Episode 333: P-hacking the Mind

[00:00:00] Very Bad Wizards is a podcast with a philosopher, my dad, and psychologist Dave Pizarro, having an informal discussion about issues in science and ethics. Please note that the discussion contains bad words that I'm not allowed to say, and knowing my dad, some very inappropriate jokes. I'm dealing with this the same way I dealt with my own alcoholism and drug addiction, with lies and delusion.

[00:01:12] Welcome to Very Bad Wizards. I'm Tamler Sommers from the University of Houston. Dave, New Jersey Congressman Thomas Keene has been missing from Capitol Hill for over two months. Not only that, there are no photos of him existing during that period of time. His chief of staff released a statement that said,

[00:01:35] There's no cameras where Tom is. Where do you think Thomas Keene has vanished to? I have not heard of this. This is so weird. That's crazy. Okay, Thomas Keene. Wait, what party is he? Good question. He is a Republican.

[00:01:55] He's Republican. He can only be at a gay sex resort, I'm guessing Jamaica, which, you know, given the levels of homophobia in Jamaica, has to be really, really like safe and secure. So that's why they don't have cameras. Exactly. Maybe it caters to closeted... Is he white? Yes. I assume he's white.

[00:02:18] So it's a gay sex resort that caters to closeted, white, probably Republican males who really want big black cock. Like they hire local. That's my guess. It's a very general guess. I mean, yeah, it's kind of the obvious choice, but yeah. Better he's dead. Like they have no cameras in heaven or hell.

[00:02:40] I saw some people posting that he's just in the black lodge, you know, with Cooper and Laura's doppelganger. He needs a doppelganger. Yeah. For the listeners, David is sharing his screen right now and all I see are gay sex resort. Exactly. I was going to look to find the name of one so that I could be even more specific. I mean, I think that's as plausible as any answer.

[00:03:10] So I'm with you on that. Black Lodge is better. Well, actually, Black Lodge could be the name. Yeah, that's true. Is he just smoking like big blunts? In so many ways. Yeah. Everything's a double entendre when you want. Yeah. When you want. I didn't even mean it that way. Oh, Thomas Keene, come back. Come back to us. Yeah. It's a little scary. Yeah, I know.

[00:03:36] And we'll feel bad about this when it, when he turns up like washed up in like the river. So, uh, yeah, today we're going to. We're doing a back by popular demand. Although the last one we did got back by popular opposition. It's the last time we did a tier list.

[00:03:55] This is a, um, a list where we take a bunch of items from a category and rank them on a grade that goes from S being the top tier down to ABCD. And last time we did fields of study slash majors in college and we, it was so long that we made it the main segment and got a lot of, a lot of chemists were not happy with us. Yeah.

[00:04:20] The chemistry people were very displeased with us and we heard a lot of invective from people that we didn't think were honestly capable of it. I think I've been getting envelopes with weird chemical powders in them delivered to me in the mail. Yeah. What was that? You know, after 9-11, what was that? Anthrax, right? Anthrax, that's right. Yeah. I have like a sign on my mailbox saying like no Anthrax deliveries because it just got too overwhelming. Right.

[00:04:48] So this time it is about philosophical thought experiments in the grand tradition of Western analytic philosophy that we're focused on. These are famous, popular, well-known, maybe even to non-philosophy audiences, certainly some of them to non-philosophy audiences. And we're ranking them. Now, initially I was going to do this as a blind ranking for Tamler because I thought it would be funny because I know that he is not a huge fan of most thought experiments. And so I was going to rank it as like worst to least bad for him.

[00:05:19] But we thought it might be more fun to discuss this and arrive at some consensus. Yeah. And I actually, one thing I might have shifted on to some extent is like feeling more positively about certain thought experiments, but often not the debate that comes out of them, which I think often drains them pretty quickly of whatever interest they had.

[00:05:43] But I think I'm a little more friendly to thought experiments than when we talked about it, you know, like back in 2014, probably something around there. Yeah, something like that. That's right. Yeah. I'm already now looking and remembering. There's one I forgot to put that we definitely talked about. Yeah. I'm surprised to not see that one. There's a couple others that I'd like to add too. Okay. Yeah. We'll add them. Yeah. All right. So let's just dive into it.

[00:06:06] Again, we're going thought experiment by thought experiment, going to rank it A, B, C, D or S tier. And I will try as I did last time to make available the final ranking, although we're going to add some. The first one is JJ Thompson's famous violinist thought experiment. So this is the idea is you wake up in a hospital, you're connected to a famous violinist whose kidneys are failing, but he's unconscious. You were kidnapped in order to do so.

[00:06:35] And if you disconnect yourself, he will die. Are you morally obligated to stay connected? Yeah. And I think the original was like some number of months. Nine months. Nine months. Oh yeah. Because it's about abortion. Yes, of course. Good. David, you're starting to get it. Yes. And it's a society of music lovers that have kidnapped this woman or you, I guess. And so you have to stay attached to them for nine months. And this is something that we did recently in my intro class.

