 Welcome back to the Agora cafe for more coffee and philosophy. This time I actually have coffee in my cup Which is much better than having an empty mug. Okay In keeping with the science fiction theme of today's Video I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and relocated us from Being virtually in Greece to virtually above Greece. So that is still Greece there Athens is roughly there That's the Isthmus of Corinth That is the Peloponnes Right there is the island of eithera where Leonard Cohen spent 10 years and I spent two glorious days Over there is Istanbul and Anadolu Kavali, which is the entrance to the Black Sea So, uh Today I wanted something a little bit different, which is I want to read something to you Which is not what I'm ordinarily going to do but two years ago I gave a presentation at the at philosophy club meeting on philosophy and literature At a local coffee house The coffee theme continues Mama mocha is here in Auburn, and I've been planning to post the The text of my talk Online, but I can't seem to find an electronic copy of the talk But I have a hard copy I haven't figured out both zoom successes and zooms failures at Maintaining this background or interesting to me, but anyway There's the um And so I thought I'd uh read it to you it deals with Both philosophy and science fiction and it touches on Some themes that are going to be recurring in my discussion of both those topics So, uh The title of it is philosophical thought experiments and fantastic fiction and I explain a bit in a Footnote and I'm going to use the term fantastic fiction to cover both science fiction and fantasy Without worrying at present about the demarcation between them One might suppose that science fiction differs from fantasy and being constrained by what is scientifically possible But many science fiction writers who think that for example faster than light travel is scientifically impossible Nevertheless make use of it in their stories and no one seems to suppose that this disqualifies such stories of science fiction It's probably closer to the truth to say that science fiction Has to present its fantastic scenarios as licensed not by present-day science, but by an imaginary version of science presented as a development of or a successor to present-day science but uh by that Okay, I'm also inclined to think that even a writer who believes in the reality of magic or the supernatural think of Arthur Conan Doyle Is still writing fantasy rather than science fiction So long as the supernatural elements are not presented as being licensed by an imaginary extrapolation from present-day science But perhaps his book the land of mist is a borderline case. Okay so In the second book of the republic Plato introduces the story of gaijes A shepherd who discovers a magic ring with the power to render him invisible uh By the way gaijes would have been somewhere around Somewhere in that area in sardis lydia uh Gaijes uses the ring to sneak secretly into the royal palace where he seduces the queen kills the king and seizes the throne of the kingdom of lydia Although gaijes of lydia was an historical person Plato presumably does not expect his audience to take this story literally Less fantastic accounts of gaijes rise to power are found in herodotus and nicholas damocene So why does Plato tell it? The point of the story is to pose a challenge to those who think that the only reasons to be moral are purely strategic In other words that the only reason I should behave cooperatively toward others is to gain a cooperative reputation That's giving others an incentive to behave cooperatively toward me Plato asks would we still have reason to behave morally if we had gaijes ring And there of us could easily keep our wrongdoing secret Thus severing the tie between conduct and reputation If Plato's opponent answers yes Then we should still behave morally if we should still behave morally even if we had gaijes ring Then they must concede that the value of morality is not purely strategic On the other hand if the answer no Then they must concede that it is not morality But only the appearance of morality that the that they are actually defending and that a genuinely moral person Must have different motivations from those they endorse In his book on obligations, the Roman philosopher Cicero who agrees with Plato's analysis here Records a response that some defenders of the strategic conception of morality had offered to Plato's thought experiment Namely that the counterfactual situation of the ring of gaijes is inadmissible since such a ring is impossible Cicero has little patience with this reply He insists that even if the ring of gaijes is impossible It still makes sense to ask what it would be reasonable to do if the ring did exist Debates over the admissibility of fantastic thought experiments in philosophical argumentation continue today With some critics maintaining that our conclusions should be grounded in reality and not fantasy Now probably all philosophers can agree that when the counterfactual scenario is conceptually impossible Actually incoherent it can legitimately be dismissed We need not offer any answer to the person who asks if two plus two were to equal five. What would three plus three equal? When the counterfactual scenario is conceivable Most philosophers Not all have traditionally regarded such a thought experiment as legitimate Even if it violates empirically established physical causal laws Fantastic thought experiments are often used in ethics Aristotle for example replies to those who think pleasure is the only worthwhile thing in human life By asking whether they would accept an offer to have their intellectual level reduced to the level of an infant In exchange for an enormous supply of infantile pleasures If the answer no that shows that they are committed to recognizing values other than pleasure More recently, Judith Jarvis Thompson and Mary Ann Warren in two of the best known philosophical articles on the morality proportion Have proposed various bizarre science fiction scenarios to the following structure If argument x against the permissibility of abortion were correct It would also follow that in science fiction scenario y a certain action z would likewise be impermissible Yet it seems overwhelmingly plausible Even to most proponents of anti-abortion argument x that in science fiction scenario y action z would in fact be permissible Hence argument x against abortion must be mistaken even by its proponents own standards Since it yields the wrong moral judgment about science fiction scenario y and I'll post a link to their articles uh in the description as well as uh an article um by my colleague, uh, Michael Watkins of that talks a bit about The the logical structure of that kind of