked if there
Speaker 1: is not a Chinese room movie. Well, I'm sure we'll
Speaker 1: hear about it from the listeners if there is one.
Speaker 1: Uh So, there you have it, thought experiments, hopefully a
Speaker 1: nice overview of what they are what they are not.
Speaker 1: Some different ways of classifying them some different examples, both
Speaker 1: from past episodes and some that we haven't really picked
Speaker 1: up and looked at here on the show. But hopefully
Speaker 1: this will this will be useful moving forward as we
Speaker 1: inevitably encounter other thought experiments in our consideration of various topics.
Speaker 1: What I hope this allows us to do is to
Speaker 1: be more confident in dismissing the ones they're not useful, right, yes, yea,
Speaker 1: to realize that they are not you know, they're not
Speaker 1: holy scripture set in stone, that that that they can
Speaker 1: be flawed. There in many cases they are flawed and uh,
Speaker 1: but then that's also part of their usefulness is that
Speaker 1: the flawed model can be presented and someone can say, well,
Speaker 1: let's look at this, look at let's change something in
Speaker 1: this model and see what happens. All right. Well, hey,
Speaker 1: if you you want to check out more episodes of
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your mind, you want to check out, say,
Speaker 1: for instance, the episodes we did on black holes, the
Speaker 1: Ship of theseus, uh, any of these these various topics
Speaker 1: we've referred to in this episode, Well you can find
Speaker 1: them all. It's stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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