[00:07:03] So I'm pretty familiar with the purpose of the thought experiment. She wants to argue that not all people have a right to life or, you know, another way of understanding what she's doing is she wants to define the right to life differently. And the way she defines it using this experiment initially is to say that it's not to be killed unjustly. That's the right you really have.

[00:07:28] And so this thought experiment is meant to show that in the case of the woman attached to this violinist against her will, that even though her detaching herself would mean the violinist would die, he doesn't have a right to have her stay attached for nine months, you know, in a room. So this just shows that you don't always have a right to life.

[00:07:53] Right. And importantly, that some moves for being pro-choice will say the fetus is not a person. And this is attempting to show that even if we all agree that it's a person, there are certain conditions under which you wouldn't have a right to not die. That's right. So she doesn't say the fetus isn't a person. She grants that. And then the premise she's disputing is all persons have a right to life. And she says, not if you understand that too broadly, only if you understand it, the right not to be killed unjustly.

[00:08:23] So this is a good thought experiment, I think, to make that narrow point. I think it's less effective as and she notes this as a defense of abortion because it seems like the if you're looking at an analogy for, you know, most abortions, this won't really fly.

[00:08:45] The analogy it fits best with is if you are sexually assaulted and then became pregnant because that was entirely against her will. So then trying to deal with that, her thought experiments start to get progressively wackier, culminating in you put up screens in your window, but occasionally those screens are defective and people seeds will occasionally get through. And what if one of them takes root in your house? Are you obliged to keep it in your house?

[00:09:15] You know, at that point, just say, just say that it's a condom that broke. Yeah. But again, she doesn't want to do that because she wants to get something where our intuitions. I think this is, I think, a relatively rare case where it's a successful one for its goal.

[00:09:31] Like if you want to have an argument that defeats the like, well, if it's a person that has a right to live, then this is a counterexample that does, like you said, the narrow job of saying, well, you don't really believe that all people have a right to life. At least if you agree that this intuition is you're allowed to disconnect yourself. So I think this would get a high-ish grade for me. Yeah, I think it gets a high-ish grade for that point.

[00:09:57] But, you know, I would temper the grade because, you know, the paper is called A Defense of Abortion. And it really, this thought experiment is at best a defense of abortion in cases of sexual assault. That's what this thought experiment could arguably give support for. Yes, it also gives support for that narrow claim that not all persons have a right to life construed in a certain way. But that in itself doesn't get you all the way to the defense of abortion.

[00:10:27] But I'll give it a B. What do you think? I was thinking B as well. Yeah. Yeah. All right. You know, because some thought experiments don't even do the narrow thing. Yeah. I'd say a lot of them don't. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Next one is Frank Jackson's Mary the Color Scientist, where the idea is Mary is a brilliant scientist who knows every physical fact about color vision. But she's lived her whole life in a black and white room. When she escapes and finally sees red for the first time, does she learn something new? Yeah.

[00:10:56] So this is part of Frank Jackson's knowledge argument originally for dualism. Because if she learns something new, even though she knew all the physical facts, then there's something that's separate that she's learning. Non-physical. Yeah. Okay. And as a thought experiment, I think it's great and quite evocative and it gets a lot of people thinking.

[00:11:20] But in terms of establishing that dualism is true, I don't even think Frank Jackson believes that anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And it's definitely one which I think was an intriguing idea, but then got beaten to hell by analytic philosophers in the 90s and early 2000s in the kind of the renaissance of consciousness studies.

[00:11:44] So along with zombies, it is, I think, you know, it's evocative, but doesn't do the thing that it's supposed to do. Yeah. As a non-philosopher of mind, I never quite liked this. I didn't think it was doing what it was supposed to do, given that the phenomenal experience would involve just different physical things going on when she saw red. What do you mean? Well, it's not just a phenomenal experience.

[00:12:11] It's like literally different waves of light waves hitting her eyes and causing different reactions in her brain. Like, I get that he's saying, like, okay, but now she has the experience versus the facts. But, like, I've just always thought it's clearly a different kind of knowledge. It's not, like, weird, you know? Yeah. I mean, I guess the idea is she's – Frank Jackson isn't denying that there's a lot of physical things going on when she sees red for the first time. But given that she knows all of that already, those physical facts of what would happen when she sees – No, I know.

[00:12:40] I get that that's the intuition that's trying to pull. But, like, knowing the physical facts is, like, very different from, like – Yes. I feel like you could just say, like, is describing, you know, C-fibers firing the same as feeling pain? Right. Like, no. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. No, that's right. And also, I don't think we can have any idea what it would really mean to know all the physical facts about, you know, consciousness. So, I think, like, that's the problem. I'm happy to give this one a D unless you want to pull it up to a C.

[00:13:06] I think I'd give it a C because it's evocative just as a thought experiment separate from any philosophical point it's trying to make. There's something kind of interesting about it. But I would also put it out of D if you want to do that because it – no, I actually want to save D for a couple of minutes. Yeah, I was going to say, let's save it. We can bring it down afterwards when we do a little post-mortem. Pascal's Mugging. You're familiar with this one, right?

