Author Archives: Brendan Bernicker

Raman, Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments and Empirical Experiments (2/2)

(This post is the second in a two-part series on the relationship between thought experiments and empirical experiments. The first post can be found here.)

I am going to knock out all of the design theory up front so bear with me for one paragraph and then we can get back to the fun stuff. According to Roger Kirk, who wrote one of the most widely used textbooks for research design in the behavioral sciences, “Experiments are characterized by the: (1) manipulation of one or more independent variables; (2) use of controls such as randomly assigning participants or experimental units to one or more independent variables; and (3) careful observation or measurement of one or more dependent variables. The first and second characteristics—manipulation of an independent variable and the use of controls such as randomization—distinguish experiments from other research strategies” (Kirk 1968). A good experiment isolates the variables being studied to remove outside influence and allow researchers to make strong, causal claims about relationships between variables.

Now that the basic theory is out of the way, lets see how it applies to empirical experiments. Good empirical experiments start with at least one scientific hypothesis (and usually one or more statistical hypotheses) that is falsifiable and offers one or more predictions that can be experimentally tested. Because good empirical experiments isolate from and control for outside influences, they are consistently reproducible. Good experiments allow scientists to assess the accuracy of the predictions they made based on their hypotheses and accordingly determine whether the hypotheses themselves are supported or rejected by the data.

Thought experiments follow a similar model. Like empirical experiments, thought experiments isolate particular variables in order to study the relationship between them. This generally takes the form of creating a hypothetical situation in which all of the parameters of the experiment are set by the philosopher in order to limit consideration to the specific decisions or phenomena being studied. The purpose of this is generally to understand how something would be in an ideal case, free from the confines of circumstance, so that decisions themselves can be isolated from their circumstances and general statement of principle can be made. These statements of principle, like predictions from hypotheses, are then tested with further experiments to find circumstances in which they do not hold or to show that they do hold in cases where they were previously believed not to. To see an example of this, check out my series of posts on the Trolley Problem/Surgeon Problem (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

These two types of experiment compliment each other well because the things thought experiments are good for, making falsifiable predictions and assessing the implications of facts and principles on real-world circumstances, are the same things empirical experiments do poorly. Because empirical researchers face a tradeoff between internal and external validity, the most internally conclusive experiments are the ones that require the most conceptualization to put in context and evaluate. Similarly, empirical research provides a way for philosophers to determine if the assumptions on which they construct their theories are consistent with what we “know” about how the world works and human behavior. Neither type is useful without the other, and everyone would do well to become familiar with both.

It is not a coincidence that many of the greatest thinkers in the history of humanity were both scientists and philosophers. Many of humanity’s greatest achievement have come from people who were willing and able to harness the analytical and predictive power of both disciplines and use them in tandem. It is vitally important that scientists have a working knowledge of philosophy and analytical thinking, and that philosophers appreciate empirical research and the sciences. In a society that tends to sort people by academic discipline and force them to specialize early, there is perhaps no rarer but more vital skill than that of thinking across disciplines and recognizing that knowledge is most powerful when it is most complete.

——

This brings us to the conclusion of my blog on thought experiments. Thank you to everyone who has read, commented, and given me feedback; I sincerely hope that you have enjoyed reading my posts as much as I have enjoyed writing them. When I started this blog, I had to chose something to put under the title at the top of the page. I settled on the quasi-official motto of western philosophy: “the unexamined life is not worth living.” I believe very strongly that thought experiments are an excellent tool for this kind of critical examination, and I am glad to have been able to share this tool with you over the course of the last several weeks.

Standard
Raman, Thought Experiments

Thought Experiments and Empirical Experiments (1/2)

If you are a natural-science person (or a psychology person), you will most likely have to take a class in experimental design while you are here at Penn State. Experiments are the cornerstone of the scientific method, so it makes sense to devote significant attention to understanding how they work, what makes some better than others, and what their limitations are. For the last several weeks, I have talked about thought experiments and the role they play in philosophy and science (If you haven’t already and you are interested in thought experiments in science, check out my posts on Relativity and The Importance of Thought Experiments to Modern Physics). For these last two posts, I want to shift gears and talk about the relationship between thought experiments and empirical experiments.

