The Beauty of a Thought Experiment

In a thought experiment you can simply specify things in a way that is much simpler than real life. In a real life example the contingencies of the particular example always make a difference. Once you move into these extreme hypothetical situations are pre-existing so-called intuitions and not likely to be reliable because we've never been in analogous situations. Derek Parfett who used a lot of these thought experiments in his book Reasons and Persons on Personal Identity even he sort of pulls the same trick as Julian Bajini.