[00:13:30] We did a segment on it way back, but I have no memory either of the thought experiment or of our discussion of it. But, yeah, we did. You don't remember that? No, I don't remember at all. This is Nick Bostrom's idea that – so, a stranger asks you for $5 and claims that if you give it to him, he'll use his advanced powers to create astronomical happiness for trillions of future beings.

[00:13:52] So, even if the chance is tiny, the idea is that the outcome is so extreme that if you're doing traditional expected utility calculations, it seems like you should, like, for sure, give him money. So, it's like, you know, suppose that the chance of him being right is 0.001. But the outcome that he's describing is so extraordinarily high, like extreme in magnitude, that you do, you know, the expected utility by, like, the valence of the outcome.

[00:14:20] And it seems like an obvious thing to give him your $5. Yeah. Here's my first D, I think. But I hate these utilitarian – and I know that they're challenging the utilitarian calculus to some degree, although I'm surprised that Bostrom would be using this to challenge. He probably just embraces the reductio. Like, you should give him the – Yeah, I think so. Yeah, that would – I think that's the point. Yeah. That's the point.

[00:14:46] But, like, see, I don't think, like, the expected utility calculus is the right way of making decisions in the first place. Yeah. And I think, you know, there are so many assumptions you make even by thinking that way. And also, I think Bostrom, if we've learned anything, it's that he is evil in, like, a supervillain kind of way.

[00:15:06] And uses a lot of this kind of reasoning to argue that, like, all philanthropic donations should be going to stop evil AI from killing humanity and stopping existential risks. But really just that existential risk. Yeah, I agree in all of the ways. Like, I don't think that the expected utility calculus is the right way to think of these things. And it has gotten abused.

[00:15:33] If you start granting this, then you can essentially pick your favorite infinitesimally small-chanced existential outcome and say we should put all of our resources into, like, an asteroid hitting the world or whatever. You know, anything that has to do with the millions of future beings that are going to exist thousands of years from now. Being awakened and the end of all suffering. So we should put it all into, like, forced meditation camps. Yeah, right. All right. So we got a good range going.

[00:16:03] BCD so far. Yeah. One we've definitely talked about, and I remember, is the Chinese room. So this is John Searle's well-known example of a sort of mechanism. So you imagine that there's a person in a room who doesn't understand Chinese, has no knowledge of Chinese, but he's following an instruction manual for manipulating Chinese symbols. So when one comes in to the room, he follows these exact rules and then outputs another set of Chinese symbols.

[00:16:30] And to an external observer, it seems as if he knows Chinese. And, of course, Searle says, yeah, this is just what computers, like, are doing. They don't have any semantic understanding. They're just manipulating syntax. Yes. Quite, I guess, relevant thought experiment these days. Exactly. And the idea is, even though it can tell you, like, how to make a hamburger or something like that, it doesn't know what a hamburger is. Or, like, if you're the person, you're just using these algorithmic instructions that you were given.

[00:17:00] You know, like, I remember being convinced that Searle was begging the question. Yeah, me too. In some way. But I don't totally, like, I can't get quite in that. That's exactly what I, yeah. Yeah. I want to believe previous David, like, who arrived at, like, this clear objection to it. Yeah. But it is compelling and it's relevant. Yes. I think that it's getting something wrong about how to think about this, but I kind of like it. Yeah.

[00:17:27] I would say that I might even be less convinced that it's wrong, although I kind of buy it that it's begging the question against, you know, the whole point is that we don't understand our own processes of how we understand things. So, we can't rule out just because of this thought experiment that somehow that does. Right. Our neurons are basically, like, the same thing, I think. Well, yeah, I don't know about that, but certainly you can't rule it out. So, yeah, I would give it a B if you want to. Like, I would be more tempted C, but.

[00:17:57] I think I'm tempted C. Okay. I think it's up there with Mary in that it's, like, a compelling example that's, like, also done to death and that I think is wrong. So, like, I guess my wrongness of it, my judgment of wrongness is tainting it. But, yeah, I would give it a C plus if that were a thing. Okay. But let's keep it in the C range. Yeah, okay. All right. Nozick's experience machine. So, you imagine a machine, as every single undergrad will tell you, like the Matrix. Well, they used to.

[00:18:26] Now it's, like, much fewer have seen the Matrix. Yeah, I guess so. Imagine a machine that could give you a perfect simulated life, complete happiness and pleasure, love, like financial success, whatever it is that you want. Once inside, you actually will be convinced that it's real. But, of course, it's not, you know, that going in. So, do you decide to go in? Yeah. You know, just to fill it out a little bit, he says you can come out every two years to just briefly reprogram. Check it.

