Speaker 1: My welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to
Speaker 1: Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm
Speaker 1: Joe McCormick. Hey, Robert, what are we talking about today? Oh? Well,
Speaker 1: we're talking about thought experiments, the things that make some
Speaker 1: people really mad and make other people talk for way
Speaker 1: too long into time. Well, the thought experiments can have
Speaker 1: both effects on an individual at the same time. That's
Speaker 1: the beauty of a thought experiment. I think. So now,
Speaker 1: we've discussed individual thought experiments on the show many times before,
Speaker 1: but I think today we're gonna try to look at
Speaker 1: the idea of a thought experiment on the show. In
Speaker 1: the past, we've talked about specific thought experiments. We've talked
Speaker 1: about Stranger's Cat, We've talked about the Infinity Hotel, the
Speaker 1: Ship of Theseus. Other times it comes up kind of informally.
Speaker 1: We might say that a particular paper we're talking about
Speaker 1: is more kin to a thought experiment. And I know
Speaker 1: that I've I've talked before about how I think of
Speaker 1: certain short stories as being more thought experiments than you know,
Speaker 1: true narratives. I think of Library of Babbel, Library of
Speaker 1: Babble other works of a lot of the short stories
Speaker 1: of Jor Haluis Borges, as well as a number of
Speaker 1: the short stories of Philip K. Dick. They're a number
Speaker 1: of those where you know, it's not really important who's
Speaker 1: doing what exactly. You know you're not you're not really
Speaker 1: invested in a story per se, but the story is
Speaker 1: there to make you think, to turn some sort of
Speaker 1: weird idea on its head, the concept driven more than
Speaker 1: character driven exactly. Now, I have to say that one
Speaker 1: of my favorite comical treatments of thought experiments is the
Speaker 1: humorous essay Shreddnger's Cat by Steve Martin, collected in his
Speaker 1: book Pure Drivel. And there's a wonderful audio book of
Speaker 1: this as well, because Steve Martin himself is reading it.
Speaker 1: Always great when you can get one read by the author. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: Martin begins this particular essay by presenting the Streusenger's Cat
Speaker 1: thought experiment just pretty much as it is, and from
Speaker 1: there he proceeds through an increasingly ridiculous mix of thought
Speaker 1: experiments that he's made up in self, such as uh
Speaker 1: vitkin Stein's banana, Elvis's charcoal briquette, Chef boy r ds
Speaker 1: bungee cord, soakagaway is rain bonnet, Apollo's non apple, non strutal,
Speaker 1: Jim Dandy's bucket of goo, and the Finnman dilemma. Since
Speaker 1: it's one of the shorter ones, I'd like to read
Speaker 1: Steve Martin's description of the thought experiment. Elvis's charcoal briquette.
Speaker 1: A barbecue is cooking wieners in an air tight space.
Speaker 1: As the charcoal consumes the oxygen, the integrity of the
Speaker 1: briquette is weakened. An observer riding a roller coaster will
Speaker 1: become hungry for wieners, but will be thrown from the
Speaker 1: car when he stands up and cries, Elvis, get me
Speaker 1: a hot dog. Yeah, that's got the right mouth field.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's it's absurd, it's ridiculous and uh, but
Speaker 1: it's effective as comedy because it does have that feel
Speaker 1: of a thought of experiment. And and many of them
Speaker 1: are exactly this sort of absurd little logic problem a
Speaker 1: more physical scenario, but it's utilized not for laughs but
Speaker 1: to explore some sort of generally a complex topic. I
Speaker 1: thought this was going to be the seven thought experiments
Speaker 1: You can't say on TV that it does make me
Speaker 1: wonder what the most risk a thought experiments are. Oh,
Speaker 1: there are actually quite a few. Yeah all right, well
Speaker 1: let's we'll save that for the midnight show. So let's
Speaker 1: let's talk about thought experiments just definition wise, Like, what
Speaker 1: is the thought experiment? Well, guess, first, you could consult
Speaker 1: the idea of an experiment. An experiment is basically a test,
Speaker 1: like you have a condition and you you instantiate the
Speaker 1: condition and you see what happens. Yeah. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it's worth pointing out that to merely think
Speaker 1: about an experiment is not a thought experiment. So if
Speaker 1: you if you say, for instance, think about the nine
Speaker 1: social psychology Stanford prison experiment, that's not a thought experiment.
Speaker 1: Um why not? Well, because you are You're thinking about
Speaker 1: an actual experiment that has been carried out. I mean
Speaker 1: this is kind of obvious, right, but but still it
Speaker 1: it it's worth going through. Now if you if you
Speaker 1: think about an experiment you might conduct, say to see
Speaker 1: if movie goers who eat twizzlers are more likely to
Speaker 1: do to enjoy sci fi films and those who eat
Speaker 1: red vines. Well, that's not a thought experiment either. That's
Speaker 1: something you could conceivably do. That's like imagining an experiment
Speaker 1: you could carry out, but thinking about the experiment doesn't
Speaker 1: really reveal anything right now. Very often the experiment in
Speaker 1: a thought experiment is exactly not the sort of thing
Speaker 1: that could be carried out in real life for a
Speaker 1: number of reasons. Maybe it's catastrophically dangerous or in or involves,
Speaker 1: you know, in encountering some feature of the universe that
Speaker 1: is not readily it's accessible, that sort of thing. Very
Speaker 1: often thought experiments, as they apply to science, involved the
Speaker 1: the 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 go near
Speaker 1: the speed of light. We do not do not have
Speaker 1: such a thing. We're probably not gonna 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 cats, an example, like if it were
Speaker 1: a dog, it would probably still resonate, but in a
Speaker 1: slightly different way. But if it were just a lizard
Speaker 1: or a slug, yes, people would be far less compelled
Speaker 1: by the idea of Shreddinger's bug, but they would be
Speaker 1: far more upset by the idea of Shreddinger's child or something.
Speaker 1: So like if it's a cat, that's the bull's eye,
Speaker 1: that's right in the red zone. It's like interesting enough
Speaker 1: to be killing a cat that people are on board
Speaker 1: to to remember to pay attention, but it's not so
Speaker 1: troubling that you're turned off and you don't want to listen, right,
Speaker 1: And and then also the cat kind of makes it
Speaker 1: more palpable. Like if it was Shreddinger's um, let's say, basilisk,
Speaker 1: that would it would instantly sound a little more threatening somehow,
Speaker 1: How about Shreddinger's apparently conscious AI Yes, or uh, that's
Speaker 1: the that's next level. Yeah, that's that's pretty good. Now.
