Monkey Business

A Thought Experiment

There’s a monkey in a mostly empty room. It’s been there since it was born. It cannot recall how it got there. It knows all the laws of surviving the room, but, to keep it simple, I will describe only this:

Two levers lie before it.

It pulls one lever, it gets a banana.

It pulls the other, it gets a shock.

Where does the banana come from? Where does the shock come from?

Does the monkey understand itself as trapped within a wider world by forces beyond its control?

Does it know itself an experiment?

If it did know, what could it do?

Would there be a benefit to the monkey denying its own survival by refusing to pull either lever?

At the very least, would the masters overseeing the experiment take heart and release the monkey on account of its refusal to participate?

Or would they just let it die and log the phenomenon?

What would they make of it all? Would they suppose the monkey simply lost heart, or would they ever suspect the monkey of suspecting them?