Call for entries: Sheffield Thought Experiment Competition

Students are invited to submit their best ideas to the Sheffield Thought Experiment Competition

Deadline: 2nd July 2017.

Eligibility: Open to all UK children aged no more than 15 years (on 2nd July 2017). Group submissions are permitted. In such cases, the group must nominate the recipient of any book prize (e.g. the school).

Submission: Entries will consist of a description of the thought experiment taking up no more than one side of paper. Along with this, the student may if they wish add an explanation of what they think the thought experiment shows, taking up no more than one additional side of paper. It is anticipated that most entries will be text based. However, entries can include images or web links. Submissions should be formatted as a Word or Pdf document.

Prize: The best three entries will receive book prizes. A short animated film of the winning entry will also be created and put on YouTube. By entering the prize, entrants agree that their entries may be edited by staff at the University of Sheffield, and publicised online. Winners may also be invited to visit Sheffield University to collect their prize.

Web page for submission information: http://www.sheffield.ac.uk/philosophy/events/thought-experiment

Thought Experiments Lesson Plan

The overall objective of this lesson is to show that anybody can think in a philosophical way, and to equip students with the confidence to enter the University of Sheffield Philosophy Department’s thought experiment competition (deadline 2nd July 2017).

Specifically, the lesson should:  Explain why philosophers use thought experiments.  Explain how thought experiments work.  Explore different thought experiments in a fun and interesting way.  Talk about what makes a good thought experiment.  Give the students the opportunity to invent their own thought experiments.

This lesson plan gives three examples of thought experiments. The teacher is welcome to present all three, or just a selection.

Introduction: What is philosophy?

Philosophy aims to investigate really basic questions like: What makes an action good or bad? When is a belief rational or irrational? Is there a God? What is a person? If you think these questions are worth trying to answer, then you think philosophy is worth doing.

This lesson will tackle important philosophical ideas that are still discussed today. Everyone can do it, but students should be aware that they will grapple with hard issues. If they feel like they don’t understand straight away, or that they are finding it confusing, they are probably doing it right!

A good way to understand how we do philosophy is to contrast it with science. Scientists explore things in the world that can be directly measured and tested. However, the kinds of questions that philosophers are interested in cannot be resolved by simple experiments. Often it’s not clear whether the thing we want to find out can be measured at all. People even disagree about what methods we should use to get definite answers.

Because there aren’t simple tests, philosophers often use thought experiments instead. These are tests philosophers perform using only their imaginations. The idea is that by seeing how things would go in an imaginary scenario, we can draw some conclusions about real life.

Task 1: The Perfect School (~20 min)

Ask each student to take 5 minutes to draw a bird’s eye view of a school that would be most ideal for them. A one-page rough drawing is sufficient. For example, if they love sport, they could draw lots of pitches, with classrooms taking up less room. If instead they think that reading is fun, then perhaps they’d want a large library that stocks all their favourite kinds of books. They don’t have to enjoy the activity to include it. It could just be something they think is really important for their life.

Next, students should take 5 minutes to draw another layout of an ideal school. However, this time they are to imagine that they don’t know what sort of person they are. Perhaps they have temporarily lost their memories, or perhaps they are souls waiting to be born, whatever. The point is that they don’t know whether they are male or female, black or white, strong or weak, smart or stupid. As such, they don’t know what subjects they are best at or what hobbies they most enjoy. They only know that they will be some kind of human being when they go to that school.

It is to be expected that the second task will be harder than the first task. Part of the exercise is to think about how the ideal gets decided.

Once students have drawn their two different layouts, ask for comments:  What is the difference between the two schools? For example, why has a student included a racing track on the first, but not the second? Or, why is there still a racing track on the second, does the student think that enough people will like racing cars for it to be included?  Are students’ second layouts more similar than their first layouts?  Which school would work best? Why?  Crucially, which school would be fairest?

Now hopefully, most the students will think that the second school is the fairest. This is because they were planning the second school not only from only their point of view, but taking into account the possible preferences of all their fellow students.

You then explain what they have been doing is a thought experiment. Without having to build any schools, or leave their seats, we can get a better idea of what a fair school might look like.

If students have engaged with the experiment well, you can explain how this sort of thought experiment is used by philosophers to think about what a fair country would look like. Instead of not knowing what sort of student they will be, they don’t know what sort of citizen they will be. Perhaps they will be born into a poor family. Perhaps they will be born with a physical disability. So if politicians used this method to decide the rules of the country, what sort of society would emerge? The philosopher John Rawls thought it would be one that prioritises looking after the least well off.

