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/lit/ - Literature

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6389365 No.6389365 [Reply] [Original]

What is the worst, most obviously incorrect or incoherent thought experiment in philosophy?

My nomination: Pascal's Wager. Collapses with the most cursory of interrogations.

The Chinese Room is pretty shit as well.

>> No.6389370

The Missing Shade of Blue

I can't understand how anyone can believe that you could imagine a colour you've never seen before.

>> No.6389374

everything is a thought experiment for solipsism lol

>> No.6389375

>>6389365
>The Chinese Room is pretty shit as well.
Pardob

>> No.6389378

>>6389370

Strong suggestion.

>> No.6389381
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6389381

Wittgenstein's lion.

Proved wrong by furries.

>> No.6389387

>>6389365
Condillac's Statue. Did the exact opposite of what it tried to do.

>> No.6391514

Pascal's wager.

It doesn't make sense, and isn't actually arguing anything.

>> No.6391527

>experiment in philosophy

Anyone know where I could find a book about these?

I know I could just google it, but /lit/ may have some insight about it.

>> No.6391844

>>6389365
Berkeley's Master Argument.
Ideas and representations aren't the same thing yo.

>> No.6391846

Zeno's Arrow

>> No.6392938

>>6389370
This is really difficult for me.
>>6389365
Chinese Room a shit.

>> No.6392943

>>6389370
I feel like Hume anticipated Hegel with this one.

>> No.6392952

>>6389365
I'll nominate Roko's Basilisk and also the different thought experiments which rest on intuition in this paper: http://www.academia.edu/4116101/Why_Im_an_Objectivist_about_Ethics_And_Why_You_Are_Too_

>> No.6392965

>>6391846
>Zeno's Arrow
Really each of Zeno's 'paradoxes' is extremely shit, but just for its detrimental impact on human thought and culture, I would give Achilles and the Turtle the advantage.

>> No.6392977

>>6389387
>Condillac's Statue. Did the exact opposite of what it tried to do.
explain, I do not see why

>> No.6392979

>>6391514
>It doesn't make sense, and isn't actually arguing anything.
are you shitting me matey ?
he says that you must not wait to see god to praise him.

>> No.6392997

The Veil of Ignorance

It's inherently flawed.

>> No.6392999

Nagels bat.

>> No.6393001

The labor theory of value.

>> No.6393002

>>6392997
>It's inherently flawed.
In what way?

>> No.6393006

>>6393001
>The labor theory of value.
>thought experiment
retard

>> No.6393012
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6393012

>>6392979
>he says that you must not wait to see god to praise him.

>> No.6393021

>>6393002
In order to function, irrational elements must be excluded by default, and the rational agents must act wholly for their own gain. Rational agents acting selfishly will never provision equally for the irrational, for they cannot conceive of irrationality anymore than you can conceive of ultraviolet, which in turn creates a facet of the unjust society Rawls was trying to avoid in the first place.

Rational beings acting selfishly will also create a plateau society by default, one which discounts the traits of the humanity that must enter into that society. Would you let someone with a weak inner ear enter into your air force? No. But what if they really want to be an ace fighter jock? Well, every agent will attempt to provision for the future wherein their whims are catered to by society regardless of aptitude, and so will create a system which will see them live comfortably pursuing their every desire without a care to function of society as a whole. This is obviously dysfunctional.

That's assuming that a wholly rational being would even enter into a contract without being able to read the fine print before signing on the dotted line.

It's a good argument to get the marbles rolling, does not hold up to scrutiny.

>> No.6393035

>>6393021
your post is a little to convoluted for me to try to actually read, but it seems to me that the claim of the Veil of Ignorance is a rather weak one (i.e.: the claim is not that this method can actually be applied with 100% accuracy in real life).

>> No.6393047

>>6393012
>daitoku is not a good, it just means "great virtue"
>zeus has no hell, only Hades' underworld, where everyone goes
>Horus has no hell, all "commoners" go to the opposite of life, all nobles joined the Gods
>Brahma (Hinduism) has reincarnation, neither heaven nor hell

this chart is weird

>> No.6393050
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6393050

>>6393047
>this chart is weird

>> No.6393051

>>6393050
that's better but now I have the autism

>> No.6393066

Zeno's paradox is so retarded i'm not even going to explain why

>> No.6393079

>>6393066
That just makes you seem more retarded.

