Six Philosophical Questions

I quite like things like this, where complicated philosophical and scientific principles are explained in a couple of minutes with cute illustrations and maybe a bit of a joke, because that’s the only level I’m going to understand them on, and I do want to understand when I’m at a party and somebody starts talking about the difference between the grandfather paradox and the multiverse theory, or some such.

It’s kind of like I explained to my son this evening, when he asked if I thought Archeologist was a good job (I should have just said yes, because he currently wants to be a sports commentator, which I’m O.K. with, he’s 10, but I’d like to encourage him in a more intellectual direction) and I said “Well, I sort of see it in the same category with Astronomy.  These are things that I like talking about, and writing about, and watching shows about on discovery channel, but if you want to actually  do it as a profession, there are a lot of long, boring hours of tedious work involved.”

I took Astronomy 101, that cured me of the bug right there.

Anyway, back to the 6 famous thought experiments.   Some of them were interesting but the only two that were new to me were the infinite hotel and the Chinese room, which definitely puts a new spin on the old Turing test.

Just cut a hole in the damned box! Problem solved.

The one with the runner and the turtle I’ve heard as the paradox of the arrow, which can never reach its target because it always has to cover half the distance. Nonetheless, it does, so there’s some flaw in the logic somewhere.

The Twin Paradox isn’t so much a paradox as just an illustration of the theory of relativity, and the Grandfather Paradox we’ve all heard before but I never get tired of it.  Saw that the other day on an episode of Haven.  That’s a good show, for people who like concentrated weirdness.

Schrodinger’s bloody cat, though. I’d just like to see that removed from the canon of philosophical questions. The cat is either alive or dead and the fact that we don’t know which is entirely irrelevant to the cat’s aliveness or deadness. It is NOT both at the same time, it is one or the other and to think otherwise is plain stupid.

I don’t know who Schrodinger was, but I think he was a pompous dumbass.