Over the course of writing this passion blog, one of my major objectives has been to dismiss the notion that thought experiments are something people use to speculate about the world from their armchairs without actually observing anything, and that empirical experiments are “better” for learning about “real” things. Empirical experiments and thought experiments are both important tools people can use to understand our world, and they each have their own distinct purposes. Especially in fields like Physics and Neurology, thought experiments can help scientists both to determine what kind of empirical experiments to perform and how to make sense of the results of those experiments. There are certainly places where empirical experiments are “better” than thought experiments, but there are also places, even in the natural sciences, where thought experiments are “better” (one of which is in determining what makes a given method of examination “better”, but this is a subject that requires a more thorough treatment than I am prepared to offer here).

In the 21st century, one of the places where empirical and thought experiments have both come into conflict and complimented each other tremendously is in neurology. If you are interested in neurology, philosophy of science, or intellectually stimulating conversation in general, I highly recommend that you take 13 minutes and 22 seconds to listen to a Philosophy Bites podcast interview with Barry Smith on the interaction between these two tool sets for exploring the mind (the interview can be found at http://philosophybites.com/2008/09/barry-smith-on.html) and, if you enjoy that, as many of their neuroscience focused interviews as you can handle (which can be found here http://philosophybites.com/neuroscience/). Essentially, Dr. Smith lays out the role that each method has in advancing both neuroscience and the various related philosophical disciplines. To him, philosophers are too skeptical of evidence from empirical experiments that contradicts their expectations, which he believes is hampering the discipline’s progress. On the other hand, he recognizes that philosophers were the first people to raise the kinds of questions neuroscience explores, that their thought experiments provided an important starting place for the empirical research, and that, in his own words, when it comes to “pathologies and neurological breakdown, help is needed by the neurologists and biologists from the philosophers to help to explain how to characterize these experiences, to understand what they’re like, and to contrast them with normal experience.”

In my next post, I am going to discuss what makes a good empirical experiment, what makes a good thought experiment, and compare and contrast the two.

Standard
Uncategorized

Finally (3/3)

(This is the third and final installment of my series of posts comparing two ethics thought experiments. If you haven’t already, check out Part 1 and Part 2.)

 

In these thought experiments we don’t know anything about the victims, which forces us to consider whether the victims’ identities matter. Ethical subjectivists would say that it is impossible to make a judgment in these cases without additional information, such as identities or identifying information, but this has a significant implication: if the ethical decision changes based on the victims’ identities, then we are accepting that some individuals’ lives are more valuable than others.

This is of course not a completely invalid assumption. While equality seems like a positive virtue, there are a lot of senses in which it is negative. First, to say simply that two people are “equal” is to accept that they are, morally, interchangeable. If what you mean is that they are equal in certain respects, such as entitlement to respect or inherent dignity, then they are interchangeable in questions concerning these aspects (ostensibly like our trolley problem and surgeon experiment). In summary, if people are truly equal (either in all respects or only in those respects that relate to human dignity), then you should save five people at the cost of one life (whether through surgery or pulling the trolley lever). I do not want to devote any more time to the drawbacks of equality here, but Henry Frankfurt’s On Inequality offers an interesting perspective on the subject.

Whether we accept the subjectivist critique or not, it is the same in either experiment: If we need identities for one, then we need identities for the other. If the potential victims are the same in each, my argument from this post is unchanged. If the victims are different, then the cases (as per the argument from last week) are reversible; if its ethical to sacrifice a given person to save one set of 5 victims by pulling the lever, it would be ethical to make the exchange between these same people via surgery.

In conclusion the fundamental value at stake is whether or not people are essentially equal in the respects that determine the value of individuals’ lives and the respect they ought to be afforded by others. If you believe this to be true, then it is fair to kill the one person, but you have to make this decision in every case. If you do not believe that this is true, then it is ok to decide whether or not to make the trade-off based on the circumstances and identities (though you would still have to make the same decision in either thought experiment).