[00:18:54] Just because how are you supposed to know what you're going to want to be like at 75 when you're 20 or whatever. So, you can come out every two years and just to head off a couple objections that people always give, like, to experience real joy and happiness and a sense of achievement, you also have to suffer and struggle a bit. But, you know, the point is you can program in the suffering and struggle. The right kind of suffering. Yeah. The perfect balance of struggle to achievement. Right. Yeah.

[00:19:23] And his point there is arguing against, like, at the hedonic aspect of utilitarianism that all we care about is pleasurable experiences or avoiding unpleasant experiences. Yeah. And he wants to say that clearly that's not true because most people would not plug into this where you can optimize your pleasurable experiences. You can optimize your happiness. But there's something more that we want. We want actual contact with reality.

[00:19:50] We want to actually be something, like, and actually be a person and not an indeterminate blob floating in a tank with no actual personality, just a simulated personality. Well, I mean, you're still you. Yeah. Your personality isn't simulated. Well, but not as you grow as a character because it is the idea. Like, it's not your actual personality is the idea. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:20:16] So what's interesting is if you ask people this, at least my knowledge of when people have done this, say, like a survey, people do have this intuition that they don't want to be plugged in. But if you ask them, imagine that you're in it right now. Would you want to be unplugged? Then their intuition flips. Yeah. So I don't know. This one, what do you think? I like this one. I teach it in my intro every year. It's a fun, you know, class when you're giving the students this thought experiment and you're heading off some of the other objections.

[00:20:45] It's also kind of fun that, like, 25 percent of the students will say, yes, I would plug in. You know, something along those lines. Some people think it's obviously yes. You know, it's funny. Yeah. Even people you wouldn't expect, you know. And especially, like, with the world and the state that it is in now, you might think that makes a difference. You know, I think it is effective as far as it goes, certainly as much as the violinist thought experiment. Yeah, you're right. Pedagogically, it's even better than the violinist. Yeah, and pedagogically, it's better. So I would give it an A.

[00:21:16] Okay, good. You convinced me. All right. The Ring of Gyges. I never know how to say it. Gyges? Gyges, yeah. So, again, this is one I teach all the time. So this is at the beginning of Book Two of The Republic. Glaucon and Adamantus are asking Socrates to prove to them why Thrasymachus was wrong, that morality is bullshit. They reframe Thrasymachus' challenge to say, look, I think people are just only instrumentally.

[00:21:45] The only reason people act morally or justly is because they want to avoid the punishment of what happens if you act unjustly. They don't want to go to prison. They don't want to have a bad reputation. They want to be able to marry into good families. And there's a lot of arguments that they give.

[00:22:04] Now, Socrates says, not only is being good instrumentally good for you, being moral, being just, not only is that instrumentally, but it's also intrinsically good for you. It's the highest kind of good, one that is both instrumentally good for you and intrinsically good for you, good in and of itself.

[00:22:24] And they are challenging him to defend that because it seems to them that when you look at the origin of morality and they give a kind of Nietzschean, you know, debunking of how people got to this point where they kind of reluctantly act justly just because being taken advantage of without being able to retaliate is worse than best case scenarios. You could just do what you want and nobody could respond or retaliate against you.

[00:22:54] But that option is not as good as the worst option is bad, which is everyone is unjust to you and there's nothing you can do about it. So we make this compromise that there is this thing called justice. And the funny thing is they also say that, like, who's the one who praises justice the most? It's the weak people. It's the people with no power because they wouldn't be able to take advantage of like a moral nihilistic landscape anyway. So, of course, they're going to be the ones that praise justice.

[00:23:24] They're not the uber mensch. Yes, it is very – it anticipates a lot of the Nietzschean stuff. Okay, so then as part of that argument, Glaucon gives this famous Ring of Gyges thought experiment where he says, imagine a ring that could turn people invisible. And now imagine you give this ring to the just man and also the unjust person. So someone who's just, someone who's unjust. You give them both the ring. And he says, of course, both of them will act exactly the same way. They will steal stuff.

[00:23:54] They will go into people's houses and have sex with the women there, which I've never understood as to how invisible. I know. It's like they will seduce the queen and I'm like, I think he just means rape. Like I – you know? And even that. And you might just get inadvertently kneed in the crotch. You never know. But anyway, his point is that once you remove the consequences away from acting immorally, then everyone will act the same.

[00:24:18] Whether you're a so-called just person or a so-called unjust person, which proves that people are only moral and just for instrumental reasons and not because it's good in itself. Yeah. So what is – remind me, what is Plato's retort? Socrates is like the rest of the Republic is the retort basically. I mean, you know, and it's not – he doesn't give any specific reply to this thought experiment.

[00:24:44] Here's why I don't love the thought experiment is like you just have to sort of believe him that everyone would act the same with the ring. Ah, he wants to do some ex-fi. He should have done some ex-fi. Yeah. Exactly. It's just – it's not empirical enough. No, but I mean like I just don't know if that's true. I actually think it's probably not true that everyone would act the same if they could turn themselves invisible.

[00:25:07] I think a lot of people who were otherwise law-abiding would start stealing shit right and left and try to gain power and try to use it in whatever way. But I don't think everyone would. And so like I'm a little unclear what it's supposed to demonstrate. It's just kind of you restating your view that people are only just instrumentally. Yeah. I definitely steal some shit. Yeah. So you wouldn't – would you go around like raping people? I would not seduce the queen. Yeah.

[00:25:37] Right. No. But like there is some power in thinking even the best people might try to get away with some things. Yes. Like I was going to say like it gets some props for being such an early example of this. But you're right. It is restating the claim in like a – Colorful way. Yeah. Vershy way. Exactly. Yeah. I don't know. I would put that around the C. Yeah. And this is blasphemy. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:26:01] There's another thought experiment in the Republic that I think is maybe the best thought experiment. Oh. All right. Let's actually take a break. And when we come back, we will complete our tier ranking of philosophical thought experiments.

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[00:30:04] Like we said, we're so grateful, and we don't think we'd be doing this without you. So thank you very much. And now back to the podcast. Okay, Runga Gaiji joins the Chinese room and marry the color scientist at the C level. We have Pascal's mugging is the lowest at D, violinist at B, experience machine at A. Will anything make it to S tier? We'll have to find out. Ship of Theseus. This is one I don't often think of as a thought experiment, but I guess it is.

[00:30:31] It's like, so the idea is, and it comes from Plutarch, I guess, a ship has all its wooden planks gradually replaced until none of the original material remains. And so when it comes home, is it still the ship of Theseus? So one by one, every plank removes, but there is some continuity. You can add to it, what if you take all of the parts that were replaced and you kind of repair them and you put those together? Now you have two ships. Is it the same thing? I mean, this one is often brought up in the context of a kind of Buddhist deconstruction

[00:30:58] of the self, but it doesn't really do that job if you think that it is the same ship. Yeah. This one has never tickled my imagination or, you know, gotten me really worked up or, oh, I got to figure out how I think about this. But that's, you know, that could just be me. I mean, I think that's right because I actually don't think that it's supposed to be intuition pumpy to begin with. It's like kind of more like a dilemma, like whether it is or not. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't think it deserves D.

[00:31:28] So like C? C. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. The closely related one, I guess, is the next one, which is the transporter problem, which we've talked to death. This comes from Derek Parfit. And it is just imagine that there is a teleportation machine that scans your body, destroys it, but keeps the information and creates a perfect replica somewhere else, you know, using atoms from there. So it puts you together exactly the same. And because it's exactly the same, you have all the memories and personality and you think

[00:31:58] that you're you. Is that still you? Yeah. I don't like this brand of thought experiment. It's the brand of thought experiment that like asks you to conceive of something that we can't conceive of really. Like we can easily conceive of it being us like in Star Trek, but it's very hard to conceive of it. Like what it would actually mean to put you back together with all the same exact organization of atoms and electrons and neurons and all of that.

[00:32:25] And you and Paul Bloom have much stronger intuitions about this than I do. So I'll let you rank it. For me, it would be in the C to D range. Yeah. See, for me, it's in the A range just because of the discussions that it provokes. And to me, what it says about people's intuitions, it is a sharply divisive question, you know, including within Paul's own marriage. Yeah.

[00:32:53] Like maybe you can't conceive of it, but it still pulls my intuition so strongly that I really like it. So shall we... You want to compromise on B? At a B? Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. But the listeners should know it would be way lower for me if it was just me because I don't care. I think the first time we brought it up to you, I remember vividly your immediate response was, will the new copy have a non-torn Achilles? Then yes. Yeah, that's right.

[00:33:22] Because it was right after I tore my Achilles. I can literally remember recording that. I was sitting on my living room floor. And I was so annoyed. I was like, no, you don't understand what the question is. You're killing yourself. It's a suicide machine. It is. I also think that I've always said you and Paul don't really believe that because otherwise you would just view every episode of Star Trek, which you both love, as just like a Holocaust. Yeah. You have a weird view of what believing is and our ability to watch fiction.

[00:33:51] Let's go do a thought experiment about what belief is. Yeah. Okay. The trolley problem. So the trolley problem. I guess Philippa Foot first described the trolley scenario and then J.J. Thompson built on it. The idea, if anybody listening to us doesn't know what it is, is that there is a runaway trolley headed toward killing five workmen stuck on the track.

[00:34:18] You could divert it by pulling a lever as an innocent bystander to go to another track that only hits one. And so the question is, is it morally permissible for you to flip a switch and cause one to die instead of five? And properly, the trolley problem is when you combine it with these other versions like the footbridge dilemma that pull your intuition in a different way, but nonetheless seem equivalent. Yeah. So you push an innocent fat man off of a footbridge in order to stop the trolley.

[00:34:48] Where here, again, in both cases, you're causing some one individual to die for the sake of saving five individuals. But people have a real strong intuition, usually, that one is permissible and one is not. Yeah. You could argue that this ruined moral psychology. I was going to say, this is either an S or a D or an F because it was definitely fruitful. It was fruitful for like people's citation count, their H index or whatever.

