I took it, but I’m totally corrupted. All of the questions are based on recognizable philosophical debates. Even the Einstein one is clearly based on Kripke’s Goedel/Schmidt objection to the descriptive theory of proper names. But **Frylock **said they wanted the corrupt as well as the uncorrupt.
Diogenes
I agreed with Diogenes in all the questions, and the reasoning, except question 1.
I agree with this. But… isn’t “your brain chemistry” actually “you”?
I don’t agree with this part. I think ‘free’ is an equivocal term, and I agree that in the libertarian sense of the word it is nonsense. But there is a more modest sense of the word that is serviceable in ordinary contexts, that allows us to distinguish actions that were caused by your desires from actions that were done under external compulsion or other duress. This enables us to determine when punishment and reward are appropriate. And in my way of thinking, punishment and reward make more sense if determinism is true, as they provide additional causal factors that can sway the deterministic process in a desirable direction. To abandon talk of freedom and responsibility would prevent us from being able to make a distinction among actions with different types of determinants which must be treated differently for reasons of social utility.
Isn’t that true of everything ? 
Anyhoo, here are mine :
1. Suppose scientists figure out the exact state of the universe during the big bang, and figure out all the laws of physics as well. They put this information into a computer, and the computer perfectly predicts everything that has ever happened. In other words, they prove that everything that happens, has to happen exactly that way because of the laws of physics and everything that’s come before. In this case, is a person free to choose whether or not to murder someone?
Nope. If the specified starting conditions and laws predicted everything that has ever happened, that includes every murder that has ever happened. Meaning those murders were always a consequence of a string of causality going back all the way to the starting conditions.
2. Suppose you drive to the local baseball stadium with some friends, and try to buy tickets at the door. There are 7 of you, but there are only 6 tickets left. You can either drive everyone to a nearby bar, which will be a lot less fun than being at the game, or 6 of you can go in, and 1 of you can take the bus home and miss the game entirely. Is it most fair for everyone to go to the bar?
It’s a Greater Good thing, innit ? Fuck baseball, anyway. The bar’ll have drunk chicks, and if all else fails there’s always drunken singing. It’ll always beat the seventh being pissed off for an unspecified amount of time - the thought of which in everyone else’s head would likely kill the fun of the baseball game anyway.
3. Suppose a mad scientist takes out your brain, and puts it in your best friend’s head. During the same operation, the scientist takes out your friend’s brain, and puts it in your head. Now your body has your friend’s brain, and your friend’s body has your brain. Your heroic mother storms into the room to save you, but not your friend, who she believes got you into this mess. Is the person with your body still you, her son?
Nope. The memories, the thoughts, the grand majority of what makes me me is up there IMO. Although I do know some people can have a hard time coming to terms with an artificial limb, or even a pace maker… But no, I’ve made up my mind about body identity a long time ago : my mind is me, my body’s just a very impractical and high maintenance transit system.
4. Suppose neurologists are able to identify every part and every connection in the human brain. Working with a team of computer scientists, they then build a robot that has a complete electronic replica of the human brain. Could this robot experience love?
And that is the opposite of the earlier question : thoughts are in the brain, that’s probably true - but emotions need a body. The human body is a weird-ass piece of engineering, something happening in the left testes will trigger the release of the contents of a gland in the brain, and so forth. Even if love is 95% self-delusion, there’s 5% chemicals in there.
5. Suppose that all you know about Einstein is that he developed the Theory of Relativity. But suppose it turns out that Einstein actually stole the idea from some guy named Moynahan, who nobody has ever heard of. In this case, when you use the name “Einstein,” are you actually referring to Moynahan?
No, you’re refering to the image of Einstein you have in your head, to your own unique idea of reality. The idea can be amended, of course - but it’ll never be more than your perception of things, never the actual state or even existence of things.
6. Suppose you hear the sound of your cell phone, so you reach in your pocket and answer the call. Your landlord is on the line, but you realize later that your ringer was off, and the sound you heard was actually someone else’s phone. When you heard that other person’s phone ring and mistook it as your own, did you actually know someone was calling you?
No - what’s philosophical about that ? Is belief in ESP big in philosophical circles ? Oh, I get it, it’s about Jung’s synchronicity. In other words : bullshit.
7. Suppose you meet a man from the future who knows everything there is to know about science. He tells you that he doesn’t like apples, and says that though he has never eaten one, he has figured out what apples taste like just by studying the relevant science. Could he know what apples taste like without ever having eaten one?
Tricky - can we ever really understand something we’ve only read about ? I went with yes, but that’s more hope talking than actual conviction.
8. Suppose scientists are able to use stem cells to grow lungs that breathe without being connected to a body. They then grow a heart that pumps without being connected to a body. If they can do all this, can they create a brain that thinks without being connected to a body?
I answered N/A - From a practical standpoint, lungs and hearts are easy, they’re just muscles. A brain would be much, much trickier to replicate - there is no reason why knowing how to create the former would lead to creating the latter. I dunno what the philosophical aspect of that question is.
