a hypothetical situation wherein an ass (or donkey) that is equally hungry and thirsty is placed precisely midway between a stack of hay and a pail of water. Since the paradox assumes the ass will always go to whichever is closer, it dies of both hunger and thirst since it cannot make any rational decision between the hay and water.
This is stupid.
I already know the answer to this. The ass starves AND thirsts to death.
How do I know this?
spoiler
Why not thirst to death?
you had me at “…to death”
Not making a choice is also a choice, and a value can be placed on that choice. It’s hard to say that starving to death would have a higher utility than drinking first or eating first.
It’s not irrational to be unable to rank two choices. An even easier scenario is to simply remove all information necessary to perform the ranking, like letting someone choose between two different unmarked doors with prizes of different value behind them.
It is probably irrational, however, to rank permanent immobility until death over picking one of the two choices between which one lacks information to perform a ranking.
The problem with the idea is that it only functions as a thought experiment. Not that that’s a bad thing per se, it just makes it less useful. You can’t really gain much from it because it breaks down in the real world completely since that perfect state doesn’t and can’t exist on a physical level. Bodies and brains have a built in drive that forces the choice, even in the absence of rational decision-making processes.
Even insects will go after the highest chance of continued survival, which is usually going to be water since its reserves are used up faster. In a circumstance where a creature is so perfectly balanced between death by starvation and death by dehydration, they’d be radically dehydrated and likely non functional to begin with.
So it only works as a way of understanding internal paradoxes of thought, not real world situations.
Not that that isn’t obvious for the most part, but I think it kinda needs saying that it isn’t a literal or realistic scenario, it’s a tool of thought.
