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The Zontarian Thought Experiment
Aug. 17th, 2011 10:00 pmYeah, I should be working on Tucker's game. I'm not. I'm writing this instead.
There is a thought experiment, or maybe just a thought game, actually I do like that better. The Zontarian Thought Game. I thought it up last week. It goes like so:
You are an astronaut. You applied to NASA and they made you an astronaut. Your first job is to visit the planet Zontar and study the Zontarians, the alien race who live there.
But wait, you say: I'm not a physicist or a xenobioligist or a linguist or anyone else who is qualified to study Zontarians. Well duh they respond, that's why you weren't in the first expedition. Those guys all came back last week, and they have tons of samples to analyze; we now know about all we'd ever care to about Zontarian physiology. What we want you to study is Zontarian society.
So you're stuck there studying Zontarian society. What you decide to do is, infiltrate it. You observe what Zontarians do until you can act like one, and then fake it. And even though they accept you as one of their own, lots of the things they do make no sense to you: they have tons of different things they can wear to make themselves warm but none that make them cool, even though it's a million degrees on Zontar all the time. Or how they will happily pay $3 for a nicely-written letter to send to someone, instead of writing their own that actually says what they want to say. That sort of thing.
And one day, you figure out something important: the bizarre things the Zontarians do aren't bizarre to them. They only do things that they want to do. So while you're memorizing rules and figuring it all out, they appear to do the impossible and intuitively know the rules, because rather than knowing what to do, they know how to feel the emotions that make them want to do that.
So, then what? That's as far as I've gotten. The Zontarians are always going to be one step ahead because the astronauts can only memorize what they've seen a Zontarian do, while the Zontarians, with their amazing powers of feeling whatever the standard emotion is that other Zontarians feel, can handle new situations.
There is a thought experiment, or maybe just a thought game, actually I do like that better. The Zontarian Thought Game. I thought it up last week. It goes like so:
You are an astronaut. You applied to NASA and they made you an astronaut. Your first job is to visit the planet Zontar and study the Zontarians, the alien race who live there.
But wait, you say: I'm not a physicist or a xenobioligist or a linguist or anyone else who is qualified to study Zontarians. Well duh they respond, that's why you weren't in the first expedition. Those guys all came back last week, and they have tons of samples to analyze; we now know about all we'd ever care to about Zontarian physiology. What we want you to study is Zontarian society.
So you're stuck there studying Zontarian society. What you decide to do is, infiltrate it. You observe what Zontarians do until you can act like one, and then fake it. And even though they accept you as one of their own, lots of the things they do make no sense to you: they have tons of different things they can wear to make themselves warm but none that make them cool, even though it's a million degrees on Zontar all the time. Or how they will happily pay $3 for a nicely-written letter to send to someone, instead of writing their own that actually says what they want to say. That sort of thing.
And one day, you figure out something important: the bizarre things the Zontarians do aren't bizarre to them. They only do things that they want to do. So while you're memorizing rules and figuring it all out, they appear to do the impossible and intuitively know the rules, because rather than knowing what to do, they know how to feel the emotions that make them want to do that.
So, then what? That's as far as I've gotten. The Zontarians are always going to be one step ahead because the astronauts can only memorize what they've seen a Zontarian do, while the Zontarians, with their amazing powers of feeling whatever the standard emotion is that other Zontarians feel, can handle new situations.
