The “Brain in a Vat” thought experiment is a scenario designed to make you think skeptically about the world around you. In the scenario, the world you find yourself in is perfectly simulated by a computer connected to your brain floating in a tank. Once you consider the scenario, you have to ask yourself if it is possible that you are a brain in a vat. I propose that it is possible that I am a brain in a vat because I can imagine this to be true. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Your brain is not in your head connected to your body, but is in a vat of nutrients connected to a highly sophisticated computer. This computer, let's call it Codey, is generating all the sensory input you have, are, or will ever experience in your life. It responds to signals your brain sends, such as the signal to move your arms to adjust your chair. Codey processes this signal like your nervous system would, except it doesn't actually move your body, because you don't have one. It then shows you the reaction that would have happened if it were real, giving you the complete illusion that you are sitting in a chair and have accidentally pinched your finger trying to raise it a little higher. In addition to generating the world you're immersed in, along with all your actions within it, Codey can make you experience things that don't respect the laws of physics. She may manifest a rainbow-haired, super sparkly, gravity-defying unicorn in front of you. Such an event may seem like a quick way to destroy the illusion, but Codey can seamlessly ease you into any new scenario. Make the world believable enough and she wouldn't let you have any context to believe that this is a new environment and that something impossible is happening. This thought experiment is often used on a larger scale considering the possibility that it's not just your brain that's involved. a tank, but everyone's brain is in its own tank. All sentient beings in this scenario are connected to Codey. We all coexist in the same simulated world and communicate with each other, but each of us experiences it through our own perspective. We also technically do not communicate in the usual sense of the word, but only have the illusion of communicating as it is facilitated and controlled by Codey. Now think about the scenario described and ask yourself: “is it possible that I am just a brain in a vat?” How do you know? The reason to consider all these hypotheses is to think about global skepticism, whether or not we can be sure that everything we know is true or false. This questioning of knowledge is the main idea explored by the Brains in Vats thought experiment and is often applied to our understanding of truth, consciousness, meaning, and more. To understand this concept, you can break the problem down into a simple example: Take the observation that the sky is blue. If you know the sky is blue, then you know you're not a brain in a vat. However, if you don't know that you're not a brain in a vat, then you don't know for sure that the sky is blue. By this logic, all science could be based on a misunderstanding, and we would be forced to reevaluate everything we think we know. There are many philosophers who have pursued a counterargument to the claim that it is possible that we are brains in vats. Hillary Putnam was one of the first, and most famous, to consider this topic in her essay “Reason, Truth and History” (1981). He explains the argument that if we were brains in vats, we wouldn't be able to think that we are. This is demonstrated through his statement that someone in thethe real world and a brain in a vat would seem to share the same language, but what the words used by the brain in a vat refer to cannot possibly refer to the same things that exist. in the real world. A brain in a vat would only have the concept of what a chair was and be able to experience it conceptually, but since it is a chair from the world of vats, it is not the same as a real chair. Interest in this philosophical problem has grown beyond just philosophers, it has also grown and made its way into the mainstream media. A famous example of this is “The Truman Show.” This was a movie released in 1998 about a man named Truman who is born and raised in a world completely made up for him. The people there are all actors pretending to be his wife, neighbors, even the postman, and it's all secretly filmed for what we would now call a reality show. Truman begins to discover that things are not adding up and tries to free himself and escape from the set. Just like the brain in the vat theory, the entire world around him is simulated, although this is done through physical media rather than a virtual reality system affecting his disembodied brain. For nearly his entire life, Truman is oblivious to the fact that his world is a facade, and has no reason to think it could be otherwise until anomalies begin to occur that he cannot explain. His interactions with others can be, and are, orchestrated just like a simulation, just as Codey does with brains in vats. Truman begins to believe that he is systematically deceived and, unlike us, tries to prove that he is and runs away. The novel, City of Ember, also portrays aspects of the brain-in-vats thought experiment. The story takes place in a world completely surrounded by darkness. There is electricity, food and water, but they are running out quickly. Two children find