Teacher’s hints:  The point of the task is to show that by imagining that they do not know what sort of person they are, students will create a much fairer school than if they only take into account their own perspective. This is stronger than simply taking others’ wants into account; the aim is to imagine that one is just as likely to enjoy ballet as rugby, or maths as much as Spanish.  The students may take the task very literally, putting a lot of emphasis on what is physically possible. This is not necessary; the focus of the task is to achieve the shift in perspective just described. So things like scale or accuracy of drawing are not important.  If the students grasp the task very quickly, or if you want to extend the task, you could also in- clude the perspectives of their teachers or their parents in their second drawing.

Task 2: The Matrix (~15 min)

To set up the second thought experiment, students are going to think about the following question: How do they know that they are here in the school? Each student should write down one answer.

Now if a student said that they know they are at school because they travelled there from their home- how do they know that they really got up this morning? Did anyone ever have a dream where they went to school, and then woke up realising you still have to go to school! Are they sure that they remember waking up? How can they be certain that they are not dreaming now?

The class may now watch a clip from the film The Matrix. In this film, the main character, Neo, has met Morpheus, who explains to him that the world he lives in is something called the matrix. Neo must choose whether he wants to find out what the Matrix really is. Show clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDadfh0ZdBM&t=2m28s (starts mid-way)

Neo has decided that he wants to find out what the Matrix is and has taken the red pill. In the next clip, he finds that he has spent his whole life in a capsule, with his brain being manipulated by machines to make him think he was living a normal life. He looks around to find that it is not just him in the matrix, but the entire human race. Show clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKwq7b2i-vc (whole clip)

Ask the class what they thought about the clip. Take 2 or 3 comments, but don't get into a discussion about the artistic merits of the film. Clarify the idea of the Matrix if necessary. If they don’t have any comments some prompts are:  How do they know that they are not in the Matrix?  If they were in the Matrix, do they think they’d be able to tell?  Does the idea of the Matrix make them wonder if the world we live in is real?

Explain why philosophers use the Matrix thought experiment. It is used in discussions about what we are able to know for certain. This is because it makes us doubt that we can rely on what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch to tell us about the world we live in. You could use yourself as an example:  How do I know I am standing in this classroom? I know I am standing in this classroom because I can see all these students in front of me and can touch the whiteboard etc.  But wait, I could be in a pod like Neo. Evil robots could be feeding this image of students into my brain, so I cannot be certain I am standing in this classroom.

Some philosophers think that this means that just experiencing something is not enough evidence to say I really know about that thing. A version of this thought experiment was devised by French philosopher Rene Descartes in 1641. The Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi also wrote a version of the dreaming argument in the 3rd century BC.

Teacher’s hints: Again, the students may want to talk about the clip literally, perhaps about the motivations of the machines or the feasibility of using humans in this way. You could mention that virtual reality computer games are getting more and more lifelike all the time, so it’s not completely unfeasible. But steer the conversation towards the main point of the thought experiment. The mere idea that it’s possible for us to be in the Matrix without knowing it seems to undermine our certain knowledge that what we see around us is really the way it seems.

Task 3: The Trolley Problem (~20 mins)

Here is another famous thought experiment was devised by the philosopher Judith Jarvis Thompson. It is often illustrated with the below image (a google image search for ‘trolley problem’ will provide copies of this image).

Explain the following scenario: There is a runaway trolley (by convention philosophers use this American word for tram) speeding down a track. Ahead of it there are five people tied up on the tracks. There’s no way they can escape or be untied before the trolley hits and kills them.  You are standing next to a lever which allows you to switch the trolley onto another set of tracks, avoiding the five people.  Unfortunately, there is a person on the new track, who is tied up as securely as the others. So this new person will be killed if you pull the lever.  You must decide whether or not to pull the lever.

Clarifications: There is no action that can be taken apart from either pulling the lever or not; the thought experiment is about which decision is the right one, not whether the choice can be avoided.

As far as you can tell, all the people on the tracks are equal morally; none have committed any bad crimes, they are the same age, have the same number of children, they are totally healthy etc. There is no relevant reason that any of them deserve to live or die more than any others.

Break into groups to discuss, then ask what they have decided. They should give reasons for their decision. Open the problem up to discussion for 10 minutes or so.

If there is broad agreement that you should pull the lever, or if discussion is flagging, you can alter the problem as follows:

This is the fat man variant. Everything remains the same, except that instead of pulling a lever, you now have the opportunity to push a particularly large man in front of the trolley (he is leaning precariously over the ledge watching what is happening). If you push him, he will die, but he is big enough to cause the trolley to stop before hitting the five people on the track. Again, if students ask, you can clarify that the fact the man is fat makes no difference to his happiness, health or moral goodness.

