Do you or have you ever use thought experiments to some practical end?
The Chinese Room thought experiment is extremely relevant to what’s going on in the world today, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/chinese-room/
I first read about it in Blindsight, a fantastic sci-fi novel by Peter Watts. (Unrelated, I also highly recommend Starfish by him as well).
So now imagine someone asks, “Do you like dogs?” and out pops the answer, “No, I hate them.” The worker inside the thought experiment room has no idea the question that was asked nor the answer that was given and it could very well run counter to their own opinions. The answer may come from bias in the initial data, or just the person who wrote the book of rules and decided to put their thumb on the scales. PLEASE stop trusting AI for literally anything, it is less than worthless, it is actively harmful.
Before I read the link, I wanna guess that its saying the common people laboring for whatever horrible business are oppressed or forced by economic circumstance to labor towards evil while the owners get the good life and the presumed gentile-ness that belies the source of their influence and resources
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers's_paradox
Olbers’s paradox, also known as the dark night paradox or Olbers and Cheseaux’s paradox, is an argument in astrophysics and physical cosmology that says the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.
The night sky being dark has some profound cosmological implications.
With the Hubble Deep Field, they pointed the telescope at a seemingly empty patch of night sky - and it turned out to be filled with distant galaxies. Also, light traveling from far enough away gets redshifted into the infrared range, which means it can no longer be seen by the human eye.
Why? Doesnt that just mean absence of light or somethijt?
Yes. But why is there an absence of light?
If there are infinite stars, then every direction you look would encounter a star. (Things stay the same brightness per subtended angle as they get far away. Space dust doesn’t matter, as it would thermalize and radiate.)
So, the universe can’t have infinite luminous matter, be static and ageless, because if it were then the night sky would look like the surface of a sun.
This may all seem obvious, but it’s neat that you can figure that out with the naked eye.
Can’t we see stars that do not show up in the night sky? Like that spot looks dark to the naked eye, with a hobby telescope it looks dark, but with a space probe telescope you can see a distant star is there?
You discounted space dust. But there has to be a near infinite amount of asteroids out there. If I wanted to see 1m lightyears into a specific spot, like the odds of not hitting an astroid would be pretty hard.
Like if you had a Lite Brite globe with each Lite Brite peg representing a sun. In the middle of the globe it would be completely lit up. However, if you started throwing around astroids around inside the globe, you’d start blocking pegs. Suns, pegs, are still behind the astroid. It’s just blocking the light. A tiny astroid could cast a huge shadow. Even tiny space dust.
One of my favorites is the “ladder paradox” in special relativity, although I originally learned is as a pole vaulter rather than a ladder:
A pole vaulter is running carrying a pole that is 12m long at rest, holding it parallel to the ground. He is running at relativistic speed, such that lengths dilate by 50% (this would be (√3/2)c). And he runs through a barn that is 10m long that has open doors in the front and back.
Imagine standing inside barn. The pole vaulter is running so fast that the length of the pole, in your frame of reference, has contracted to 6m. So while the pole is entirely inside the barn you press a button the briefly closes the doors, so that for just a moment the pole is entirely closed inside the barn.
The question is, what does the pole vaulter see? For him, the pole has not contracted; instead the barn has. He’s running with a 12m pole through what, in his frame of reference, is a 5m barn. What happens when the doors shut? How can both the doors shut?
I will admit that I have never used this thought experiment for any practical end.
For those who haven’t studied relativity, this thought experiment is great at showing the “Relativity of Simultaneity”.
The only way the doors can shut from the pole vaulter’s reference frame is if they close at different times. The exit door opens and shuts first, before the tip of the pole has gone beyond it (otherwise it would hit the door, obviously), and then later, only once the back end of the pole has cleared the entrance door, does it close.
For me it is all about our senses & perception: how would you describe a colour to someone that has never seen? How would someone that has never seen describe their surroundings to you?
If we all percieve the world different how can all agree on things like colours? I mean what if you perceive the sky as green and me as pink but sience has thaught us these colour range has to be blue. So we go our whole life thinking green / pink is blue, due to people definding the reflexion /absorbtion of certain light waves as blue?
That’s an interesting one. A blind person can easily describe things using the words they learnt, just like we do. A cube is still a cube even when you can’t see it, because you can feel it so you can agree about its shape.
Color blindness is different. My friend is a graphical designer, and he chooses interesting and unusual color combos. He is red/green color blind; both look the same to him. (Fun aside: he is also a taxi driver.) Now, obviously red and green are components in the colors he uses, so what color does he actually see?
We cannot explain colors to each other because it is always in reference to some other color, which is also changed in his vision, and maybe not to the same degree as pure red or green. What color is an orange? We both know without looking, but his perception is different from mine. He would need to not be color blind to become able to describe to me how different he sees stuff.
It’s like, the subjective qualia of experience, what we call consciousness, there’s no way to prove anyone else has it, or that they have it the same way you do. That they claim to have it doesn’t mean they actually have an internal experience. Consciousness is one of the biggest mysteries of humanity
If you had to be haunted by someone else forever, they are a ghost, cannot be more than a mile from you at all times, do not eat, sleep, or age, who would it be?