>> No.6393080

>>6393035
Are you agreeing or disagreeing? I am claiming that the Veil is weak, as it only produces the outcome Rawls desires under very specific circumstances, and even then only if you ignore some very obvious flaws.

>> No.6393145

>>6392977

He argued that if a statue had and senses it would have a sort of consciousness. Maybe he included memory, I can't remember now. Anyway he attempted to defend Locke's empiricism i.e. Mind as a Tabula Rasa. But the thought experiment actually shows that you need conceptual schemes (Kant) to understand sense impressions. His heart was in the right place but he did Locke no favours :)

>> No.6393553

>>6391527
Not experiments, thought experiments.

There is experimental philosophy but they mostly research peoples intuitions and their motivation for their intuition.

>> No.6393570

>>6393021
You're post hardly makes any sense? What do you mean by irrational? why shouldn't rational agents provide for them? They can't conceive irrationality? HAVE YOU EVEN READ THE FUCKING EXPERIMENT?

>That's assuming that a wholly rational being would even enter into a contract without being able to read the fine print before signing on the dotted line.

This is like in trolley problems when someone says you could just signal to the driver or something to avoid the problem, you are missing the point.

>> No.6393628

>>6393570
I'm not sure what he means either, but I can't even see what the experiment is trying to tell me. Abstracting from your own perspective doesn't seem psychologically very realistic. When someone claims to be doing that, thinking neutrally about how to organize society, most of the time they are just pretending to be neutral (they might not even be aware) in order to generalize the ideology of their specific social position.

>> No.6393642

>>6389365

For what it's worth, Pascal didn't believe in the wager, which is itself a subtle criticism of those who would try to believe in God by those means; in the same work that the wager appears in, the Pensees, there are passages about the geometric and subtle minds, with a lot of criticism of the geometric mind. The wager falls under such a category, making it a very dark joke.

>> No.6393668
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6393668

Münchhausen trilemma

>> No.6394235

Natural rights may aswell be a thought experiment and its a shit one

>> No.6394369

Humes Fork

>> No.6394397

>>6389365

The Origin of the Species by Darwin

You have one question, that if asked, will reveal how shitty it is

>> No.6394403

>>6389370

It just proves how universals are misleading as fuck

>> No.6394426

The Chinese Room is quite good.
Pascal's Wager is better than people think it is. Problem is that they don't read the Pensees and so don't understand it in its proper context.

>> No.6394442

>>6393668
It's funny that Aristotle already fucking dealt with this.

>> No.6394465

>>6389365
the ontological argument

not because "hurr God dusnt exist" but because it essentially boils down to "if I can picture it in my mind it must be real," and because of the ridiculous and outlandish claims it supposes to reach God's existence.

>> No.6394649 [DELETED] 

>>6392952
>Denying the bassilisk
>Not trying to aid in it's creation however you can

Enjoy being resurrected and tortured for eternity.

>> No.6394971

>>6394442
How?

>> No.6395009

>>6393668
How?

>> No.6395117

>>6393050
the wiccan column is weird

>> No.6395123

>>6393050
>>6395117
oh nm i see what's going on

>> No.6395134

Russell's Teapot. The degree of specificity and extraneous details of the teapot is nowhere near comparable to the idea of God.

>> No.6395215

>>6394465
Check out this 1 weird trick that Atheists HATE

>> No.6395266

>>6393050
Atheism rewarded? What?

>> No.6395267

>>6395134
Prove to me there isn't a teapot out there.
Go on.

>>6395215
Theists though.

>> No.6395279

>>6393066
RETARD DETECTED

>> No.6395287

>>6395266
Rewarded with nothing. There is no afterlife.

>> No.6395309

>>6394465
This

Also Plato's theory of forms

>> No.6395485

>>6394442
>>6394971
Still waiting tbh, I'd appreciate a solution to this so that philosophy isn't bullshit.

>> No.6396039

>>6393570
>on the Internet no one knows you're the ghost of Rawls
Settle down m88, it's just talk.
As they are constrained by Rawls' definition that they be 'selfish' the rational agents will be thinking of themselves. They might conceive of irrationally intellectually, the same way a blind dude conceives of colour, but they can't really understand it. No doubt they'll provision the future so that they'll be comfortable if they happen to be born as a retard or a house cat (irrational beings) but they won't provision for a future where these irrational are treated fairly. Hell, I'd almost say they'd be worse off than they would be in our society, since we at least have the luxury of being selfless.
>>6393628
Pretending to be neutral is the point. You've got to imagine that you're a soul floating in some aether, looking down on Earth at all the shit that's happening without any clue which newborn baby you'll come to inhabit. Then you and the other souls are asked to make rules for the society you're about to enter. Rawls' idea is that you'll all make totally just and fair rules across the board, since none of you know where you'll be on Earth and you don't want to be disadvantaged when you get there. I disagree with this, primary because Rawls' moves the goalpost after establishing this argument by saying: '
Well, if everyone's acting rationally, and selfishly, we'll get a fair utilitarian society, won't that be nice?' Which has a few flaws.