Has anyone changed their mind? A lot of the time, people think it’s ok to divert the trolley in the first case, but not to push the man in the second case. However, in both cases you are saving five people and one person dies. Why should anyone’s response be different?

Teacher’s hints:  On the face of it, this thought experiment asks us to make a hard moral decision. It forces us to recognise the difference between letting people die and killing people. Some people think it makes us realise that to kill may sometimes be the morally preferable thing to do.  If people think it’s not permissible to push the fat man, does that mean they ought not to divert the trolley in the first case either? That is, does the thought experiment help us to appreciate that really, there’s no morally important difference between actively killing someone to save others, and letting someone die as an unintended by-product of saving others?  Advanced: if the class has followed the thought experiment closely, you might want to explain that it can tell us about how people think about morality (or what is right or wrong) more generally. If someone has a strong feeling that the five should be allowed to die, since it is wrong to kill full stop, then this means that for that person it is the action itself that is morally important. However, if someone thinks that it is acceptable to kill the one person to save five, then at least sometimes it’s the consequences of the action that are most important.

Task 4: Thought Experiment Workshop

The students are now tasked with making their own thought experiment. You can start by getting people to work individually before sharing their ideas with each other, or make it a group task. The thought experiment can be in any medium they like, including diagrams, stories or plays. The more creative the better! Having developed their thought experiments, the students should also show how they think people should respond, justifying their answer as well as they can.

It is hard to define what makes a good thought experiment because they are creative and imaginative exercises. That said, the best thought experiments tend to have the following qualities:  All good thought experiments meaningfully explore ideas. This means that just imagining a crazy thing happening is not enough. For example, if a student imagines a situation in which they could fly simply by flapping their arms, this doesn’t appear to tell us anything interesting. (But perhaps if another dimension were included, this scenario might be used to explore big ideas. For example, what if half the population could do this while the other half could not? What would be the effects on society?)  Good thought experiments are clear and easy to imagine. They make it easier to think about difficult issues. The best thought experiments are like art works: they are vivid, dramatic, memorable, sometimes funny.  Good thought experiments help people realise something that they didn’t realise before.  In good ‘dilemma’ thought experiments (like the trolley problem), people strongly disagree about what to do! This makes people have to find deep reasons in defence of their preferred response.

There are different ways in which you can try to come up with your own thought experiment. Some of these include:  Take an existing thought experiment and change it in various ways to see if something interesting is now suggested. For instance, lots of people have fun coming up with different versions of the trolley problem, such that it has become an internet meme. Can you think of any variations? This is probably the most accessible method.  Another way to create a thought experiment is to invent a wacky scenario, and then see if there’s anything interesting about the way people respond in that scenario. Maybe it shows something about how we form beliefs, or how we decide what is good, or what kind of things people are. For example, if we could make robots as intelligent as humans, what consequences could that have? Would it show anything about the human mind?  Or you can start with a particularly tricky problem and then imagine a situation that makes that problem more obvious or urgent. For example, philosophers have wondered whether the past and the future exist, or only the present. One way you could dramatize that problem is by thinking whether it makes sense to ‘travel’ in time. For that to work, would people have to have parts of themselves in the past and future as well?  Yet another way is to think of a thought experiment in the same manner as a scientific experi- ment. With scientific experiments, you think of a hypothesis and then test it by controlling the relevant variables. This template can be followed when creating thought experiments. For exam- ple, perhaps you know why you are afraid of making a speech. Your hypothesis might be that you are afraid the audience will think what you say is stupid. To test that hypothesis, you could imagine your speech being received well, with everyone interested and impressed by what you have to say. If you knew this to be the case, then would you still be afraid of making the speech? If the answer is no, then your hypothesis was correct. If it is yes, then it can show that the possi- bility of appearing stupid does not explain all of your fear about speaking in front of the assem- bly and you will need a new hypothesis.

Further Resources

If you want to see more examples of thought experiments then here is a good resource http://www.philosophyexperiments.com/. This site lets you engage with thought experiments online and offers a running commentary on their philosophical implications.

The Open University also has a set of 60 second thought experiments on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL73A886F2DD959FF1

The following books and films also provide some thought experiments we love: Novels and short story collections Ted Chiang, Stories of Your life Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy George Orwell, 1984 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (and many others) Isaac Azimov, I Robot (and many others) Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and many others) Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughter House 5 (and many others) Stanislaw Lem, His Masters Voice (and many others)

Film and TV Christopher Nolan films (Memento, Inception, Interstellar) Charlie Kaufman films (Being John Malkovich, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) Gattaca Moon Rick and Morty Star Trek

If you require further information or advice about running this session with your students, or regarding the thought experiment competition, please contact Dr Tom Cochrane, Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield