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by coldtea
4105 days ago
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Yeah, because professors of philosophy and epistemologists toil for years about the subject, but some 2-minute comment shows it for what it is... You even got the facts wrong. They are not doing a "non physical experiment". They are proposing a thought experiment -- you know, the kind lots of scientists did, Einstein and Shroedigger among them. The "non physical" part is just that it tries to establish that there is "non physical" knowledge (qualia). That is, nothing about the experiment as a process (as opposed to the output) is necessary to be "non physical"... |
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Neither Einstein nor Schrodinger "did" thought experiments. They used thought experiments (which is a really terrible name for imaginary scenarios) to motivate arguments and guide thinking, not to demonstrate anything.
No one who has been paying attention to the history of knowledge uses thought experiments for anything other than illustrative, explanatory or motivational purposes. In particular, the conceit that imaginary scenarios can teach us anything about the way reality actually is long outdated, as no such imaginary scenario has ever done any such thing.
Relativity was motivated by thought experiments, but so too have been numerous false ideas. Therefore thought experiments can do nothing to distinguish false ideas from true ones, so anyone who uses them for that purpose is doing them wrong.