APU Blogs

Philosophers sometimes create thought experiments to help us think through tough questions.  A couple of examples: 

Suppose some mad scientist removed your brain, dumped your body, and kept the contents of your cranial cavity alive in a vat.  Moreover, our mad scientist has your brain hooked up to electrodes that induce various stimuli.  This allows you, or your brain at least, to have all the sensory experiences you would have if your brain was still attached to your body, even though yours is now bobbing around in a vat.  Thus, for example, you could visually experience a beautiful beach in Hawaii, smell the fresh air, hear waves crashing on the shore, feel sand between your toes, and taste the mango smoothie your waiter just brought.  The only difference is that the stimuli come from wires attached to your brain, not from eyes, fingers, and other physical organs.  This thought experiment raises a number of interesting questions, such as whether there is any way to know whether the physical world truly corresponds to our experience of it.

“The Runaway Trolley Car” thought experiment is not quite so outlandish in its assumptions.  In this case, a cable has snapped and the trolley car that had been attached to it is hurtling down the track out of control.  Unfortunately, there are five people tied to the track.  Fortunately, you can throw a switch and direct the runaway trolley.  Unfortunately, the track onto which you would divert the trolley has one person tied to the track.  Which choice is the most ethical?

Most people are going to switch the car.  Sacrifice the one to save the five.  But here’s the catch.  Suppose instead that a traveler stops by the hospital with a minor medical concern.  The doctor has five patients who will die without a transplant, and this lonely traveler could supply the necessary organs for all five patients.  Is it still OK to sacrifice the one involuntary organ donor to save the five?  Why would it be permissible in one case but not in the other?

A lot of people don’t really like thought experiments because, admittedly, the circumstances supposed in them seem rather detached from reality.  (However, some evil scientist may be causing you to believe such events are unrealistic by zapping a few neurons in your vat-bound brain.)  Nevertheless, thought experiments can be useful to think through important assumptions and questions.  Given this, I’ve been considering devising my own thought experiment.

Here’s the premise.  Suppose that you inhabit a planet populated with beings that behave in highly weird ways.  In fact, you are assigned to such beings at birth.  They do strange things.  For example, if you are in a school program as a kid, they totally ignore the other 200 children stacked on risers and zoom in the video on you the whole time.  And they wave to you while you are up there.  Like you see them just as clearly as they see you. 

That’s only the start of the embarrassing things they do (and don’t get me started on their clothes).  These odd beings seem to bumble their way through their life right into yours.  It’s almost like they have some odd built-in need to be deeply devoted to you without a clue about how to do it. 

So it isn’t just their cluelessness that leaves you a bit bewildered; it’s their hyped-up sense of attachment to you.  You get the idea that they would throw themselves under a runaway trolley for your sake.  If I really wanted to get wild with this thought experiment, I could write it in such a way that they find a way for you to attend a school that cost about $30,000 per year.  I probably shouldn’t put that in.  Envisioning the possibility that such an institution exists strains all credibility beyond the breaking point.  It makes the brain-in-a-vat scenario seem downright probable.

I’ve got to come up with a name for such bizarre creatures.  Maybe we could call them Pay-rents.

Here’s your task.  In this hypothetical world where you are forced to interact with Pay-rents, despite their obvious oddness, would it make any sense to call them up occasionally and just say “thanks?”  Discuss amongst yourselves.