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Thought experiment

andyandy

anthropomorphic ape
andyandy
Joined
Apr 30, 2006
Messages
8,377
Suppose you get the following proposal from an eccentric billionaire:

"Toxin X is a substance that will make you violently ill for a few hours. However, it has no long term effects of any kind. As an experiment in psychology, I'm offering you a million dollars if tonight at midnight you fully intend to drink toxin X by tomorrow at noon. You don't actually have to drink the toxin; all you have to do is to intend to drink it. Your intention will be tested by a device similar to a polygraph which my people have developed and which has been shown to be 100% accurate. If at midnight you have the intention, a million will be wired to your bank account. The only other conditions are that you are to make no bets, do anything that will cause you to become irrational, or arrange for any way to avoid the effects of the toxin."

Suppose you decide that being ill for one day is a reasonable price to pay for a million dollars. Your first thought is to therefore agree to the proposal. It then occurs to you that you won't even have to become sick in order to win the money. All you have to do is to intend to drink the toxin. You don't actually have to carry out your intention.

But now if you know ahead of time that you don't actually have to drink the toxin, then you can't really intend to drink it. So you tell yourself you really do have to drink it. But then if at midnight you really did intend to drink the toxin, and you got the million, then come the next day you would no longer have any reason to drink it: you've already been paid and drinking the toxin would make you unnecessarily sick.
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Is there any way for you to win the money?


I've not linked it, so that you can't immediately look up what has already been written on it.....without doing any googling, what do you think?
 
I think it nicely shows that the concept of "intent" is problematic. Whether you "intend" to exhibit any behaviour can only be determined after you have exhibited that behaviour, which means it cannot meaningfully be claimed to precede the behaviour. A machine that can determine intent ahead of intended behaviour with 100% accuracy is therefore an impossibility.
 
This is strange.
I can intend to drink it, fully intending to drink it, and puking three hours after I drink it.
People sincerely intend to do stuff all the time that they are reluctant or even afraid to carry out. Marriage for example.
 
I tend to agree on the difficultly of creating puzzles based around knowing intent.

The puzzle tries to raise a question about knowledge of 'the truth' being a real good. Would the drinker be better off not knowing? If a person is better off not knowing, maybe the value of knowing something as it is, cannot be axiomatic.

There are implications to accepting ignorance as a virtue that I tend to resist. I would be far more likely to accept that knowing 'true knowledge' of something was a 'real good', if not an axiom. Humm...
But now if you know ahead of time that you don't actually have to drink the toxin, then you can't really intend to drink it.
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This does not seem to follow and might be fallacious reasoning. I don't see why I can't intend to drink it, even though I understand that I do not need to drink it.
So you tell yourself you really do have to drink it. But then if at midnight you really did intend to drink the toxin, and you got the million,
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Ok, after midnight is the next day and I have my million because I had the right intention. The intent meter even said so. So far so good, I have my million.
...then come the next day you would no longer have any reason to drink it: you've already been paid and drinking the toxin would make you unnecessarily sick.
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Drinking the toxin might be eccentric but not irrational. I intended to drink the toxin last night and the intent detector said so. After all, I would not have my million if my intention was not already judged right.

I don't need to drink toxin in order to win, which I already did. But suppose I will still drink it as evidence that my intent was true. All that says is that I'm skeptical of an intent detector and I want to prove my intent with evidence in case the eccentric billionaire changes his mind and tries to take my million back. It would be hard to prove I had no intention about drinking the toxin after I actually drank it, so that seems at least rational.
 
This was dealt with extensively in my first year of law school under the umbrella title "inchoate offenses." Suffice to say that I know the answer - or, at least, the practical work-around that the law has devised. I'm not going to tell you, though, because I spent $100,000.00 and I'm not giving it away for free.
 
You would need to go ahead and drink the toxin anyways because it is the only way to really express that your intention was legitimate. It was in taking the easy way out (not taking the toxin because it was allowed) that would cause you to fail this test.
 