[00:35:15] But it was not, I don't think, fruitful for understanding the mind or understanding ethics. I think it was deeply detrimental to that. Yeah.

[00:35:26] Now, if you could save it as a niche normative ethics paper where there would have been some back and forth between philosophers about, you know, the normative appropriateness of killing, letting die, and didn't sort of ruin moral psychology for 10 years, would you be like, oh, it's like a decent? No. I will say, like, I use it just to illustrate, like, consequentialist intuitions versus deontological intuition.

[00:35:54] So I do use it in a class, but then I don't want to talk about it. And, you know, I think the problem with it also is that you're supposed to accept, like, with the fat person on the bridge that he'll definitely, you're 100% sure that it will stop the train and kill the five people. And, you know, like, I just think people are often not thinking in those terms. So I don't even like it as a thought experiment on its own terms. I don't totally trust intuitions that come from it.

[00:36:22] But I hate that people have been emailing us variations of this for, you know, 15 years practically. Like, there was that one where the little baby solves the trolley problem. Yeah, the two-year-old solves the trolley problem. Have you seen that, Tammy? Have you seen it? Only the, like, 190 times that that has been brought to my attention. And, like, as if it's the first time we're going to see it. So I would give it a D. Yeah. Very happy.

[00:36:46] I have, like, these mixed feelings because I've used it in my research in a way that I don't think abuses it in the ways that you were describing, where it's just sort of like an illustrative. The chip is worth the third. Yeah. Where, like, the point is that people don't have any principles really about this. But actually, I'm okay giving it a D because I think we would have been better off probably creating our own stimuli and not. Right.

[00:37:12] It got extra killed with, like, the gajillion, you know, loop variations and stuff. The claim that it's tracking anything about the human mind is kind of crazy. It's crazy. And also this forced dichotomy between non-consequentialist and consequentialist reasoning. Yeah, that's right. And that's the other time I've used it where I think it's kind of interesting to show that, like, what people generally think is that you're kind of like a monster if you feel no compunction about doing it.

[00:37:38] So it's less about what you do, but, like, how you're reacting to it. Even if you're at the switch. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But I'm fine with it as a D. Yeah. It's done too much damage. It deserves a D. Yeah. Okay. The utility monster. Do you want to explain this one? No. Okay. D. So this is Robert Nozick's kind of thought experiment to attack utilitarianism. It says, imagine a creature that gets vastly more pleasure from resources than normal people do.

[00:38:06] So, like, you know, every pleasure you get from eating your favorite donut, it gets like a million more hedonic units for eating its favorite donut. So it gets far more pleasure than normal people do. Giving it everything would maximize the total amount of happiness. So does utilitarianism sort of require that we give the utility monster every resource available to maximize happiness? Yeah.

[00:38:28] So this and related thought experiments to me is like a reductio ad absurdum of, like, analytic philosophy. And certainly, like, the utilitarian deontological debate. I find nothing interesting about it. I find nothing compelling about, you know, as an objection to utilitarianism. I think it's – we're talking about, like, real life and ethics.

[00:38:56] And to reduce it to these kinds of insane thought experiments is, yeah, again, detrimental in a different way to actual moral inquiry, I think, the way it should be conducted. Yeah. It's detrimental, but neither does it have the cool, like, little package of pulling intuitions. From the minute I heard it, I thought this is a problem that would only arise if you had come to some sort of crazy utilitarian theory. Yeah.

[00:39:26] Like, most people would be like, well, no. Obviously not. Yeah. It doesn't pull normal intuitions. Right. It pulls people with very specific commitments. Yeah. Not even intuition. It pulls their reasoning. It exposes them as, like, enemies of, like, the good. The one thing I was going to say is, to the extent that it makes utilitarians question their view, do you think it has value? I just don't think it does do that. Yeah. Never cared for it. I've never cared for it. Yeah.

[00:39:53] I'm actually indifferent to it in a way that, like, maybe doesn't even deserve a D because I don't hate it enough. Like, if there was a below D, I would put it there. Yeah, useless. Yeah, it's useless. Okay, good. Okay, John Rawls' Veil of Ignorance. Yeah. Do you want to give this one? Sure. This is the famous thought experiment in his monumental work.

[00:40:18] It is trying to establish certain principles of justice from, like, a priori reasoning. Yeah. The way it tries to do that is to imagine if you are a rationally self-interested individual, but you are stripped of all the contingent things about you. So, what kind of family you're going to be born into, your looks, your intelligence, your socioeconomic status, at least when you're born.

[00:40:48] Whether you're a short king or an NBA player. Yeah, exactly. So, you don't know any of that. And you have to agree on certain principles for governing your society. What are those principles going to be? And he derives certain principles, including, like, certain basic rights that you would want to be established in case you get a bad roll of the dice. And certain principles about when inequality should be permitted, only if it also helps the least advantage.