a mysterious box containing instructions and damaged tools that they piece together to help them discover a secret tunnel outside their town. They follow him and end up in the outside world; Then they realize that their city has simply been underground the whole time (DuPrau). Their city relates to the theory because it is, in a sense, a simulation created by their ancestors to keep them safe. It is a simulation that everyone believes is real, and their knowledge is completely based on this belief, just like our knowledge of our beliefs. The boys find a way out of the simulation, but only because they find a document written by an architect of their home before the city was taken underground and everyone forgot about the outside world. It's possible that I'm a brain in a vat because I can imagine this to be true. If I think about the perception of my finger, then I can break down my knowledge of its existence into all the sensory input I receive from it. If there is no other form of perception other than physical perception, then this is the only way I know my finger is real. If there were a super computer that could simulate all of these sensory inputs exactly as I am experiencing them now, I can imagine that as a brain in a vat I would experience everything exactly the same. So I can imagine myself being a brain in a vat, so it's possible that this is true. By applying a modal theory we can see how likely it is that other worlds are real and that we might simply be in a different world than we think we are. There is a theory of modality called modal realism that makes the brain-in-the-vat thought experiment easier to understand. It also makes it easier to consider the brain-in-the-vat thought experiment a real possibility. The concept of modality is a toolphilosophical used to ask questions about what is possible and what is necessary for a possible world to be true. Modal realism is the view that if a world is possible, then it is real. This means that there are infinitely many worlds that all exist independently of each other. There is only one warrant for this theory; aAll worlds must exist both spatially and temporally isolated from each other. Other than that, there is no difference between the reality of our world and other worlds. We can take the theory of modal realism one step further and say that if we can imagine a possible world, then it is real. A world in which the world's inhabitants are brains in vats is a world we cannot interact with, but we can still argue that it exists through the theory of modal realism. The next step is to take what we know and ask ourselves: “Could our world be that world of brains in vats?” The answer is: "yes!" Since we can imagine that it is possible that we are brains in vats, then it is possible that we are currently in that world. This is because there is no difference between how we would experience our world as brains in vats or as embodied brains. This theory of modality then also allows us to hypothesize that not only does the brains-in-vats scenario exist, but all its variations also exist as separate worlds. “The Truman Show” and “City of Ember” are just two of the infinite brain-in-vat-like worlds that exist. Truman is alive, in the same sense that we are, but he exists in a spatiotemporally separate world. He is discovering that there are inconsistencies in his reality and is venturing out to explore them. It doesn't take much creativity to imagine you could be Truman in the world of "The Truman Show." Therefore it is a possibility that we are, or, at least, in a personalized version of it. Our world is much more similar to the world in which “The City of Ember” exists. Although they live underground and have the tools to explore the limits of their world, they choose to accept their subjective reality without question. This is the same way we often accept our reality, never imagining that what we are experiencing may not be the whole truth of our world. In the world with the City of Ember, they have the tools to understand if their experience of their world is true. We don't have such tangible tools as they do, but we do have the theory of modal realism and others like it to help us find our way "on the surface." a way in which we can distinguish between how a brain in a vat would experience and how an embodied brain would experience. This problem was addressed by Dr Ofra Magidor, the current Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at the University of Oxford. In his article “How Both You and the Brain in a Vat Can Know Whether or Not You Are in a Vat,” he discusses the externalist epistemic response to the brain in a vat scenario. Epistemic externalists believe that facts external to the agent's awareness can still justify their belief. This view is applied to mean that the BIV-you are unable to know adequate evidence, as the real world does, to support their beliefs. The evidence, as Magidor provides, is as follows: in the real world it is proposed to perceive hands, while in the brain in the vat it is proposed that they appear to have hands or the sensation of them. The result of this is that the real-world you has sufficient support for knowledge unlike the brain-in-a-vat you, and since I can propose that I am perceiving hands, I know that I am not a brain-in-a-vat you. I find his reasoning to be that the experience of perceiving and the experience of perceiving not.