Speaker 1: Another important aspect of thought experiments is that it's something
Speaker 1: that should generally be visualized in the mind as this,
Speaker 1: as the thought experiment has rolled out, you you're picturing it. Uh.
Speaker 1: It's in doing this it makes a concept more digestible,
Speaker 1: or it explains a you know, fundamental paradox, etcetera. And uh,
Speaker 1: and and and this again. It has a lot in
Speaker 1: common 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 or 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, interesting 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 BC
Speaker 1: to b C, wrote on the Nature of Things suntura. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, and he has a fun little thought experiment
Speaker 1: he rolls out. So, um, Lucretius 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 not. We don't need to know
Speaker 1: his name. It's just a soldier. Yeah we could, we
Speaker 1: could call him hat I guess. But um, his original
Speaker 1: write up of it is a bit longer. This boiled down. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: march the soldier up to the edge of the universe,
Speaker 1: having 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. So the universe is not actually bounded there, right,
Speaker 1: because you just threw a spear beyond the edge. Now,
Speaker 1: if the spear bounces off the barrier, well then the
Speaker 1: wall itself is proof of something beyond your your your
Speaker 1: spear just bounced off of something. What is that something?
Speaker 1: A wall is a thing? Yeah, so it In looking
Speaker 1: at this, you can see that it illustrates a conceived
Speaker 1: version of reality and lays out an experiment. And of
Speaker 1: course it also illustrates one of the other features of thought.
Speaker 1: Experiments you can pick at them. So Lucretius may have
Speaker 1: presented this, as you know, as a real sentence stopping
Speaker 1: comment on the nature of the universe at the time.
Speaker 1: But certainly if you if you think back of even
Speaker 1: discussions that we've had on the show about infinities and
Speaker 1: different type to the infinities, and and some of the
Speaker 1: arguments for you know, for exactly how I finite universe
Speaker 1: would work, then you can see that his argument doesn't
Speaker 1: quite hold up to modern cosmology well as you've presented
Speaker 1: it here. This is actually a great example of how
Speaker 1: thought experiments can seem brilliant but actually produce flawed conclusions
Speaker 1: because they contain drum roll hidden assumptions. Here, I would
Speaker 1: say one fatal hidden assumption is that Lucretius takes on
Speaker 1: board without considering the geometry of a finite universe. Now again,
Speaker 1: I'm certainly not going to go and argue that space
Speaker 1: is finite. That's not my goal here, But my I
Speaker 1: would say there are ways in which space could be
Speaker 1: finite that Lucretius is overlooking with this example, because there
Speaker 1: are different ways you could imagine a finite universe. One
Speaker 1: is a sort of closed three D space with exterior
Speaker 1: walls like the inside of a box. And this is
Speaker 1: 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's 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 know,
Speaker 1: the idea of saying, well, hey, my soldier throws a
Speaker 1: spear at the edge of the universe and it keeps going,
Speaker 1: then your your argument is nonsense. It also kind of
Speaker 1: sounds like, oh, we had a really cold weather today.
Speaker 1: I guess there's no global warming. I guess there's no
Speaker 1: climate change. Using a far simpler model than the than
Speaker 1: 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 absurdity is in a single test case of
Speaker 1: the idea of a universe with walls on the outside
Speaker 1: of it, that I think that's a valid way to
Speaker 1: criticize the concept. Now, I do have to say at
Speaker 1: the same time, Lucretius is a little thought experiment here,
Speaker 1: even to modern readers it it still does something when
Speaker 1: you think about it like it does force you to
Speaker 1: think about the uh these ideas of the finite and
Speaker 1: the infinite. Uh So, just as like a simple thought
Speaker 1: experiment is kind of a logic puzzle, it still carries
Speaker 1: its own weight. Now, they're absolutely have been thought experiments
Speaker 1: that have been extremely useful and powerful in the history
Speaker 1: of the advancement of science, that have not just like
Speaker 1: made a clever seeming point, but have actually pushed science forward.
Speaker 1: And these happen a lot of time in the history
Speaker 1: of physics because physics experiments work best when you can
Speaker 1: tightly limit the variables. But in reality, it is very
Speaker 1: hard to tightly limit the variables on pure physics experiments. Uh.
Speaker 1: There there's often just a lot of like more more friction,
Speaker 1: more resistance, more whatever than you actually want. But here's
Speaker 1: an example. Let's say you go up on top of
Speaker 1: the Washington Monument and you drop to objects side by side.
Speaker 1: They're the same shape, but one is heavier than the other.
Speaker 1: Let's say one is a plastic DVD of Flubber and
Speaker 1: the other is the new Criterion edition of RoboCop two,
Speaker 1: which has a jewel case made out of lead. So
Speaker 1: which one hits the ground first? Well, ideally they're both
Speaker 1: going to hit the ground at the same time, right,
Speaker 1: And you know that because we live in a post
Speaker 1: Galileo age, the post Copernican post Galileo age. But this
Speaker 1: might have been kind of a shock to you if
Speaker 1: you lived in say, ancient Rome, or in medieval Europe,
Speaker 1: where it might well have been assumed that the heavier
Speaker 1: object would hit the ground first because heavier objects fall faster.
Speaker 1: For 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 act 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 sight. So first
Speaker 1: Salviati and Simplicio argue about experiments concerning cannonballs and bird
Speaker 1: shot and stuff. And Simplicio is not moved from the
Speaker 1: Aristotelian position that objects fall through a medium with a
Speaker 1: speed proportional to their mass. And so I've tried to
Speaker 1: reconstruct the next moment in the dialogue, but sort of
Speaker 1: rewritten 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 Wisel cowboy. All right, I'll give that
Speaker 1: a goin Now, look here, we don't even need to
Speaker 1: do any experiments to prove that Aristotle is wrong and
Speaker 1: a heavier body does not fall faster than a lighter one.