argument When critics of Thompson and Warren object that their science fiction scenarios are far-fetched and implausible Their defenders reply like Cicero two millennia ago That since the thought experiments do not need to be realistic in order to perform their argumentative function Uh pointing out that they are unrealistic is irrelevant The philosophical use of fantastic thought experiments is by no means confined to ethics The greek philosopher archetypes for example Uses a science fiction scenario to criticize the view that the universe is spatially finite Suppose he suggests we could travel through outer space to the point where the universe supposedly ends And we were then to attempt to thrust a spear past the alleged spatial limit If the spear is impeded then something must exist beyond the limit in order to block it If the spear is not impeded Then again there must exist something beyond the limit namely empty space uh Then this next bit is not in the paper if I just want to say a little bit of how I think an Aristotelian would have responded um And they could say well If the spear doesn't keep going Um, then that's mean there's something out there blocking it just means it's run out of space to move in And if the spear does keep going that doesn't mean that there was previously space out there for to move and do It means that you have altered the shape and size of the universe. You've created a little Spear shape point on the edge of it. Yes, that's what I suspect. Aristotle would have said to archetypes Uh, had they uh been able to join us uh for coffee here on the international space station That's where this photo is from by the way NASA no copyright More recently Hilary Putnam has used a science fiction scenario to argue against the view that what our words refer to is determined by an associated description in our minds Putnam asks us to imagine a planet twin earth, which is exactly like our earth So For all you know, that might be twin earth not earth back there Uh, exactly like earth including the exact similarity of language except that wherever there is h2o on our earth A superficially similar liquid with a different chemical composition xyz exists on twin earth Before science had advanced far enough to Detect the difference between h2o and xyz The mental descriptions the denizens of earth and twin earth associated with the word water might well have been identical Yet plausibly our water and their word water nevertheless already referred to different chemicals This affinity with a genre of fantastic fiction runs through the entire history of philosophy With countless thought experiments resembling short stories in the fantastic fiction genre Descartes famously inquires what we could know if an all-powerful demon were constantly trying to deceive us And less famously asks us to imagine looking out the window and wondering whether the coats and hats We see passing below cover human bodies or mechanical contrivances Locke defends an account of personal identity via scenarios of souls switching bodies And of the same body being inhabited successfully by different souls each inheriting the memories of the previous soul scotus inquires whether a mind that existed for only a single instance of time Could make a free will choice during that instant Hume imagines a human being created ex nihilo with fully developed cognitive powers and immediately confronted with a billiard table And asks what such a person would be able to predict about the causal interactions of billiard balls Rousseau investigates what human society might look like if it arose from an initial situation in which all humans are solitary Putnam asks whether a brain floating in a vat having its neurons stimulated to simulate bodily experience Could coherently entertain the hypothesis that it is only a brain in a vat Ibn Tufail asks what philosophical knowledge could be achieved by someone spontaneously generated on a desert island Growing up with no human interaction Well, Ibn Sina goes in one better by asking the same question about someone raised in the sensory deprivation tank Both give surprisingly optimistic answers More recently John Searle describes a person hidden in a room Who follows rules for responding to chinese language inputs with chinese language outputs despite not knowing any chinese Well, netblock describes an attempt to simulate A human brain by having the entire population of china networked together so that each individual plays the role of a single neuron Both of these examples Are descendants of liveness thought experiment of entering a calculating machine as large as a mill And whether it makes sense to think of it as conscious Robert Nozick asks whether we would have any reason not to plug ourselves into a machine They could perfectly perfectly simulate any possible experience Well, Donald Davidson inquires whether an exact duplicate of you swamp man Spontaneously formed by a freak accident with lightning and swamp water would count as having your or any mental states Frank Jackson tells the story of a neuroscientist raised in a black and white room And inquires what she would learn upon being released and experiencing redness for the first time John Rawls asks us to imagine what principles of justice we would choose If we suffered temporary amnesia about our values characteristics in place in society Harry frankfort spins a tale about a scientist who's implanted a device in your brain And will activate it compelling you to make a certain choice Unless the scientist foresees that you will still you will make the same choice on your own Well, these various examples do not all have the same structure What they have in common is that in each case what would be reasonable to say about some fantastic Hypothetical case is taken as grounds for what we should actually say about real life cases Indeed, it's a typical feature of philosophical analyses But they are supposed to apply to all conceivable cases not just all actual ones or even all physically possible ones Philosophy takes as its field the range of the conceivable not the range of the actual And of course the same is true of fantastic fiction more or less I say more or less because there's no strict requirement that fantastic fiction scenarios be even conceptually possible Isaac Asimov thought time travel was not just physically but conceptually impossible Yet he wrote several perfectly good stories featuring time travel nonetheless Relying on what was from his point of view an illusion of conceivability As Aristotle remarks in the poetics in fiction a plausibly presented impossibility is preferable to an implausibly presented possibility However, in most cases the scenarios and fantastic fiction are at least conceptually possible Though sometimes