Have you ever been able to tell what the other person is thinking? How could you know this? It is one thing to assume that we are not in a position to know anyone's thoughts at all; it is quite another thing to assume that a person may not have thoughts at all that you could know.
The philosophical zombie is a thought experiment, a concept used in philosophy to explore the problems of consciousness and its relationship to the physical world. Most philosophers agree that they don't really exist. Here's the thing: the people you meet in the world actually look like characters in a computer game. They talk as if they have consciousness, but they don't. They may say "oops" if you kick them, but they don't feel pain. They simply exist to help your mind explore the world, but do not have their own.
The concept of a zombie is used mainly to criticize physicalism, according to which there is nothing but physical things, and everything around can be determined solely by its physical properties. The conceivable argument assumes that anything conceivable is possible, and hence such zombies are possible. The very possibility of this - unlikely but possible - raises all kinds of problems related to consciousness, for example, the following kind.
Qualia is, in simple terms, the objective experience of the other. It may seem simple to assert the impossibility of accurately knowing the experiences (experience) of another person, but the idea of qualia (this is plural, the singular will be “quale”) brings this assertion into the complex section.
For example, what is hunger? We all know what hunger tastes like, right? But can you be sure that your friend Alexander or Vasily will feel the same hunger as you? We can even describe it as "an empty feeling in a rumbling stomach." Not bad, but for Alexander this "emptiness" will be completely different than yours. Or, for example, "red". Everyone knows what red looks like, but how would you describe it to a blind person? Even if we break the red color into light frequencies and find out which of them produce the reference red, we still cannot be one hundred percent sure that Vasya or Sasha do not see the reference green in it.
This is where the weird starts. A famous qualia thought experiment involves a woman growing up in a black and white room, getting all the information about the world from black and white monitors. She learns and comprehends everything there is to know about the physical aspects of color and vision: wave frequencies, how the eye perceives color - everything. She becomes an expert and eventually knows all the factual information on these matters.
Then, one day, she leaves the room and sees colors for the first time. In the process, she learns something about flowers that she didn't know until that time. But what? First of all, what it is like to see color.
Descriptivist theory
The British philosopher John Stuart Mill in the 19th century outlined a theory of names that lasted for many years - its essence is that the meaning of a proper name is that this name carries in the outside world. Pretty simple. The only problem with theory is with things that don't exist in the outside world. The sentence "Harry Potter is a great wizard" is completely meaningless according to Mill.
The German logician Gottlieb Frege challenged this view with his Descriptivist theory, according to which the meanings - the semantic contents - of names are a collection of descriptions associated with them. With this explanation, the above sentence would make sense because the reader and author would mean something along the lines of "pop culture character" or "a fictional boy created by Rowling" when referring to Harry Potter.
It seems simple, but in the philosophy of language - before Frege - there was no distinction between meaning and reference. That is, there are several meanings associated with the word - with the object to which this term refers, and the way in which this term refers to this object.
Believe it or not, descriptivist theory is riddled with holes that have come to light in it in the last few decades, notably by the American philosopher Saul Kripke in his 1971 book Naming and Necessity. Take at least one argument (in a nutshell) that if the information about the subject of the naming is incomplete or incorrect, the name may refer to another person about whom the information will be more accurate. Kripke's objections only ignited the fire of debate.
The mind-body problem
The mind-body problem is one aspect of dualism, a philosophy that basically holds that for all systems, the principle of dividing all things into two types, for example, good and evil, light and dark, wet and dry, is valid, and that these two things must necessarily exist independently of each other and be equal in terms of their influence on the system. Dualistic religions assume the existence of God and Satan, monistic ones reduce everything to a single deity or monad, pluralistic ones allow the existence of many gods.
The mind-body problem is much simpler: what is the relationship between body and mind? If dualism is correct, then humans must be either physical or mental entities, yet we seem to exhibit properties of both. This raises a number of issues that manifest themselves in different ways: are mental and physical states kind of the same? If yes, which ones exactly? What is consciousness and how does it differ from the physical body, can it exist outside of it? What is "I" - is "you" physically you? Or is "you" your mind?
The problem is that dualists cannot find a satisfactory picture for themselves of tying body and mind together, which can bring them back to the concept of philosophical zombies. Unless the next point intervenes and destroys this whole philosophy.
Simulation Argument
Ever since The Matrix came out, we've all been wondering: ? This idea is incredibly strong and suits everyone at least at the level of argumentation. And while the "yes, it's just a movie" argument has convinced many, the roots of the movie's idea stem from the so-called simulation argument, which may frustrate many of you.
First, let's look at the so-called sleep argument. During sleep we do not know that we are dreaming; we are fully convinced that the dream is real. From this perspective, dreams represent the pinnacle of virtual reality and prove that our brains can deceive themselves into thinking that pure sensory input represents our physical reality when it actually doesn't. Moreover, it is almost impossible to say for sure whether you are sleeping now - or always sleeping. Now let's think about something else.
