Transpersonal experiments with consciousness

Can we travel faster than light? Even this is subject to our Mind! But He will have to give up the "Ego", stop identifying himself with his suit - the body mind, go beyond its boundaries, turning into the Mind of Light ... Only on the wings of the supramental consciousness, identifying yourself with the Universe, you can be at any point in It in the twinkling of an eye... "Everything that a person can imagine, He can bring to life" Three pioneering experiments 1.) Transpersonal transmission of thoughts and images. In the early 1970s, a team of two physicists, Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, performed one of the first experiments in controlled transpersonal thought and image transmission. Targ and Puthoff placed the receiver in a sealed, opaque, and electrically shielded room, and the sender in another room, where he observed bright flashes of light at regular intervals. An encephalograph (EEG) recorded the brain waves of both the recipient and the sender. As expected, the sender's brainwaves were exactly what bright flashes of light usually accompany. However, after a short period of time, the receiver also began to show similar waves, although he did not observe flashes directly and did not receive the usual signals accessible to the senses from the sender. Targ and Puthoff also conducted experiments in the realm of seeing at a distance. In these experiments, distance made any form of sensory communication between the separated receiver and sender impossible. At a randomly chosen location, the sender acted as a signal beacon, while the receiver tried to see what the sender saw. To record their impressions, the recipients gave verbal descriptions, sometimes making sketches. Independent experts concluded that the descriptions and sketches corresponded to the characteristics of the place that the senders actually saw in 66% of cases. 2.) Spontaneous Communication: The second series of pioneering experiments was conducted by Jacobo Greenberg-Silberbaum of the National Mexican Institute. Over the course of five years, he conducted more than 50 experiments on spontaneous communication between individuals. He divided the subjects into pairs inside soundproof and electromagnetically isolated Faraday chambers and asked them to meditate together for 20 minutes. He then placed them in separate Faraday chambers, where one subject received stimuli and the other did not. The first subject received stimuli at random intervals so that neither he nor the experimenter knew when this would happen. Those subjects who did not receive stimuli remained relaxed and did not open their eyes. They were asked to try to feel the presence of a partner and were told nothing about the stimuli. Typically, sequences of 100 stimuli were used - such as flashes of light, sounds, and short, but not painful, electric shocks aimed at the index and ring fingers of the right hand. The electroencephalograms (EEG) of the brain waves of both subjects were then synchronized and examined for "normal" potentials evoked in the stimulated subject and "transmitted potentials" in the unstimulated subject. Transmitted potentials were not found in controlled situations when neither subject received a stimulus, when the screen prevented one of the pair of subjects from receiving the stimulus (such as flashes of light), or when the two subjects had not interacted before. But in experimental situations, when one of the pair of subjects received stimuli, and both subjects interacted before, the transferred potentials appeared in 25% of cases. The young couple in love was a particularly outstanding example. Their EEGs remained in sync throughout the experiment, confirming that the feeling of deep connection is not just an illusion. In a somewhat limited version, Grinberg-Silberbaum was able to repeat the results obtained. When one person demonstrated transferred potentials in one experiment, he usually demonstrated them in subsequent ones. The results did not depend on the space separating the senders and receivers - the transmitted potentials appeared regardless of how far or close they were from each other. 3.) Dowsing: The third experiment is about dowsing. It turns out that dowsers can often pinpoint the location of underground streams very accurately. Willow twigs, like pendulums, react to the presence of groundwater, magnetic fields , oil and other minerals. Obviously, it is not the wicker itself that reacts to the presence of water and other substances, but the brain and nervous system of the person who holds it. The rod, pendulum, and other devices of the dowser do not move unless they are held by the dowser; they simply amplify the subtle and unintentional movements of the dowser's arm muscles. It turns out that dowsers can also receive information not from natural sources, but transmitted at a distance by the consciousness of another person. Lines, shapes and forms can be consciously created by one person, and they affect the mind and body of other people who are at a distance and do not know what was created and where. Their rods move as if figures, lines and forms were prompted by natural causes directly in front of them. All this has been elucidated in a series of remote dowsing experiments carried out over the last 10 years by Geoffrey Keene, a renowned engineer, together with colleagues from the British Society of Dowsers' research and dowsing group. It turned out that the location of forms can be determined with an accuracy of several inches, even when they are created thousands of miles away. Positioning accuracy is not affected by the distance between the person creating the dowsing fields and the physical location of those fields: the results were the same whether the experimenter was creating the dowser shape at a distance of a few inches or 5,000 miles. It didn't matter if the experimenter was standing on the ground, in an underground cave, flying in an airplane, or sitting inside a shielded Faraday chamber. Time also had no effect: the fields were created faster than measurements could be made, even at great distances. Time also didn't matter because the fields remained stable after they were created. In one case, they continued to exist for more than three years. But they could disappear if the person who created them wanted it. Keene concluded that the fields accessible to the dowsers were created and existed in the information field that fills the Universe. The brain interacts with this field and perceives dowsing fields as holograms. According to Keane and the dowsing research team, this is an example of a non-local interaction between the brain and the field of different and even distant people. / Riddles of Consistency of Consciousness. Erwin Laszlo./

The studied nerve cell, as it turned out, was associated precisely with the holistic image of a particular actress, and not at all with individual elements of her appearance or clothing. And this discovery provided, if not a key, then a clue to understanding the mechanisms of long-term memory retention in the human brain. The only thing that prevented us from moving forward were the very considerations of ethics and law that were mentioned above. Scientists could not place electrodes in any other areas of the brain, except for those that were subjected to preoperative research, and this research itself had a time frame limited by a medical task. This made it very difficult to find an answer to the question of whether the neuron of Jennifer Aniston, or Brad Pitt, or eiffel tower, or maybe, as a result of measurements, scientists accidentally stumbled upon only one cell from a whole network connected to each other by synaptic connections, which is responsible for maintaining or recognizing a certain image.

neuroengineering

Has a neuro-machine interface been created that allows paralyzed people to control a robotic arm?
Yes, such an interface has been created. Particularly interesting in this regard is the work of neuroengineer John Donoghue of Brown University (Rhode Island). The laboratory he leads has developed BrainGate technology, which helps the paralyzed to break out of the "prison" of their body. Most often, paralysis occurs not as a result of damage to the brain, but due to a violation of communication between the brain and the peripheral nervous system, for example, due to damage to the spinal cord. If the motor cortex is intact and functioning, a small chip with gold electrodes is inserted into it. The chip reads the signals coming from the desired groups of neurons and converts them into commands for the computer. If a robotic manipulator arm is connected to the computer, then it is enough for the patient to think about how he raises his arm, how the robot will perform the intended movement. In the same way, a paralyzed person can control typing on a computer or move the cursor around the screen. The only inconvenience is that there are wires sticking out of the top of the skull, but this is a trifle compared to complete immobility. In the future, Donohue dreams, an electronic chip implanted in the brain will control not a computer, but the muscles of the patient's own body through a system of electrical stimulators that will be implanted in the muscles.
Can the brain see without eyes?
What we think of as vision is actually the brain's interpretation of the electrical signals generated by the array of light-sensitive rods and cones located on the inside of the retina. At the retina a high resolution- about 126 megapixels, if approximately expressed in parameters in which the matrix of a digital camera is evaluated. However, the structure of the eye contains a lot of imperfections and the final picture is still the result of calculations carried out by the brain. It is the brain that takes care of visual perception created maximum comfort for us in orientation in space. But, as it turns out, even if the brain is presented with a picture of a much lower resolution, and even if the “input” device is not the eye or light-sensitive cells, the brain will still be able to orient us. Proof of this is the work of the American scientist Paul Bach-y-Rita. Having created a low-resolution matrix (144 small gold contacts) to which a video image was fed with a sweep in the form of electrical signals of different intensities, he applied the contacts ... to the tongue of a visually deprived test subject. At first, electrical signals created only an unpleasant tingling sensation, but after a while the brain learned to recognize in these stimuli the simplified outlines of surrounding objects.

