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(Remember folks, in a thought experiment you can do anything! To say, “That’s impossible!” is not allowed!) So I’ve been reading Hunger Games (which I highly recommend), and a devilishly conceived thought experiment presents itself. Aliens come to Earth with highly advanced technology and a sporting air. Continue reading Thought Experiment August: A ‘Hunger Games’ Style Death-match with Yourself BCC’s Ronan introduced me to the work of Nick Bostrom, an Oxford Philosopher. He writes and thinks on technology and ethics issues. He has a fascinating line of reasoning. He argues that quite possibly we are living in a simulation, like The Matrix. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: What if you are just a minor character in a computer game Alien beings have scanned your brain and determined you are the perfect person to conduct a little ethics experiment. They are immensely powerful trans-dimensional beings, but almost entirely void of ethical thinking. They relish doing ethics experiments, to see what all the fuss is about it in humans. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: Pick your alien invasion It is Thought Experiment August! Time to once again put on your thinking caps and ponder the dicey issues of modern thought. I’ve explored the issues related to allowing artificial life into your religious community here and what it might mean to be an artificial life here. But let’s back off and decide when, for the first time, an artificial life might deserve rights. Continue reading Thought-experiment August: Your new Z11 robot Everything living depends on ecology. The planet’s hydrologic cycles provide the water that we use for agriculture and industry. Everything you’ve eaten today depended upon soil ecologies, the carbon cycle–driven largely by photosynthesis, insects, and countless other ecosystem processes. Consider, for example, the things made of wood around you right now. Continue reading Ecology and Economics: Betting against science I just returned from the MS4 conference. It is the fourth year that a group of philosophers of science have gathered to try to tease apart the implications of computer simulation in science. My interest in computer simulation is in its uses in ecology (see the abstract for my paper if you are interested), but for me, some of the most captivating work of this kind is being done on climate models, in which simulation is used to try to sort out the implications of our warming planet. Philosophers try to pick out what science is doing, it examines its assumptions and attempts to cut the lines of demarcation between what is good and bad science. Science studies the world, philosophers study the science. Sort of like judicial review in laws (don’t take this too far, scientists hardly ever pay attention to what philosophers are saying). Continue reading The models of climate change Here’s a twist on a classic ethics thought-experiment. You are high on a hill with a high-powered rifle and scope and you know you never miss (you are an ex-navy sniper say), even with a moving target. Down below on a train trestle you see a scene of horror unfolding. Three teenage girls you don’t know have climbed onto the trestle. To get there they must have climbed over a fence marked with ‘danger’ warnings. They have clearly broken several trespassing laws. A train is coming around a bend and it will kill all three teenagers. You know this. Furthermore, you can see the engineer is Sally, who you know is 65 years old because you read about her upcoming retirement in the local paper. You know nothing else about her. She is on the other side of the bend and will not see the teenagers until it is too late to brake. You also happen to know that Sally has an active switch that she must squeeze with her hand to keep the train from breaking and that if she is incapacitated the train automatically breaks. Should you shoot Sally to save the girls? And making it harder, Would you shoot Sally to save the girls? Continue reading Thought-experiment August: (4) Should you shoot Sally to save the girls? |
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