The Frankenstein Problem: Origin Stories of Science Fiction Thought Experiments

The summer of 1816 has achieved a certain legendary status in literary history, and deservedly so. When Mary Shelley, then eighteen years old, sat down in that rented villa overlooking Lake Geneva and produced the first draft of what would become *Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus*, she initiated a tradition of imaginative speculation that would eventually coalesce into one of the most philosophically fertile genres in all of literature. The circumstances of the novel's conception are well known: the rainy summer that kept the assembled company of Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and the young Mary Godwin indoors; Byron's challenge to each of them to write a ghost story; Mary's famous sleepless night haunted by the question "What would happen if." What is perhaps less appreciated, despite its obvious importance, is the precise nature of that question and what it reveals about the cognitive operations underlying science fiction as a literary mode.

"What would happen if" is not merely a rhetorical device or a convenient formula for categorizing speculative fiction. It is, rather, an encapsulation of a particular mode of philosophical inquiry that has been systematically explored in the philosophy of science and the philosophy of mind since the mid-twentieth century: the thought experiment. When Mary Shelley asked herself what would happen if a scientist created a living being from assembled parts, she was engaging in exactly the same cognitive activity that led Gottfried Leibniz to imagine the Mill of Molyneux, that led John Locke to speculate about the prince and the cobbler, that led Hilary Putnam to propose his famous twin Earth scenario, and that led Robert Nozick to construct the experience machine thought experiment. The genre we call science fiction, I want to argue in this opening chapter, is in its most fundamental nature an extended, elaborated, and narratively realized form of philosophical thought experiment—and understanding this relationship illuminates both the philosophical depth of science fiction and the distinctive contributions that literary speculation can make to philosophical inquiry.

The argument of this book proceeds from the conviction that science fiction is not derivative of philosophy, not a popularization of philosophical ideas dressed in the costume of adventure and speculation. Rather, science fiction constitutes an independent mode of philosophical investigation, one that employs narrative and speculative world-building as its primary methodological tools, and that is capable of addressing philosophical problems in ways that are unavailable to the more traditional methods of analytic and continental philosophy. To establish this claim, however, we need to develop a rigorous theoretical framework for understanding both what thought experiments are and how science fiction operates as a distinctive form of thought experimentation. This chapter undertakes that foundational work, using Mary Shelley's *Frankenstein* as our primary exemplar—appropriately enough, given that Shelley's novel stands as the ur-text of the genre, the first major work in what would become a rich and varied tradition of speculative fiction.

The Architecture of Counterfactual Thought

To understand science fiction as thought experiment, we must first come to grips with the nature of counterfactual thinking itself. Counterfactuals are conditional statements that express what would be the case if some antecedent condition were true when, as a matter of fact, it is not. The standard logical form of a counterfactual conditional is "If P had been the case, then Q would have been the case"—or, in the subjunctive mood that English uses to mark counterfactuality, "If P were the case, Q would be the case." The philosopher David Lewis, in his landmark 1973 paper "Counterfactuals" and his subsequent 1986 book of the same title, developed what has become the standard semantics for counterfactual conditionals, drawing on the possible worlds framework originally developed by Leibniz and later refined by modal logicians. According to Lewis's account, a counterfactual "If P had been the case, Q would have been the case" is true if and only if either there are no possible worlds in which P is true (making the conditional vacuously true, since its antecedent is impossible), or in the closest possible worlds to the actual world in which P is true, Q is also true.

This brief exposition of modal semantics already reveals something crucial about the relationship between counterfactual thinking and science fiction. The "what if" question that launches a science fiction narrative is essentially a request to explore a counterfactual possibility—to consider what the world would be like in some nearby possible world where the proposed change has been made. When Philip K. Dick asked what would happen if external markers of identity (in this case, license plates identifying vehicles) could be changed, producing a world in which people could wake up as different persons than they were the night before, he was conducting an extended modal exploration, tracing the consequences of a counterfactual antecedent through all the ramifying implications for personal identity, social organization, and the nature of reality itself. When Ursula K. Le Guin asked what would happen if a society were organized around the principle of complete economic sharing (in *The Dispossessed*), she was constructing a thought experiment in the philosophical sense, using the tools of narrative fiction to explore a counterfactual social arrangement and its implications.

But there is more to thought experiments than mere counterfactual conditionals. The philosophical literature on thought experiments distinguishes between two broad categories: constructive thought experiments, which aim to establish the truth or falsity of some theoretical claim by constructing a hypothetical scenario that either confirms or refutes it; and elaborative thought experiments, which aim to deepen our understanding of a concept or situation by exploring its implications in a systematically varied hypothetical context. Science fiction, as a literary form, aligns most closely with the elaborative mode, though it often incorporates elements of constructive experimentation as well. The distinctive contribution of science fiction, I want to argue, is its capacity to elaborate counterfactual possibilities with a richness and detail that goes far beyond what traditional philosophical thought experiments typically achieve.

Consider the classic philosophical thought experiment proposed by Robert Nozick in his 1974 book *Anarchy, State, and Utopia*: the experience machine. Nozick asks us to imagine a machine that could give us any experiences we desired—pleasurable experiences, experiences of reading books or writing them, of having conversations or raising children, of being loved or respected or admired—and that would make us believe we were experiencing all these things. Should we plug into such a machine for the rest of our lives? Nozick's answer is no, and he uses this thought experiment to argue against hedonistic theories of value: we want to *do* things, not just have the experiences of doing them; we want to *be* a certain sort of person, not just have the experiences of being that sort of person; we want to actually engage with reality, not just with a simulation of reality. The thought experiment is powerful and illuminating, but it remains, by design, simple and limited in scope. It presents a single hypothetical scenario and draws a relatively straightforward moral from it.

Science fiction, by contrast, characteristically builds worlds—elaborate, detailed, internally consistent possible worlds that explore the implications of a central counterfactual premise in much greater depth. Aldous Huxley's *Brave New World* is, in one sense, a massively elaborated response to Nozick's experience machine q