Apparently, humans have lived as a species long enough to create a computer simulation that simulates human beings with artificial intelligence. Informing artificial intelligence about its nature - simulation - is contrary to purpose, because the model will not be genuine. If such models and characters are not banned, we will definitely launch billions of them - to study wars, history, diseases, cultures and more. Some, if not most, of these simulations will also develop similar technology and run their own model, ad infinitum.
So who are we really? One indigenous civilization that will develop this technology, or one of a billion simulations? Of course, it is more likely that we are just a model.
Synchronicity is a term coined by renowned psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung. It stands for "significant coincidences," and Jung was partly inspired by a very strange event involving one of his patients.
Jung took as a basis the idea that coincidences that do not seem to happen by chance may initially manifest themselves in the mind of the person who perceives these coincidences. One patient was suffering from some kind of subconscious trauma, and one night he dreamed of a golden scarab beetle, a large and rare such beetle. The next day, during a session with Jung and after describing the dream, an insect hit the window of the room. Jung took it - it was a golden scarab, very rare for the climate of this region. He let him into the room, and while the patient raised his jaw from the floor, he described in detail his theory meaningful matches.
The meaning of the scarab is that the patient was familiar with its meaning - the totem of death and rebirth in ancient Egyptian philosophy. For the patient, he was a symbol of the rejection of old ways of thinking that made his treatment difficult. For Jung, however, the incident reinforced the idea of synchronicity and its consequences: our thoughts and ideas, even subconscious ones, can have a real effect on the physical world and manifest in it in ways that matter to us.
Orchestrated objective reduction
You probably understand that the main focus of many of these concepts is an attempt to understand the nature of consciousness. The theory of "orchestrated objective reduction" does not differ from them, but was born in the works of two independent from each other smart people from two different points of view - mathematical (Roger Penrose, famous British physicist) and anesthesiology (Stuart Hameroff, anesthesiologist). They assimilated their work into a unified "Orch-OR" theory after several years of separate work.
The theory is an extrapolation of Gödel's incompleteness theorem, which revolutionized mathematics and states that "any<…>a theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete.” In general, it proves the incompleteness of mathematics and of any particular system in general. Penrose went further, arguing that since mathematics is a "system" and theorems like Gödel's are provable by human mathematicians, "the inevitable conclusion is that mathematicians do not use known procedures of calculation to discover mathematical truth. We conclude that mathematical understanding—the means by which mathematicians reach their conclusions in search of mathematical truth—cannot be reduced to blind calculations.”
Roughly speaking, human brain it's just not that it performs calculations and calculations - like a computer, only faster - but it does ... something else. Something that no computer could replicate, some "incomputable process" that cannot be described by an algorithm. There are not many things in science that fit this description. For example, .
Uncertainty principle
deals with particles (or waves, whichever you prefer) that are so small that even the act of observing or measuring them can affect what they do. This is the basic idea of the so-called uncertainty principle, which for the first time.
Dual nature quantum was born to explain the following. If a particle appears in two places at the same time, or functions as a wave at one point and as a particle at another, or appears and disappears in principle - this may be in the order of things at the quantum level. But the act of observing or measuring will affect what is observed at the present moment.
For this reason, although we can get an accurate representation of one state of a quantum object (say, the speed of an electron), the means that will be used to make measurements (say, shooting a photon to intercept) will affect its other properties (location and mass), so a complete picture of the state of this object is simply not possible in principle, and its properties become uncertain.
eternal return
There are a number of problems associated with the Big Bang cosmological model, not the least of which is the likelihood of the so-called , according to which the Universe is going to collapse or heat death. One theory that can eliminate these problems is the Eternal Return theory - which simply states that there was no beginning or end to the universe. It is eternal and has always existed.
The theory relies on infinite time and space. Within Newtonian cosmology, it has been proven by at least one mathematician that the "eternal return" of the universe is a mathematical certainty. And of course, this concept is reflected in many religions, ancient and modern.
This concept is central to Nietzsche's writings and has serious philosophical implications for the nature of free will and destiny. It weighs heavily on the very essence of our existence - we are doomed to be tied to space and time and experience the fullness of our existence for eternity. Unless, of course, you consider alternative theories.
Ease
If the concept of a universe without beginning or end, in which the same events repeat without meaning and without end, looks heavy, one can consider the philosophical concept of "lightness", which is exactly the opposite. In a Universe that has a beginning and an end, the existence of anything is absolutely meaningless, because it is fleeting and does not carry any consequences. Such a universe is filled with lightness and completely meaningless.