As a final thought, people often present a version of this experiment in which the one person is your son/daughter. In this case, the outcome is the same to neutral observer (who is not the parent of the person) as in the original experiment. As a result, those who embrace consequentialism/utilitarianism cannot give preferential treatment to their child. To those who believe in virtue ethics or duty ethics, saving the child can be considered either the virtue of loyalty/friendship or the duty of a parent to protect his/her child. If you are inclined towards assuming that saving five lives is worth killing one person in the trolley problem simply because of the numbers, bear in mind that the extension of this logic requires making the same trade-off both in the surgery case and if you have an emotional attachment to the one person.

Standard
Uncategorized

Treat Like Cases Alike (2/3)

(this is a continuation of last week’s post, which can be found here)

Now that you are familiar with the experiments themselves, I want to compare and contrast them to draw out some of the underlying ethical considerations. As Mitch pointed out in a comment last week, the numbers in each experiment are clearly the same, yet the surgeon harvesting the organs of one patient to save five “feels” more wrong than pulling the lever in the trolley problem. The first question I want to answer is whether this gut instinct is rational.

In each case, some amount of death is inevitable: five people will die if you do not act, one person will die if you do. In neither case are you responsible for the circumstances, as you neither infected the five patients with their respective diseases nor caused the trolley to lose control. Both cases have innocent victims who are not responsible for their circumstances, and in both cases the one victim is in no danger unless you act. As far as I am concerned, these cases are equivalent in all relevant respects and impartiality dictates that the same logic must be applied in each. In other words, unless you can think of a compelling difference that I have missed, it is irrational to choose to pull the lever but not perform the surgery.

One possible reason some have offered for deciding differently in the two cases is that the surgery is more likely to set a precedent for future surgeons, meaning that future surgeons may repeatedly kill healthy patients to give their organs to ill ones. While on the surface this may seem like a valid critique (life-saving organ transplants are, in fact, more common than runaway trolleys barreling towards physically restrained workmen), this should not be a problem. One of the fundamental tenets of impartiality is treating like cases alike. If we are o.k. with the surgeon doing this once, we should be o.k. with all surgeons doing it always. The circumstances of each individual surgery are the same (barring additional information), so we should not fear that the action we deem moral is repeated.

I have made a point in this argument of emphasizing impartiality, but it should not be accepted at face value that impartiality is important. I have embraced it here because I am attempting to take a rational approach to these experiments (to contrast the gut feeling that leads people to treat them differently). Rationality requires beliefs (and actions that follow from them) to be grounded in reason and facts. By definition, there is no factual reason for treating cases differently based on attributes that are irrelevant to the situation at hand. Consequently, to treat identical cases, or cases that differ only in irrelevant respects, differently is irrational. Some philosophers have argued that rationality itself is not important, and that being guided by emotion is preferable. I do not wish to engage in this debate here (nor do I have the requisite expertise in the field), but if you are interested there are a lot of books on the subject.

Up to this point, I have argued only that we must decide the same way in either case: I have not argued for deciding one way or the other. For that, you will need to read again next week. In the meantime, if anyone believe that there is a difference I have missed that makes treating these cases differently acceptable, please let me know in the comments.

 

— Yes, I have changed this from a two-part to a three-part post. I am trying to be thorough so you guys can get a sense of how the process of evaluating thought experiments generally works. I promise that next week I will finish this and move on to something else (unless you guys want me to keep going with this, in which case you can leave me a comment next week). —

Standard
Uncategorized

Experiments in Ethics (1/3)

For this week’s post, I want to delve into a set of thought experiments that offer compelling lenses through which to view one of the most essential fields in the entire discipline of philosophy: ethics. For as long as people have interacted with one another, their behavior has implicated questions of right and wrong. These questions have formed the basis of the vast majority of legal codes, social norms, and religions.

