The Step to Rationality: The Efficacy of Thought Experiments in Science, Ethics, and Free Will

Abstract

Examples from Archimedes, Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and others suggest that fundamental laws of physics were-or, at least, could have been-discovered by experiments performed not in the physical world but only in the mind. Although problematic for a strict empiricist, the evolutionary emergence in humans of deeply internalized implicit knowledge of abstract principles of transformation and symmetry may have been crucial for humankind's step to rationality-including the discovery of universal principles of mathematics, physics, ethics, and an account of free will that is compatible with determinism.

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