Monday 8 September 2014

On the intersection of Imagination and Reality

Recently I was asked if I thought it a good idea to base decisions about reality on imaginary things.
Time and the limitations of the medium did not permit of a full answer, beyond a basic yes hypotheticals can be useful.

So, a little more...

Take an imaginary construct like the philosophical zombie - not a shambling flesh eating undead beast, but a "perfect"copy of a human, excepting that it has no inner life or life of the mind
It doesn't think to itself, no inner monologue.
It is otherwise indistinguishable from anyone else, can work, respond to questions as if it remembers things, tell you if it is happy or sad etc.
Is it alive? Is it human? If you somehow found out what it was, would it be okay to kill it?

Or how about the swamp man - I go out into the swamp and am somehow killed, completely disintegrated, so there is nothing left. Next day the swamp grows a perfect copy of me at the point of my death (or perhaps just a fraction before) which goes back into town and picks up my life where I left off.
Is it alive? Is it me? If my family finds out the first me died, should they be upset?

 Clearly (I hope) neither of those two are real things, but they can be useful tools for thinking about various concepts and problems that are real, Used skillfully imaginary constructs and scenarios can do things like isolating parts of a complex problem so that they can be considered independently or compared for differential importance, or they can give us space to look at something objectively and avoid or reduce emotional content.

But, here is a caveat, beware of using imaginary things not as a tool for thinking, but rather as an excuse not to think - e.g. The Great God Wibble says that this is just, therefore it is....

So, in short,

Imaginary things should not be used as an excuse not to think.
But nor should things being imaginary be used as an excuse not to think.

Shorter still

always

Think not not think.

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