Not A Blog™

Despite the title, this entry is not a thought experiment. Rather this is about the phrase “thought experiment”—and what it is not. I’ve seen the phrase thrown around incorrectly and it annoys me. In particular, it’s been used to defend pseudoscience—that’s probably what bugs me more than anything. But other people have thrown it around in defending more mundane things. My conversational matrix informs me that cultural norms dictate it is improper for me to correct people on the use of the phrase during informal conversation, so I use this space to say what I wanted to say to someone earlier this week.

A thought experiment is not:

Wishful Thinking. This is pretty extreme, but I’ve seen it happen. Just because something is a really compelling idea and you really, really, super-really want it to be true because it would be so cool—this does not, in any way, make the thinking you do about said subject a “thought experiment”. Case in point is some blog entry I read recently about the idea that ones organs contain some of the “information” or “personality” of the person they were originally attached to. There are anecdotes (read: not-evidences) of people who got a heart transplant and acquired the personality traits of the person who took the time and effort to grow the heart in the first place. It doesn’t sound plausible to me, but hey. I’ve been wrong before.

The point is not whether or not the idea has merit, but the defense the author used when people started voicing their concerns, in particular that the notion hasn’t been empirically tested. When someone said it doesn’t sound plausible, she fires back with something similar to, “It’s not purely scientific. This article is supposed to represent a thought experiment…” Well thank you for playing, better luck next time. Invoking the old “thought experiment” routine doesn’t give your idea any more merit than it had before. I suppose it has something to do with the phrase sounding more credible than what you’re really doing in that situation which is either wishful thinking, or, at the very most…

Speculation. It’s great to speculate about things. I speculate about all kinds of things: what I would have done for lunch yesterday if I didn’t go to the Chinese buffet; what the asteroid belt may have been; how many pins can dance on the head of an angel—that sort of thing. Speculation is conjecture without evidence. In other words, it sounds great to say that the asteroid belt used to be a planet inhabited by smart beings who blew themselves up with nuclear weapons, but there is not a single iota of evidence for this. It’s speculation. Likewise, although I may make the claim than an angel can have but a single pin dancing on its head, the fact is that angels cannot even be proven to exist; how much less can we make assumptions about their cranial pin-dance area? Again, it’s speculation—idle, even.

Planning. I’ve spent a great deal of time weighing the pros and cons of buying a new laptop. I really want one. Naturally, I don’t need one at all and even though I physically have enough money to purchase one, I can’t afford it. This rumination on what the monetary impact of purchasing a new laptop would be on my life is not a “thought experiment”. It’s financial and situational planning.

A Scenario. Now we’re getting closer to what a thought experiment is, but we’re not there yet. A scenario, in and of itself, is not a thought experiment. Harry Turtledove’s alternate history exploring what the world would be like had the south won the Civil War, while interesting, isn’t a thought experiment. It’s a scenario.

Speculative Fiction. We’re close—so close—but no cigar. Some speculative fiction and science fiction is a thought experiment, so in wielding such a broad brush, I paint myself into a corner full of confused people and mixed metaphors. But again like with the scenario, just because something is [speculative|science] fiction does not automatically put it in the thought experiment category. Sometimes this fiction is just superficial.

So what is a thought experiment? It’s defined by one thing that it must do, otherwise, it falls into one of these other catagories. A thought experiment’s ultimate goal is to give insight into the way things actually are. This can happen in a scenario, and it does happen quite often in fiction, but you can see where the distinction arises. If fiction has no pretenses as to how it aids understanding today, it’s not really a thought experiment. If you’re speculating about explanations for things which are little understood, or to account for anomalies, this isn’t really a thought experiment because it doesn’t help us understand things better. It offers an explanation, sure—and when this explanation has been emperically verified, then it explains things, at which point it would no longer be a thought experiment anyway; it would be a real experiment.

A thought experiment is a form of inductive reasoning. We take a look at the way things are and say, “if this example we see here is true all over the place, then insert consequences here.” In science, it’s used to discover basic properties about the universe which may not, at the present time, be possible to test. I used this myself back in my essay Information when I talked about the possibility of predicting the future if one had perfect knowledge of the universe (that is to say, by suspending the uncertainty principal and seeing where that takes us). The ultimate conclusion is that the universe is the smallest presentation of all the information in the universe—which might turn out to be wrong. But the point is that the thought experiment of perfect knowledge—while not emperically testable—still provides some bit of information about the universe that may be emperically testable by some other means at some other point in the future.

In terms of philosophy, a thought experiment generally provides some scenario but with the intent of eliciting an intuitive response to the situation. In this way, things such as morality can be “studied” and greater insight gained into the human condition. An example of this is the Brain-In-A-Vat thought experiment, the most pop-culture-ey iteration of this being The Matrix. However, it’s important to note that The Matrix itself isn’t a thought experiment because it tells a story which doesn’t illuminate anything about us, today, now. It just hijacked (I mean, “borrowed”) the classic philosophical supposition and used it for the basis of the plot. We could be living in the matrix—or some other type of simulation—but there’s no way of knowing and, furthermore, it doesn’t explain anything else about our world. Not a thought experiment.

This is the sort of minor, inconsequential thing that annoys me like so many mosquitos in June. If it comes up again, I’m going to start correcting people in person. No one wants that.

-Ted