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How faculty and students in philosophy are using virtual reality to make thought experiments a little more real. 

Go into any intro to philosophy class and you鈥檒l find a thought experiment that goes like this: A runaway trolley is headed for a group of five people stuck on a train track. Next to you is a lever that, if pulled, can divert the trolley to a different track. The dilemma: There鈥檚 one person caught on the other track, too. What do you do? Kill one person or five?

This thought experiment is called The Trolley Problem and it drives Erick Ramirez, assistant professor of philosophy, a little nuts. Not only is the premise bizarre, he argues, but it鈥檚 a hypothetical exercise that the participant has little chance of completing with any accuracy. 

鈥淧eople stink at correctly simulating environments in our heads,鈥� Ramirez says. 鈥淲hat we鈥檙e actually doing is we're trying to predict our behavior.鈥� 

As a result, the exercise isn鈥檛 as valuable as it could be. Ramirez believes the solution lives, oddly enough, in video games. He and associate professor Scott LaBarge decided to recreate thought experiments like The Trolley Problem in virtual reality simulations and, with the help of Miles Elliott 鈥�19, they鈥檝e produced several virtual reality simulations that force people to make 鈥渞eal鈥� choices.

鈥淚 think that鈥檚 more useful for talking about moral judgments or what philosophical theories ought to be given more weight,鈥� Ramirez says.

Besides being a more genuine intellectual exercise, Ramirez thinks VR could help students understand thought experiments better and even aid in psychological research. Ramirez says there鈥檚 already evidence that suggests social experiments鈥攕uch as 鈥� recreated in virtual reality can garner similar results to the original.

With VR headsets, Ramirez could also track a variety of variables, like head movements to identify where people are looking when they make a decision. Also, he could control elements that could introduce bias. For example, in the traditional trolley problem, the physical makeup of the people on the track is up to the individual. In the VR simulation, it鈥檚 set. 

鈥淢aybe I鈥檓 picturing all women. Maybe your men have red hair. Maybe the men I鈥檇 picture have blonde hair or something like that,鈥� Elliott says. 鈥淭here are all these details that you or I might not even think to talk about because we鈥檙e just not starting from the same place.鈥�

Elliott, a philosophy major, has handled the heavy lifting on designing the game, which has been a hobby of his since his early teens. His goal throughout this project has been to make the game believable as a simulation. Anything that takes you out of the scenario can affect the reality of the subject鈥檚 reaction and quality of the results.

For The Trolley Problem, Elliott says the original premise doesn鈥檛 make sense in a modern context. So, they changed the trolley to a train in a lumber yard. The people on the tracks are lumberjacks who have been pinned by a fallen tree, rather than tied there by some unnamed villain.

In addition to The Trolley Problem, the team is working on a half dozen other simulations including Judith Jarvis Thomson鈥檚 The Violinist鈥攚here a person is kidnapped and required to spend nine months hooked up to a world-renowned violinist in a coma to keep him alive or unhook themselves and let the violinist die. The thought experiment is intended to defend abortion.

Elliott says he鈥檚 excited to be adding to the work of people he admires.

鈥淭he coolest part of this is Thomson did this really important philosophical work 40 years ago and now we can say, hey, instead of talking about your same experiment, we created it and here鈥檚 what we found people did,鈥� Elliott says.

黑料网 has made these simulations available for researchers and faculty at other schools to  to expand the impact and collect data.

Support for this research comes in part from a partnership between 黑料网 and Oculus Education. Oculus selected 黑料网 as one of several institutions, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, Cornell, and other prestigious universities, to examine how virtual reality (VR) can impact learning outcomes.