Stephen Atchison DC said:
You would need to go ahead and drink the toxin anyways because it is the only way to really express that your intention was legitimate. It was in taking the easy way out (not taking the toxin because it was allowed) that would cause you to fail this test.
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I agree with this assessment. You'd have to work it backwards, starting with drinking the toxin, which is the fuel for your intent to drink it. The last link in the chain to work backwards from is drinking it, not not drinking it, so you have to drink it.

Winning the money is not dependent on anything but your willingness to be ill for a day. If you wouldn't swap a day's health for a million, then you can't win this, even if you believe you don't actually have to drink the toxin.

So, providing you actually drink it (and are not merely prepared to drink it), then you will win.
 
If the intention detector is 100% correct, then you either cannot win the money, or you will drink the toxin. Otherwise, your intention is false, and the detector will know this.
 
zaayrdragon said:
If the intention detector is 100% correct, then you either cannot win the money, or you will drink the toxin. Otherwise, your intention is false, and the detector will know this.
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I'm pretty sure there's a false dichotomy here. You may truly intend to drink the toxin at midnight, the detector confirms this and you get the million. At 12.01 you, acutely allergic to, say, nuts, unwittingly eat something with nuts in, your throat swells and you lapse into a coma, are carted off to hospital for emergency treatment which is successful, but takes 24 hours for you to recover consciousness. The noon deadline passes with no toxin administered and the million in your poke.

I can't see any of the rules being broken here.

Loss Leader's "inchoate offense" provides the out, I believe.
 
I think this is a variant on N****** 'paradox'.

To make the problem clearer, the money will be sent to your bank account 12 hours before you drink the poison or not all. What happens to you after this time does not effect the outcome.

Suppose someone you know to be utterly truthful would come up to just before you drink the poison and say "Don't drink the poison, you got the money." or "Don't drink the poison, you've already failed the test."

Regardless of what your intent was there is no point in drinking the poison at this point. However, after the intent test, even if no one trustworthy says anything to you, you still know that one of the above statements is true and there is no point in drinking the poison now.

So do you decide to drink or not?
 
ok, so this is Kavka's toxin puzzle thought experiment....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavka's_toxin_puzzle

now the wiki conclusion is above my head

Non-cognitivism vs. Moral realism
The nature of this paradox is grounded in a non-cognitivist ethical theory, presupposing that there is no objective moral law. In an attempt to deny this paradox, we would need to presuppose a theory of moral realism, in which objective moral truths do exist and we could cite various internal incentives toward the fulfillment of our intention. Examples of such incentives include the guilt that would result from failing yourself by not following through on your intention (to the extent that an intention is a promise made to oneself), or a categorically commanded duty not to lie, including to oneself. Whether or not such an approach would be successful is certainly open to debate, as are the conclusions of the paradox in general.
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if someone wants to explain how this relates to the experiment, I'd be greatful......:)
 
andyandy said:
ok, so this is Kavka's toxin puzzle thought experiment....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavka's_toxin_puzzle

now the wiki conclusion is above my head



if someone wants to explain how this relates to the experiment, I'd be greatful......:)
Click to expand...

It seems to me that one needs to do an awful lot of reading into to get this into the so-called experiment.
You need to enter the wonderful world of academic obscurantism that is way off the path of practical thinking.
There is no puzzle.
There is no paradox in the thought experiment.

Did you promise you'd drink the poison? That might entail a moral issue.
But that's not stipulated in the experiment.

Gosh, this is like those silly "zombie" arguments we had going a while back.
If you want an actual puzzle, play Sudoku.
 
DickK said:
I'm pretty sure there's a false dichotomy here. You may truly intend to drink the toxin at midnight, the detector confirms this and you get the million. At 12.01 you, acutely allergic to, say, nuts, unwittingly eat something with nuts in, your throat swells and you lapse into a coma, are carted off to hospital for emergency treatment which is successful, but takes 24 hours for you to recover consciousness. The noon deadline passes with no toxin administered and the million in your poke.

I can't see any of the rules being broken here.

Loss Leader's "inchoate offense" provides the out, I believe.
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In that scenario, yes, I agree. But circumstances aside (for example, you're kept in a 'safe' environment the whole time), you'll either win the money and drink the toxin, or you won't.
 
andyandy said:
ok, so this is Kavka's toxin puzzle thought experiment....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavka's_toxin_puzzle

now the wiki conclusion is above my head



if someone wants to explain how this relates to the experiment, I'd be greatful......:)
Click to expand...

Sounds like crap, even if it's on wiki.
 
I already drank it and have booked a trip to Amsterdam for the next day, reserved a hooker and pound of good hash. exercise done. I intend to have a good time.
 
I would win the money, and here's how I would do it.

I would immediately contact a friend, and draw up a contract that said, "If offered a chance to drink toxin X, I will give my friend one million dollars if I turn down the chance."

In other words, to demonstrate that my intent is genuine, I will create a condition that makes it certain that there really is a penalty for failing to drink the toxin. Now, "intent" is not enough to win the money. I still have to do it, which would make my intent genuine.
 
Here's what the law has to say on the subject:

Quite some time ago, the courts ran into the problem of intention. First of all, it is impossible to know what is in a person's mind. In fact, people can often have conflicting emotions. A lost wallet with a hundred dollars in it can cause a person quite the dillemna. Second, even if a person at one point intends to do a criminal act, if he changes his mind and decides not to why should we punnish him? After all, fear of punnishment may have been the motivating factor in which case the system worked and we should all be quite proud of him.

The law has solved this by decreeing that intention alone will not be enough to prove a person's guilt of anything. What is needed is some sign that this person really would have committed the criminal act if given the chance. So the law requires some action towards the crime. If I want to kill my boss and I tell everybody I'm going to, I've done nothing illegal. If I go to the store and buy a shotgun legally, I've probably done nothing illegal. If I load the gun, I'm still OK. The moment I aim it at my boss, I've committed a crime. I've taken an action with no innocent explanation in furtherance of an illegal goal. That's the crime.

This poison hypothetical is not unfamiliar to television viewers. It confronted a character on one of the most popular TV shows of its time. In an episode of Friends, Ross needed to prove how sorry he was to Rachel. She demanded, on Joey's reccomendation, that he drink a cup of fat. He promised to - that was not enough. He held the glass - that was not enough. He put it to his mouth - not enough. Not until the fat touched his lips was Rachel satisfied that his intentions were pure. Sadly, they broke up a little while later.

Those worried about Ross and Rachel, though:

Rachel doesn't go to Paris and they get back together in the last episode.
 
andyandy said:
ok, so this is Kavka's toxin puzzle thought experiment....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kavka's_toxin_puzzle

now the wiki conclusion is above my head

if someone wants to explain how this relates to the experiment, I'd be greatful......:)
Click to expand...
I'll try. If morals are absolute then there is no paradox. Assuming moral absolutes you either intend to drink the poison or you don't. The proof of your intention are the results. If morals are not absolute then there is a paradox.

Now, we need to consider whether or not it is possible to form an intention to perform a future act, given the foreknowledge that after forming the intention you will have no incentive to fulfill your intention. In fact, a person X who attempts this, will have very good reasons not to.
As soon as X intends to drink the toxin, X can collect the reward—X does not actually have to drink it. So, once the time has come to drink the toxin, the reward will already have been collected and the only thing that will result from drinking the toxin will be extreme discomfort—having received the reward, no incentive remains to drink the toxin. Given this foreknowledge, it seems unreasonable for X to drink the toxin. But considering that X can come to these same logical conclusions, X cannot logically form the intention to begin with.
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