Speaker 1: Let's take Aristotle's principles as granted for a minute. What
Speaker 1: are those principles. Well, body falling in a fixed medium
Speaker 1: like air has a fixed velocity, and that's determined by
Speaker 1: its nature. And you can increase this speed unless you
Speaker 1: add momentum. And you can't decrease this speed unless you
Speaker 1: 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. Go okay, So by
Speaker 1: by tying the two stones together, the slower fall on
Speaker 1: pebble should reduce the speed at which the millstone falls,
Speaker 1: making its speed less than it would have been alone.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, when you tie them together,
Speaker 1: their combined masses greater than the millstone alone. So shouldn't
Speaker 1: they together fall even faster than either one individually? From
Speaker 1: your principles of motion, we are forced to conclude that
Speaker 1: by tying the two stones together, the falling speed of
Speaker 1: the millstone is both increased and decreased. Well, dang it,
Speaker 1: I am stumped, all right, So that that's that's pretty
Speaker 1: fun because it basically illustrates how he's created kind of
Speaker 1: like a little political cartoon right here, right right. And
Speaker 1: I 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 relati civity and had the character representing Einstein's
Speaker 1: point of view named like cletaus t dip Wad. But anyway,
Speaker 1: Karl 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 reduction reductio ad absurd um is one
Speaker 1: of the most powerful logical tools we have. It's when
Speaker 1: you combine premises that somebody holds to be true and
Speaker 1: you demonstrate that when they're taken together, they force you
Speaker 1: to conclude something absurd that cannot possibly be true, which
Speaker 1: means at least one of the premises, even though you
Speaker 1: believe them, actually cannot be right. And so here Galileo
Speaker 1: is basically using two premises. One is that the the
Speaker 1: idea that objects of different mass have different natural speeds
Speaker 1: at which they fall. And the other is that you
Speaker 1: can add the mass of two objects together to create
Speaker 1: a greater combined mass. And so he constructs a scenario
Speaker 1: when it's actually not implausible at all to show that,
Speaker 1: when taken together, these two premises implied something absurd and
Speaker 1: self contradictory. So one of the premises has got to
Speaker 1: be wrong. And since we accept the basic arithmetic of
Speaker 1: mass that you can add the mass of two objects
Speaker 1: together to create a greater combined mass, it showed that
Speaker 1: the idea of a fixed falling speed determined by an
Speaker 1: object's mass had to be wrong. So I would say
Speaker 1: this is absolutely a case where a thought experiment actually
Speaker 1: did reveal something useful about reality. Though of course it's
Speaker 1: it's helpful as well that you could go out and
Speaker 1: test this with physical objects later. You you know, you
Speaker 1: do so, even if there's some hidden assumption that's guming
Speaker 1: up the conclusions you're drawing from this thought experiment, you
Speaker 1: could do physical experiments that would sort you out later.
Speaker 1: All right, Well, on that note, let's take a break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we'll explore some more examples
Speaker 1: of thought experiments before we discuss a little bit of
Speaker 1: a bit more about what exactly that they are and
Speaker 1: how we might categorize them. Thank alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: Joe is a time for Jim Dandy's bucket of goose. No,
Speaker 1: let's do Newton's bag of cheese. Sounds good? Okay? So
Speaker 1: Galileo's rocks obviously are not the only famous imaginary falling
Speaker 1: objects to provoke advances in physics. Uh The seventeenth and
Speaker 1: eighteenth century English poly math Isaac Newton was also responsible
Speaker 1: for many famous thought experiments that illustrated his revolutionary ideas.
Speaker 1: Probably the most famous and enduring is what I'm gonna
Speaker 1: call ballistic mountain. So back in Newton's day and there
Speaker 1: was a lot of confusion about different types of motion
Speaker 1: and what explained the motion of objects in the heavens.
Speaker 1: A good example would be, let's say you drop a
Speaker 1: wool sack full of goat cheese from a tower. Which
Speaker 1: direction does it travel? Goes straight down right? You wouldn't
Speaker 1: want to be standing under that goat cheese. And at
Speaker 1: the same time, scholars recognize that the Earth was spherical
Speaker 1: or roughly spherical, as had been proved for many hundreds
Speaker 1: of years, and it almost seemed as if objects were
Speaker 1: being pulled straight down towards the center of the Earth,
Speaker 1: and the Earth seemed to pull all objects toward it
Speaker 1: at a constant rate, as Galileo had showed, regardless of
Speaker 1: the mass of that object. And you see this all
Speaker 1: the time, even if you throw an object horizontally. Let's
Speaker 1: say you are hurling a wool sack full of goat
Speaker 1: cheese at your enemy, the Royal astronomer John Flamsteed. If
Speaker 1: Flamsteed is too far away when you throw the sack,
Speaker 1: obviously the gravity is going to pull the sack down
Speaker 1: to the Earth before it hits him. Gravity always pulls down.
Speaker 1: But then contrast that with if you look up at
Speaker 1: the heavens at night, you will observe that the motion
Speaker 1: of the planet seems to be governed by another force entirely.
Speaker 1: Instead of falling straight into the Sun or into the Earth,
Speaker 1: the planet seemed to travel through the heaven in smooth,
Speaker 1: roughly circular elliptical orbits, just as the Moon seems to
Speaker 1: travel in a smooth elliptical track around the Earth. So
Speaker 1: how could the motion seen in the heavens be so
Speaker 1: different from the motion scene on Earth? Like was there
Speaker 1: a divine hand guiding how the planets traveled through the void.
Speaker 1: So Newton proposed a thought experiment in his Principia, and
Speaker 1: it went roughly like this, Robert, imagine, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: up on top of the tallest mountain on Earth, the
Speaker 1: Gigantic 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 sins, of
Speaker 1: which there were many, because he was a jerk, so
Speaker 1: work off those piece. So he climbs up to the
Speaker 1: top of the Mountain of Purgatory, oh, which I guess
Speaker 1: is earthly paradise, right. But but he gets up there
Speaker 1: and he brings a cannon with him. Oh that's that's.
Speaker 1: That's already. I feel like it's probably breaking some rules,
Speaker 1: but okay, yes, and it's in a salt on the
Speaker 1: heavens already. But it's an assault on the heavens in
Speaker 1: more ways than one, more way than one, more ways
Speaker 1: than one. I never know how to pluralize that correctly anyway,
Speaker 1: So let's say you got the cannon up at the
Speaker 1: top of the mountain. You shoot a cannon ball out
Speaker 1: parallel to the ground at a hundred kilometers per hour.
Speaker 1: What happens, Well, it travels in the familiar arc that
Speaker 1: any anybody who has used a firearm like that will recognize.
Speaker 1: So it goes horizontally at a hundred kilometers per hour
Speaker 1: while simultaneously falling towards the ground at the normal acceleration,
Speaker 1: and eventually it hits the ground with a thud. But
Speaker 1: let's say you pack more gunpowder into the cannon and
Speaker 1: shoot the ball out of the barrel faster, say two
Speaker 1: hundred kilometers per hour. What happens, Well, it makes an
Speaker 1: arc again, but the arc is a slightly different shape.
Speaker 1: It falls to the ground at the same rate as before,
Speaker 1: but this time it travels a lot farther horizontally before
Speaker 1: it hits the ground. Now, imagine you just keep packing
Speaker 1: more and more power into the cannon, so that the
Speaker 1: ball goes farther every time before it hits the ground.
