Gafoo’s Blog

I wish to thank everyone who participated in this thought experiment. I have to say that on Sunday when I put up the post I was needing some encouragment and after reading your thoughts and feeliings on the matter I was completely overjoyed. For those religous types, I guess you could say I was filled with the holy spirit.

I came up with the scenario in the course of a big argument with Alyssa. I won’t go into too many details except to say that it started with a game of dominoes and ended with emotional exhaustion. Through the course of this argument I found that I was doing things that I have done all my life. That is, I was putting things into extreme black and white and similtaneously trying to eliminate the grey area. I realized it’s something we all do to a certain degree simply because it’s a limitation on us as humans. We could try to imagine what is in the grey area (the god box) as much as humanly possible but we will never truely know.

So what is the answer?

I purposely created this question to have no answer. At least no logical conclusion can be drawn from the information I have given you. I have, in effect, created a world of black and white with a little grey area. When you started thinking about the question (an unanswerable question) you were creating a “god box” of your own. Whatever answer you give is uniquely yours. When you put these answers down you were giving me a little window into your mind. Thank you everyone it was a fascinating view. So now that all of that is out of the way, let me give you a glimpse of me.

The side question is important to answer first. I put it last to either confuse or strengthen everyones argument. It was usually more of the latter. My answer to this is that based on the information given, neither one of them is god. If one of them were then the experiment is entirely over. Some people were giving the possibliy that one of them was god and created the box in the first place but I say making that conclusion is the result of more grey area. More importantly it ignores one of the rules of the experiment “they cannot affect each other in any way.”

As for the main question however I came to the conclusion that Person A is the “smart” one. I only came to this conclusion when I realized that person B doesn’t exsist. I unknowingly set up Person B as a person who cannot exsist in this universe I created. I have stated that Person B will “not waste a single thought on the box.” We assume in the experiment that both people have actually seen the box, otherwise they wouldn’t have opinions based on it exsistence. If that is the case then Person B can’t exsist since he has already wasted a thought on the box in forming his opinion. Even though he chooses to remain “blissfully ignorant” he is still cognizant. He has become person A. Please remember that although this may sound like damning evidence of my answer, it is still just my own personal opinion. I could very easily turn the data around and make it so Person A can’t exsist.

From my point of view, my “god box” is full of all kinds of crap. It gives me so much uncertainty and doubt. I can’t just sit there and watch it get bigger and bigger. I have to think about it. I have to wonder what is inside. And here’s the funny part. When I wonder about the box I go over to it and pick it up and shake it (just like christmas time when I was a kid). Everytime I shake it something falls out. That just tells me that the more I shake it, the more stuff is going to come out. And so I am gonna continue shaking it for the rest of my life in the hope that one day it will be empty…