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Thought experiments
rivercane
Veteran
Anyone else enjoy thought experiments? From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_experiment:
A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment (from German) considers some hypothesis, theory,[1] or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. Given the structure of the experiment, it may or may not be possible to actually perform it, and, in the case that it is possible for it to be performed, there need be no intention of any kind to actually perform the experiment in question. The common goal of a thought experiment is to explore the potential consequences of the principle in question.
Famous examples of thought experiments include Schrödinger's cat, illustrating quantum indeterminacy through the manipulation of a perfectly sealed environment and a tiny bit of radioactive substance, and Maxwell's demon, which attempts to demonstrate the ability of a hypothetical finite being to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
I find that they can be a good bridge between the non-duality of Zen koans and the rationality and empiricism of science in that they can help the Western mind go beyond language. Many contain profound implications on the nature of consciousness. Here are a couple of my favorites.
Chinese room thought experiment
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room:
If you can carry on an intelligent conversation with an unknown partner, does this imply your statements are understood?
Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that he or she is talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.
The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese?[6][b] Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".[c]
Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese,"[9] he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
Searle argues that without "understanding" (or "intentionality"), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking" and since it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word. Therefore he concludes that "strong AI" is false.
Mary's Room thought experiment
From http://www.philosophy-index.com/jackson/marys-room:
In philosophy of mind, Mary’s Room is a thought experiment meant to demonstrate the non-physical nature of mental states. It is an example meant to highlight the knowledge argument against physicalism.
The thought experiment is as follows: Mary lives her entire life in a room devoid of colour—she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, though she is capable of it. Through black-and-white books and other media, she is educated on neuroscience to the point where she becomes an expert on the subject. Mary learns everything there is to know about the perception of colour in the brain, as well as the physical facts about how light works in order to create the different colour wavelengths. It can be said that Mary is aware of all physical facts about colour and colour perception.
After Mary’s studies on colour perception in the brain are complete, she exits the room and experiences, for the very first time, direct colour perception. She sees the colour red for the very first time, and learns something new about it — namely, what red looks like.
Jackson concluded that if physicalism is true, Mary ought to have gained total knowledge about colour perception by examining the physical world. But since there is something she learns when she leaves the room, then physicalism must be false. As Jackson explains:
A thought experiment or Gedankenexperiment (from German) considers some hypothesis, theory,[1] or principle for the purpose of thinking through its consequences. Given the structure of the experiment, it may or may not be possible to actually perform it, and, in the case that it is possible for it to be performed, there need be no intention of any kind to actually perform the experiment in question. The common goal of a thought experiment is to explore the potential consequences of the principle in question.
Famous examples of thought experiments include Schrödinger's cat, illustrating quantum indeterminacy through the manipulation of a perfectly sealed environment and a tiny bit of radioactive substance, and Maxwell's demon, which attempts to demonstrate the ability of a hypothetical finite being to violate the second law of thermodynamics.
I find that they can be a good bridge between the non-duality of Zen koans and the rationality and empiricism of science in that they can help the Western mind go beyond language. Many contain profound implications on the nature of consciousness. Here are a couple of my favorites.
Chinese room thought experiment
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room:
If you can carry on an intelligent conversation with an unknown partner, does this imply your statements are understood?
Searle's thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that he or she is talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.
The question Searle wants to answer is this: does the machine literally "understand" Chinese? Or is it merely simulating the ability to understand Chinese?[6][b] Searle calls the first position "strong AI" and the latter "weak AI".[c]
Searle then supposes that he is in a closed room and has a book with an English version of the computer program, along with sufficient paper, pencils, erasers, and filing cabinets. Searle could receive Chinese characters through a slot in the door, process them according to the program's instructions, and produce Chinese characters as output. If the computer had passed the Turing test this way, it follows, says Searle, that he would do so as well, simply by running the program manually.
Searle asserts that there is no essential difference between the roles of the computer and himself in the experiment. Each simply follows a program, step-by-step, producing a behavior which is then interpreted as demonstrating intelligent conversation. However, Searle would not be able to understand the conversation. ("I don't speak a word of Chinese,"[9] he points out.) Therefore, he argues, it follows that the computer would not be able to understand the conversation either.
Searle argues that without "understanding" (or "intentionality"), we cannot describe what the machine is doing as "thinking" and since it does not think, it does not have a "mind" in anything like the normal sense of the word. Therefore he concludes that "strong AI" is false.
Mary's Room thought experiment
From http://www.philosophy-index.com/jackson/marys-room:
In philosophy of mind, Mary’s Room is a thought experiment meant to demonstrate the non-physical nature of mental states. It is an example meant to highlight the knowledge argument against physicalism.
The thought experiment is as follows: Mary lives her entire life in a room devoid of colour—she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, though she is capable of it. Through black-and-white books and other media, she is educated on neuroscience to the point where she becomes an expert on the subject. Mary learns everything there is to know about the perception of colour in the brain, as well as the physical facts about how light works in order to create the different colour wavelengths. It can be said that Mary is aware of all physical facts about colour and colour perception.
After Mary’s studies on colour perception in the brain are complete, she exits the room and experiences, for the very first time, direct colour perception. She sees the colour red for the very first time, and learns something new about it — namely, what red looks like.
Jackson concluded that if physicalism is true, Mary ought to have gained total knowledge about colour perception by examining the physical world. But since there is something she learns when she leaves the room, then physicalism must be false. As Jackson explains:
It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.
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Comments
I was going to post Mary's room before I saw that you had already done so.
Imagine that we are viewing things and events happening on Earth from a distant planet. We know that light takes time to travel and scientists have informed us that some stars are only detected long after the original stars have died out. If we are not aware of this fact, we would think that those stars are still there. Suppose the same thing happened to Earth.
So we see all the events taking place on Earth, the wars, famines, births, deaths, marriages, the World Cup, etc. Even the trees, mountains, lakes etc appear real and substantial. But the “reality” is all these things that we know to be true from seeing and hearing are an illusion. The Earth is gone but we remain convinced that this is not so. We see our families and friends doing their things. We have moments of joy, happiness, anger and sadness, getting involved in things. Everyone standing where we are will see exactly the same thing.
But in reality they don’t exist anymore!
If the scientists have not pointed out that we are only seeing the play of light and sounds in our consciousness, we would believe what our senses tell us. For some, even the scientific explanations are not enough to break our illusion.
Our senses deceive us into believing that the world and everything in it truly exist. There is nothing we can hold on to as real. All that we can perceive can only come through our senses. There is a time lag between contact of our retina and form, eardrums and vibrations and the actual process of seeing or hearing. Everything that we see or hear no longer exist. There is nothing that we can hold on to as permanent in such a world.
The world of our senses is neither existent or nonexistent but is dependent on the activity of our senses. Therefore is no 'the world' besides these ongoing activities.
In this experiment what is real becomes unreal. What we “know” to be substantial and permanent is in fact a conjuror’s trick.
The actual process of seeing or hearing takes place in microseconds between for example the light travelling from an object to reach the retina and eventually registering in the brain as visual consciousness. But the underlying principle is similar.
The past is over, the future is yet to come. Even the now doesn't truly exist.
For the objects for sights, sounds, smells, taste and sensations are no longer there by the time they register in our consciousness. They have already slipped away.
Yea, there's something about Mary's room @person. I mean, it seems obvious that she would gain knowledge by being able to see color for the first time, but according to Physicalism there should be no new knowledge to gain and we still can't quite define exactly what that is. Kind of like music or art.
Good point @pegembara and very interesting post.
Is this not the case? Perhaps I'm missing something.
What is it that she has gained by seeing color? I think everyone would agree she has gained something, but what is it exactly? It seems to me it can't be defined and this mysterious something is what disproves purely materialist theory.
I guess my point is that sometimes when the rubber hits the road, theory meets experiment, the world acts in strange and seemingly illogical ways.
I often leave a saucer of milk out for Schrödinger's cat/no cat. Only as a thoughtless experiment.
Holding two or more complementary or conflicting ideas in the paradoxical world of our mind may not be presently possible. With practice and future AI symbiosis and some forms of spiritual practice we may improve our impossibilities at 'wider' thinking. We are not very bright compared to the potential of evolution.
Hence it seem to me that the thought experiment is taking a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Same for the second experiment, since we aleady know from the possibility of Behaviourism, the ufalsifiability of solpsism, etc. that there is no observed behaviour that could prove the existence of consciousness.
So the thought experiments are very good and illustrate what they are suposed to illustrate, but they do not tell us anything we haven't know for centuries. Which is my objection to modern consciousness studies, that it has yet to say anything new and just goes around in circles. This is why I gave up my subscription to the journal of consciousness studies and started buying books on Buddhism.
Einstein's favourite mathematician (forget his name for now) saw the problem of reconciling the 'legato of the continuum' with the 'staccato' of a series of points as the most important in physics. But they cannot be reconciled. The whole idea of spacetime as physicists usually conceive of it is paradoxical. Buddhist ideas are a considerable advance on this, far more sophisticated and problem-free.
Also, my rather limited understanding of the Planck length is that reality breaks down at anything smaller and so the Planck length is a limit on reality, it is only conceptually and mathematically that we can go smaller.
My overall point is that sometimes our quite legitimate conceptual frameworks don't fit with the way the world seems to work. Maybe I'm just not understanding your argument.
"Emoto’s Water Experiment: The Power of Thoughts"
http://www.highexistence.com/water-experiment/
To copy one little snippet in favor of Planck length's absoluteness The other side seems to be saying that at present something at a Planck length is the smallest size that we could theoretically measure or see. Theoretically that is, the smallest thing we've measured at present is like 10x-16 and a Planck length is 10x-35 @Jeffrey I'm not sure of the answer to your question. In the scale of the universe model they appear to be about the same size.
http://www.scaleofuniverse.com/
BTW, if you haven't seen this website check it out, its really cool.
Also, my rather limited understanding of the Planck length is that reality breaks down at anything smaller and so the Planck length is a limit on reality, it is only conceptually and mathematically that we can go smaller.
My overall point is that sometimes our quite legitimate conceptual frameworks don't fit with the way the world seems to work. Maybe I'm just not understanding your argument.
Hi @person. I think you'll find that conceptually and mathematically we cannot go smaller, and that this is why we sometimes treat a Planck length as being a real physical limit. But there is no evidence that spacetime is quantised and it is a blatantly paradoxical idea. On the other hand, the idea that spacetime is a true continuum and not quantised is also paradoxical (since a true continuum would have no parts and so could not be extended). Thus physics and metaphysics are unable to support one view of spacetime or the other. The only non-paradoxical idea is that there are two truths about space and time, and that extension is a conventional phenomenon and ultimately unreal. Physics has already come very close to this idea, and physicists occasionally conjecture that spacetime is an illusion of some sort.
If our conceptual framework does not fit with the way the world works then it would not be legitimate, it would be incorrect. This is the connection with Buddhism, that if the Buddhist view is incorrect then spacetime is paradoxical. It would have to be conceived as being unambiguously quantised or unquantised, and both ideas fail in logic.
I hope that makes sense. Feel free to object. I'm exploring these ideas, not speaking as an authority.