Speaker 1: The rate at which the cannonball falls is going to
Speaker 1: always stay the same, but the horizontal speed and the
Speaker 1: horizontal distance covered keeps increasing. And then combine this with
Speaker 1: the idea that the Earth is a sphere, which they
Speaker 1: knew at the time of of Newton. This means that
Speaker 1: eventually you will shoot the cannonball at a speed where
Speaker 1: it travels so fast that it's falling arc is greater
Speaker 1: than the curve of the Earth. So it flies and
Speaker 1: it falls, but it never hits the ground. It travels
Speaker 1: around the Earth in a continuous circle. So the cannonball
Speaker 1: is still governed by the same two forces, gravity which
Speaker 1: wants to pull the cannonball towards the center of the
Speaker 1: Earth in inertia, which wants to keep the cannonball traveling
Speaker 1: in a straight line. But they these forces combine to
Speaker 1: cause the ball to just keep flying around the Earth
Speaker 1: in a circle in space. And Newton had a very
Speaker 1: famous illustration of this that that sort of helped make
Speaker 1: his point, where he showed arcs of of cannon balls
Speaker 1: falling off and becoming longer and longer until they just
Speaker 1: became a circle. And now the crucial extrapolation is this
Speaker 1: is what planets due to the Sun and what the
Speaker 1: Moon does to the Earth. So Newton had used nothing
Speaker 1: more than an imaginary scenario to demonstrate good reason for
Speaker 1: believing something shocking that the forces that govern the heavens
Speaker 1: and the forces that govern the movement of objects on
Speaker 1: the Earth like cannonballs or wool sacks full of cheese
Speaker 1: are exactly the same. This is the unification of terrestrial
Speaker 1: and celestial forces. And this this is a key principle
Speaker 1: in establishing the modern age of physics. And it's rather
Speaker 1: brilliant too. And then he took something that was there
Speaker 1: was so so much more relatable in order to explain,
Speaker 1: you know, the movement of the spheres. Yeah, exactly. And
Speaker 1: of course this is a case where a thought experiment,
Speaker 1: while revolutionary, was not enough to prove the case. Fortunately
Speaker 1: Newton had conducted ingenious real world experiments also, so in
Speaker 1: this case it was the use of a pendulum combined
Speaker 1: with astronomical observations to show that the Moon falls towards
Speaker 1: the Earth at about the same speed as objects dropped
Speaker 1: on Earth fall toward the ground, which is a funny
Speaker 1: thing to consider whether you're dropping a bag of cheese
Speaker 1: out of an airplane or watching the Moon fall toward
Speaker 1: the Earth. They followed about the same rate, but the
Speaker 1: Moon's competing inertia and position of course keep it in orbit,
Speaker 1: and there are of course powerful implications that followed from Newton.
Speaker 1: These could be put to use in rocketry, like ultimately
Speaker 1: we had to figure out the delta V required to
Speaker 1: achieve lower thorbit and to escape Earth's orbit entirely if
Speaker 1: we wanted to say, send probes to other planets. Uh
Speaker 1: And and by the way, I didn't make up the
Speaker 1: part about the sack of cheese. But Newton did actually
Speaker 1: have enemies. And just to tell one quick story, there
Speaker 1: was this astronomer named John Flamsteed. I mentioned him earlier,
Speaker 1: and Newton was pretty much a total jerk. Flamsteed was
Speaker 1: this English astronomer. He was the English Astronomer Royal during
Speaker 1: Newton's time, and he was working on catalog of objects
Speaker 1: in the heavens. And Newton wanted access to Flamsteed's catalog. Basically,
Speaker 1: he wanted data so he could use it to prove
Speaker 1: his theories. But Flamesteed wasn't done putting it together yet,
Speaker 1: believing it wasn't ready for publication. So Newton constantly harassed
Speaker 1: and bullied him to get this information. Eventually threw his
Speaker 1: weight around with the English Royalty to get Flamsteed's catalog
Speaker 1: published early before it was ready, which Flamsteed did not
Speaker 1: like at all. There's also a story that Newton, as
Speaker 1: the president of the Royal Society, went to the Royal
Speaker 1: Observatory to inspect Flamsteed's equipment and they got into a fight,
Speaker 1: and Flamesteed wrote that quote Newton ran himself into a
Speaker 1: great heat and very indecent passion, and he used knavish
Speaker 1: talk and called me all the ill names puppy, etcetera
Speaker 1: that he could think of. So like Newton's out there
Speaker 1: like screaming and other scientists calling them puppies, just thinking
Speaker 1: a real real ass of himself. Yeah, anyway, shows that
Speaker 1: even some of the smartest people ever can are not
Speaker 1: above you know, puppy calling. Well, I mean it makes sense.
Speaker 1: Wasn't new In a a more of a cat person?
Speaker 1: Didn't he uh oh for cats to move in and
Speaker 1: out of the chambers of his house. I didn't look
Speaker 1: up the usage history of that word, so I don't
Speaker 1: know exactly what it meant to call somebody a puppy
Speaker 1: and whatever year this was, but profanity scholars right in
Speaker 1: might a smart 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
Speaker 1: examples do you have for us? Well, just a few
Speaker 1: quicker ones in in physics, and of course one of
Speaker 1: my favorites is that people dreamed up the concept of
Speaker 1: a black hole as a mathematical thought experiment, long before
Speaker 1: any evidence of such a thing had ever been detected,
Speaker 1: Like we talked about this in our black Holes episode.
Speaker 1: But around seventeen eighty three and seventeen eighty four, the
Speaker 1: English natural philosophers John Michelle and Henry Cavendish dared to
Speaker 1: ask a bizarre question. So they knew that light itself
Speaker 1: had a speed, and they were armed with Newton's insights
Speaker 1: about gravity, inertia, orbits, and escape velocity, So they asked,
Speaker 1: what if there were a star so massive with with
Speaker 1: such a great gravitational attraction that escape velocity for this
Speaker 1: star was greater than the speed of light. In other words,
Speaker 1: a star so massive that even light could not escape it.