The first thought experiment that I want to explore is called the trolley problem. There are many versions of the trolley problem that have been used to explore different dimensions of ethics, but I will explain the original as it was proposed by Philippa Foot in 1967. In Foot’s though experiment, there is a runaway trolley careening down a track towards a junction. You are placed near the junction holding a lever. If you do not pull the lever, the trolley will remain on the current track and hit five workmen working on that section of the track. If you do pull the lever, the trolley will be diverted to another section of track on which there is only one workman. It is assumed that all the people working on whichever portion of the track the reader chooses (either 5 workmen or 1 workman) will be killed. For reference, there is a sketch below that shows this visually (although in the sketch the people are tied to the track).

trolley-problem pic

The question Foot poses is whether the reader should pull the lever and divert the train toward the track with fewer people. Essentially, it is a question of whether human lives are fundamentally interchangeable (and therefore 5 is greater than 1) or each should be treated as an individual moral agent deserving the respect of others. Some philosophers have attempted to tease out a middle ground; usually by changing the numbers on each side, assigning specific attributes to the people involved (for example, the one person is your daughter or the President of the United States, or the five people are prisoners or terrorists), or changing the role the individual plays (pushing a man onto the tracks to stop the trolley rather than pulling a lever). At its core, the question is about determining the worth of people and deciding if it is morally acceptable to make decisions about how to act based on one’s perception of a person’s worth.

Since most people tend to read Foot’s experiment and instinctively accept that the person should divert the trolley to kill the individual person, one philosopher offered a particularly powerful counter-experiment that often elicits the opposite response. In this experiment, proposed by Judith Jarvis Thomson in a 1985 paper, you are a brilliant surgeon with five patients of the same blood type in need of five different vital organs. This surgeon also has a sixth patient who is perfectly healthy but who’s organs are compatible with the other five patients. Thompson asks whether the surgeon would be morally justified in taking the five vital organs from the healthy person in order to save the five other people who need the organs.

Like with the first experiment, this one lends itself to a number of variations. A few notable ones include different numbers of patients in need of organs, the possibility that some of the organ transplants will not be successful, and assigning roles the the characters in play (the five people are children or the one person is the president, etc.) Because there are a number of ethical issues at play in each of these variations and this post is already fairly long, I will use the next two weeks’ posts to explore these issues in great detail.

Standard
Uncategorized

The Ring of Gyges

After a brief foray into scientific thought experiments, I want to return to pure philosophical ones. For this week’s post, I want to focus on another famous thought experiment from Plato’s Republic: “The Ring of Gyges”. In the Republic, the story of the ring of Gyges is told by Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, when he his talking to Socrates about the nature of justice (for anyone interested, this comes at the beginning of the second book of the Republic). Socrates and Glaucon are discussing Thrasymachus’ assertion (from book 1) that “injustice, when on a sufficient scale, has more strength and freedom and mastery than justice,” and trying to decide whether people would prefer to be unjust if they knew that they would not be punished. To help them consider this question, Glaucon explains to Socrates the legend of the Ring of Gyges.

Gyges, a real historical figure, was the king of Lydia from 716 to 678 B.C.E.; approximately 3 centuries before Socrates and Glaucon would have had their dialog (to clarify, Plato wrote the dialogues after Socrates’ death and the extent to which they are based on real events is unclear). According to Glaucon’s legend:

When Gyges was a shepherd in the service of the king of Lydia; there was a great storm, and an earthquake made an opening in the earth at the place where he was feeding his flock. Amazed at the sight, he descended into the opening, where, among other marvels, he … saw a dead body of stature, as appeared to him, more than human, and having nothing on but a gold ring; this he took from the finger of the dead and reascended…. (Later) he chanced to turn the collet of the ring inside his hand, when instantly he became invisible to the rest of the company and they began to speak of him as if he were no longer present. He was astonished at this, and again touching the ring he turned the collet outwards and reappeared; he made several trials of the ring, and always with the same result: when he turned the collet inwards he became invisible, when outwards he reappeared. (The other shepherds sent him to make an annual report to the king; but) as soon as he arrived he seduced the queen, and with her help conspired against the king, slew him, and took the kingdom.

This is clearly mythological, but many aspects of it do align with what historians understand of the life of Gyges. For example, Gyges was born a shepherd, was sent by other shepherds to deliver a message to the King of Lydia, and did kill the King. It is unclear whether he seduced his wife prior to killing the king or married her after, but they did have a relationship.