An easy version of this concept was considered in his book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. The same concept is approved by Zen Buddhism and teaches to enjoy it. Many oriental philosophies teach lightness and strive for it as a form of perfection and enlightenment.
In the end, you have the right to accept any point of view. Or you can't take any.
What is a philosophical zombie? First, it is a being whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of a being endowed with consciousness. Secondly, with all the similarities in behavior, the philosophical zombie does not have consciousness, it does not have internal experiences. For Dennett, the conceptual possibility of zombies is of great importance: if philosophical zombies are possible, then human consciousness is not at all necessary for the functioning of a living organism.
As an example that argues for the possibility of a philosophical zombie, Dennett cites the Shaki robot. This robot has an I / O system, as well as an interface through which it receives data about the outside world. If we “ask” the robot “what do you perceive?”, then in response we will receive the values of certain characteristics that are recorded in the robot’s memory through a communication interface with the outside world (this can be a video camera). Regardless of what transformations will receive the initial data from the camera, they will be the answer to the question. For example, it can be an array of zeros and ones, or words that were originally set by the programmer to describe the environment (square, circle, triangle). Shaka has only this way of expressing data and the question of “how does he actually imagine what he perceives?” meaningless, he does not choose how to say what he finds in introspection. As Dennett writes, "Shakey just found himself with things to say." Thus, the connection between statements and questions is direct, it is not mediated by internal contemplation and introspection, because they do not exist - a robot is an absolutely mechanical system, which we have no doubt about the absence of subjective experience.
What if we improved such a robot? Give him sensors that allow him to have sight, smell, etc., as well as sensors for his internal (but unconscious, Dennett insists) states? Dennett calls this robot Zimbo. Zimbo is a zombie that is behaviorally complex, thanks to his control system that allows for recursive self-determination. Such a zimbo will be sure that he has subjective experience - although he will not have it! He will convince all interlocutors that he really feels certain experiences, as well as annoyance from the fact that his subjective experience can be doubted.
The question is the following: is it possible the existence of such a zimbo? From a positivist point of view, this idea is unverifiable: if a zimbo is behaviorally indistinguishable from a human, then there is absolutely no way to tell whether he has mental states (subjective experience) or not. Similarly, a given idea is unfalsifiable for the same reasons.
On the other hand, we can nevertheless formulate the very definition of zimbo in speech. For most researchers, this is enough to establish a conceptual possibility, but my position is that the existence of a zimbo is conceptually impossible, due to internal inconsistency. The idea of a zimbo is based on the position of the first person: if we looked at the zimbo from the inside, we would see that he does not have any mental states. But the problem is that we, by definition, cannot perform this operation of "testing for subjective experience." The first-person position consists in complete identification with the subject of research. If we want to take the position of a zimbo, then we must become a zimbo, that is, look at the world through his eyes (use the data of his "sense organs"), and also lose the most subjective experience (by definition, which describes the zimbo).
In this case, we can give a verbal account of our states, but in no way can we understand that we do not have any subjective experience, since the very term "understanding" refers to the existence of a subject who makes a judgment. That is, plunging into the “state of zimbo”, we lose the opportunity to answer “do I have internal states”, since there are no internal states. The essential definition of internal states is that they are immediate givens of consciousness: the ultimate description of pain is that we experience this feeling with all evidence and are not able to ignore it.
How then is it possible that we can accept the idea that something behaves exactly like us, but does not have internal states, if, when trying to “get into the skin” of a zimbo, we stop thinking, and therefore lose the very content of the idea of a zimbo? In this case, the idea of zimbo stands in line with statements that, when trying to analyze them, lead to the evidence of the emptiness of their mental content: we can use them in speech as phraseological units that describe something that is inaccessible to “understanding”, although we can be aware of them.
A good analogy to the idea of a zombie is the idea of a four-dimensional orthogonal space: instead of three planes perpendicular to each other, we work with four. Despite the fact that we can set a coordinate system for such a space, as well as analytically prove theorems, calculate values and take integrals from four-dimensional functions, it will remain inaccessible to our subjective experience, and will exist only as a mathematical object.
According to popular belief, experiments are the privilege of the exact and natural sciences. However, philosophers also often resort to experiments, albeit mental ones. I have selected 10 of the most discussed thought experiments that have been developed by philosophers over the past 50 years.
But what if a person's life depends on your decision? What will you do: will you do as you please, and this person will die, or will you sacrifice your interests, and he will live? And if this person, whom they offer to worry about, is completely unknown to you? By imagining yourself in this situation, you can more clearly understand what morality, conscience, duty mean, rather than spending years cramming theories and concepts of ethics.
This and all other thought experiments are distinguished by the fact that in them the action takes place not in reality, but in the minds of those who conduct them. This is a kind of intellectual exercise that allows you to vividly and figuratively feel what the philosopher wants to say, understand the logic of his position and try to imagine yourself "inside" his philosophical system.
