Here you propose a thought experiment. It opens:
…you and nine other people are locked in a completely opaque, environmentally sealed, seamless, unmarked, soundproofed, motion-stabilized, climate-controlled, indestructible (at least by the occupants), and inescapable shipping container. Moreover, you and the others wake up in that container with no data pertaining to any other reality.You continue with the observation, “that container is one among hundreds on a ship* in the middle of an ocean is not something you or any member of your group know ab initio or are capable of ascertaining from your available data set.”
Okay. What happens next? Is there a question you wanted to pose to these incarcerated humans bobbing about on the bosom of Blue Water, completely in the power of the vagaries of the weather with no way to know what’s going on outside the shipping container?
Sounds like your classical conditio humana to me! [See: Hesoid]
My first question would be: Where did you ever get such a gaggle of clueless human beings? That, once incarcerated in a shipping container, lost their minds, their memory, their past experience and general knowledge of the world, such that they were totally helpless? When has a non-lobotomized or chemically-untampered-with person ever experienced such conditions of total helplessness?
In short, it seems the very design of your thought experiment puts up a screen against the very thing I most want to talk about. It is screened out by the application of this rule: “Moreover, you and the others wake up in that container with no data pertaining to any other reality.” It is suggested the presently “available data set” is not up to the job of engaging whatever problem is being raised in this thought experiment.
Well then, it seems to me you are positing zombies, not human beings. But no matter….
Now if the most important question is the number of containers on the ship or the weather conditions, then I grant you, these incarcerated humans are truly disadvantaged in the knowledge sphere — but still not totally ignorant! Some of them might recognize, for instance, what a ship’s roll feels like…. And so it is hasty to say the humans have lost all their knowledge. They still know some things, the knowledge of which could be of enormous value to their survival and the survival of the species.
I think you wanted a thought experiment that could focus on direct observables, and on that basis felt that humans — under the contrived conditions stipulated — would be “helpless.” In answer to which I’d only want to suggest: humans aren’t as helpless as they look; and contrived solutions tend not to endure.
Thank you ever so much for writing, King Prout. Somehow, I feel you are still unsatisfied with the way I have put these issues. If that’s true, then let’s go on from here….
My one comment is that the issue seems to boil down to: how do we know what we know and how sure are we that we actually know it.
Lurkers might be interested in our previous investigation of that very point.
You can spin pretty fantasies to while away your incarceration, but even if one such tale happens to closely parallel the external or greater reality...
1. it has no effect on your situation, and...
2. it can never be tested from within the container
And the point here is: If you cannot test a thing, you can't even *claim* to know a thing to be any more valid than any other untestable thing. You and everything you know, even the parameters of knowing itself, are all stuck within your operational reality - whether that reality is "the Really *Real* Reality"[tm] or not.
I'll answer your objections obliquely:
1. Addendum to the Given: Allow some of the ten people to have some "memory" or pre-confinement data set relating to "reality" outside of the container. Some such sets are vague, all are fragmentary, and none agree.
Result: No change in the scenario - they still can't test squat, so they still can't know squat.
2. And what if, my dear, the inside of the shipping container doesn't look like the inside of a shipping container? I remind you of the parameters of the original Given: "...completely opaque, environmentally sealed, seamless, unmarked, soundproofed, motion-stabilized, climate-controlled, indestructable..."
I've been a dockworker, betty. I *know* shipping containers outside and in. If I woke up to find myself inside an environment as stipulated above, I would NOT recognize it as a shipping container.
I tend to use language VERY carefully, betty - it does not serve the reader to dismiss any stipulated detail as trivial.