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Buridan’s donkey and determinism

שו”תBuridan’s donkey and determinism
asked 9 months ago

I heard you introduce Buridan’s donkey question in a lecture on determinism.
The question places a person in the place of a donkey and asks, if a person were equidistant from food, would he die of hunger?
I wanted to add that for the situation to exist under perfect conditions, we need to assume not only that the person is equidistant from the food, but that his entire life has existed without any difference between left and right (for example, a person who as a child was told that it was always better to go right can choose the right side even at an equal distance, and this would be the deterministic rational choice for him).
If so, we need to imagine the situation in which a person experiences a completely symmetrical life, for food his entire life, both externally and internally. This means that his brain behavior is also completely symmetrical (he is not right-handed or left-handed) and that throughout his entire life, all of his experiences were equal and symmetrical. This means a reality and a world in which the laws of nature are also always symmetrical, and everything a person experiences is symmetrical.
This is a fictional reality for Holtin that is even difficult to imagine, but only in such a reality can the thought experiment be carried out.
In such a situation, it is no longer so difficult to imagine that the person might not be able to choose a side and die of hunger, and perhaps he might not even be able to move his legs, because any movement would be a first-of-its-kind symmetry breaking in a world with symmetrical laws.


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0 Answers
מיכי Staff answered 9 months ago
First of all, this is a thought experiment. Your situation makes no difference to my argument. But beyond that, there is no need to assume anything about his biography. It is enough to assume that his mind and everything is now in a symmetrical state. Even if he has gone through many adventures that balanced each other and brought his mind now to symmetry between right and left, that is enough.

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