A Series of Brain-Wrenching Thought Experiments: Vol. 1
Is this a brain or a cauliflower? Who can say!
Thought experiments are mental exercises that really exercise the old grey matter. Which is no way to describe your Uncle Mark, and it is not your place to make him exercise. He is older than you and can make up his own mind about what to do.
Here are a few thought experiments to ponder and puzzle over. There are no right answers. Or maybe there are, if the universe is objective. It doesn’t seem to be, but what do I know?
Time Travel
If you had the ability to travel back in time to when you were, say 20, would you do it? You’d have all the knowledge you have now, but you’d be back where you were, and in your own body, at age 20. Of course, if you aren’t 20 yet, this doesn’t apply to you, child!
So, there are pros and cons to this proposition. Say, for example, you are happily married and have children you love. Resetting to an earlier age would almost certainly guarantee that you would not have the same children, and possibly not the same spouse.
On the other hand, you could go back and use your knowledge from today and apply it as your old self. Not only your knowledge, but your wisdom. You could avoid some significant mistakes, make a lot of money — almost limitless based on your knowledge of things to come.
So, are the kind of person to exchange the love of those you are with now in exchange for material gain and a possibly better life beginning at an earlier point in your existence, not to mention a de facto longer life as you will have bought however many more years you had by jumping back to 20?
If most of us thought about it, the hideous implications of going back would likely overcome the temptations.
On the other hand, you’d know not to watch the last season of Lost, so it’s really a wash.
2. The Hilbert Hotel Paradox
Imagine, if you will, there’s a hotel with infinite rooms. They are numbered sequentially beginning at 1, and the hotel is full. When a new guest is booked they can be accommodated as all the guests move to the next room. Why? I do not know. But, I will say this, that arrangement would make me give a bad Yelp review, particularly if guests showed up throughout the night.
I think this paradox requires examination beyond Hilbert’s initial thought. Where would you build a hotel with infinite rooms? What would the property tax be? How could you hire enough staff for such a hotel? Is there room service? If so, how do they keep food from getting cold between the kitchen and one of the larger numbered rooms. Finally, when a new guest shows up, do an infinite number of new key cards have to be issued?
The whole enterprise is, at best, unwieldy.
3. The Ship of Theseus
Ok, so Theseus had a ship. He presumably sailed in it to Crete to fight the minotaur in a hedge maze or something. It was like The Shining, but without snow.
Anyway, let’s say that after his adventures Theseus retired and people preserved the boat as a monument to him, because, I guess, he kept people safe form Minotaur attacks, which couldn’t have been that big of an overall problem, but you know how people tend to overreact.
Anyway, over the years, the boards of the ship start to rot. So, one by one, they are removed and kept in a shed. The old boards are replaced with new ones, until over the years none of the original pieces remain. Like the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players finally all cycled off of SNL.
So, the question is this: Is the ship with no original pieces still the Ship of Theseus? If not, at what point did it cease to be that ship? With the changing of the first board? With the replacement of the poop deck (which is a very funny part of any ship)? Is there a percentage of new pieces that change it, or is the first repair on a single board the point at which it changes.
To complicate this, lets say someone opens up the shed and reassembles the rotted pieces. So now there are two boats. Which one is the Ship of Theseus, and, more importantly, which one would command a higher ticket price to come gawk at it?
I argue neither is the Ship of Theseus, as Theseus is long dead, and the boat has passed on to his heirs, so the point is moot. Now if we want to argue which is the boat of Harry Melikonus (Theseus’s great great great and so on grandson), that’s a good question, but we’ll need to let the probate lawyers cope with that.
I trust your brain is baffled and beleaguered, and that you will consider checking in on further thought experiments.