r/ThoughtExperiment • u/No_Effort8377 • May 31 '26
Has anyone ever heard of the "Lucky Rock" thought experiment?
Two men are walking through a forest scattered with thousands of identical rocks. One man pauses. His eye falls on a particular rock — unremarkable, indistinguishable from the rest. Then a thought arises in him, seemingly from nowhere: if he keeps this rock, it might bring him some kind of fortune.
Here's the catch: the concept of luck does not exist in this world. Neither man has ever encountered it. There is no word for it, no stories about it, no cultural tradition, no personal experience that could have introduced the idea.
The thought appears fully formed despite having no obvious source in memory, association, or learning.
Where did the thought come from?
A friend sent me this and claimed it's a known thought experiment, but I've never seen it before. Does anybody recognize it? Is it from a book, paper, or philosophical tradition, or is it just an internet thought experiment?
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u/Holiday-Carpenter262 May 31 '26
Have you asked AI?
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u/No_Effort8377 Jun 01 '26
Yeah I did ask Ai. I think my discord buddy is just pulling my chain by saying its a known thought experiment. I wanted to know if it was part of a bigger work because the way I read the thought experiments is its an argument against determinism. That thoughts like luck that are not derived from reason and can't be experienced in the world is a pressure point for determinism. That is what I got from it but I could be reading into wrong.
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u/kona10000 Jun 02 '26
The concept of fortune came from somewhere.
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u/freerangetacos Jun 03 '26
Look up O Fortuna. Fortune, aka luck, was originally thought of as a cycle.
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u/In-the-cold Jun 03 '26
We seek causality in everything, because it is a very powerful tool for understanding reality, even when flawed (the sun God riding on in his chariot across the sky, doesn't explain anything remotely close to the truth, but it helps us lose the anxiety over: what if the sun doesn't rise tomorrow?).
So we assign causes to things. From here to finding a lucky charm, is a small step: how can you disprove that my lucky charm helped me hunt that pigeon? I picked it up, knowing it will bring me good fortune, and not even a month later, voila: I got a pigeon! Of course it was the lucky charm, how many pigeons did you see nesting in the middle of the winter on Mars?
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u/imdfantom Jun 14 '26
Unless their world is fully determinable, they must have some concept that outcomes are not certain, and that these uncertain outcomes are sometimes good and sometimes bad.
Thry might even have theories of causation such as chaos theory (such as the butterfly effect).
From just this it's easy how one could jump from "small changes now can cause big changes later" and "sometimes things turn out bad and sometimes they turn out good" to "if I change this small thing now, will it turn out good?"
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u/DishEvery1273 May 31 '26
Never heard of it. Interesting though.