영어 모의고사 (자동 편성)

Suppose a mad scientist removed a living brain from its body, placed it in a vat of nutrient fluid, and connected its neurons to a supercomputer capable of generating perfectly ①unrealistic sensations. The brain would experience a full and convincing world, complete with a sky, a body, and other people, without ever suspecting that none of it existed outside the simulation. This scenario, unsettling as it sounds, raises a genuinely difficult question for anyone confident in their own perception: how could a person ever ②prove that they are not that very brain right now? Ordinary evidence cannot help, since any proof gathered through the senses would itself be ③generated by the same simulation being tested. Some philosophers conclude that absolute certainty about the external world is simply ④unattainable, while others argue that the mere possibility of deception, however vivid, is not sufficient reason to ⑤abandon our everyday trust in what we perceive.

Physicist Erwin Schrödinger devised a now-famous thought experiment not to describe an actual laboratory procedure, but to ①conceal an absurdity hidden within a leading interpretation of quantum mechanics. Imagine a cat sealed inside a closed box together with a radioactive atom, a Geiger counter, and a vial of poison gas rigged to break open the instant the atom decays. Because the atom's decay is governed by genuine quantum randomness, standard quantum theory describes the atom, before anyone looks, as existing in a ②superposition of having decayed and not having decayed at the same time. If the theory is applied consistently to the entire box, the cat itself would have to be considered ③simultaneously alive and dead until an observer opens the lid and looks inside. Schrödinger intended this image to sound obviously ④ridiculous, using the cat's absurd fate to question whether the act of observation truly determines physical reality, or whether the mathematics is simply being pushed ⑤further than it was ever meant to go.

Long before calculus existed, the Greek philosopher Zeno constructed a series of paradoxes designed to show that motion itself might be logically impossible. In one version, a swift runner named Achilles races a slow-moving tortoise that is given a modest head start. Common sense insists that Achilles will quickly overtake the tortoise, yet Zeno's argument suggests otherwise. By the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting point, the tortoise has crawled a little further ahead; by the time Achilles closes that new gap, the tortoise has advanced again, however slightly. This process repeats endlessly, generating _______________. Zeno concluded that Achilles could never actually catch the tortoise, a conclusion that plainly contradicts everyday experience.

Philosophers sometimes ask their students to imagine a creature physically identical to an ordinary human being in every measurable respect, one that walks, talks, laughs, and even cries out in apparent pain when injured, yet that has no inner conscious experience whatsoever. (A) Critics respond that mere conceivability proves very little about what is genuinely possible in the real world. (B) This imagined being, commonly called a philosophical zombie, behaves exactly as a conscious person would, since every neuron fires in precisely the same pattern. (C) Defenders of the argument claim that because such a zombie is at least conceivable without any logical contradiction, consciousness itself cannot be fully explained by physical processes alone.

Philosopher Harry Frankfurt devised a scenario to challenge a long-held assumption about moral responsibility: that a person can be blamed for an action only if they could genuinely have done otherwise. (A) Frankfurt used this scenario to argue that moral responsibility depends on the actual reasoning behind a choice, not on some abstract guarantee that an alternative path remained available. (B) Black's hidden mechanism made it impossible for the man to have chosen otherwise, yet most people still consider him fully responsible for what he freely decided to do. (C) Imagine a man named Black who secretly implants a device in another man's brain, ready to force a particular decision, though the second man ends up deciding entirely on his own to do exactly what Black wanted.

Imagine a man locked inside a room who does not understand a single word of Chinese, yet who possesses a giant rulebook written entirely in English, and who uses it to answer notes slipped in through a slot. (A) This scenario was designed to challenge the assumption that a computer running a sophisticated program truly understands language simply because it produces convincing output. (B) Yet the man inside understands nothing at all; he is merely manipulating shapes according to formal rules, without grasping their meaning. (C) From the perspective of a native speaker reading the responses, the room seems to understand Chinese perfectly.

The ancient puzzle known as the ship of Theseus asks a deceptively simple question: if every plank of a wooden ship is replaced one by one over many years, is the vessel that eventually results still the same ship it once was? (A) Suppose a careful collector gathered every discarded plank and reassembled them into a second vessel, built exactly as the original once stood. (B) Two ships would then exist side by side, each with an equal claim to being the genuine one, and no obvious way to decide between them. (C) Most people's first instinct is to answer yes, since each individual replacement seems too small to erase the ship's identity, but the puzzle grows far sharper once a second twist is introduced.

Imagine a distant planet identical to Earth in every visible respect, except that the clear liquid its inhabitants call "water" is not H2O but a different compound, XYZ, that happens to look, taste, and behave exactly the same. (A) Even though the two speakers hold identical thoughts and mental images when they use the word, their statements refer to two different substances, because the underlying chemical composition fixes what a word ultimately picks out. (B) When an Earthling and a Twin Earthling each say the word "water," they seem to mean the same thing, since neither could tell the substances apart without a chemistry lab. (C) Philosopher Hilary Putnam used this scenario to argue that the meaning of a word is not determined solely by what happens inside a speaker's head.

Philosopher Robert Nozick devised a thought experiment to test a simple hedonist assumption: that pleasure and the avoidance of pain are all that ultimately matter to human beings. (A) If the hedonist assumption were correct, then everyone should rush to connect themselves permanently to such a machine, since it could deliver a lifetime of perfectly satisfying experiences. (B) Yet when people actually consider the offer, most hesitate and many refuse outright, a reluctance Nozick took as evidence that human beings care about more than the quality of their internal sensations. (C) He asked readers to imagine a machine capable of producing any experience they desired, from writing a great novel to falling in love, all indistinguishable from reality once they were plugged in.

This malfunction, harmless as it sounds, reveals something troubling: memory and psychological continuity alone cannot fully settle what personal identity actually requires. Imagine a teleportation device that scans every atom in your body, transmits that information to a distant station, and reconstructs an exact physical duplicate there, while destroying the original body in the process. ( ① ) From the traveler's point of view, stepping into the machine and stepping out on the other side would feel utterly seamless, complete with continuous memories and a sense of having simply walked through a door. ( ② ) Philosophers, however, are troubled by a version of the same device that malfunctions. ( ③ ) Instead of destroying the original, it leaves the original body intact while still creating a perfect duplicate elsewhere. ( ④ ) Now two people exist, each with identical memories and an equally strong claim to being the original traveler, and there is no principled way to say which one is the real continuation of the person who entered the machine. ( ⑤ )