it is all guess work. — Apollodorus
Maybe it's time to change the vat. Or its contents, as the case may be :wink: — Apollodorus
The brain in a vat is simply Descartes' deus deceptor given a modern sci-fi makeover. The point seems to be everything could be an illusion. In Descartes' gedanken experiment, the only certain knowledge is the self as a thinker, thinking thoughts. In the brain in a vat scenario, the "self as a thinker" is the brain. Come to think of, Gilbert Harman (the originator of the brain in a vat thought experiment) must've wanted to convey that such a horrific possibility remains alive even if physicalism were true. — TheMadFool
Correct. When it comes to things like consciousness, how it operates, and how it produces cognition, perception, experience, etc. it is all guess work. — Apollodorus
Not quite. Not that everything could be an illusion at all, not even in the running, not withstanding what analytic theorists say. Talk about illusions implies talk about what is not an illusion, for there can only be the one with the other. So from where comes the basis for something Other than what is there, in experience? Well, there is no basis, for anything you can imagine is purely phenomenological. It's not as if one can reach beyond phenomena into a "real" world, affirm what it is, then return with a thesis about illusions and reality.
Descartes opened to door to aporia, but did not walk through, cheated, as it were, his way out of the very doubt he posited. But here, we are more genuine to the assumption, and it is not merely doubt anymore; it is a theoretical impossibility to establish foundational knowledge of something outside the phenomenological world. — Constance
Maybe it's time to change the vat. Or its contents, as the case may be — Apollodorus
But the implications are never given their due. — Constance
I see no difference between what you say here and what Descartes and Gilbert Harman are implying with their thought experiments. The idea is to rattle the cage of dogmatists (?) - grasp them by their arms firmly and shake them hard till the come to their senses or simply slap them across their faces until they come to the realization that certainty is the aporia in the sense that it's impossible.
Am I sure? you might ask. Exactly, I would reply! The answer is the question! — TheMadFool
I think that the 'out there' being 'in there' in the brain is probably captured in the idea, which goes back to Plato, of the microcosm and the macroscosm. The brain is so complex as the neuroscientists show, and if there are deficits, it affects the whole wiring, and psychedelics can create transformations, as suggested by Huxley's 'Doors of Perception'. But, we cannot step outside of our brains to perceive true objective reality, as suggested by Nagel in 'The View From Nowhere'. — Jack Cummins
Oh, they've been given far more than their due, I would think. For good or ill, we're part of the world just like everything else--even that little homunculus in our head some people assume exists. — Ciceronianus the White
When it comes to things like consciousness, how it operates, and how it produces cognition, perception, experience, etc. it is all guess work. — Apollodorus
How does one ever affirm a "true objective reality" is has not encountered such a thing to even talk about? this becomes an entirely metaphysical affair, — Constance
On the simple level of a physical reduction, we most certainly already are a brain in a vat; I mean actually, for the vat in question is a human skull and there we are "wired up" to receive the world. — Constance
Such a concept is meant to challenge our basic thinking about knowing the world, for brains in vats are, to the events actually surrounding the brain, epistemically opaque. Nothing can be know about that room where the brain sits envatted given that knowledge is simply given through wires and programming. — Constance
No matter how you slice it up theoretically, you will never explain the essential epistemic connection to make "out there" come "in here". — Constance
Step barefooted on sharp glass, this is not guessing there is pain — Constance
But Descartes escaped uncertainty with God. And it is not the rattling of a cage, as I see it. It is a revolution of the way we see the world. Science's assumptions about an independent and knowable exterior world is now completely untenable. Phenomena are now the true epistemic foundation, and so inquiring eyes turn here. The subjective world, largely ignored by empirical science, is now front and center, and meaning becomes first philosophy. — Constance
It's not guess work at all. There's just a lot we don't know yet. Not the same thing. Because, you know, science. — T Clark
We don't even know who it is that knows or thinks that they know. — Apollodorus
And keep in mind, if you are a pragmatist, then you do not hold the metaphysical view that there is some knowable stuff out there. — Constance
have always loved that brain in a vat notion that is supposed to rattle epistemology students. On the simple level of a physical reduction, we most certainly already are a brain in a vat; I mean actually, for the vat in question is a human skull and there we are "wired up" to receive the world. But the implications are never given their due. — Constance
Oh, they've been given far more than their due, I would think. — Ciceronianus the White
There is an established discipline of cognitive psychology and science which works on issues of perception, emotion, consciousness, and other aspects of mind from a scientific viewpoint. The phenomena they study and theories they develop are not mysterious or outside the limits of mainstream science. — T Clark
well-known, clear-cut, and non-mysterious — Apollodorus
Additionally, when people do have knowledge, it is not direct, personal knowledge, it is second-hand knowledge acquired from scientists. Scientists themselves have no direct knowledge of scientific facts but learn about them from other scientists, etc. Plus, they may have no knowledge of things that are outside their particular discipline or field, and so on. — Apollodorus
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