There is no need to ask surgeons to remove the brain of a certain patient in order to answer the question: will the personality continue to remain in this case? this person in body. After all, we can use our imagination. You don't really need to sit chained in stocks in front of a wall on which a shadow theater performance is projected to understand that our life is a spectacle - for this it is enough to imagine the Platonic image of a cave.
Rereading Nikolai Berdyaev's text about philosophical truth and intellectual truth, I remembered the 1990s, two little rooms on Zubovsky Boulevard (they rented some outbuilding at the Progress publishing house), where the then young magazine Logos was located. Piles of collected works of Soviet philosophical classics and Progressive propaganda were then dumped in the courtyard. They grew anew when a new tenant moved into the next room. Many other magazines and publishing houses, countless projects and undertakings, then came out of those small rooms. There were no intellectual disputes, but there was a lot of work - they tried to exfoliate from the newly mastered Russian and Western philosophical tradition something real. I remembered, because Nikolai Berdyaev was never in this sifted residue.
The experiments that will be discussed below were selected according to three criteria. First, they are in the spotlight modern philosophy- there are hundreds of works dating back to the last decades in which they are studied. Secondly, they were developed by philosophers, and not by mathematicians, game theorists, etc. You won't find the cats that physicists love so much on this list, but there are plenty of brains, zombies, Swamp people and other favorites of philosophers. Thirdly, all of these experiments were formulated in the last 50 years, although some of them develop concepts that are more than one century old.
Description: let us imagine a being physically similar to a man in everything, which, nevertheless, is devoid of conscious experience. Such a creature (let's call it a philosophical zombie) acts like an automaton, reacting to stimuli in a normative way. One of the functions of the philosophical zombie is to imitate humanity, that is, the presence of what is called consciousness, soul, qualia, and so on.
Question: Is a philosophical zombie different from a human?
Philosophical meaning: With the help of this experiment, they refute the theory that a person is just a biological machine that reacts to the physical facts of the outside world. For example, one could argue that if this theory is correct, then zombies are humans, but humans are more than zombies in terms of consciousness, so this theory is a simplification of the true nature of man.
2. "Swamp Man"
Description: Let's imagine the philosopher Donald Davidson walking through the swamp, who stopped next to a dry tree to wait out a thunderstorm. A lightning strike splits Davidson's body into molecules, and, by an incredible coincidence, creates an exact replica of Donald Davidson from dry wood. Davidson's replica (let's call it "Swamp Man") moves exactly as Davidson did when he was alive and leaves the swamp. Meeting Davidson's friends on the road, Swamp Man gives the impression that he recognizes them and responds to their greetings on English language. Davidson's double enters his house and it may seem to others that he sat down at his desk to write a philosophical article.
Philosophical meaning: Using this experiment, we demonstrate that human personality- it's not only physical body person, but also the history of the relationship of this person with the outside world. Thus, Swamp Man cannot recognize Davidson's friends when he meets them on his way home - to recognize someone, you need to see this "someone" before. This experiment draws our attention to the fact that each of us has a unique history of relationships with other people, with the things of this world.
3. Toxin Puzzle
Description: An eccentric billionaire places a vial of toxin in front of you which, if you drink it, will cause you to suffer excruciatingly throughout the day, however, he does not threaten you with death or any long-term complications. According to the billionaire's condition, if you express your intention to drink poison tomorrow afternoon at midnight, then tomorrow morning you will receive a million dollars. You are told that, in fact, you do not need to take the poison in order to receive the money - it will be in your account before the time comes to realize your intention to drink the toxin. You are completely free to change your mind after receiving the money and not drink the toxin.
Question: Can a person intend to drink a toxin if they do not plan to act on that intention?
Philosophical meaning: This experiment is used in many philosophical fields. For example, in political philosophy it helps to explain why it is precisely politicians who do not stick to their campaign promises, if it is not directly related to their ability to win votes in elections.
4. "Mary's Room"
Description: all her life, Mary is in a room where everything is black or white. Mary is a brilliant scientist, but she only explores the world through a black and white monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision. Mary gradually masters all the physical information that needs to be collected about what exactly happens when we see a ripe tomato or the sky and, accordingly, use the terms “red”, “blue”, etc. And now imagine that Mary is allowed to come out of her imprisonment to see the world in all its colors.
Question: Will Mary learn something new about color when she sees non-black and white objects with her own eyes?