Picture game

Be that as it may, the experiments continued, and Moran Cerf joined them - an extremely versatile personality. An Israeli by birth, he tried himself as a business consultant, hacker and computer security instructor at the same time, as well as an artist and comic book writer, writer and musician. Here is a man with a spectrum of talent worthy of the Renaissance, undertook to create something like a neuromachine interface based on the “Jennifer Aniston neuron” and others like him. This time, too, 12 patients of the medical center named after A.I. Ronald Reagan at the University of California. During preoperative studies, they introduced 64 separate electrodes into the region of the median temporal lobe. At the same time, experiments began.

The development of the sciences of higher nervous activity promises incredible prospects: people will be able to better understand themselves and cope with currently incurable ailments. The problem remains the moral and legal side of experiments on a living human brain.

First, these people were shown 110 pop culture images. As a result of this first round, four pictures were selected, at the sight of which, in the entire dozen of subjects, the excitation of neurons was clearly recorded in different parts of the studied area of ​​the cortex. Next, two images were simultaneously displayed on the screen, superimposed on each other, each with 50% transparency, that is, the pictures shone through each other. The subject was asked to mentally increase the brightness of one of the two images so that it obscures his "rival". At the same time, the neuron responsible for the image on which the patient's attention was focused produced a stronger electrical signal than the neuron associated with the second image. The pulses were recorded by electrodes, entered the decoder, and turned into a signal that controlled the brightness (or transparency) of the image. Thus, the work of thought was quite enough for one picture to begin to “clog” another. When the subjects were asked not to enhance, but, on the contrary, to make one of the two images paler, the “brain-computer” link worked again.

Is it possible to emulate the human brain using a computer program, or create a computer similar to the brain?

While such an analogue does not exist, however, science is moving in this direction. It must be understood that even though electronic computers are often called the “brain”, in reality, computers and the brain have practically nothing in common structurally. In addition, if a computer is a creation of the human mind and the principles of its work are thoroughly known to specialists and described to the last comma, then science is incredibly far from fully understanding what is happening under the skull. The task of the scientists involved in the Blue Brain project, funded by the Swiss government and carried out in collaboration with IBM, is therefore not to create an electronic competitor to the brain. In the end, many specialized tasks such as mathematical calculations, the computer has long been doing incomparably better than our "gray matter". The goal of the project, which uses the most powerful computing technology, is to create a 3D computer model of what is happening inside the brain, and then use it to test various hypotheses related to its work. The human brain consists of 100 billion neurons, and the number of possible combinations that can arise when they are connected exceeds the number of atoms in the Universe, so researchers have not yet decided to take on a task of such magnitude. We are talking only about building a model of the neural column of the rat neocortex. The column consists of "only" 10,000 neurons, forming 30 million synaptic connections with each other. The model is based on observations of the real brain and reflects the individual behavior of each neuron. At the same time, the multiprocessor artificial "brain" consumes an enormous amount of electricity, and the power consumption of the human brain is only 25 watts.

light head

Was this worth it? exciting game the need to conduct experiments on living people, especially those with serious problems with health? According to the authors of the project, it was worth it, because the researchers not only satisfied their scientific interests of a fundamental nature, but also groped for approaches to solving quite applied problems. If there are neurons (or bundles of neurons) in the brain that are excited at the sight of Jennifer Aniston, then there must be brain cells responsible for more essential concepts and images for life. In cases where the patient is unable to speak or signal their problems and needs with gestures, connecting directly to the brain will help doctors learn about the patient's needs from neurons. Moreover, the more associations are established, the more a person will be able to tell about himself.