Speaker 1: And this was perhaps the earliest formulation of the concept
Speaker 1: of a black hole, which would later be developed by
Speaker 1: so many other important astrophysicist Karl Schwartz, Shield, Chander, Shaker,
Speaker 1: Oppenheimer and others. And and if you want more on that,
Speaker 1: we 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: don't encounter thought experiments to deal with things like morality, right,
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 as 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 whole 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 feel pain, But does it really understand what
Speaker 1: it means to feel pain? Uh? So? The American philosopher
Speaker 1: John Searle proposed a thought experiment to answer this question
Speaker 1: in the early nineteen eighties. I think it was first
Speaker 1: in the year nineteen eighty, and his work asked us
Speaker 1: to imagine the following scenario. You already to go there
Speaker 1: with me, okay, So imagine you are an English speaker
Speaker 1: 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, Carl 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: Carl 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 thing king you're a human by talking to them
Speaker 1: through text, and Searle says, it doesn't matter how convincingly
Speaker 1: the computer simulates being able to have a conversation in
Speaker 1: any language. It's still like the non Chinese speaker in
Speaker 1: the Chinese room. It can't really understand what it's doing.
Speaker 1: It's only blindly following instructions that create an illusion of
Speaker 1: understanding where true understanding is impossible. Now, there have been
Speaker 1: tons of responses to this scenario over the years, and
Speaker 1: I think we'll come back to this towards the end
Speaker 1: of the episode. But the idea is the thought experiment
Speaker 1: of imagining the person in the Chinese room leads you
Speaker 1: to new knowledge. It should lead you to the correct
Speaker 1: conclusion that it's impossible for a machine to understand something,
Speaker 1: or at least a machine interpreting formal instructions. Robert, I,
Speaker 1: I could almost detect by the way you're furrowing your
Speaker 1: brow that this this one's filling you with venom. Well,
Speaker 1: the Chinese room, Yeah, um no, I mean I love it.
Speaker 1: I keep I keep wanting to say something kind of
Speaker 1: snarky about like just the human experience itself being you know,
Speaker 1: like the Chinese room 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 is
Speaker 1: full in that even if it fails to prove what
Speaker 1: it sets out to prove, it could make common misunderstandings clear, right,
Speaker 1: does that make sense? YEA 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 roof, can be useful in the same
Speaker 1: way that introducing terminology to a discussion 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. Alright, 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? Thank alright, we're back. So
Speaker 1: in looking at the history of thought experiments, you know
Speaker 1: where you able to find the oldest one on a
Speaker 1: like a like a cave wall. Uh No. But I
Speaker 1: mean we kind of end up getting into a similar
Speaker 1: situation when we start trying to think about this, because
Speaker 1: certainly we know that thought experiments were employed by a
Speaker 1: pre Socratic philosopher, So this has been before the life
Speaker 1: of Socrates, before four seventy BC. And and thought experiments
Speaker 1: are 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. In the centuries to follow. The
Speaker 1: term itself is often attributed to one Ernst Mock who
Speaker 1: lived at eight thirty eight through nineteen sixteen. He was
Speaker 1: an Austrian physicist and philosopher. And they point this out
Speaker 1: because he used the term, let's see, if I get
Speaker 1: this right, gadoncan experimente uh. But it seems though that
Speaker 1: like it was already in use by the time he
Speaker 1: used it, and it may have derived from the Danish
Speaker 1: uh Tunka experiment. And then it turns out that GEORGA.
Speaker 1: Lichtenberg through seventeen ninety nine he discussed quote experiments with
Speaker 1: thoughts and ideas. So funny, like all of these are
Speaker 1: coming after the advent, you know, after Galileo, like Galileo
Speaker 1: and Newton, and people had already been using these, As
Speaker 1: we said, they weren't the first to use them, but
Speaker 1: they used them in really profoundly influential ways in real science. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like we're looking at three phases here.
Speaker 1: There's the phase where people are actually calling it a
Speaker 1: thought experiment, there's the phase where people are using them
Speaker 1: to great effect, and ultimately, I think if we if
Speaker 1: you go back further in time, you know, get lost
Speaker 1: in the mists of of of earlier history. I think
Speaker 1: it's fair to say that thought experiments are generally a
Speaker 1: more refined idea of something that we just do as humans,
Speaker 1: and internal simulation of of observed empirical data and processes.
Speaker 1: Trying to run an experiment in your mind given what
Speaker 1: you know, right, and you know, I can imagine this
Speaker 1: is kind of getting into the territory of our our
Speaker 1: other show Invention, which everyone can can learn about invention
Speaker 1: pod dot com. It's a podcast about inventions and where
Speaker 1: they come from. Subscribe now, subscribe now now, Uh, seriously,
Speaker 1: stop and go and subscribe. But but you know, you
Speaker 1: can imagine with any of these inventions. This is even
Speaker 1: some of the ancient ones that we've talked about, Like
Speaker 1: there is a thought experiment level that is that is
Speaker 1: in play. But I don't think it's a great stretch
Speaker 1: to imagine some of these ancient inventors and inventive minds
Speaker 1: essentially engaging and thought experiments. Oh well, yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that's an interesting way of putting it that you have
Speaker 1: to sort of before you create a tool, you have
Speaker 1: to imagine what would happen if you use something of
Speaker 1: a certain shape in a certain way without having seen
Speaker 1: something like that done before. Right. But then again, of
Speaker 1: course we go back to what we said earlier about
Speaker 1: how just envisioning an experiment you could carry out is
Speaker 1: not in and of itself a thought experiment, but it's
Speaker 1: still kind of the roots of the thought experiment, right, Um,
Speaker 1: in terms of thinking about like, well, what are some
Speaker 1: taxonomies we can refer to for thought experiments? Uh, they're
Speaker 1: basically various ways you could categorize thought experiments, but there's
Speaker 1: not really a fully agreed upon standards so much. Obviously
Speaker 1: you can categorize them by the discipline that they stem from.
