Thought Experiments
Instructions
In your groups, take some time to look over the selection of philosophical thought experiments below, and choose one for your group to discuss. The goal here is not to come to some correct analysis of the thought experiment but to see what it sparks in you and why.
Below, I’ve included some questions to help guide your discussion. The goal is not to answer all of these questions, but to question the answers you come up with.
- What assumptions or beliefs does this thought experiment challenge? How does it make you reconsider your existing views?
- If you could modify one aspect of the scenario, what would you change and how would that alter the philosophical implications?
- What emotional or intuitive reactions does this thought experiment evoke for you? Why do you think you had that response?
- How might different cultural or historical perspectives approach this scenario differently?
- What real-world situations or ethical dilemmas does this thought experiment remind you of? How does it illuminate those real issues?
- What further questions or thought experiments does this scenario inspire you to consider? How could you extend or build upon it?
- How does this thought experiment relate to fundamental questions about human nature, consciousness, morality, or the nature of reality?
- How might advances in science or technology in the coming decades impact the premises or implications of this thought experiment?
- What insights does this scenario offer about the limits of human knowledge or understanding? What aspects remain fundamentally mysterious?
Selection of Thought Experiments
Ship of Theseus
If a ship’s parts are to be replaced over time, is it still the same ship?
The Ship of Theseus, one of the well-known philosophical thought experiments, raises questions about the nature of identity and continuity over time. In the paradox, the question is whether a ship that has had all its components replaced throughout time is still the same.
The Trolley Car Problem
Would you sacrifice one person to save many people?
The Trolley Problem is a famous ethical thought experiment that challenges the ethics of sacrificing one life to save many others. Typically, the hypothetical situation is as follows:
You’re standing next to a tram track, watching as a runaway tram approaches five people who are chained to the track and unable to escape. However, if you notice a nearby lever, the tram would be diverted onto a different track, killing the person connected to that track in its place. What do you do?
The Chinese Room
Can a machine understand or mimic language?
In The Chinese Room thought experiment, the question of whether a machine can genuinely understand language or merely mimic it. This experiment is as follows.
A non-Chinese-speaking person is locked in a room with a book filled with Chinese symbols and a set of instructions for manipulating the symbols.
A person from outside passes a note to him written in Chinese. The person inside the room responds to the note as per the regulations before passing the note back to the person outside.
Do knowledge and intellect come from simply adhering to rules and manipulating symbols or if something deeper in human consciousness enables us to comprehend language?
The Experience Machine
Would you plug into a machine that gives a perfect life simulation, not real experiences?
This philosophical thought experiments is as follows: Imagine there exists a machine that can simulate perfect life experiences, where one can feel and experience anything they desire without suffering any consequences.
They couldn’t tell the difference between the simulation and the real world since this ideal life simulation would be so believable. Then, this experiment asks whether you would plug into this machine and spend the rest of your life in the virtual world.
The Sorites Paradox
At what point does a small change in quantity lead to a change in quality?
The Sorites Paradox is one of the philosophical thought experiments which ventures into the nature of limits and how we define them. Here is how it follows:
Imagine a mound of sand with a million grains in it. The pile of sand is unaffected by the removal of even one grain. Even if another grain is removed, it remains a sand pile.
This cycle continues until only a few sand grains are left. When does a sand mound stop becoming a pile? In other words, when does a small change in quantity cause a big difference in quality?
Put another way: when you eat a sandwich, when does the sandwich stop being a sandwich and start being you?
Mary’s Room
Is there more to conscious experience than just physical processes in the brain?
Philosopher Frank Jackson propounded Mary’s Room to refute the physicalist theory of the mind-brain connection. The experiment is as follows:
Mary, a talented scientist, has lived her entire life in a room with a TV monitor in black and white. She knows everything there is to know about colour vision, but she has never seen colours.
After being let out of the room one day, she notices a red apple. Despite never having experienced colour vision firsthand, the question is whether Mary learns anything new about what it’s like to see red or if she already knew everything there was to know about it.
Poetry
Instructions
In your groups, take some time to look over the selection of poetry below, and choose one poem for the group to discuss. The goal here is not to come to some correct analysis of the poem but to see what it sparks in you and why.
Below, I’ve included some questions to help guide your discussion. The goal is not to answer all of these questions, but to question the answers you come up with.
- What images or sensory details in the poem stand out to you most vividly? Why do you think those particular details captured your attention?
- What emotions or feelings does the poem evoke for you? Are there any lines that particularly resonate with your own experiences?
- What questions does this poem raise for you about life, nature, human relationships, or the world around us?
- Are there any lines or phrases that surprise you or make you see something familiar in a new way? What makes them surprising or illuminating?
- What connections can you draw between this poem and your own life or the wider world? Does it remind you of anything you’ve experienced or observed?
- What do you think the poet was wondering about or marveling at when they wrote this poem? What sense of awe or curiosity comes through in their words?
- If you could add another stanza or line to this poem to extend its sense of wonder, what would you write?
Poetry Selection
Lost
by David Wagoner
Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. You must let it find you.
I Love the Dark Hours of My Being
by Rainer Marie Rilke
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a grave
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots embrace:
a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs.
The Holy Longing
by Johann W. Von Goethe, translated by Robert Bly
Tell a wise person, or else keep silent,
because the mass man will mock it right away.
I praise what is truly alive,
what longs to be burned to death.
In the calm water of the love-nights,
where you were begotten, where you have begotten,
a strange feeling comes over you,
when you see the silent candle burning.
Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness,
and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward.
Distance does not make you falter.
Now, arriving in magic, flying,
and finally, insane for the light,
you are the butterfly and you are gone.
And so long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow,
you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth.
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I Go Among the Trees
by Wendell Berry
I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.
Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.
Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.
After days of labor,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.
No Hay Camino
by Antonio Machado
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship’s wake on the sea.
The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.