Thinking — August 5, 2025
The thought experiments that test your life, not your logic
Why some of philosophy’s strangest scenarios are more than mental games.
A group of people in ancient attire react to shadows cast on a wall, referencing Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.
Key Takeaways
- Philosophical thought experiments aim to test, stretch, or even shatter our intuitions about how the world works.
- Some reveal cracks in arguments. Others ask for more than analysis — they press us to confront existence, question identity, and reevaluate what we live for.
- Here, philosopher Shai Tubali explores three distinct types of thought experiments, including ones that can reshape how you live life.
Shai Tubali
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A lone figure stands at the edge of the Universe and hurls a spear into the unknown, only to find the edge wasn’t an edge after all. A demon tells a chronically ill person that every moment of their life — every high, every hardship — will repeat forever, exactly as it is. A 16-year-old boy tries to travel alongside a beam of light, hoping to catch up, but no matter how fast he goes, it never slows. Someone is offered the chance to live in a simulated paradise, but there’s a catch: Once inside, they’ll forget it isn’t real. And a human falls in love with a consciousness that has no body, no boundaries, and no need for them.
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What captured my eye was in the email:
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with Stephen Johnson • Thu 7 August, 2025
Hey Big Thinkers,
“Which do you prefer?” my fiancée asked me, pointing to wedding flowers in two vases, each one thoughtfully holding the flowers in a unique arrangement. Or so I was told. To my eye, they looked the same. In that moment of indecision, I became Buridan’s ass — the dim donkey in an old philosophical thought experiment stuck between two equidistant and identical piles of hay. With no reason to choose one over the other, the donkey starves.
Buridan’s ass is meant to satirically highlight the limits of rational determinism, the idea that we always choose based on the strongest reason. In real life, you don’t wither away in analysis paralysis; you just pick something. “The left one,” I said.
Thought experiments can refine and poke holes in your arguments and intuitions. But some go much further. As philosopher Shai Tubali writes this week, one particular kind of thought experiment can transform you by challenging not your logic but the way you choose (or don’t choose) to live life.
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I’d never heard of “Buridan’s ass” (i.e., the donkey starves between two equidistant and identical piles of hay). To a fat old white guy injineer, it obvious! You just flip a mental coin and who cares if it’s heads or tails.
The article goes on to itemize a whole lot of philosophical thought experiments. Some I’d heard of; some not.
- Lucretius’ spear flung at the edge of the Universe
- Nietzsche’s vision of eternal recurrence
- Einstein’s attempt to chase a beam of light
- Robert Nozick’s 1974 Experience Machine.
- Spike Jonze’s Her a bodiless mind.
- Zeno’s paradox of a race between Achilles and a tortoise
- Einstein’s elevator and train
- Schrödinger’s cat
- Heisenberg’s microscope
- Plato’s cave
- Wittgenstein’s beetle
- Foot’s trolley problem
- Putnam’s brain in a vat
- Searle’s Chinese room
- Avicenna’s flying man
- Thomas Nagel’s “food for other species”
- Williams’s Makropulos’ living for 300 years
He categorizes these into: Clarifiers, Shifters, and Transformers.
The final quote is epic:
Thought experiments can walk alongside us, animating our inner lives. They aren’t merely tools of reason — they are instruments of reflection. At their best, they revive philosophy’s oldest purpose: not thinking for its own sake, but thinking that informs how we live.
This article gave me a lot to investigate.
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