If you know you will divorce your partner and your daughter will die at a very young age in the future, would you still enter the relationship and choose the path of life as you foresee it? If this future is pre-determined, is your choice still free?
These are reflection questions I pose for my students after letting them watch Arrival, a science fiction movie, and read Story of Your Life, a short novel by Ted Chiang, from which the movie is adapted. It’s a story of humans meeting aliens and a story of knowledge of the future and free will. In the story, Louise, a linguist, acquires the ability to experience time in a non-sequential, simultaneous way by learning the aliens’ language, Heptapod B. The simultaneous mode of consciousness enables Louise to experience the past, present, and future of her life all at once. She foresees that she will have a daughter, Hannah, and pre-experiences both the happy moments of playing with Hannah and the heartbroken scene of learning about Hannah’s death at 12. This simultaneous mode of consciousness also changes how Louise perceives causation and free will, which is only available for beings with the sequential mode of consciousness (humans). She decides to embrace her own future and her daughter’s life and death, without changing anything. The whole story is analogous to a letter Louise writes to Hannah telling her everything from the night she is conceived, and thus named “story of your life.”
In this post, I want to reflect on my experiences of using Louise’s story to teach the metaphysics of free will. One challenge I encountered in teaching is how to get students interested in metaphysical topics. As a student of philosophy, I love metaphysics, understanding the foundational commitments we have about the universe and humanity. As a teacher of philosophy, I am excited to see students form an awareness of their implicitly held, deep commitments and start to reflect on and evaluate them. Philosophical discussions on metaphysics, however, can strike students as abstract and not relatable. Why care about metaphysics? Students who intellectually can follow the philosophical reasoning in these debates may still feel disconnected and wonder why care about them personally.
When I got the first opportunity to teach my own course at SLU, I was both excited and nervous about dealing with this challenge and making metaphysics relatable to students. During a conversation about teaching, Dr. Scott Ragland, who also works on free will, recommended Arrival to me. I started with reading the original story written by Chiang, and after finishing both the novel and the movie, I believe it’s best to let the students read/watch both (I’ll explain later). In 2021 and 2022, I used it for both my Ethics and Intro classes. Through teaching this story, two things stand out to me about teaching science fiction stories in philosophy class: the ways in which students engage in both empathic imagination and meta-reflection through the story.
Narrative and Empathic Imagination
Part of the difficulty in relating metaphysics to the lives of students lies in imagination. Metaphysics invites us to imagine living in a world with fundamentally different physical or psychological laws. This could be hard. Thought experiments are supposed to expand our imagination, helping us reason through these obscure, abstract what-if possibilities. The literature on free will is full of such interesting thought experiments. For example, Frankfurt-style cases and various manipulation cases illustrate what acting without alternative possibilities could be like. They are philosophically built, aiming to sharpen the debate and drive intuitions for or against a theory.
Making an abstract philosophical idea relatable to students, however, requires a different type of imagination, one that’s more vivid, personal, and open-ended, which I’ll call empathic imagination. Imagining empathically involves projecting oneself in an imagined situation and emotionally experiencing the significance of the idea or question—the result is thinking for oneself from a truly unique perspective.
The novel and the movie of Louise’s story together fill this gap of imagination. By using different verb tenses or cutting strategies, the novel/movie simulates Louise’s inner world and her simultaneous mode of consciousness, presenting glimpses of Louise’s past and future to the reader/audience. Before their awareness of what happened to Louise’s mind, the reader/audience already gains a feeling of Louise’s novel experiences about time. One of the most fun parts of the class discussion was working out with students the sequential timeline of the story, locating the present time, and then inviting them to imagine seeing things from Louise’s perspective and how they would feel and choose. With a primer like this, discussion on abstract themes like how language affects our thinking, whether there’s causation if there’s no concept of time, and so forth naturally flows in class.