[00:41:17] Yeah. There's, yeah, primary goods that it gives to everybody, but then certain secondary goods. I don't remember all the details. Like, I think it's an interesting thought experiment. It might be incoherent to imagine yourself stripped of everything. Yeah. I think that's what we, when we talked about it, we sort of arrived at that. And I do kind of agree with that criticism.

[00:41:40] And it also just kind of assumes that, you know, in the same way, I guess, that the ring of gyges kind of assumes what people would actually want. And, you know, it could be that some people have more risk tolerance than others. And so they would want to swing for something a little higher. And then finally, I think this really did a lot of damage to political philosophy. It really made it abstract. And there is this whole ideal theory versus non-ideal theory debate within political philosophy.

[00:42:10] And I am so firmly in the non-ideal camp. And I think the veil of ignorance is why ideal political philosophy, you know, just imagining things under certain perfect circumstances with a very kind of disembodied sense of the individual. Like, what would be the most just arrangement? So I think, like, although I don't think he was a bad guy, I think he did a lot of damage.

[00:42:36] And that some of this stuff is propped up as a way of, and I'm not the first person to say this. And I read other people saying it and found it convincing. But it does some kind of work in upholding the status quo. Because it gives this kind of illusion of rights being established through, you know, a priori philosophy. Now, to give Vral's credit, in later work, he regretted that he tried to be so content about it.

[00:43:06] And he restricted it to people who live in a roughly democratic society, like what they would want. So, which also might address some of the incoherence problems. I'm not sure. But anyway, what do you think? You know, I clearly had the same, like, fundamental issues about this notion. You know, it breaks down when you're like, what is this person behind the veil? You have to infuse it with something.

[00:43:32] And I think people unwittingly infuse it with lots of things that they are. I don't know about, like, what it did to political philosophy. I believe you, that it was bad. But, so unlike the Ring of Gyges, I don't think it's assuming the conclusions that Rawls draws. I think if you treat it as a pure thought experiment, you know, he gets to some Maximin principle. But it doesn't, the thought experiment itself to be effective doesn't require you to agree with Rawls' conclusions. And here's why I still like it.

[00:44:01] I think that one of the things that it's doing is forcing people to think about, especially people we talk to, like our students. The possibility that they might be, you know, randomly sorted into the worst off in society. If that was a possibility, yeah, what would you? Yeah, what would you want a society to look like if you had been sorted that way? And so I don't feel so negative about it. Like, I kind of like the imaginative component of making people think about their life being worse off. Yeah, I agree with that.

[00:44:30] I'd even, I mean, it's so foundational, even if some of that, I think, has led to bad things. I could give it a B. Yeah, I like the B. Okay. Okay, the last one that I had here was the OG Pascal's wager. Yeah. Which is actually Pascal's example of, like, pulling your intuition about might as well believe in God. Because, look, here are the outcomes. You don't believe in God. He doesn't exist. Nothing. You die, you die. You die, you die.

[00:44:58] You do believe in God and God is real. You get eternal reward. But if you don't believe in God and God is real, then fucking burn in hell forever or whatever. So, yeah, OG Pascal's wager. What do you think? I'm a little split on this because on the one hand, I think it's great. You know, it's such a fun idea to think of whether you believe in those terms as just a kind of, well, look at the upside, look at the downside.

[00:45:28] And the upside is so great. Then the downside is, you know, maybe you would believe something false. But compared to eternal bliss versus eternal suffering, like, you know, who cares? We have a lot of false beliefs. So, I like it for that.

[00:45:44] I think there's a fundamental weakness, which I'm sure we talked about when we talked about Pascal's wager, which is that God would, you know, not care that the only reason you believed in him is because of this kind of self-interested trick. And that maybe you would just go to hell anyway. So, like, and maybe you could say, well, you're even the chance that God only cares about whether you believe or not and doesn't care about the reasons why you believe is enough to make it still worth it.

[00:46:14] But, you know, that diminishes it a little bit for me. But I still think it's as thought experiments go, it's up there. What do you think? I've always hated it. I think it's, you know, it ignores that there's a gajillion different views that you might, you know, the real God might be some random ass Egyptian deity from the, um, also that it's hard to ever arrive at a sincere belief this way.

[00:46:38] And I think, yeah, like we said, sincerity seems to be necessary for at least many conceptions of what salvation would be. People, though, are persuaded, you know, most recently, Scott Adams, the Dilbert comic author before he died, tweeted something basically that was like, I'm converting to Christianity. Yeah. Just in case. And a lot of people before they die, they, you know, like my dad is, you know, pretty much an atheist for most of his life, kind of got a little bit more interested in God as he was, you know.

[00:47:07] And so, like, I think it is picking up on those things and it's not as transactional and strategic as it's often presented. I think it picks up on, we do kind of want this to be true. And maybe some of the rewards come from, you know, as you start to be more open to belief, maybe because of this, then you start practicing. And over time, that turns into something more sincere.