>> No.6396113

>>6392965
>>6393066
I disagree. All of the classical objections to Zeno's paradoxes allows for small adjustments to circumvent them. For example, it's easy to come up with similar paradoxes so that Archimedes' or Aristotle's objections no longer work. The best explanations for the paradoxes don't really arise until the 20th century.

>> No.6396164

This thread just proves /lit/ is philosophically ignorant.

>> No.6396590

>>6395485
>philosophy isn't bullshit
You'll be waiting a while anon

>> No.6396634

>>6396164

This post just proves this anon is philosophically ignorant.

>> No.6396662

>imagine, just for arguments sake, that other humans have internal private experience

LOL

>> No.6396819

>>6393642
>For what it's worth, Pascal didn't believe in the wager, which is itself a subtle criticism of those who would try to believe in God by those means; in the same work that the wager appears in, the Pensees, there are passages about the geometric and subtle minds, with a lot of criticism of the geometric mind. The wager falls under such a category, making it a very dark joke.
what are the passages to support this ?

>> No.6396906

>>6395266
some conceivable supernatural thing where such belief gets you some sort of afterlife reward. i've never seen it termed as such, but i have seen people argue that it's just as conceivable, or whatever, that a god may exist that honors atheism, or whatever, as a god that honors theism, so.

>> No.6396915

>>6396662
pretty much this, and the zombies

>> No.6396931

>>6392999
>>6392997

These. Especially the way people apply them to society. Completely wrong, turned them into pop philosophy.

>> No.6397110

>>6394397
"Have you read the bahble?"

>> No.6397116

>>6391846
Why? I think it displays pretty well the opposition between logic in a vacuum and empirical experience?

>> No.6397596

>>6394426
>people reading French theologians instead of reviews from Dawkins
You have a strange view of humans.

>> No.6397604

>>6394465
>people so oblivious they conflate being with reality

I sincerely think that most serious theologians not too heretical would say directly that God isn't real.
Overall reality is probably the most fucked concept used as if it was obvious.

>> No.6397810

>>6391844
They are not? Could you elaborate?

>> No.6398156

>>6396662
>>6396915
True, the notion of privileged perspective is something most people realize at some point and then abandon purely for social, ethical or religious reasons, but fortunately there are some recent strands in philosophy dealing with it

>> No.6398776

>>6398156
>philosophy dealing with it
such as ?

>> No.6399881

>>6398776
I recommend the book Conscious Life, published by Oxford University Press

>> No.6399918

omnipotence paradox

>> No.6399943

>>6398156
SHould have mentioned that people also abandon it for emotional and existential reasons

>> No.6399953

>>6397810
Here's Russell on the matter""If we say that the things known must be in the mind, we are either un-duly limiting the mind's power of knowing, or we are uttering a mere tautology. We are uttering a mere tautology if we mean by 'in the mind' the same as by 'before the mind', i.e. if we mean merely being apprehended by the mind. But if we mean this, we shall have to admit that what, in this sense, is in the mind, may nevertheless be not mental. Thus when we realize the nature of knowledge, Berkeley's argument is seen to be wrong in substance as well as in form, and his grounds for supposing that 'idea'-i.e. the objects apprehended-must be mental, are found to have no validity whatever. Hence his grounds in favour of the idealism may be dismissed.""

>> No.6401906

>>6389381
I just went and looked that up
jesus christ, how retarded
I mean, I can appreciate what he's getting at, but holy shit that's awful

>> No.6402363

>>6399953
Anon, why did you have to remind me of Russel retardness. As if reading this would not be enough, I made me distinctly remember what he says about Schopenhauer.

Russel is of the finest argument in favor of suicide.

>> No.6402415
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6402415

Xeno's paradox.

>he doesn't believe in quantized space

>> No.6402475

>>6402415
They didn't have the notion of quantization back then.