Speaker 1: So here's a bunch of physics thought experiments. Here's some
Speaker 1: quantum physics thought experiments. Here's some some economic thought experiments,
Speaker 1: so psychological thought experiments. You know, we could also break
Speaker 1: them up based on their features, I guess, but I'm
Speaker 1: not surely really sure that does any good, because again,
Speaker 1: if it's a cat or a dog or basilisk, it
Speaker 1: doesn't matter. That's just some some flavoring that's added to
Speaker 1: the little story of the thought experiment. Well, I'm already
Speaker 1: seeing in the examples we've discussed so far, one clear
Speaker 1: distinction that emerges, which is the thought experiment that shows
Speaker 1: the absurdity or contradictions inherent in some pre existing idea,
Speaker 1: versus the thought experiment that demonstrates a new conclusion or
Speaker 1: show reveals new knowledge based on premises you already accept. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's that's where we come back to Karl Popper,
Speaker 1: who we talked about briefly earlier. Karl Popper was an
Speaker 1: Austrian British philosopher and professor who lived nineteen o two
Speaker 1: through and he this is this is basically how he
Speaker 1: divided up thought experiments. He said, they're basically three types heuristic,
Speaker 1: in other words, to illustrate a theory. Okay, so this
Speaker 1: would be the kind that just helps clarify what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, gives people something to picture. And you would
Speaker 1: argue that maybe I don't know what, I'm not quite
Speaker 1: sure how Newton's canon would fit in there. Was that
Speaker 1: just to illustrate or did he actually prove something using
Speaker 1: the image of the canon? Well, you could also argue
Speaker 1: that it falls into the next category, right critical against
Speaker 1: the theory, because he's kind of playing with the preconceived
Speaker 1: notions about how these things would work. Right Well, I
Speaker 1: guess yeah. It does challenge the idea that they're different
Speaker 1: mechanics at operation in the heavens than there are on
Speaker 1: the earth. And now the Carl Popper's third category then
Speaker 1: is apologetic in favor of a theory. Okay, so you've
Speaker 1: got the kind that illustrates, the kind that challenges, and
Speaker 1: the kind that argues in favor of Now, on a
Speaker 1: similar note, you have Canadian philosopher of science James Robert
Speaker 1: 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, there's of the
Speaker 1: broad categories, okay, and then there are some some subtypes
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: extract late to new knowledge, but it's much easier to
Speaker 1: use them in a way that's reasonable to demonstrate a
Speaker 1: contradiction between existing pieces of knowledge or principles that the
Speaker 1: extended version of the reductive ad absurdom. These are I
Speaker 1: think some of the most powerful uses of thought experiments
Speaker 1: when they when they have the power to clearly show
Speaker 1: that things that you already believe or accept or are
Speaker 1: you know, bound to accept, are in fact self contradictory.
Speaker 1: All right, so let's let's get down to one of
Speaker 1: the 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
Speaker 1: science is is one of the criticisms is often thrown
Speaker 1: out regarding thought experiments. But of course thought experi erments
Speaker 1: have been really useful in the history of science, as
Speaker 1: we've talked about before, a lot of important advances in
Speaker 1: the history of science have been before they were confirmed
Speaker 1: in fact by physical experiments, were predicted by thought experiments.
Speaker 1: That this is a very common feature, especially in physics.
Speaker 1: I mean you could even say in fact that there
Speaker 1: there are whole realms of physics today. It's probably what
Speaker 1: you would call theoretical physics. You often hear this division
Speaker 1: of theoretical physics, physics and experimental physics. Uh, there, there's
Speaker 1: all this stuff in theoretical physics right now that we
Speaker 1: don't have a way of testing with physical experiments yet.
Speaker 1: And you can, you can kind of try to make
Speaker 1: your arguments one way or another stronger about string theory
Speaker 1: or something like that, but it just we we don't
Speaker 1: have a test for it yet. So you could say
Speaker 1: that all of that is in a way a type
Speaker 1: of mathematically elegant thought experiment. But but if you go
Speaker 1: back and look at you know, Newton and Galileo and
Speaker 1: all this, and certainly Einstein, there's no denying that thought
Speaker 1: ex periments have been extremely useful and productive in the
Speaker 1: history of physics. But thought experiments can sometimes also, as
Speaker 1: we've acknowledged, be confusing and misleading, even though there are
Speaker 1: other times illuminating. A favorite of ours on here is,
Speaker 1: of course Daniel Dennett. You know, he likes to highlight
Speaker 1: that the different kinds of thought experiments that try to
Speaker 1: leverage our intuitions into new discoveries simply by tightly controlling
Speaker 1: the variables of an imagined scenario. And some of the
Speaker 1: most famous thought experiments in history, actually, I think maybe
Speaker 1: confuse more than they illuminate. I don't want to put
Speaker 1: words in his mouth, but I think Dinnett would say
Speaker 1: this about Donald Davidson's swamp Man, which we discussed in
Speaker 1: our ship Thesist episode, or Searle's Chinese Room, which maybe
Speaker 1: we should come back to now. So we explain searles
Speaker 1: Chinese Room earlier, with the person exchanging the symbols in
Speaker 1: the room, and the question of does the person in
Speaker 1: the room who doesn't speak Chinese but can simulate perfect
Speaker 1: conversational output in Chinese by following this instruction manual, does
Speaker 1: that person really understand Chinese? And a lot of people
Speaker 1: have thought, yeah, this is a powerful disproof of the
Speaker 1: 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 Crle 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 like
Speaker 1: paper could think, or a book of instructions could think,
Speaker 1: but but like I think, like he's the person who
Speaker 1: put this system together. You know, you are the one
Speaker 1: who put a human inside a room as the metaphor
Speaker 1: for a computer. Computers do not actually have a tiny
Speaker 1: human inside them that's performing operations with opportunities to understand
Speaker 1: or not understand. Likewise, there is not actually a little
Speaker 1: human sitting inside your brain with the job of understanding
Speaker 1: or not understanding inputs and outputs. Your brain is a
Speaker 1: system in many ways. You might say that system of
Speaker 1: your brain that produces your mind is more comparable to
Speaker 1: the 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 that,
Speaker 1: at the very least a system of information processing but
Speaker 1: also story inputs and outputs all working together. There's not
Speaker 1: there's no evidence of a pilot inside who does all
Speaker 1: of the final understanding. Right. That's rights as simple as
Speaker 1: it would be to imagine that, you know, because it
Speaker 1: would reduce whatever we're trying to figure out, would reduce
Speaker 1: it to a person would get back into that that
Speaker 1: that kind of you know, neolithic mindset. And so I
Speaker 1: think this now, I certainly don't want to say that
Speaker 1: that I'm not like casting expersions on John Searle. I'm
Speaker 1: sure he is a very brilliant man, much smarter than me.
Speaker 1: And there's been a lot more you know, complex back
Speaker 1: and forth on this. But just to somebody who's right
Speaker 1: about this a good bit, it seems to me like
Speaker 1: this is one of those thought experiments that needlessly turns
Speaker 1: up confusion just by bringing in a lot of unnecessary
Speaker 1: assumptions and the connotations of the imagery you use in
Speaker 1: the thing, like we've got a person inside a room
Speaker 1: that that's making you think of analogies to a person
Speaker 1: sitting inside the computer or an observer inside the observer
Speaker 1: in the brain right now. I I do take the
Speaker 1: problem of consciousness seriously. I'm not one of those people
Speaker 1: who you know, would hand awave and say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: consciousness is easy to explain, it's just a you know,
Speaker 1: systems theory or whatever. But I don't think the Chinese
Speaker 1: room proves machines can't think or understand, or have intentional
Speaker 1: or meaningful internal representations or be conscious. I think that's
Speaker 1: still an open question into my mind. The Chinese room
Speaker 1: experiment is one of these thought experiments that creates a
Speaker 1: lot of confusion by the hidden assumptions it imports with
Speaker 1: its central imagery. I don't know, am I being unfair? No?