[00:47:35] Every time you get the Crusades. Yeah, you burn heretics, which is fun. Like, when was the last time you burnt a heretic? Well, I call them heretics. Heretics. Yes. I burned them. Is it heretics or heretics? It's heretical heretics. Heresy, though. It's a heresy. Heresy, yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I could be wrong. I could be wrong. Yeah, I guess like I'm pretty negative on it. You want to do a compromise with this one? But I can compromise, yeah.

[00:48:04] Yeah, I mean, if the fucking transporter problem is a B, it's got to be at least a B. All right. We'll put Pascal's wager as a B. All right. That's the list that I had. The one that I didn't have that I forgot is the zombie. Yeah. Problem. Which I would probably put in the C range. But I think you missed the two best ones. Yeah, okay. What you got? So the first one is Descartes' Evil Demon. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:31] That one, I would say, is fascinating and has led to so much. You know, I would put that in the S tier since we don't have an S tier thought experiment. We don't have an S tier. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I forgot. You know, it's funny. I thought of Descartes and I was like, oh, well, I mean, what's the thought experiment though? You know, he's just sort of proposing that. But yeah, you're right. That's the thing that starts it off. That he could be systematically deceiving us.

[00:48:54] And so we can't, even though we've established that we're a thinking thing, we can't be sure of anything that we're seeing is true because we could be systematically deceived. So I would put that in the S tier. And then the other one, and maybe this is too involved to be a thought experiment, but I think if you can call it a thought experiment, it's, I think, the best one any philosopher has come up with by far. And that's Plato's Cave, which we've devoted a whole episode to. Oh, yeah. Yes. I wouldn't have thought of that as a thought experiment. Yeah.

[00:49:34] It's Descartes' evil demon, but I don't know. Some of these other ones are kind of like that too. Well, I guess, yeah, I don't know. In any case, there's a whole, if you want to hear us talk about Plato's Cave, there's a whole episode somewhat recently, meaning in the last two years at some point, I think. Now, the evil demon's good because you can insert the source of doubt with anything. It doesn't have to be a demon. It can just be like the brute fact that our senses are constrained by what evolution gave our brain. Yeah.

[00:50:03] Or like we're in a simulation or- Or we're in a simulation. Exactly. Yeah. All right. That's good. I agree. S tier. All right. I wish I could have thought of more S tiers. Yeah. Well, there's not a lot, I think, but I'm sure we're missing a bunch because I didn't even look into this, but you got the ones that I teach besides Plato's Cave and occasionally Descartes' evil demon. Oh, you know the one that I teach is the singer drowning of shallow pond. Yes. That's another, I think, S tier one.

[00:50:33] Yeah. Yeah. Talk about like an effective thought experiment for changing the world, you know? And just what it does to students who go through that. You know, we have a whole episode way back in the day on the stages of Singer, but it is such a powerful example or thought experiment that it usually will take like my entire seminar for that day. Yeah. People talking about it. And their various objections. Yeah.

[00:50:58] And it's like, I think even in that thought experiment episode we did way back that we said like this is kind of in some ways the most effective thought experiment that anyone has come up with because it makes a point that is true. Yeah. Yeah. That causes people to reflect upon the ways in which they aren't being good people in the way that they might think they are. Yeah. And, you know, also started like the whole effective altruism movement essentially.

[00:51:27] Like everyone within that was – and, you know, not that the effective altruism movement right now is something to be – Suffering a little bit. Not that it's not celebrated necessarily necessarily, but, you know, like to have such an impact and so many organizations have received so much money and you can really trace it back to this one thought experiment like that was come up in, you know, famine, affluence and morality, which I believe is like in the 70s he wrote that.

[00:51:56] Yeah. And, okay, so both that and the Descartes demon have this property that I think they're great at teaching, but I can give them without secretly thinking, well, there's this deep problem with it the way that I do with some of these other ones where I have to like convince them that all of these things are like just suspend your disbelief or like don't – The fat man really will stop the trolley or he really will be – yeah.

[00:52:25] Yeah, I don't feel guilty about it. Like with the trolley problem, I feel guilty when I'm teaching it sometimes. Yeah. So I would put that in S tier as well. Oh, good. All right. All right. So we got those two in S tier. We got the experience machine at A, the only one in A. We got the B tier, the violinist, the transporter problem, the veil of ignorance and Pascal's wager. I can't believe the transporter problem is at a B. Like I – Well, you know, listen. I don't know what to sign that name. I put Pascal's wager at B.

[00:52:54] I would put them both in C. Like it's more important for me to have the transport problem lower than to have Pascal's wager higher. You're willing to like cut off your nose to spite your face is what you're saying. Sorry. Ship transporter problem, C. Fine. Pascal's wager, C. I see. Along with Mary the color scientist, the Chinese room ring of Gyges, ship of Theseus, C being the most populated category.

[00:53:21] At the D level, Pascal's mugging, the trolley problem, and the utility monster. Yeah. All right. Like last time, I'll try to include an image including our two S tier ones. All right. Well, with that taken care of, we'll bring this episode to a close. Join us next time on Very Bad Wizards.

[00:54:22] Just a very bad wizard.