Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum

I Was a Brain in a Vat
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/...AAE5EC28A1

ABSTRACT: Could you be a brain in a vat, with all your experiences of people, plants, pebbles, planets and more being generated solely by computer inputs? It might seem difficult to know that you aren’t, since everything in the world would still appear just as it is.

In his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues that if you were in such a predicament, your statement ‘I am a brain in a vat’’, would be false since, as an envatted brain, your word ‘vat’ would refer to the vats you encounter in your experienced reality, and in your experienced reality, you are not in one of those but are instead a full-bodied human being with head, torso, arms, and legs living in the wide open world.

The following extended thought experiment is intended to illustrate that, contrary to Putnam’s view, you, as an envatted brain, could truthfully believe that you are a brain in a vat... (MORE - details)

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Why philosophy of physics?
https://aeon.co/essays/why-do-philosophy...ics-itself

INTRO: When I’m making small talk at parties and suchlike, revealing to others that I’m a philosopher of physics is a little bit like rolling the dice. What reaction am I going to get? The range is pretty broad, from ‘What does philosophy have to do with physics?’ to ‘Oh, that’s way above my pay grade!’ to (on happier occasions) ‘That sounds amazing, tell me more!’ to (on less happy occasions) ‘What a waste of taxpayer’s money! You should be doing engineering instead!’

Only the last of these responses is downright stupid, but otherwise the range of reactions is perfectly reasonable and understandable: philosophers of physics are, of course, not ten-a-penny, and what we’re up to is hardly obvious from the job description. So what I want to do here is sketch what the philosophy of physics really amounts to, the current state of play in the field, and how this state of play came about... (MORE - details)

Thank you CC. This is the authenticity I like to see.

Quote:‘Even though we disagree, we’ll grant’, my lead attorney argued, ‘that anytime the victim’ – that’s me, by the way – ‘said “I am a brain in a vat”, inside the vat, it was false.’ The defence smiled contentedly, but then their countenances dropped. ‘Nonetheless’, my attorney continued, ‘as Thomas Nagel argued in his 1986 book The View from Nowhere, even if a brain in a vat cannot truthfully claim, I’m a brain in a vat’, they still are a brain in a vat!’ – I had learned about this view of Nagel’s in my vat, and I’m sure my scientist parents regretted ever letting me do so. We won,

The very state of being in a vat, and being pumped with signals simulating a bodily existence in a physical world, seems to automatically preclude one's ever knowing about it, unless we posit a priori knowledge not dependent on our experience. Like space and time. Could one's knowledge of one's ontic status transcend that of empirical knowledge? At best one may only say that a transcendent existence beyond the simulated reality/me can be intuited, as a sort of variable X or placeholder without any information about it whatsoever. Analogously in our world, the mystical enlightenment or gnosis of a higher level of nonegoic being seems to elude all attempts to describe it. An ineffable and timeless/spaceless "in itselfness" perhaps like Kant's noumena, phenomenally present but indefinable.

I don't see anything there that actually manages to refute Putnam. Finding out about the actual vat, after the fact, doesn't change the falsity of the claim at the time, as your reference to a vat was different. For all you could have known, your consciousness could have been housed in a computer, with no biological brain or physical vat at all.

I started by reading the "Why philosophy of physics?" article.
Of comments on the value his subject he quotes (an engineer?) saying "What a waste of taxpayers money! ..." - How stupid is that?
He obviously thinks he's very clever and very useful but by the end of the article I'm left thinking "What a waste of taxpayers money!" - probably not altogether surprising to find that I trained as an (electrical) engineer.

Onwards and upwards to Brains in Vats.