Speaker 1: I think you're being being very fair. I mean again,
Speaker 1: I come back to um to certainly like political cartoons
Speaker 1: as as a reference, you know, not that not to
Speaker 1: reduce the Chinese Room to something so you know, ultimately
Speaker 1: kind of base. But there is a boiling down of
Speaker 1: of a process. There's a boiling down of a of
Speaker 1: a problem that takes place in a thought experiment like this,
Speaker 1: and then you do have to ask, well, in reducing
Speaker 1: it to this model, what of the necessary complexity is
Speaker 1: lost that is necessary to understanding 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
Speaker 1: in that takes in symbols and puts out symbols, then
Speaker 1: you're basically not really changing much. You're just saying, well,
Speaker 1: it's 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: which is the title of one of his books, Intuition Pumps, Uh,
Speaker 1: dinn It writes, quote, Intuition pumps are cunningly designed to
Speaker 1: focus the reader's attention on the important features and to
Speaker 1: deflect the reader from bogging down in hard to follow details.
Speaker 1: There's nothing wrong with this in principle. Indeed, one of
Speaker 1: philosophy's highest callings is finding ways of helping people see
Speaker 1: the forest and not just the trees. But intuition pumps
Speaker 1: are often abused, though seldom deliberately. Of course, dann It
Speaker 1: himself has has played with thought experiments before. Absolutely, I'm
Speaker 1: instantly reminded of the it was almost kind of a
Speaker 1: little short story he wrote about those A robot with
Speaker 1: a human brain. Wonderful. Yes, the where am I? I
Speaker 1: think it was called? So dan It is as he says,
Speaker 1: they're certainly not opposed to thought experiments, but he uh,
Speaker 1: he points out, I think quite correctly that sometimes they
Speaker 1: actually confuse more than they illuminate. Whether that's true of
Speaker 1: the ones he himself is put together, it's it's hard
Speaker 1: to say. I mean a lot of times. The benefits
Speaker 1: of these physics thought experiments, as we've been saying, is
Speaker 1: you can eventually go out and test and see whether
Speaker 1: they were on the right track or whether they were
Speaker 1: 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 because it's essentially swamp thing from
Speaker 1: the comic book, right, Yeah, So this was an example
Speaker 1: of you know, Dinnett explaining how intuition pumps can go wrong.
Speaker 1: And again, intuition pumps are just thought experiments that that
Speaker 1: rely on our intuitions that don't like take specific data
Speaker 1: on board. Really, I'll try to do very very quick.
Speaker 1: The example was this guy named Donald Davidson. He was
Speaker 1: a philosopher. So he said, assume lightning strikes me while
Speaker 1: I'm out walking in the swamp, and it evaporates my
Speaker 1: body and I'm just gone. And then meanwhile, it also
Speaker 1: strikes a tree next door, and it rearranges that tree
Speaker 1: into an exact adom for Adam copy of me with
Speaker 1: all my memories, and he calls this creature swamp Man.
Speaker 1: And so he asks, is that copy really me? Davidson says,
Speaker 1: you know, is it really friends with my friends even
Speaker 1: though it has never met them before? Does it really
Speaker 1: know what a banana tastes like even though it has
Speaker 1: never tasted or even touched one? This was offered, I think,
Speaker 1: to interrogate the question of how the history of an
Speaker 1: object is related to the identity of that object. Is
Speaker 1: a thing that is an exact copy of you, that
Speaker 1: behaves exactly like you, but hasn't been where you've been
Speaker 1: and done what you've done in what ways? Is that
Speaker 1: actually different from you? But didn't responds to this story
Speaker 1: by saying, you know, this thought experiment might not actually
Speaker 1: reveal all that much. And as a point of analogy,
Speaker 1: he asks us to consider the cow shark. So the
Speaker 1: cow shark again, is it's created when a normal cow
Speaker 1: gives birth to an animal that is adam, For Adam
Speaker 1: exactly like a shark that you would find swimming in
Speaker 1: the ocean. And he asks, now, is this newborn animal
Speaker 1: a cow or a shark? Oh, but also take on
Speaker 1: board that it has cow DNA in all of its cells.
Speaker 1: Now a question like this, it might do something useful,
Speaker 1: like it might help us identify what features we think
Speaker 1: are important when we use words like cow and shark,
Speaker 1: But it really doesn't reveal anything about biology or about
Speaker 1: the world. You know, you're not going to get new
Speaker 1: information about reality from it. I think the best it
Speaker 1: could hope to do is help us figure out what
Speaker 1: we mean by words, and not to say there isn't
Speaker 1: value in that. But yeah, that seems to be about
Speaker 1: all that it does. Yes, so then it actually arrives
Speaker 1: at a claim. He says, quote, the utility of a
Speaker 1: thought experiment is inversely proportional to the size of its
Speaker 1: departures from reality. That's why he's saying. You know, Swampman
Speaker 1: just doesn't seem to be all that useful and understanding
Speaker 1: what it what it means to be a physical object
Speaker 1: like a person, because something like that is never going
Speaker 1: to happen in reality. I also, and I felt this
Speaker 1: way before too. I also feel like swamp Man is
Speaker 1: just a little too complicated, Like just use Star Trek.
Speaker 1: Just say Cat to Picard teleports down to Planet X
Speaker 1: and then back up to the Enterprise, Like is then
Speaker 1: what happens when he hangs out with his friends, what
Speaker 1: happens when he plays the flute, etcetera. Well, I guess
Speaker 1: it's the same problem either way. But to answer that question,
Speaker 1: you're using your intuitions, which are trained on a world
Speaker 1: where that never happens. So your intuitions just don't do much.