In the era of the crisis of the intelligentsia and the awareness of their mistakes, in the era of the reassessment of old ideologies, it is necessary to dwell on our attitude towards philosophy. The traditional attitude of the Russian intelligentsia to philosophy is more complex than it might seem at first glance, and an analysis of this attitude can reveal the main spiritual features of our intellectual world. I'm talking about the intelligentsia in the traditional Russian sense of the word, about our circle intelligentsia, artificially isolated from national life. This peculiar world, which has hitherto lived a closed life under double pressure, the pressure of external bureaucracy - reactionary power and internal bureaucracy - inertia of thought and conservative feelings, is not without reason called "intellectualism" in contrast to the intelligentsia in the broad, national, general historical sense of the word.
Philosophical meaning: The Mary's Room experiment is directed against excessive rationalism, which asserts the reduction of the world to formulas, calculations, and numbers. Jackson draws our attention to the fact that seeing with your own eyes the blue of a cloudless sky is not the same as knowing the numbers that comprehensively characterize the blue color.
5. "Brains in a barrel"
Description: as a result of the operation, the brain of a certain person is separated from the body and placed in a "vat of nutrient solution", due to which it continues to function. The supercomputer, by transmitting special impulses to the nerve endings of the brain, creates the complete illusion that there was no operation, that he still has a body, communicates with other people, in general, leads a completely ordinary life.
Question: Is the thought of an ordinary person about, say, a tree, and the thought of a "brain in a barrel" about a tree, if they both observe it (one is real, the other is virtual) one and the same?
Philosophical meaning: The thought experiment "Brains in a barrel" can be used, for example, as a warning to those who overly romanticize their stay in the virtual space. After all, the “reality” in which we are on the Internet differs from reality in that it is only a stream of electronic impulses. Thanks to the webcam, we can see a blossoming apple tree, but we will not feel the sweetish aroma of a flying apple blossom, we will not be able to run our hands along the rough trunk of this tree, we will not be able to feel the warmth of the sun on our cheek, the rays of which break through the leaves.
6. Brain in Houston
Description: Imagine that Daniel Dennett had his brain surgically separated from his body. Thanks to advanced technology, both the brain and the body continue to function properly. Moreover, the brain, contained in a special vat in a laboratory in Houston, continues to exercise control over its body with the help of a complex radio communication system. A whole series of microtransmitters transmits signals from the brain to nerve endings that go into the empty skull of the philosopher's body. When Dennett recovered from the operation, the first thing he did was to examine his own brain in a vat, and then they sent him to Tulsa to dismantle the atomic warhead in the mine. However, in the course of underground work, in the skull of the body, all the microtransmitters began to fail one by one. Accordingly, at first Dennett's hearing fails, then his voice, then right hand, then vision, and finally all connections between the brain and body of the philosopher Daniel Dennett are torn.
Question: Where is the personality of the operated Daniel Dennett: in the vat where his brain splashes, or from outside the vat - in his body?
Philosophical meaning: Critics of the existence of the soul and the use of metaphors related to the human heart love to use Dennett's thought experiment. They are sure that it is not worth complicating the medical fact with sentimental thoughts that a person’s consciousness is a product of the activity of his brain.
7. "Chinese room"
Description: a certain person, not knowing Chinese, is placed in a room with baskets full of Chinese characters. He was provided with a manual in a language that he understands, which contains algorithms for combining Chinese characters (for example: “if you see a character similar to those in basket No. 3, then put the character from basket No. 1 next to it”). Behind the door of the room are people who speak Chinese, who send our prisoner some sets of hieroglyphs. As an answer, the person from the Chinese room should also transmit hieroglyphs to them from his room. What he does, adding the hieroglyphs available to him in certain sequences, according to the instructions of the manual.
Question: Does the person in the Chinese room understand Chinese when, using formal rules, he combines the hieroglyphs from the baskets?
Philosophical meaning: This experiment is used to show that no artificial intelligence can, in principle, be born in a computer. In any case, with the current level of computer technology.
8. Experience Machine
Description: suppose there is a machine capable of providing a man with any experience he desires, by creating extremely convincing illusions in his mind. Scientists have learned to stimulate the brain so skillfully that its owner will be absolutely sure that it is he who composes a great novel, meets someone, reads an interesting book, and so on.
Question: Will you agree to be connected to such a machine for the rest of your life, having previously programmed to your liking all the events that should happen to you?
Philosophical meaning: This experiment is being talked about by philosophers who want to see if what happens outside of our experience matters to us. It's not even the virtual machine that Nozick is talking about. Let's take the hackneyed situation of starving children in Africa. For if we do not know that they are starving, the fact that they are starving will not upset us. So isn't it easier just not to know, not to be interested in what can upset us? Of course, it is simpler, but it is unworthy of a person - many philosophers believe.
