thought experiments

[hermanntrude]

OK i reckon we're ready for a new one. This is definately a test of your logic. see if you can find the answer:

Malcolm has decided to make all his decisions rationally. He is starving to death because he found himself exactly halfway between two identical kwik-e-marts. He cannot rationally decide which one to go to, so he can't eat. He realises, though, that staying put is irrational because it would lead to death. He decides that if he makes the decision irrationally, maybe by flipping a coin, he can make the decision and break the deadlock. But then is he making a rational decision? tossing a coin would be the rational thing to do because it allows him to eat, but it's an irrational process... what is the rational thing to do???

 

[Curiosity]

Hermann

Let his feet make the decision - start walking in whichever direction one of the stores is located. It makes no difference which way.

Letting a coin (ergo chance) direct you for life sustenance is irrational. Creative but irrational.

But then creative people are not always rational....That wasn't your question however.

Re your father

We under use most of our brain - and that is why I think we humans are in an early state of evolution.
Your father had the capability of tapping into areas of our brain which can teleport but because our
population would negate and criticize this as impaired thought, we have no real knowledge of how many
people can actually accomplish this. I believe many children can before they are "socialized". Creative genius (if it can survive through all of our rules and laws and order) makes excellent use of the gift through imagination making impossibility and dreams as yet undreamt a reality.

 

[s_lone]

you'd be surprised the thoughts i can think on my own. but yes i have heard such things of schizophrenics before.

My father told me recently that when he was a child he used to be able to freely enter and leave a state of mind which sounds to me a bit like a trip. he could make it so he didnt know what anything was, he couldn't label anything and only saw them as the objects they actually were, he didnt even know who he was or what he was, but could easily leave this state of mind as well.

I think this explains a lot about him, and me

Trying to listen to someone speak your language and to NOT understand is extremely challenging but worth trying. A real test of mind and perception... Listen to conversations in the street, in the bus or subway and try to imagine you are hearing a foreign language...

 

[hermanntrude]

OK two interesting posts but neither dealing with the real issue. we have established that something is wrong... there appears to be a paradox in that the tossing of the coin is the only rational thing to do but is yet irrational. so which is it? this is important to malcolm because he needs to make a decision which affects his life. We all KNOW what the sensible thing to do is but we don't know how to explain it rationally.

So far you both get an F

as for my father do you really believe (curiosity) that he tapped into teleportation territory? how can a brain do that? and if he got to that part why didnt he use it? I feel it's much more likely he could somehow generate the equivalent of a psychadelic trip, maybe just spontaneously interefere with his own dopamine receptors or something

 

[Curiosity]

Hermann

"F" doesn't phase me - I was a lousy student in high school and had to pay my way through college by working full time - a grind. I think our perception of "rationality" is wanting however in our answers to your posited question re Malcolm. We each have our own ideas of what it means. That is the beauty of humanity - we are not clones or replications mirroring thoughts.

I believe parts of our brain have the capacity for limited time and ideal conditions to express things to people who in our world of "brain cramp" have no time to comprehend what they have experienced or are too frightened to analyze the phenomenon. We may have moments of insight which vanish as quickly.

I believe also children zone out far more than we give them credit for but as they have no way to express it to us in adult language, and they eventually are "schooled" out of the introspective modality and we lose the ability before we know how to capture and develop it. Unless our brains become impaired through physical means such as tumor or are rewired by mental disease. Then we are ignored or medicated to "conform to society".

We are certainly a work in progress and for some religious belief allows us to come close to thinking in terms of the "mystical" but even then religious belief continues to tie us down from our natural ability to free float in other dimensions...even regarded by some as wrong.

I also believe we humans have come nowhere near the possibilities our brains offer. I believe many things are available and not utilized - not in my lifetime - unless you believe in reincarnation.

But that is another topic for another day.

 

[hermanntrude]

hmm nice answers but not what i found in the book. far simpler i'm afraid. The paradox is an illusion. Flipping a coin is not an irrational process, it is non-rational. rationality plays no part in the process, just the same as it is not irrational to like strawberries more than raspberries, that's a question of taste which is not realted to rationality.

The same applies here. Malcolm can flip a coin, thereby performing a non-rational process in order to help him rationally decide how to get food. paradox evaporates.

lets have a drink

 

[Curiosity]

Hermann

Aw so....I over read the question - but there were only two possibles in your post:
ration and irrational. Non-rational was the obvious but not offered. Walking was non-rational dontcha think?

Slurpee ok.....too early for anything unless you have some of Sassy's cough medicine which made her so darn funny last evening....I mean she is funny cold sober....

What do you think about s_lone's post about listening to people speak and tuning them out....? That was an interesting situation too.

bye for now - thanks for the slurpee!

 

[hermanntrude]

ha no problem. Imaginary drinks are free

the point is that rational and irrational are not on and off, and they don't apply to everything. there are parts of life into which rationality does not enter. This again can be important in making decisions, as Malcolm may find out if he ever makes his mind up which way to go.

I thought s_lone's post sounds very interesting and i suppose anyone thoughtful will have attempted to imagine a world without words or without comprehension of words. Have you ever tried to think without using words? I can't do it, i actually can't. I wonder how animals think?

I know what u mean about cough medicine. Codeine is good stuff, they should sell pills of pure codeine

 

[hermanntrude]

new one:

A man has invented a teleporting machine and has set up a business to allow people to get to mars in about 10 minutes so the communities out there are expanding fast and the human race is undergoing a revolution of new resources. He is rapidly becoming rich and then one day he gets a lawsuit in the mail. A man is suing him for killing him. He claims that since the teleporting machine destroys the body at one end, and recreates it at the other end, he has essentially been killed and cloned.

The inventor of the machine can hardly understand... after all he's been teleported hundreds of times and he doesnt feel dead, but he also knows very well that a body is destroyed at one end... technically the suer is correct... but he can't seriously have a claim... can he?

 

[MikeyDB]

I'd love to answer any question you can pose regarding the future and I'll use the I Ching to generate the answer...

The logic of interrupting the commonplace through interjecting an artificial element ...like flipping a coin to assist in making a decision is the basis for the Oracle of the I Ching....

Anyone familiar at all with this book? Pre-dates all religious texts and has been translated into more languages than any other book....including the Bible and the Quran...

 

[MikeyDB]

Aboard the mother ship that brought me here in the first place we used teleportation all the time. What is teleported is consciousness. It requires only protoplasm or some other form of matter to inhabit to re-animate in a form that's more acceptable in any particular space-time.

 

[hermanntrude]

the point is, what holds the life exactly? can u consider someone dead when an exact replica holds the very same consciousness and memories? is there a case here for suing for the killings, despite hte fact the guy who is dead appears to be alive?

 

[MikeyDB]

I'm saying no, there is no case because sentience requires mind and although mind requires a vehicle to carry it, it is the mind wherein life resides not in the corpus.