Using Net Benefit Accounts to Discipline Agencies: A Thought Experiment

Cog as a thought experiment

In her presentation at the Monte Verità workshop, Maja Mataric showed us a videotape of her robots cruising together through the lab, and remarked, aptly: "They're flocking, but that's not what they think they're doing." This is a vivid instance of a phenomenon that lies at the heart of all the research I learned about at Monte Verità: the execution of surprisingly successful "cognitive" behavi...

Locke’s Answer to MoLyneux’s thought experiMent

P discussions of Molyneux’s problem within contemporary philosophy of mind tend to characterize the historical debate the problem inspired as primarily concerned with the role innately known principles, amodal spatial concepts, and rational cognitive faculties play in our perceptual lives.1 Indeed, for broadly similar reasons, rationalists have generally advocated an affirmative answer, while e...

The Thought Experiment Approach to Qualitative Physics

This paper discusses the application of the thought experiment methodology to qualita­ tive reasoning. Problem solving using this technique involves simplification of the origi­ nal problem, solution of the simplified problem, and generalization of the results obtained. Our emphasis in this work is to demonstrate the ef­ fectiveness of this approach in addressing com­ plexity and grain size iss...

Nuclear War in Europe: A Thought Experiment

A thought experiment with clocks in static

In order to directly demonstrate that in static gravitational field the rate of clocks increases with their distance from the source a simple thought experiment is proposed.