Philosophy of Film. Film as thought experiments - Essay Example

Thought experiments are an important part of many abstract theoretical sciences, and play a significant role in the field of philosophy in which the philosophers have to investigate and illuminate multifaceted issues and dense theories which they cannot experiment empirically. It is not wrong to say that thought experiments are themselves complicate to comprehend because they are a complex subject. The Trolley Problem is a famous thought experiment in the field of ethics (Thomson, 1985), which intends to discuss that in the physical world, there is often not a moral course of action that one can proceed with, given choices.

It involves a madman who has tied five people on one trolley track, and one on another. A trolley is careening toward the five people and you, as a savior, can save either the five people or the one on the other track. When you save the five people, you are held guilty to have killed the other one, and when you do nothing you are accused of immoral act of doing nothing to save them. Another thought experiment is Monkeys and Typewriters that says that infinite number of monkeys, if given infinite time on infinite number of computers, can produce a work of Shakespeare (Sober 116).

How film is considered as a thought experiment is an interesting topic. Film can prove philosophical in the same way as one of the thought experiments. Filmmakers have tried to incorporate thought experiments in many recent films like The Batman (The Trolley Problem) and The Dark Knight (The Prisoner’s Dilemma). Whether film can be regarded as thought experiments or as a piece of philosophy has been a hot topic of debate between the philosophers of modern times. The modern concept of filmmaking has this thing that film can do philosophy other than mere entertainment, and can be considered as legitimate works of philosophy.

Wartenberg asserts that thought experiments are a strong bridge between film and philosophy, although they are not the philosophers’ realm entirely (57). He asserts that the strongest evidence that thought experiments provide a link between film and philosophy is “their reliance on hypothetical-i.e. fictional scenarios” (57). The film, the Matrix, is about the deception hypothesis in which whatever the characters of the film experience is such a reality that is in fact “a huge, interactive perceptual illusion…created and maintained by the computers that have taken over the world” (Wartenberg and Curran 276).

The concept is based upon such a world that depicts time 200 years later, and it has been regarded as computers’ triumph against human beings in a distressing combat. Computers have been shown breeding humans as humans have been devising ways to breed animals. The philosophy in the film is that human bodies are shown generating more energy than they are consuming, and for this extra energy that is being expelled out, computers have been designed in such a way that they breed humans that are kept in a skyscraper.

The logic behind the concept is that “humans need to have their minds distracted while their bodies produce the required electrical energy” (Wartenberg and Curran). How the film raises the question that the whole perceptual experience of the