Speaker 1: They're there, They are not honed to solving this kind
Speaker 1: of problem. Your intuitions are much more useful in say,
Speaker 1: like combining premises about how things fall and stuff like that, right,
Speaker 1: because actually you're quite experienced with falling, and you can
Speaker 1: combine that with observations about gravity and stuff. Now, I
Speaker 1: don't I don't think uh. Dennett's little proclamation there about
Speaker 1: the size of its departures from reality is then again
Speaker 1: like a solvent that will that will fix all the problems,
Speaker 1: because it can be very hard to measure the size
Speaker 1: of a departure from reality in the consistent way, Like
Speaker 1: does the Chinese room experiment depart more or less from
Speaker 1: reality than Einstein imagining a train traveling near the speed
Speaker 1: of light? Right? Because the Chinese room you could do that,
Speaker 1: I mean, maybe somebody has done that. I mean, all
Speaker 1: you need is just a person in a room and
Speaker 1: an individual on the outside writing Chinese characters down right,
Speaker 1: I mean you know, and also speaking and being able
Speaker 1: to being able to speak and write Chinese. Obviously you
Speaker 1: can't have just nonsense going in, but that are the
Speaker 1: only two components, and we could we could pull this
Speaker 1: off today if we needed to. Though, I would say
Speaker 1: that the problem with the Chinese room actually is not
Speaker 1: its departures from reality, as in, like, it's not plausible
Speaker 1: that you could make a room like this and put
Speaker 1: somebody in it because you have a determined if it's
Speaker 1: illustrating anything about how a proposed machine is thinking or
Speaker 1: not thinking, right, the lack of its use, I think
Speaker 1: is it's in its departures from the thing it's supposed
Speaker 1: to represent. It's supposed to be an analogy for a computer,
Speaker 1: but it's actually not a good analogy for a computer,
Speaker 1: because it's a room and a person and some pencil
Speaker 1: and paper that just like they're not the same thing.
Speaker 1: But with Swampman, Yeah, they're all these fantastic ideas in
Speaker 1: it that don't match up with reality. Whereas the ship
Speaker 1: of theseus is a is A is so brilliant and
Speaker 1: and as and as to the test of time, because
Speaker 1: everybody can can associate with that, like the upkeep of
Speaker 1: physical structures and devices, the constant replacement of those things,
Speaker 1: the constant change to things that we think have autonomy,
Speaker 1: like like ourselves or or sports teams, clubs, buildings, etcetera. Well,
Speaker 1: a 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 doing these kind of computations. I also want to
Speaker 1: 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: You there's just no like, how do you feel in
Speaker 1: the values on that equation? So I give it credit
Speaker 1: for that. It it I don't think it's all us
Speaker 1: the question, but it does give you a first place
Speaker 1: to start climbing where you can even contemplate what it
Speaker 1: would mean to solve this question. Now, to return back
Speaker 1: just the idea of what is the thought experiment? What
Speaker 1: is an a thought experiment? I do want to refer
Speaker 1: to just a few ideas that have been pointed out
Speaker 1: by Dan Falk and his Ian article Armchair science. Thought
Speaker 1: experiment played a crucial role in the history of science,
Speaker 1: But do they tell us anything about the real world?
Speaker 1: He points out that John Norton, a philosopher at the
Speaker 1: University of Pittsburgh, has argued that we shouldn't elevate thought
Speaker 1: experiments too highly. They are essentially quote elegantly crafted arguments
Speaker 1: that bring vivid pictures to the mind's eye. So the
Speaker 1: argument here is that the thought experiments, as we've been discussing,
Speaker 1: don't produce any new knowledge themselves, but rather constituted deduction
Speaker 1: of existing knowledge. And he maintains that all thought experiments
Speaker 1: are are simply restate, can simply be restated. His arguments,
Speaker 1: like his challenge, his sort of rough challenges, you can
Speaker 1: bring me a thought experiment, I'll just restate it as argument,
Speaker 1: and that's all there is to it. Well, I think
Speaker 1: he's essentially correct that any good thought experiment can be
Speaker 1: restated as a deductive argument, you know, with the kind
Speaker 1: of 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 philoso for the University of Toronto,
Speaker 1: who points out that 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 use full four? I mean,
Speaker 1: can't be sure, but it really seems like what's likely
Speaker 1: is not that, say, our boreal primates were trying to
Speaker 1: work out analytical premises of an argument and say, you know,
Speaker 1: premise one is no. I mean, they were imagining scenarios,
Speaker 1: like thinking is useful for saying, Okay, if I went
Speaker 1: 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 Nurcessian 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 of
Speaker 1: some system. You're interested in, some real world system that
Speaker 1: retains its sensory and motor properties that 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 you
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
Speaker 1: knowledge like you have to have some real knowledge you
Speaker 1: have walked through your house, you've seen your house, and
Speaker 1: then 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
Speaker 1: way essentially falling back on the sign on sign of
Speaker 1: an invest investigation is going to be the clearcut method
Speaker 1: of solving that particular question. Yes, especially if you care
Speaker 1: about getting the right answer right. Yes, Uh, those sometimes,
Speaker 1: I mean, I thought experiments can be very useful, especially
Speaker 1: in scenarios where you're not super concerned with precision, but
Speaker 1: you're more concerned with like the directionality of an answer.
Speaker 1: Like a thought experiment can be quite useful in uh,
Speaker 1: just getting a guess about whether a quantity in reality
Speaker 1: is going to increase or decrease without knowing exactly how
Speaker 1: much it's going to increase or decrease, you know what
Speaker 1: I mean. Yeah, And then of course it to go
Speaker 1: back to black holes for instance. Like that's an example
Speaker 1: of counting windows in a house you haven't been to yet,
Speaker 1: by by your by your understanding of everything surrounding whatever
Speaker 1: that house should be, so that there there are cases
Speaker 1: where that is the best method for trying to count
Speaker 1: the windows in a given house. Well, it's almost like knowing,
Speaker 1: like what is the what is the tension and support
Speaker 1: strength of glass? Now trying to imagine how big of
Speaker 1: a 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 basically you're you're arguing for a shared
Speaker 1: cinematic universe of thought experiments. I mean, I think most
Speaker 1: of them are in the public domain, So this would
Speaker 1: be a great This would be a great franchise for
Speaker 1: somebody to to pick up and run with. You know,
Speaker 1: at this point, I think a good number of the
Speaker 1: most famous thought experiments have at some point had like
Speaker 1: an indie movie made out of them. You know, there's
Speaker 1: got to be I would be shocked if there is
Speaker 1: not a Chinese room movie. Well, I'm sure we'll we'll
Speaker 1: hear about it from listeners if there is one. Uh.
Speaker 1: So there you have it. Thought experiments. Uh, 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. Yes,
Speaker 1: you have to realize that they are not. You know,
Speaker 1: they're not holy scripture set in stone, that that that
Speaker 1: they can be flawed. There in many cases they are flawed.
Speaker 1: And uh, but then that's also part of their usefulness
Speaker 1: is that the flawed model can be presented and someone
Speaker 1: can say, well, let's look at this, look at let's
Speaker 1: change something in 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: were heard too in this episode, Well, you can find
Speaker 1: them all. It's stuff to blow your Mind dot com.
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