The question that Socrates and Glaucon discuss is whether a man who could make himself invisible would behave justly or unjustly. Glaucon agrees with the general principle expressed by Thrasymachus that men are only just out of a fear of reproach or punishment; and therefore argues that, with the knowledge that his unjust behavior would never be punished or discovered, “no man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men.” Socrates however argues that a man who did these things would be a slave to his appetites (the word that the Ancient Greeks used to describe one’s desires) and would never truly be happy or fulfilled as long as he lived unjustly.

The Ring of Gyges offers one way of looking conceptualizing the role that shame and social pressure play in making people behave morally, but different philosophers have come up with a number of similar thought experiments since Plato. It is a little off-putting to think that you, the person sitting next to you, and the hundreds of people you walk past on a daily basis are restrained from killing you only by a form of pseudo-peer-pressure; but deep down anybody who has ever done something in private they would never have done in public knows that there is some truth to this.

This intuition laid a lot of the ground work for social contract theory’s “state of nature/state of war” and has perplexed legal and social philosophers for millennia. On a lighter note, some have speculated that the ring of Gyges, with makes its wearer invisible and possibly evil, may have been the inspiration for the “One Ring” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, though this is a controversial claim. Whether or not it was the inspiration, there are a lot of notable similarities.

Standard
Raman, Thought Experiments

Physics or Philosophy

Last week I wrote about the value of thought experiments in the sciences. To illustrate my point, I used the example of Einstein’s theory of relativity and talked about how scientists never could have arrived at the concept empirically and the fact that they had still been unable to prove it. Apparently my challenge was accepted, because earlier today scientists at the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) confirmed that they were able hear the sound of two black holes colliding 1.3 billion light years away by registering ripples in space time. The results announced today are the first empirical conformation of the existence of gravity waves, which Einstein predicted as part of his general theory of relativity (which I discussed in last week’s post). It is also the first ever direct detection of black holes, which have been impossible to observe until now because of the fact that they do not emit any radiation. The fact that after 100 years of technological and methodological progress scientists have only now been able to confirm Einstein’s theory, and only with his research to tell them what to look for, shows how far ahead of his time Einstein was and further proves my point about the incredible power of thought experiments.

Rather than pick another though experiment to talk about, I want to give a quick overview of how thought experiments have driven the refinement/development of relativity, quantum theory, and many of the other most significant discoveries in physics of the last century. This is not an appropriate venue for an overview of the theories themselves (and I would certainly not be qualified to give one even if it were), but there are a few unifying themes that make thought experiments particularly useful in these fields.

In a review of a recent book about Einstein and Schrödinger, the author notes that “each had a strong philosophical bent, which shaped his worldview” and that “those philosophical influences contributed to their mutual dislike of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics.” One of the main reasons that physicists often resort to using thought experiments to make their points is that the theories they work with often deal with unobservable phenomena that are either far too large (think black holes), far too small (think fundamental particles), or far to abstract (think space time or the alternate dimensions required by string theory) for people, even theoretical physicists, to conceptualize (as a side note, all of those examples started as thought experiments). Thought experiments, when well designed, allow physicists to think through conceptual problems without getting bogged down in cumbersome details. The physicists can then work backwards to test their intuitions empirically. They are not always right, Einstein was wrong about quantum entanglement and most modern physicists believe that Schrödinger was wrong about superposition, but the thought experiments give them a starting place for empirical testing.

Stephen Hawking famously said that “philosophy is dead” because there was nothing else for us to learn about the world without hard data. While his commitment to data and evidence may resonate with many in STEM fields, you unfortunately will not be rid of us philosophers so easily. The story of the last century of physics is philosophy first, math later. In the same interview, Hawking himself admits that scientifically testing his preferred unifying theory, called “M Theory,” would require a particle collider the size of the Milky Way galaxy; but he defends his commitment to it with synthesis, logical syllogism and thought experiments: much like a philosopher would. If Stephen Hawking is correct that philosophy is dead, someone should probably tell Stephen Hawking: he may be out of a job!

