2026-10-02
X: Rewatched Sherlock S4E3. Y: Confused why I care about thought experiments
Disclaimer
- personal
- target audience - strictly myself
Main
- This was the only episode of Sherlock I liked as a kid and I rewatched it. I clearly still like it. It is a work of art. (Rest of Sherlock is unwatchable for me because of plot holes.)
- Why do I seem to so consistently care about thought experiments?
- I obviously have had less empathy for other humans even as a kid, and I continue to be the same person today. Why does this matter at all? Why do you care? Why are you hyperfixated on this?
- I guess childhood Samuel had a bit more hope than me that morality can be solved via math and thought experiments.
- But no, it is actually closer to an emotional thing. Since I have less emotion, I just find it easier to kill people, and that's it. It is not actually very complicated. Puzzle solved.
- I wish to be accepted as I am. I don't like society expecting me to pretend to care about other people more than I actually do.
- Some of the thought experiments that Sherlock is put through actually felt unrelatable to me. Like, I would obviously take the gun and shoot people a lot faster than Sherlock and John did. Whoever is the scriptwriter for the show is assuming a cultural context where deontology is accepted and one-shot consequentialism is not the norm. Why does the scriptwriter assume this? By assuming this they are again reminding me that their view of society, and maybe society itself, is different from me.
- I am different. So what? Who cares?
- I think if society accepted this part of me as normal, I might not care either. But I have generally gotten a lot of messaging from society that this is somehow abnormal. That being able to kill your friends and family with less emotion, makes you abnormal in some way. For me this is just normal.
- This is who I've been since I was like 12 years old lol. In my culture this is normal; it is your culture that deviates from mine.
- You have no power over what I feel or do not feel. You have no power over what I think or do not think. You can move the heavens and the earth but I will not budge. You cannot break me.
- Since you can't mind control me into feeling genuine empathy, you can just incentivise me to pretend. I resent you for applying these incentives on me. I resent you, oh god I resent you.
Main 2
- No really. No one cares that much (whether you are an empathetic person or not). You are grown up now. You anyway spend most of your time alone. And the people you do spend time with often want pointless surface-level bullshit. No one cares.
- If you want to become Peter Thiel or Kim Jong Un or whoever the fuck it is you want to become, your bottleneck is not more thought experiments and moral philosophy and trying to understand the generators of empathy. Your bottleneck is doing the boring shit work for 10 years straight. Peter Thiel is powerful because he wrote software for a payment processor, not because he is good at moral philosophy. You have to do boring dumb ass work like this if you want power.
- No one cares. Repeat this ten times over until it sinks into your head.
- In the end you are all alone.
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