The way Louise foresees the future by experiencing the events first-personally rather than having propositional knowledge of the future creates an ambiguous space for interpretation and judgments about her freedom. On the one hand, the future is already determined, and it seems Louise cannot change it when she experiences the past and future simultaneously. For this reason, Louise doesn’t seem to have libertarian freedom. On the other hand, Louise’s acceptance of the future is a well-informed, authentic choice, as she knows how it feels when the future comes true, which suggests a different conception of freedom than the libertarian one, which conceives freedom as being the true source of one’s choices and actions.
Philosophical examples often need to avoid such ambiguity for argumentation purposes. For pedagogical purposes, this is precisely what we want students to grapple with. This ambiguous space leaves room for students to add their personal understanding to the story. By creating their own interpretation, they also learn more about themselves and the implicit commitments they hold about life and reality. For example, in one reflection on Louise’s choice, a student wrote, “I wouldn’t try to alter my future or attempt to stray from fate, because I feel that the pre-determined path would still be the path with my best interests at heart. This path would be most true to me and my character.” Here, the student expresses an idea in line with the sourcehood compatibilist account and relates to it personally.
Meta-reflection: how storytelling influences intuition
While empathic imagination relates one to an idea or question vividly, it may also raise worries about how narratives “manipulate” one’s intuition and emotion. This is one reason why I assign both the movie and the novel to students. They tell the same story and embed philosophical ideas into the story in different ways and with different details. I want students to compare the differences, think about how they influence their emotions and judgments, and whether the change of intuition is justified by good reasons. One difference is the cause of the death of Hannah, Louise’s daughter. In the original novel, Hannah dies of an accident in rock climbing, an activity she loves as a kid. In the movie, Hannah dies of an unknown cancer. Many students reported that changing the cause of death to disease makes the story more reasonable and Louise’s choice more convincing. It’s mysterious and morally unacceptable that Louise does nothing to prevent Hannah from dying in an accident. Clearly, the intuition is due to the belief that accidents are preventable while serious diseases are inevitable. However, will this difference of agency or control remain if everything is pre-determined? If determinism is true, should we change the way we talk about luck and the probability of events? Reflection like this expands students’ understanding of determinism, and what differences it implies on their common beliefs in daily life.
Meta-reflection on how the story is told also creates opportunities for the class to reflect on the legitimate and illegitimate role of storytelling in shaping intuitions and influencing judgments, which could lead to a subsequent discussion of how storytelling and philosophical reasoning can complement each other in the practice of inquiry. For example, the story/movie contains the idea that knowing the future rules out free will, but that it nevertheless provides Louise a sense of purpose and meaning in everything that happened, is happening, and will happen to her. But what is this purpose or meaning? This is never made explicit in the novel or the movie. In class, I asked students to discuss the purpose or meaning of Hannah’s life so that such meaning makes the story convincing to them. It’s a difficult question, but also a personal one. I was impressed by the students’ honesty, sympathy, and reflectiveness in the discussions. In one discussion, they concluded, it must be the best possible life for Hannah, since Louise, who loves Hannah deeply, accepts it.
Reflecting on this experience of teaching, I will continue incorporating stories with philosophical insights into teaching. Stories, especially science fiction stories, expand our imagination and leave space for us to explore uncertain or unknown ideas in paradoxical and ambiguous ways. It’s like a funhouse mirror, showing us a view of ourselves from perspectives that, though not exactly real, can certainly improve self-visualization and self-understanding. This, I think, in addition to equipping students with rigorous mind and reasoning skills, is valuable for a philosophy class.
Yiling Zhou
Yiling Zhou is a PhD candidate at Saint Louis University. Her research is primarily focused on the nature of agency and free will in relation to ethical and psychological issues, especially the way humans cognize causally and socially shape our conceptions of freedom. In her spare time, she enjoys reading stories, hiking, and being with friends and her two orange cats.
In the realm of fiction, we can walk in the shoes of countless characters, exploring their joys, sorrows, and everything in between.