9. Suppose a runaway train is coming down a track, and is certain to kill five workmen who can’t get out of the way. You’re standing next to the controls and can switch the train to the other track, but if you flip the switch, one man working on that track is sure to die. Should you flip the switch?
All other things being equal, 4>1, so you flip that sucker even if you have to hate yourself for it. Heck, even if you can’t live with it and kill yourself afterwards, 4 is still >2.
I don’t subscribe to the idea than all human life is equally valuable, though - so if those 5 persons were vegetative, assholes, killers or Miley Cyrus, my choice would probably be different. But if all I have to make the choice is “5 people, one person”, yeah, I do what I gotta do. It may not lead to the best outcome in the end, but that’s why life sucks.
Don’t fight the hypothetical 
But that is a philosophical, ethical decision : those 2-3 people have opted to sacrifice their personnal enjoyment for the good of the group (probably hoping for reciprocation down the line - but it never happens, does it ? :)).
All of that is irrelevant - this isn’t about real life, or even which decision you choose from the hypothetical, but about analyzing and thinking about the decision making process that led you to make that choice.
Similarly, the specifics of the hypothetical don’t matter - answering “oh it’s OK, me and my friends hate baseball anyway” for example would be silly. It is assumed/implied in the question that all 7 people equally want very much to go to the ballgame, and equally don’t really want to go to the bar.
So what this question really boils down to is : Do you consider it better for a portion of society to get everything it wants at the cost of fucking over another portion of society ; or for everyone to have less than what they wanted but an equal portion of something that is still better than nothing ?
Real life indeed is more complicated and full of options than that hypothetical, if anything because no one in the group of 7 will put an equal value on “going to the ballgame”, but to start dealing with a complex equation like that, it’s better to get definite answers to a bunch of “simple” ones. Then you can try to reduce the complex equation to one you’ve already solved, or a combination thereof, instead of facing the wall of complexity head on. And that’s philosophy for you.
It’s not about ESP or Jung. It’s a Gettier problem. Roughly, philosophers are alleged to have thought for centuries that knowledge = justified true belief. So Gettier counterexamples are examples where you have a true belief (someone is calling you on your phone) for which you are justified (in this case, you have evidence: hearing a ring tone you thought was your own), but intuitively it is not knowledge. Ergo, knowledge =/= JTB, so then there was a cottage industry of trying to figure out a fourth condition to tack onto JTB to get knowledge.
I only realize that in the altered scenario, though; in the first scenario, I make the deduction that my phone is ringing, therefore someone’s calling me, check my phone, and someone is actually calling me, thus validating my conclusion; making the same deduction in the case proposed by mr. jp, I find that my phone didn’t actually ring at all, thus invalidating my reasoning.
I wouldn’t – I had believed that this was the case, but that belief has been shown to be false.
I very much want to agree with you here, because that’s instinctively correct to me, but I’m not sure that I can – in the end, you never do know X because X, you form the belief that X because X caused a chain of events leading you to form the thought that X, i.e. your sensory data and your mind’s interpretation thereof causes you to believe that X. This means that you need to possess additional knowledge – how to correlate light hitting your retina and sound waves hitting your ear drums with events in the outside world, and furthermore, how things like X look and sound (or whatever else sensory input causes in you the belief that X). Can this additional knowledge fulfil your criterion for being regarded as knowledge? I don’t think so – you’re launched into an infinite regress, since all knowledge is proximate, and thus needs knowledge of the proxy (how it represents some X, and how that representation is supposed to be interpreted), which in turn only is proximate and so on.
Or take, for the moment, god’s existence and his role as creator of the universe as given – everything exists because of god. Then, take little old atheist me, and subject my brain, unbeknownst to me, to an intense magnetic field, which causes me to have an experience of divine being, turning me into a believer. One could say that I do believe in god because god, in fact, exists, since I couldn’t have had the experience otherwise, what with no universe existing and all; yet, the experience causing my knowledge of god’s existence was just as uncorrelated to that as the wrong phone ringing was to me actually being called (provided, perhaps, that there’s not some form of predeterminism at work, i.e. that subjecting me to the magnetic field was someone’s free decision, not one made by god when he created the whole shebang).
I see. That sounds a lot like hairsplitting to me, though. Math and physics teachers have spent a lot of time over the years explaining to me that a correct result obtained with flawed reasoning was worthless, so whether or not you can categorize it as “knowledge” rather than “coincidental truth” or “lucky guess” seems irrelevant to me - it’s still a wrong deduction even if it happens to be right. But then, that part of philosophy consisting of arguing over terms and their exact definition has always kind of irked me. Too much like lawyering :).
I wonder, though. I know (say) that the tallest person in Nevada is over 6’ tall. I know this based on general reflections on the distribution of height in a population of any size. But the height of the tallest person in Nevada is not itself part of the cause or explanation of my belief. So only in a very attenuated sense (if at all) do I believe the tallest person in Nevada is over 6’ *because *the tallest person in Nevada is over 6’.
I don’t think this is sufficient to establish knowledge, though – the probability distribution merely gives you an expectation to find individuals taller than 6’, but by no means guarantees it; it would be possible to exchange the whole population of Nevada with people shorter than 6’ without changing the distribution of height (say, within the US) one iota, and in that case, your belief that there are people taller than 6’ in Nevada clearly would be false. Even more, if you had a population entirely composed of people shorter than 6’, and fit a Gaussian to their height distribution, you’d get a non-vanishing likelihood for people to be over 6’, and thus, for a large enough sample, an expectation to find such people, even though they may not exist at all.
You may be right. But I may be able to change the example so that it works. Suppose I am in Nevada, and meet someone who is 6’1". I then really do know that the tallest person in Nevada is over 6’ tall, even though the person I met is in all likelihood not the tallest person in Nevada, and the actual tallest person and his actual height plays no role in the explanation of my knowledge.
But S&I’s point can be made in a slightly different way. I live in Texas right now. I myself am six feet and one inch tall. That means the tallest person in Texas has to be at least that tall. So I know that the tallest person in Texas is taller than six feet. But the actual tallest person’s being taller than six feet doesn’t enter into the causal explanation for my having formed the belief that the tallest person in the state is taller than six feet, so it seems there’s a counterexample to the necessary condition on knowledge that I conjectured. Oops.
I have to “retreat” so to speak to a weaker conjecture. What I have in mind is this: If you know X, then you believe X, and your having that belief was caused by the same factors which caused X to be true. But on trying to specify how this works out in S&I’s example turned out to be more difficult than I thought. I started having to get into some stuff about the groundedness of biological generalizations in general. :eek: (Think of the similar question, how do I know that the lions kept at San Diego Zoo have fur? Those individuals’ having of fur did not itself enter into the causal explanation of my forming the belief that they have fur.) So I have done you guys the mercy of deleting that passage from this post until I can organize the thoughts better.
I really should have spotted this kind of counterexample to my conjecture right off the bat, considering I just wrote a paper that deals in part with the grounding of biological generalizations. (It was about Swampman!)
Nothing to see in this post, sorry.
Do I believe the tallest human is a human because the tallest human is a human?
I just don’t see how **Kobal2 **can fail to enjoy this kind of stuff. 
Not necessarily; you could just believe it because the logical form of the sentence. “The tallest X is X” is true for any X. (ETA–Well, it’s true for any X of which “X is tall” can be truly predicated–the curse of philosophy is you can’t make any statement without immediately wanting to go back and qualify it.)
Interesting test. The only one I couldn’t answer was the sports game one because it would depend on various factors not included in the question.
What’s up with the final statement? “There was no deception involved so there’s no debriefing”…
What kind of tests involve deception, and what kind of debriefing follows?
Thought provoking. I sort of expected a personal analysis at the end, but was happy to take it either way.
BTW, re the question about philosophical training: I had 2 or 3 philosophy classes in college and am currently in a grad school rhetoric program, where philosophy is a key part of our readings. Ie: I am in that rather large grey area in between “one class” and “doctoral work.” Your answer choices might muddy your results.
IANA social scientist, but wikisays:
Emphasis added.
- In this case, is a person free to choose whether or not to murder someone?
Yes of course. There’s no obstacle to making that choice. If the computer was to tell you what you were going to do in the future, you could still make the opposite choice.
- Is it most fair for everyone to go to the bar?
No answer - depends on the group dynamic and individual preferences.
- Is the person with your body still you, her son?
No. Although the more accurate answer is mostly no. Although body is part of identity, the greatest part of identity is mental.
- Could this robot experience love?
I said yes. The robot could experience the mental aspects of love. It might not be able to experience all of the emotional aspects of love if all of the various hormones and neurotransmitters weren’t fully simulated.
- In this case, when you use the name “Einstein,” are you actually referring to Moynahan?
I put no, but the question wasn’t all that clear. Being in the present tense, I assume you now know the proper person to refer to in different situations, so there’s no reason to still use Einstein’s name in reference to relativity. If you didn’t know, then you are referring to a compound identity, which does not exist.
- When you heard that other person’s phone ring and mistook it as your own, did you actually know someone was calling you?
No. I can’t imagine any other way to answer this unless you are invoking psychic phenomena.
- Could he know what apples taste like without ever having eaten one?
I put no, because I believe in qualia. But he might imagine something close enough if he had a really good description and had a lot of experience tasting all of the components of apple separately. So I might say yes if the question were worded differently. A better question is whether or not he could imagine what it tastes like if he had no sense of taste. In which case, definite no.
- If they can do all this, can they create a brain that thinks without being connected to a body?
I put no, because I don’t think the brain can ‘think’ without some kind of stimulus or input. It could think if it had some kind of body or input surrogate though.
- Should you flip the switch?
Absurd situation of course, since realistically you’d have other options. But assuming these are the only two choices, yes flip the switch.