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.