9. "Curtain of ignorance"
Description: imagine a certain group of people who must determine the principles of social life, in accordance with which they will live. Thanks to the action of the "veil of ignorance", each of these people does not know their place in society, their class position and social status. None of them knows their luck in the distribution of natural talents and abilities, the level of their mental abilities, particularities of their rational plan of life and even specific features of their own psychology, such as a propensity to take risks or a predisposition to pessimism or optimism. Thus, due to the operation of the "veil of ignorance", no one in the group is able to tailor the principles of social life to gain advantages for their own benefit.
Question: What concept of social justice will be chosen by people whose position is not determined by their self-interest?
Now intellectual disputes about God have somehow gone out of fashion. Religion in everyday life. Orthodox writers walk around with a proud air, feeling themselves as carriers of the highest truth, which does not need proof. And unbelieving positivists with hidden irony look sideways at those who “hit God” (there is such a terrible expression), transferring to religion their critical attitude towards the nomenclature of the Russian Orthodox Church, which is very reminiscent of the former top of the CPSU. In particular, disguised consumerism: a high-ranking pastor wearing a watch worth 30,000 euros on his wrist is certainly suspicious, he undermines moral foundations faith.
Philosophical meaning: This experiment is used by philosophers who believe that there can be some kind of natural justice. Not justice for a certain person, a stratum of society, but for a person as such. Not infrequently these philosophers forget that there is no abstract man, and that abstract justice is only good for abstract purposes.
10. "Violinist"
Description: when you wake up, you find yourself lying in a hospital bed next to an unconscious famous violinist. As you are informed, the violinist's kidneys failed, and the Music Lovers Society decided to save his life with your help, since your blood type is optimal for this enterprise. The activists of this Society kidnapped you and tricked the doctors into connecting the violinist's circulatory system to your kidneys. And now your body cleanses not only your own blood, but also the violinist's blood. The head physician of the hospital tells you that if you remove the tubes connecting you and the violinist now, he will die, and offers to endure 9 months, during which the violinist will recover, and his organs will be able to independently support his life.
Question: Is it necessary to sacrifice your interests for the life of another person?
Philosophical meaning: The thought experiment first of all by a woman, and then by the philosopher Judith Thomson, of course, concerns the problem of abortion. Many women in their lives faced a difficult dilemma: to kill or not to kill. born child? Thomson considers this issue on a moral plane, placing on different scales the personal interests and life of a person you do not know.
quantum suicide
Just like the well-known problem with the cat languishing in a box, this experiment touches upon the problems quantum mechanics- only from the point of view of not an observer, but the participant of the process. In place of Schrodinger's cat, there is a conditional hero who shoots himself in the head with a gun with a mechanism that depends on the decay of a radioactive atom. The probability of a misfire is 50%. At the moment the trigger is pressed, two quantum theories collide - the so-called "Copenhagen" and many-worlds. According to the first, the observed hero cannot be in two states in parallel - he is definitely either alive or dead.
But the second option is much more romantic - each new attempt the shot splits the universe into two alternative versions: in one, the participant remains alive, and in the other, he dies. But the hero's surviving alter ego will never know about own death V parallel world. The author of the experiment, MIT professor Max Tegmark, firmly adheres to the concept of the multiverse, but is in no hurry to test it on himself. “Everything will be all right with me, but my wife Angelica will remain a widow,” he explained in an interview. And it's hard to argue with that.
But as seductive as the theory of alternative universes was, most quantum mechanics interviewed by Tegmark himself in 1997 agreed with the Copenhagen concept. And later polls of scientists in the "zero" repeated the same result.
Survival Lottery
British philosopher John Harris came up with a cruel ethical puzzle. Imagine a world where organ transplants are carried out perfectly, and the ethical rules are such that letting a person die and killing him is one and the same. As a result, all of humanity agrees to participate in the "survival lottery" - as soon as any person is near death, a random lot indicates who must sacrifice his life to save him. And since one donor can save several dying people, his sacrifice is quite justified statistically. Everything seems to be fair, but you don’t want to live in such a world. But there is reason to reflect on the justification of self-sacrifice and the line between non-intervention and murder.
The philosopher himself in this story was worried about another important problem. “In many cases it will be painfully difficult to decide whether a person is to blame for his misfortune. There are many ways in which he can drive himself into this trap, and the task is to determine to what extent a person is responsible for his own destiny and how much his actions were conscious. And how can we be sure that a person is not to blame for the misfortune that befell him, and can we rely on this confidence to save him? In other words, even if the "lottery of survival" is considered ethically sound, is it worth saving a smoker from lung cancer? The main thing is that real doctors do not think about this issue.
Philosophical zombie
This hypothetical living dead, unlike the characters in Resident Evil, does not eat people: he is a completely harmless creature, outwardly indistinguishable from an ordinary person. The only difference is that the philosophical zombie is not capable of feeling anything and has no conscious experience, but can imitate any human reactions and actions. For example, if you prick him with a needle, he will quite convincingly depict pain.
The possibility of the existence of such a zombie refutes the concept of physicalism, according to which human perception is due only to physical processes. The philosophical zombie also struggles with the ideas of behaviorism. Indeed, in terms of behavior, such a dead person is indistinguishable from a real person, and according to this theory, consciousness, desires and other mental manifestations are reduced only to behavioral patterns.
This experiment indirectly affects the problem of artificial intelligence - in place of a zombie, you can just as well imagine an android copying all human habits. Such an android would surely pass the Turing test - while continuing to remain unaware of itself. And this forces us to reconsider the criteria of reasonableness.
Maria's room
Like a philosophical zombie, this experiment makes you think about the difference between real experience and knowledge about how the experience should be. Imagine a black-and-white room, where Maria, a specialist in the neurophysiology of vision, sits at a black-and-white monitor. She has never seen color, but she has all the information about the human reaction to it: she knows exactly what we experience when we see a blue sky or a scarlet rose. The question is, will Maria learn anything new if she sees the color herself?
This is another stone in the garden of physicalists, who believe that any knowledge is knowledge only about physical facts. However, some authoritative philosophers (including the famous American cognitive scientist) are of the opinion that the personal experience of color is unlikely to surprise an omniscient scientist. Even if you try to play a trick on Maria and give her a blue banana instead of a normal one, theoretical knowledge about the color of all things in the world will help her respond adequately. However, for the purity of the experiment, perhaps it would be worth replacing the banana with something more spectacular - for example, a painting by Matisse.
Infinite monkey theorem
A favorite thought experiment of the physicist and fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy claims that an abstract monkey, chaotically hitting the keys of a typewriter for eternity, will sooner or later type any predetermined text (the most popular version is Shakespeare's Hamlet).
Enthusiasts have already tried to implement this experiment: in 2003, students and teachers at the University of Plymouth spent $2,000 on research by giving a computer to six monkeys at the local zoo. But in a month of work, aspiring writers Elmo, Gum, Heather, Rowan, Holly and Omela did not really succeed - their creative legacy amounted to only five pages, mostly containing only the letter “S”, and by the end of the project the computer was more than a deplorable sight. However, representatives of the university claimed that they learned a lot of useful things from the experiment.
But interest in the question does not fade: perhaps because this theorem is as old as the world. Specialists in the theory of probability became interested in it at the beginning of the 20th century, but even ancient philosophers thought about the possibility of randomly generating a meaningful text. For example, in Cicero, the role of a monkey was played by an abstract man throwing metal letters to the ground, and instead of "Hamlet" there were "Annals" by Ennius. “It is unlikely that by chance even one line can turn out in this way,” the philosopher delivered a verdict.
But mathematicians do not agree - the probability of sooner or later printing a full-fledged book, randomly poking at the keyboard, although negligible (about 1/10183 800), still exists. And the recognized expert on quantum mechanics, Seth Lloyd, argues that this is how everything that exists appeared. Unless, of course, we take the Universe itself for a computer, and random quantum fluctuations for monkeys. Thus, the fantastic assumption became the basis of a new branch of science - quantum information theory.
Poison and reward
Another inhumane fantasy: a certain millionaire places a vial of poison in front of the hero. The poison is not fatal, but its use causes terrible torment during the day. The rich man makes an offer that cannot be refused: if the hero agrees to drink poison tomorrow afternoon, then tomorrow morning he will receive a million dollars. That is, in principle, it is not necessary to take poison - the daredevil will receive a prize before the time comes for poisoning. Common sense dictates that the most logical thing to do is agree, get rewarded, and not drink the toxin. But here a paradox arises: how can one intend to do something (and after all, money is given out precisely for intention), without intending to do it? It turns out that honestly fulfilling the agreement without drinking poison is still impossible.
Curtain of ignorance
An excellent experiment on the topic of social justice, invented by the American philosopher John Rawls. Suppose all decisions on the organization of the society of the future are entrusted to a certain group of people. In order to make the concept they came up with as objective as possible, they were deprived of knowledge about their own social status, class affiliation, IQ and other personal qualities that could provide a competitive advantage (the so-called “curtain of ignorance”). It turns out that when making a decision, they cannot take into account their own interests in any way. What concept will they choose?
It must be said that Rawls himself was a liberal, and his Political Views implicitly affect the purity of the experiment: the curtain case is initially based on the fact that fairness means equality of opportunity. But in democratic politics, he could be a good litmus test for any lawmaker.
Chinese room
A man who doesn't know Chinese sits in a room with baskets full of Chinese characters. He has a detailed textbook in his native language explaining the rules for combining hieroglyphs. In this case, only the outlines of the characters are used - it is not necessary to understand their meaning. But as a result of such manipulations, it is possible to create a text that is no different from the written language of an ordinary Chinese. Behind the door are people who pass signs of questions in Chinese to the recluse. The hero, guided by the textbook, sends answers - meaningless for him, but quite logical for readers.
In fact, the hero symbolically passes the Turing test: he plays the role of a computer, the textbook is a database, and the messages are the questions of the person to the machine and its answers to them. The experiment shows the limits of the machine and its inability to learn human thinking simply by reacting to given conditions in a learned way. It also warns against a mechanical approach to learning: the practiced skill of solving specific problems does not mean that a person really understands what he is doing. So the compilers of assignments for the exam should keep this experiment in mind.
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What is a thought experiment?
A thought experiment in philosophy, physics and a number of other sciences is a form of cognitive activity, where a situation is modeled not in the form of a real experiment familiar to each of us, but in the imagination. This concept was first introduced into use by the Austrian positivist philosopher, mechanic and physicist Ernst Mach.
Today, the term "thought experiment" is actively used by various scientists, entrepreneurs, politicians and specialists in various fields around the world. Some of them prefer to conduct their own thought experiments, and some give all sorts of examples of them, with the best examples of which we want to introduce you.
As the name implies, we will consider eight experiments in total.
Philosophical zombie
Imagine a living dead. But not sinister, but such a modest, harmless, similar to an ordinary person. The only thing that distinguishes him from people is that he cannot feel anything, does not have conscious experience, but he is able to repeat their actions and reactions after people, for example, if he is burned with fire, he skillfully imitates pain.
If such a zombie existed, it would go against the theory of physicalism, where the perception of a person is due only to the processes of the physical plane. The philosophical zombie also does not correlate in any way with behavioral views, according to which any manifestations, desires and consciousness of a person are reduced to behavioral factors, and such a zombie cannot be distinguished from an ordinary person. This experiment also partially concerns the problem of artificial intelligence, because in the place of a zombie there may be a notorious android capable of copying human habits.
quantum suicide
The second experiment concerns quantum mechanics, but here it changes - from the position of an eyewitness to the position of a participant. Take Schrödinger's cat, for example, shooting himself in the head with a gun powered by the decay of a radioactive atom. The gun can misfire 50% of the time. , there is a collision of two quantum theories: "Copenhagen" and many-worlds.
According to the first, the cat cannot be in two states at the same time, i.e. he will either be alive or dead. But according to the second, any new attempt to shoot, as it were, divides the universe into two alternatives: in the first, the cat is alive, in the second, it is dead. However, the alter-ego of the cat, who remained to live, will remain unaware of his death in a parallel reality.
The author of the experiment, Professor Max Tegmark, leans towards the theory of the multiverse. But most of the experts in the field of quantum mechanics, who were interviewed by Tegmark, trust the "Copenhagen" quantum theory.
Poison and reward
Curtain of ignorance
A wonderful experiment on the topic of social justice.
Example: everything related to social organization is entrusted to a certain group of people. In order for the concept they came up with to be as objective as possible, these people were deprived of knowledge about their status in society, belonging to classes, intelligence quotient and others that can guarantee competitive superiority - this is all the “curtain of ignorance”.
The question is, what concept of the organization of society will people choose, being incapable of taking into account their own personal interests?
Chinese room
A man who is in a room with baskets filled with hieroglyphs. He has at his disposal a detailed manual in his native language, explaining the laws of combining unusual characters. It is not necessary to understand the meaning of all hieroglyphs, because only the drawing rules apply. But in the process of working with hieroglyphs, you can create a text that is no different from the written language of a Chinese resident.
Outside the door of the room are people passing cards with questions to the recluse. Chinese. Our hero, taking into account the rules from the textbook, answers them - his answers do not make sense for him, but for the Chinese they are quite logical.
If we imagine the hero as a computer, the textbook as an information base, and people's messages as questions and answers to the computer, the experiment will show the limitations of the computer and its inability to master human thinking in the process of simply responding to initial conditions through a programmed way.
Infinite monkey theorem
Based on this experiment, an abstract monkey, if he beats the keys of a printing mechanism in a chaotic manner for eternity, at one of the moments will be able to print any text that was originally given, for example, Shakespeare's Hamlet.
Attempts were even made to bring this experiment to life: teachers and students at the University of Plymouth raised two thousand dollars to give out a computer to six macaques in the zoo. A month has passed, but the "test subjects" have not achieved success - their literary heritage contains only five pages, where the letter "S" predominates. The computer was almost completely destroyed. But the experimenters themselves said that they learned a lot from their project.
You can come up with some of your own unusual thought experiments - for this you just need to turn on your head and. But have you ever thought, by the way, that many of us, almost everyone, mentally conduct all kinds of experiments involving, for example, ourselves, someone close to us or even pets? The next time you imagine a situation, write it down on paper or even publish it - maybe your ideas will get a good development.
