This is philosophy bites with me David Edmonds and me Nigel Warburton.

Philosophy bites is available at W.

What would it be like to be a bat? If Star Trek-esque your body was broken down into its molecular

structure, transported to another planet and reconfigured exactly as before, would that person still be you?

A terrorist is about to explode a nuclear device.

You can stop him only by torturing his child, should you do it?

Julian Bejini is the editor of The Philosopher's magazine

and author of The Pig that Wants to be Eaten and 99 other thought experiments.

Philosophers use thought experiments all the time, but what can a thought experiment really tell us?

Julian Bijini, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Nice talking to you.

Now the topic I want to focus on today is thought experiments.

Thought experiments occur a lot in philosophy, but could you just say what a thought experiment

is? Well you know some people agonise over this question and have a very clear narrow definition. I mean I use the term

very broadly is any kind of hypothetical or imaginary scenario which helps you think

through a concept and argument or an idea to give you a better take on it,

try and see if it really adds up.

So could you give an example of one?

Very famous one, for example, is John Searle's famous Chinese room thought experiment.

There he's thinking about artificial intelligence and he's trying to address the question of whether

a computer could ever think.

So he thinks, well let's imagine what is a computer?

...