they are not physically possible at least according to present scientific understanding On other cases, they are physically possible in principle, but not achievable by any technology presently available to us Given the similarity between philosophical thought experiments and fantastic fiction stories How similar are they in their purposes? In some cases the purposes do seem quite similar Ursula Le Guin's short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas Depicts an idyllic society whose near universal happiness depends on the misery of the single individual The story seems to function very much like a thought experiment to undermine the utility of thought To undermine the utilitarian idea that the welfare of the many can justify the sacrifice of the few Indeed Le Guin borrowed the idea from a philosophical argument by William James who in turn got it from Dostoevsky Many dystopian stories function by picking some present-day trend and extrapolating it forward to a nightmare as extreme This describes such works as The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984, Atlas Shrugged, Fahrenheit 451 Harrison Bergeron, The Handmaid's Tale, and The Hunger Games As well as say the depiction of Mordor and Isengard in Lord of the Rings One way of reading such works is as a warning This future is where we're headed if we don't nip these trends in the bud But another way of reading them Not incompatible with the first but distinct from it is not so much as a prediction As a way of showing that these trends are problematic already by presenting them in extreme form The argument being not These would be bad in extreme form. So they are also bad in moderate form. That would clearly be fallacious But rather showing these trends in their extreme forms reveals their essential nature In such a way as to condemn their moderate forms also As with Plato's observation in the republic that moral phenomena written in small letters may be easier to discern if we see them written in large letters first Another way that fantastic fiction stories can criticize present-day institutions and practices Is by divorcing them from their customary associations in order to make their problematic nature more visible For example, Alphel signs classic 1953 comic book story Judgment Day Depicts a human astronaut returning to check on the progress of a robot colony Only defined to his bafflement that the orange robots are oppressing and marginalizing the blue robots Despite the fact that two kinds of robots are essentially identical apart from their outer coverings Clearly the thought behind the story is that the irrationality of color prejudice will be more obvious to many in the robot case Since most readers have no pre-existing prejudices one way or other about the color of robots And then can hopefully be extended to the for some initially less clear human case Of course, not all fantastic fiction stories have morals as obvious and straightforward As judgment day or the ones who walk away from omelos And that's good since well heavy-handed moralizing can certainly be appropriate in many cases One wouldn't want all literature to take that form So for instance the moral of Ursula Le Guin's novel The Dispossessed is neither a narco-communism is great Nor a narco-communism is awful Though many readers do seem to come away with one or the other of those up shots Rather Le Guin presents her imagined society as having both attractive and unattractive features And non-dogmatically invites the reader to consider a Whether or how far the two aspects can be separated and b in cases where they can't be How the trade-offs in such a society are to be compared with the trade-offs inherent in other types of society An important philosophical function of fantastic fiction and of course mainstream fiction as well Is to make philosophical ideas clearer by dramatizing them Plato presents his dialogues timeus and crittius as sequels of a sort to his republic He has Socrates note that he has just finished describing the ideal state in theory But complained that that which is beyond the range of a man's education He finds hard to carry out an action and still harder adequately to represent in language Hence his feeling about the state which we have been describing is like that of a person who i'm beholding beautiful animals Either created by the painter's art or better still alive, but at rest Is seized with the desire of seeing them in motion or engaged in some struggle or conflict to which their forms appear suited Critias then obliges Socrates by beginning to relate a story about the ideal state Imagined as prehistoric Athens at war with Atlantis One difference between philosophy and fantastic fiction is that a good philosophical thought experiment Usually tries to address just one question whereas a good story may have many different questions interwoven A related difference is that philosophical thought experiments usually seek to be unambiguous And this is not necessarily a requirement of fiction For example, Franz Kafka's fantastic stories of people trapped in baffling mazes of latin marriage bureaucracy Are sometimes read as a critique of modern bureaucratic civilization Uh and sometimes read instead as a depiction of the human condition generally On the latter interpretation the elusive authority figure that the protagonists can never manage to meet face to face is god But there's some evidence that Kafka Intends both interpretations and seeks to have his stories function on both levels Even if the two readings seem to have different upshots On the political reading totalitarian bureaucracy is apparently condemned Whereas on a theological reading god is apparently not condemned Needless to say fantastic fiction need not have any philosophical aim It can use its fantastic scenarios purely for entertainment value and there's nothing wrong with that But most fantastic fiction tends to be at least a bit more philosophical than that For example, time travel stories often explore such questions as What would try time travel be like if it were possible to change the past? What would it be like if it weren't possible to change the past? And what would it be like if only the present were fully real? One might think the last option is not a possible form of time travel story But Stephen King pulls it off in The Langaleers The Langaleers does not make sense as a literal depiction of metaphysical presentism But it works just fine as a metaphorical description of it depiction of it Well philosophy and fantastic fiction do not have identical aims Their aims overlap often enough to make for an intriguing affinity Okay, that's all I've got if interested to see your Comments below Like share subscribe all that good stuff and I'll see you next time