Standard
Uncategorized

Gedankenexperiment

For this week’s post, I want to explore the relationship between philosophical thought experiments and scientific thought experiments. When people think about science, they usually think about empirical experimentation, not philosophical conjecture; however, many of the greatest scientists have also been philosophers, and their philosophy has had a profound impact on their scientific discoveries. This is perhaps most obvious with older scientists/philosophers; such as Aristotle, Galileo, Newton, and Descartes (yes the same one from last week); but it is no less true of more recent ones like Bohr, Einstein, Turing, and Heisenberg. While it may seem counter-intuitive, many of science’s greatest developments in the last century have come from thought experiments rather than physical ones. To better illustrate this, I want to give a famous example.

There is perhaps no more famous modern scientist than Albert Einstein. While many people are vaguely familiar with some of his most notable work (E=MC2, Special and General Relativity, etc.), fewer people are familiar with his research methods. Einstein himself described the process through which he discovered relativity as a “Gedankenexperiment,” gedanken being the German word for thought. This experiment was simple.

Einstein imagined that he was riding on a beam of light and looking at another beam of light parallel to his own. Reasoning from classical mechanics, the second beam should appear to be still, yet according to the laws of electromagnetism, light’s speed must always be 3×108 meters per second. Both classical mechanics and electromagnetism claimed to be universal, meaning that the laws were the same for all observers, but Einstein’s thought experiment led him to conclude that either classical mechanics or electromagnetism was wrong, or that neither was universal. Confident in the laws of each, he reasoned that neither could be universal. It was from this insight that special relativity was born.

He was not done yet though. He then thought about a man in a falling elevator car. He knew that the car and the man would fall towards the center of the earth at the same rate, and reasoned that the man would thus be unable to feel his own weight. He then realized that the man would also be unable to determine, from within the car, whether he was falling due to gravity or accelerating up as the result of a force. While this was a revolutionary insight at the time, it probably should not have been. If you replace the elevator in Einstein’s experiment with the earth, which is constantly in motion, it is obvious that our measurements of motion here on earth are relative to our frame of reference. We do not express the speed at which cars travel as the observed speed (say 60 MPH) in our reference frame plus the speed of the earth’s rotation around the sun (roughly 1000 MPH) plus the speed at which our solar system is moving within our galaxy (roughly 514,000 MPH) plus the speed at which our galaxy is moving within the universe (indeterminate, because we have no external frame of reference, like the man in the elevator!!).

The fundamental insight Einstein had was one that scientific experimentation could never have arrived at empirically, since its entire premise is that empirical observation itself is relative. Without philosophy, the theory of relativity and the scientific breakthroughs that came with it would have been impossible. While this is just one example of the intersection between philosophy and science, I hope it has been helpful in understanding their relationship. If you guys are interested, I have dozens of similar examples and would gladly write a few posts about them, so let me know in the comments.

Standard
Raman, Thought Experiments

Brain in a Vat

Imagine that a mad scientist created a machine into which he could place a human brain. This machine, which we shall call a “brain vat”, would not only keep the brain alive and functioning, but it would allow the scientist to create virtual stimuli and feed them directly into the brain. The brain would register all of these stimuli in exactly the same manner as normal human sensory experiences, as these are already interpreted as electrical signals anyway. In this way, the scientist could create an entire fictitious world that, to the captive brain, would feel completely normal.

What if I told you that you, the person reading this post, were not actually a human being but instead merely a brain in a vat? You may attempt to prove me wrong, but you would find that quite difficult, and you would not be alone. This thought experiment has puzzled philosophers since it was first proposed in 1641 by René Descartes (Though Descartes’ experiment used an evil demon in place of a vat. The vat was proposed Gilbert Harman in 1973 to update the experiment to accommodate modern understandings of psychology and neuroscience). The idea of the brain in a vat (BIV) is that no brain could ever know whether it was in a skull or a vat, and could therefore never know whether everything it experiences is real or an illusion.

Descartes answered his own version of the experiment with his famous cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). I do not have the time or space to fully explain the Cogito in this post, but I highly encourage everyone to read about it. Essentially Descartes argues that either the world is real and he is experiencing it, or he is being deceived. Even if he is being deceived, he still exists in order to be deceived. Therefore, the fact that he can question his existence is sufficient to prove that he exists.

Importantly, the Cogito does not prove that he is not being deceived (or, to use the BIV terms, that he is not a brain in a vat). What Descartes instead proves is that he is something, not necessarily a human or even necessarily a brain, but something. Based on the Cogito, a BIV can know that it exists, but it cannot know anything else about itself or the world.

This thought experiment has implications for ethics (if you are a brain in a vat and nothing else is real, there is nothing wrong with doing terrible things to others), epistemology (the study of knowledge and what it means/why it matters), our understandings of what it means to be human, and many other philosophical disciplines. Many scientists have also written about and studied this thought experiment for a variety of reasons and in a variety of contexts.

On a lighter note, if this all sounded very familiar, it may be because this thought experiment is the basic plot of The Matrix (though the matrix also includes some elements of the experiment from last week’s post, The Allegory of the Cave). On an even lighter note, here are some funny cartoons about this thought experiment. Have a great weekend, even if it’s all an illusion!
BIV Cartoon

BIV Cartoon 2

(cartoons from https://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2014/08/14/a-scientific-response-to-the-brain-in-a-vat/.)

Standard
Raman, Thought Experiments, Uncategorized

The Allegory of the Cave

Ok, so before I start commenting on specific thought experiments I want to stop and explain what thought experiments are and why they are important. Often times philosophers find themselves dealing with very conceptual, multifaceted questions that are too abstract and complex to meaningfully discuss. To get around this, they will often create thought experiments. Thought experiments, like science experiments, seek to isolate the variable being studied to allow for meaningful exploration. This usually takes the form of setting up a fictitious scenario in which people are confronted either with a purer form of the initial question or some allegorical situation.

To illustrate this, consider Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” (or “Allegory of the Den” depending on the translation). In the allegory, Socrates (Plato’s teacher and the narrator of all of Plato’s dialogues) asks a friend named Glaucon to imagine that there are prisoners in a cave chained against a wall. Behind them there is a fire and a walkway (see image). Throughout the day, puppeteers walk down the walkway with puppets that cast shadows on the wall. The men can see the shadows, but they cannot see the objects themselves. If the shadow were of a book, the prisoners, knowing nothing else of books, would say that they see a book. We know that what they see is merely a shadow of a book, an approximation of the real object, but they would not understand this.

Socrates asks Glaucon to consider what would happen if a prisoner was released and able to see the sun and real objects in their true forms. Glaucon observes that he would likely be put-off at first, but that he would soon come to understand that these new objects were real and that the old ones were all shadows. Socrates then asks what the man would do if he was taken back into the cave and made to again watch the shadows. Glaucon points out that he would likely be frustrated by the triviality of it all, and that he would be especially incapable of trying to assign meaning to the shadows like the other men, since he would know that the shadows were not really the objects the men assumed they were.

Plato wants us to learn a few things from this allegory. Specifically, he trying to illustrate the life of people who do not understand his theory of forms. The theory of forms holds that the universe has a creator and that there exists only one of each object/concept in the world, which is located in the mind of the creator. According to Plato, the physical incarnations of these forms (the name given to the original object/concept) are merely copies of the forms and are therefore imperfect. Plato equates these copies to the shadows on the walls of the cave and himself to the man who has been let out to see the original objects, the forms.

While few people seriously believe his theory today, there is still much to be learned from the allegory. While Plato intended it to represent ignorance of the forms, it can really be used with any kind of ignorance. It is also commonly used to illustrate the concept that, while we develop perceptions of objects in our minds, these perceptions are distinct from the objects that created them and not all of our “knowledge” about these objects is correct.

Hopefully this has helped you to see how thought experiments can be useful in illustrating complicated concepts. I picked an easier one for the first post, but I will try to get into some more complicated and abstract ideas as the semester progresses. On a side note, I am trying to decide whether or not to discuss paradoxes on this blog. They have a completely distinct purpose from thought experiments, but they are also useful ways of thinking about tough questions and force readers to challenge their minds. If you have an opinion, let me know in a comment.

 

platoscave

https://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm

Standard