Mstrdm

(Stephen McGregor)

Thought Experiment Comics

Started March 2026, ongoing

I really love thought experiments, and for a long time I’ve wanted to have a go at turning some of my favourite ones (which tend to be of the philosophical variety) into comics. There have always been a couple problems with this idea, though. The first problem is that I’m a rubbish visual artist, and the second problem is that there’s no real incentive for a proper artist to commit their time and talent to what amounts to a vanity project for me.

AI has presented I wouldn’t say exactly a “solution” to these problems, but a workaround, anyway. The objective of this project is for me to have a go at exploring some thought experiments that I like through a combination of image and text. As a starting point, I believe that a good thought experiment operates by creating a basis for discovering entanglements across different conceptual domains. The sensory quality of thought experiments allows us to do the kind of non-analytical mapping between things, the sort of direct perception of something-as-something-else that is the essence of among other things metaphor, that can be the catalyst for epiphany.

One issue with thought experiments in general is that they can become intuition pumps, a mechanism which, deliberately or not, allows existing assumptions and biases to contaminate a mode of exploration that is meant to be radically open to novelty and surprise. But if this is a problem with some thought experiments - and I think it is - then it is also a problem with analogical thinking in general. When we allow different conceptual spaces to cross-pollinate, there is inevitably a risk of making false connections and so arriving at odd conclusions. This, though, is the price worth paying for really seeing rather than just analysing the way things are.

And one issue with the approach I’m taking to thought experiments here is that the crucial artwork and so the corresponding imagistic intelligence is, because it’s being done by AI, just a kind of approximation of how things I describe to a model should look. There is no opportunity for a human with an ability to communicate through images, grounded in the experience of a life actually lived in space and time, to show things in ways that feel true and at the same time surprising. I’m not sure what to do about this for now, but I’m not oblivious to the problem, either.

For now I’ve only done one thought experiment: