Seven thought experiments

They don't make me question everything, but they are pretty intriguing.

Mary lives in a black and white room, reads black and white books, and uses screens that only display images in black and white to learn everything that has ever been discovered about colour vision in physics and biology. One day, her computer screen breaks and displays the colour red. For the first time, she sees colour. Question: Does she learn anything new?

If she does, then it shows that qualia, individual occurrences of subjective elements of experience, exist; as she had access to all possible information other than experience before she saw the colour but still learned something new. This has implications for what knowledge and mental states are. Because if she learns something new then mental states, like seeing colour, can’t be described entirely by physical facts. There would have to be more to it, something subjective and dependent on experience.

[My thoughts on this one here]

Imagine a donkey placed precisely between two identical bales of hay. The donkey has no free will, and always acts in the most rational manner. However, as both bales are equidistant from the donkey and offer the same nourishment, neither choice is better than the other. Question: How can it choose? Does it choose at all, or does it stand still until it starves?

If choices are made based on which action is the more rational one or on other environmental factors, the ass will starve to death trying to decide on which to eat- as both options are equally rational and indistinguishable from one another. If the ass does make a choice, then the facts of the matter couldn’t be all that determined the outcome, so some element of random chance or free will may have been involved.

I don't really see the problem if we strictly abide by the notion that the donkey has no free will. We might as well replace it with a computer algorithm that any makes a selection when something is different. If nothing is different, then by definition it cannot choose. The donkey analogy only seems more problematic because, quite obviously, real donkeys do have free will. Unless you're one of those people who don't believe in free will at all, in which case I guess you still have problems.

Alternatively, if the donkey always acts in the most rational matter, it will realise that there is nothing preventing it from choosing at random. Eating is the most rational course of action, therefore choosing randomly is the most sensible action.

Question: If you are obligated to save the life of a child in need, is there a fundamental difference between saving a child in front of you and one on the other side of the world? In The Life You Can Save, Singer argues that there is no moral difference between a child drowning in front of you and one starving in some far off land. The cost of the ruined shoes in the experiment is analogous to the cost of a donation, and if the value of the shoes is irrelevant than the price of charity is too. If you would save the nearby child, he reasons, you have to save the distant one too. He put his money where his mouth is, and started a program to help people donate to charities that do the most good.

There are counter-arguments of course. Most of them rely on the idea that a drowning child is in a different sort of situation than a child who is starving and that they require different solutions which impose different obligations. 

I prefer Terry Pratchett's philosophy : at least start by doing the good that's in front of you. But if we reduce it down the extreme, then no, I don't think you're obligated to spend all your resources and all your energy on being as selfless as possible. That will only lead to your rapid demise anyway, but more fundamentally, you're not obligated to organise your entire life in order to maximise the good that you do in the world. That too is unhealthy and counter-productive.

http://bigthink.com/scotty-hendricks/seven-thought-experiments-thatll-make-you-question-everything