In the 60s of the last century, when Eastern religions began to take over the minds of the widest sections of the American intelligentsia, the physicist and staunch Buddhist Alexander Holdstat published a voluminous article designed to convince readers of the truth of Buddhist teaching and its consistent unity with the latest scientific discoveries. It is obvious that Buddhism, as a practice of personal liberation, does not need any scientific or any other justification, but Holdstat, apparently, was well aware that Western man, accustomed from childhood to blind faith in the power of scientific knowledge, needs the usual and understandable terminology to explain the essence of Buddhist teachings. In addition, the Buddha himself encouraged his followers to preach the Dharma in languages ​​understandable to people: the essence of the message should prevail over its form, since understanding is the best coin that the listener can repay the speaker.

In his article, Holdstatt described several thought experiments that have become classics today, although their original source is now little known and interesting. Holdstat's experiments are divided into three parts: analytical, spatial and temporal, however, such a classification is very conditional and does not fully reflect their essence, therefore, in this article they will be described in semantic order without any fictitious gradations. Like many Dharma preachers, Holdstat began his explanations with an analysis of the human self itself, which in Buddhism is recognized as illusory and not possessing a true nature. As an illustration of this thought, the scientist proposed to conduct thought experiment No. 1.

Holdstat's first experiment

Imagine that your brain has been safely removed from your head and divided into two hemispheres. The left hemisphere is in London and the right hemisphere is sent to Sydney. Communication between the hemispheres is provided by a cable laid under water. Your body in Los Angeles still sees the world through your eyes. Communication with it is also provided by electrical cables. Where, then, is your consciousness located: London, Sydney, or Los Angeles? Or maybe in one of the wires at the bottom of the ocean?

Analyzing everything in detail possible options, Holdstat comes to the conclusion that consciousness retains its integrity, despite the dismemberment of its carrier: no matter how many parts we divide human brain, while ensuring the connection between its individual elements, consciousness will remain in an unchanged form. Thus, the integrity of a person is just a bodily fiction familiar to our mind.

Holdstat's second experiment

Your split brain is still in London and Sydney, only now each half has its own pair of eyes, ears, and mouths. You are receiving conflicting information about your whereabouts: one pair of eyes sees a rainy English autumn, and the other a hot Australian spring. It turns out that you, like a bodhisattva, are in two places at the same time, but if you speak, then both of your mouths will say the same thing. If we mentally increase the number of your eyes in different places on the planet to a thousand or even a million, this will in no way affect the integrity of your very consciousness.

True, Holdstat wonders what will happen if the connection between the two hemispheres of the brain is temporarily disconnected. Will both “halves” of a person say the same thing (most likely not, although Holdstat suggested the possibility of some kind of synchronization between them at the quantum level) and, more importantly, will the integrity of consciousness be preserved or will we get two different consciousnesses through ordinary division? Here Holdstat, contrary to Western common sense, argued that the integrity of consciousness would be preserved, although there would be no exchange of visual information between the hemispheres of the brain. The scientist explained his position as follows: if we leave the brain divided for a year or ten years and as a result two independent consciousnesses arise, then when the connection between the hemispheres is switched back on, we will have to get two personalities with slightly different experiences that exist in one person at the same time, but at the same time, the consciousness, for the right to possess which they will fight, will remain united and identical to itself. Due to the fact that no one has yet been able to verify these conclusions empirically, this consequence from the second experiment has received the not entirely correct name "Holdshtat's paradox".

Holdstat's third experiment

Now Holdstat invites us to mentally divide the brain into a million separate particles and scatter them all over the planet, providing each of them with a personal set of sensory organs and a constant channel of communication with the rest of the parts. Not only that, we don't need to put pieces of the brain into robots, as suggested by the scientist in the previous experiment. Suppose we have learned how to transplant them into other living beings, and now your brain particles are in the bodies of wolves, bees, ants, birds, fish and other living beings. You look at the world through their eyes and perceive the whole picture in your unsplit consciousness. What will you feel if one of the ants with a grain of your brain is suddenly crushed to death by a stone? How would you feel if a hunter maliciously shot a hare, killing a piece of your mind?

