Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ The stranger is a theologian.
Denis Diderot
But blowing out the candle actually would make it easier to find your way (it ruins your night vision).
Not if the forest is sufficiently dark that your night vision doesn’t have enough light to work with.
That seems like an easy case to test, provided you have some way to re-light the candle.
You need to make two assumptions for the analogy.
1) You can’t re-light the candle.
2) If you do things exactly right, you’ll get out with just before starving to death (or dying somehow) otherwise, you are dead.
Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: ‘My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly.’ The stranger is a theologian.
Denis Diderot
But blowing out the candle actually would make it easier to find your way (it ruins your night vision).
Not if the forest is sufficiently dark that your night vision doesn’t have enough light to work with.
That seems like an easy case to test, provided you have some way to re-light the candle.
You need to make two assumptions for the analogy.
1) You can’t re-light the candle.
2) If you do things exactly right, you’ll get out with just before starving to death (or dying somehow) otherwise, you are dead.