Thought Experiments: Connecting Literature, Philosophy and the Natural Sciences

Catalog description

Imagine an omniscient being who knows the position of every atom in the universe—could such a being predict the future? Or imagine all of your experiences are identical to those you’ve had all your life, yet it turns out you have all along been a brain in a vat, stimulated by neuro-electical impulses which lead you to think you are walking abound in the world. Or imagine a being identical to you—a perfect physical duplicate—which does not have conscious experience. Does that mean consciousness is something other than physical? Would such a being be a zombie? Examples like these—fictional scenarios that get the mind moving down a certain track of speculative argument or hypothesis—are called “thought experiments”. The course will explore the literary and philosophical aspects of thought experiments with a number of questions in mind: What do thought experiments add that straight logical argumentation does not? What is the relation of these sorts of explanatory fictions to experiments conducted in laboratory settings? Do thought experiments yield new knowledge about the world? Could works of fiction or films function in their own way as thought experiments? (is Frankenstein a thought experiment? Kafka’s Metamorphosis? an episode of Black Mirror?) The course will look in detail at thought experiments from philosophy, literature and film with emphasis on the entwinement of the humanities and the sciences, and with the aim that a focus on thought experiments helps to dispel assumptions that there is a chasm separating quantitative kinds of analysis from qualitative and imaginative ways of thinking.