With the help of this experiment, Holdstat tried to explain the principle adopted in Buddhism of not causing malicious harm to other living beings, but he did not stop there and boldly stepped further. Imagine that as a result of a technical failure, the connection between the particles of your brain is lost forever. Where are you now? Where is your consciousness? Your illusory "I" has disappeared without a trace, but your consciousness has retained its integrity - it is still the same for all beings participating in the experiment, only now it does not know it. Since all living beings on Earth originated from one cell, we have a single consciousness for all, and only our stubborn faith in the illusory significance of our own "I" prevents us from breaking out of the fetters of ignorance about our true nature - this is the conclusion from the third experiment. Another conclusion is that if you systematically replace the particles of your brain, united in a common network, with particles from another person, this will in no way affect your consciousness, only your personality will change.

Holdstat's fourth experiment

Having played enough with space, Holdstat moves on to the question of time. As you know, the speed of information transfer is limited by the speed of light. Imagine that your brain has grown to size solar system, and now the signal from one neuron can go to another for several seconds. You are still aware of what is happening around you (with the help of the same pair of eyes in Los Angeles), but now your thought processes have slowed down several times, which makes it seem to you that the world has begun to move faster. If your brain processes information 24 times slower, then a day for you will last only one hour of subjective time, and so on.

Imagine that every neuron in your brain is at the edge of the universe, and the signals between them go for billions and billions of years. Thus, your perception of time will slow down just enough that the entire existence of the universe from its birth to its death will fit in just one single moment of awareness.

Holdstat tries to explain that the perception of space and time is subjective and determined by causal relationships, but for consciousness, billions of years can last no longer than one heartbeat of a frightened mouse looking at the Universe. The paradoxical conclusion of Holdstat is as follows: consciousness does not exist in space and time, this space and time exist in consciousness.

Fifth experiment of Holdstat

From the previous experiment, it follows that the past, present and future can "exist" in the mind at the same time. A signal sent by a part of the brain from one end of the Universe will reach the other part in a billion years, as a result, two slices of data will appear in your mind at once: the events of the present moment and what happened a billion years ago, but both of them will exist simultaneously. The past and the present will merge, and you will perceive a billion years as the finest line between the past and the future, because we do not perceive the time required for the neurons of our brain to exchange information as significant, even if it lasts for billions of years. However, since many causal chains fit into this face, you can easily predict the development of events in the future. Strictly speaking, the future for you has already come in the third part of the brain, to which the signal from the first two will reach another billion years.

Holdstat's sixth experiment

Let's go back and reduce our brain just enough so that the exchange of data between neurons becomes instantaneous and unhindered. Simply put, let's compress our brain into a point with an almost zero radius. Since our thought processes will be faster, outer time will slow down. If the brain is compressed to a state of zero radius, Holdstat argues, time will stop for us altogether. Given a question, we can read every book in the library of Congress in a hundred subjective years to give the best possible answer, but from the point of view of an outside observer, we will answer almost instantly. The questioner will most likely decide that we have the omniscience of the Buddha and, in some sense, we do. Eternity is contained in every moment, therefore, from the point of view of an enlightened consciousness, cleansed of the habits of human perception, this moment is no different from a billion years. Spatial and temporal restrictions are significant only for the human body, but not for consciousness, which does not occupy space at all and does not keep track of time using wristwatches.

Of course, today these mental experiments look largely naive, and some of Holdstat's conclusions are scientifically dubious, but they can still be considered a useful basis for the practice of analytical meditation and, in general, a good reason to reflect at your leisure on something more important than the next political one. scandal or TV show. In the roaring 1960s that followed, several additional Holdstatian thought experiments appeared, but they should be considered nothing more than additional food for thought. Pure analytical meditation, to my knowledge, was not particularly popular during the psychedelic revolution. Holdstatt's paradox has not yet been resolved for quite obvious reasons, although the development of the Internet and neurosurgery allows us to remain optimistic in this issue. As for Holdstat himself, his body was cremated in 2001, and his consciousness belongs to all of us exactly to the same extent that ours belonged to him, while he walked the Earth and breathed the air common to all its inhabitants.

Scientists have found that if you look another person straight in the eye for a long time, you can change your mind. Anyone can do the experiment.

First experience

Giovanni Caputo, who is a professor at one of the Italian universities, did an experiment with mirrors. The experiment involved 50 people who looked at themselves in a mirror in a dimly lit room. The duration is 10 minutes. Already in the first two minutes, people began to experience some changes in their minds. In the first minute, people saw themselves with some kind of deformations, then their own reflection changed beyond recognition, and at the end, some monsters appeared in general. Some subjects claim that at the end of the experiment they saw their dead relatives in the reflection. The volunteers were forced to switch mirrors and the hallucinations became more dramatic.

New experiment

An Italian scientist decided to conduct a new experiment and selected 40 volunteers. All participants were divided into pairs. The experiment was conducted in a dimly lit room, but people now sat on chairs and peered into the eyes of their partner. The distance from each other was one meter. People were divided in such a way that one group sat opposite each other, and the rest were with their backs. The second group of volunteers had to look at the wall. Due to the low light, people's color perception was reduced, but facial features could be easily seen. To prevent people from having unnecessary fantasies and hallucinations, they were instructed that they were participating in a meditative experience.

What happened?

After the experiment, volunteers were asked to fill out questionnaires. It turned out that those who looked into the eyes of their partner for 10 minutes began to perceive sounds more clearly and distinguish colors better, it seemed that time slowed down. About 90 percent of people admitted that in the middle of the experiment, the faces of their partners began to distort, and about 70 percent saw real monsters or monsters, and 10 percent were sure that their dead relatives were sitting opposite. None of the participants remained indifferent. Everyone had some kind of emotion.

Conclusion

Indeed, people begin to see another world, but this is due to dissociation or distorted reality. The scientist argues that if there is an exit from consciousness, then there must be an entrance. The appearance of monsters can be explained by the lack of sensory stimulation. The fact is that when a person peers at one point, his peripheral vision becomes dull. This can explain the distortion of the partner's facial features. When visual information is missing or disappears, the brain itself begins to build it up, from here people begin to see all sorts of monsters, and someone of their dead relatives. The origin of the hallucinations will be determined soon, as the scientist has planned a new experiment.

We will talk about unusual experiments based only on the mental perception of reality by a person, in the form of artificially modeled puzzles that will undoubtedly be of interest to people who love to brainstorm. It will seem to many that scientists who came up with puzzles like: about a spider in a urinal or a beetle in a box went crazy, but do not rush to draw conclusions, try to think about these experiments and tell us about your conclusions.

A classic game theory problem in which the subject must decide whether to confess to a crime or not, despite the fact that he does not know how his accomplice will respond.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it this way:

“Two were arrested for bank robbery and placed in different cells. The investigator offered everyone a deal: “If you confess and your accomplice remains silent, I will drop all the charges against you, and he will receive a huge prison sentence. If an accomplice testifies, and you remain silent, they will let him go and put you in jail for exactly the same period. If you both confess, you'll get jail time, but I'll get you two out on parole. If neither of you confesses, you will have to put both of you, but not for long, because there is no direct evidence against you.

If we assume that both defendants only care about the minimum term for themselves, then each faces a difficult dilemma in which the option of betrayal dominates over cooperation with an accomplice due to the fact that one does not know how the other will behave. The best way out of the situation for both is silence, however, rationally speaking, almost every person comes to the conclusion that it is more profitable to betray than to cooperate, regardless of how the accomplice behaves. The rationality of each together leads them to an irrational decision.

Frank Jackson

This thought experiment is directed against the philosophy of physicalism as the belief that everything in the world, including mental processes, has physical nature. It follows from the experiment that there are non-physical properties of the surrounding world that can only be comprehended through direct experience.

One of the creators of this concept, Frank Jackson, formulated the problem as follows:

“Mary, a brilliant scientist, is forced to study the world from a black and white room through a black and white monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision, and suppose she has all the physical information we can get about what we experience when we see ripe tomatoes or the sky, or when we use the words red, blue, and so on. For example, she knows what combinations of wavelengths emitted by the sky stimulate the retina of the eye, and what exactly happens in the central nervous system when the phrase "The sky is blue" is pronounced. What happens when Mary leaves her room or when she is given a color monitor? Will she learn anything new?

In other words, Mary knows everything about color except the most basic: she has never seen any color other than shades of black and white, so she cannot predict the difference between academic knowledge and actual experience.

This problem makes it clear that even objective observation does not allow a person to get an idea of ​​all the properties of an object. In simple terms, it is not given to us to imagine what exactly we do not know.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

An experiment proposed by Ludwig Wittgenstein shows that people, in principle, are not able to fully understand each other.

Imagine that there is a group of people, and each of them has a box that contains what everyone calls a beetle. No one can look into someone else's box, but at the same time, everyone claims that it is precisely by the appearance of their beetle that they know that it is really a beetle, and no one knows what is in the boxes of other owners of "beetles".

When the group members discuss what is in their boxes, the concept of "beetle" ceases to make sense, because everyone means something different, but what exactly - no one knows. Thus, "beetle" begins to simply mean "what is in the box."

Wittgenstein believed that the experiment perfectly illustrates the fact that a person never knows for sure what his interlocutor has in mind, because he does not know what he is thinking. Wittgenstein's experiment is connected with the so-called hard problem of consciousness, described by the Australian philosopher David Chalmers, and the phenomenon of qualia, that is, the dependence of the perception of the world on the mental state.

Imagine a person who knows only one language, for example, Russian. He sits in a room and, using a detailed manual that allows him to competently operate Chinese characters, without even understanding their meaning, is various offers in Chinese.

If at the same time, for example, people who speak Chinese are watching him through the window, they will get the complete impression that the person in the room also knows this language.
John Searle

The experiment, according to its author, the American philosopher John Searle, is a weighty argument against the possibility of creating an artificial mind. Even if a computer is able to recognize speech and formulate sentences, it does not really understand their meaning, because it is acting according to a program laid down in it by a person, just like a person in a room follows instructions and forms the correct phrases in Chinese, but in reality does not know this language.

Some researchers argue against Searle's concept, arguing that it is necessary to consider a room, a book with instructions and a person in the system, and this suggests that the interaction of the three components does allow the system to understand Chinese. Others believe that human thinking is a manipulation of concepts that are put into the brain by training in the same way that a program can be loaded into a machine, so nothing is impossible in creating a computer mind.

The American philosopher Robert Nozick developed a thought experiment hinting that humans might actually be able to live in the Matrix.
Robert Nozick

Suppose that scientists have created a machine that allows you to give a person any experience that he wants. By stimulating the brain, it can generate sensations such as reading an interesting book, meeting someone, or writing a novel. Will you agree to connect to such a machine, having previously programmed everything that should “happen” to you, understanding at the same time that you will spend your whole life with electrodes connected to the brain, but the impressions will not differ in any way from real life experience?

The main idea of ​​Nozick's experiment is that there may indeed be good reasons for a person to connect to such a "machine for the production of personal experience(as the philosopher himself calls it). In life, people are often deprived of the opportunity to choose, even in favor of "artificial" experiences, so the temptation is great. Of course, one can say that no “virtual reality” can replace the real one, but one way or another, the problem raised by Nozick has been the cause of numerous philosophical disputes for several decades.

Now there are many variants of this thought experiment, but its principles were formulated by the English philosopher Philippa Foot back in 1967 in the article "Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect". The bottom line is this:

“A heavy uncontrolled trolley rushes along the rails at high speed. On its way, five people are tied to the rails, who must inevitably die. You have the option to move the arrow, and the trolley will turn into a siding, but at the same time it will crush another person, also tied to the rails. What will be your actions?

Utilitarians, who believe that the moral value of an action is determined by its usefulness, will undoubtedly shift the arrow to minimize Negative consequences. Adherents of the philosophy of Kantianism (named after its creator - Immanuel Kant) will certainly not interfere, because they consider people as an end, not as a means, therefore, even one person cannot be only an instrument for saving five others.

In another version of this dilemma, the role of the shooter is played by a fat man who must be pushed onto the rails in order to prevent the trolley from killing the others, but this does not affect the difficulty of choosing between deliberately killing one, albeit in order to save several people, and non-intervention, followed by the death of five .

The idea of ​​this unexpected experiment, which has already become a classic, came to the American philosopher Thomas Nagel when he went into the toilet of Princeton University and noticed a small spider in the urinal, which seemed to him very sad. Every time the philosopher peed in the urinal, the spider seemed to become even sadder from hopelessness. Nagel raised the issue of the spider in his essay "Birth, Death, and the Meaning of Life":
Thomas Nagel

“I went into the toilet, looked at the spider in the urinal, and gradually its pathetic appearance began to depress me. Of course, it may have become a natural habitat for him, but just because he was trapped in the smooth porcelain walls and could not get out, there was no way to know whether he wanted to leave the urinal or not.

Once I made up my mind - I took a hefty piece of toilet paper and lowered it into the urinal, the spider grabbed it, I pulled it out and put it on the floor. He sat motionless, and I left. When I returned a couple of hours later, the spider was in the same place, and when I went to the toilet the next day, I found its corpse in this place.

The experiment shows that even when acting out of the best of intentions, a person does not know what his intervention in a situation can actually lead to, and what is good for each participant in a particular situation.

Imagine a world where everyone became a vegetarian. People would stop raising animals intended for slaughter, which means that millions of pigs, cows and chickens would not even get the right to life, even with the subsequent transformation into cutlets or into soup.

Moreover, domesticated cattle are completely unprepared for independent existence, therefore, one way or another, most of these animals are doomed even without a butcher's knife - chickens have forgotten how to fly, which makes them easy prey for predators, and cows would die in the first winter. Those who still managed to adapt to natural conditions would cause irreparable harm to wildlife. Do you think it's better than eating meat?
Virginia Woolf

The famous British writer Virginia Woolf once said:
“Of all the arguments in favor of vegetarianism, those that people voice are the weakest. The pig is most interested in the demand for bacon. If everyone were Jews, there would be almost no pigs left in the world.”

Of course, the statement is very controversial: what is better, for example, when 20 billion people live in poverty or when 10 billion people bathe in luxury? If the latter, then what about the 10 billion individuals who will never be born? On the other hand, how can you even worry about those who will never be? Everyone decides for himself.

An interesting thought experiment in the field of political philosophy was proposed by the American John Rawls.
John Rawls

Imagine that you and a group of other people are in a situation where you need to work out the principles of an organization together. human society in which to live, but none of you have a clue about the philosophical concepts, models state structure, physical laws, achievements of psychology, economics, biology and other sciences. Because of a certain “veil of ignorance”, no one can assess their natural data and social status, in general, it is necessary to re-create the laws of human existence.

Question: what will you agree to if you are not guided by selfish and selfish motives?

Most likely, according to Rawls, principles would gradually be created that would guarantee everyone equal fundamental rights and freedoms, for example, providing education and employment opportunities, but his theory of justice, which assumes the existence of a single natural justice for each person as such, and not for individuals or classes, is criticized by many philosophers as utopian.