Brain in a vat thought experiment: a mad scientist, machine, or other entity might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, such as those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world...
We may now formulate an argument for skepticism as follows:
1. We are sometimes mistaken in our perceptual beliefs.
2. If we are sometimes mistaken in our perceptual beliefs, then it is always logically possible that our perceptual beliefs are false.
3. If it is always logically possible that our perceptual beliefs are false, then we never know that any of our perceptual beliefs are true.
Therefore
4. We never know that any of our perceptual beliefs are true.
Mitigated Scepticism - David Hume
David Hume qualified his own Scepticism by pointing out that to live at all we have perpetually to make choices, decisions, and this forces us to form judgements about the way things are, whether we like it or not. Since certainty is not available to us we have to make the best assessments we can of the realities we face - and this is incompatible with regarding all alternatives with equal scepticism. Our Scepticism there ore needs to be, as he put it, mitigated. It is indeed doubtful whether anyone could live on the basis of complete Scepticism - or, if they could, whether such a life would be worth living. But this refutation of Scepticism, if refutation it is, is not a logical argument.
In practical life we must steer a middle course between demanding a degree of certainty that we can never have and treating all possibilities as if they were of equal weight when they are not...
Story of Philosophy - by Bryan Magee
http://www.amazon.com/Story-Philosophy-Bryan-Magee/dp/078947994X
Dr. Know & the Braino Helmet
Imagine that a superscientist
invents machine, we shall call it a "braino," that enables him to
produce hallucianations in certain subjects. The machine operates
by influencing the brain of a subject who wears a special cap,
called a "braino cap." when the braino cap is placed on a subject's
head, the operator of the braino can affect his brain so as to
produce any hallucination in the subject that the operator wishes.
The braino is a hallucination-producing machine. The hallucinations
produced by it may be as incomplete, systematic, and coherent as the
operator of the branio desires to make them.
The present argument starts from the premise that the braino is a logical possibility, and consequently that there should be hallucinations that are coherent, complete, and systematic in every way. From the premise of logical possibility, we conclude that we in fact have no way of telling whether or not we are hallucinating.
If the braino is a logical possibility, then how can we tell that hallucinations are not in fact so hard to detect? On the contrary, we may suffer hallucinations that we cannot detect. If it is logically possible that hallucinations should be coherent, complete, and systematic in every way, then there is no way of detecting at any moment that we are not suffering from a hallucionation.
How we can tell that we are not hallucinating. The braino argument is intended to establish that we can never tell this, even if we can sometimes tell that we are hallucinating. Consider some perceptual belief that you would maintain does not from hallucinations. what experiences guarantee this? Indeed, what experiences provide you with any evidence of it?
Notice that whatever experience you indicate, the braino argument will be quite sufficient to prove that such an experience is no guarantee against hallucianation. All we need do is imagine that you have, unknown to yourself, the braino cap on your head. the operator of the braino is producing the very experiences you claim guarantee that you are not hallucinating.
Imagine that all people are controlled by the braino and that the machine is run by some evil being, Dr. Know, who plots to keep us completely in error through hallucinations. Dr. Know does not wish to be detected, so he supplies hallucinations that are coherent, complete, and systematic. Indeed, the hallucinations he produced in us are a PERFECT COUNTERFEIT OF REALITY.
Our experiences fulfill our expectations and contain no more surprises than we would expect from reality. But is it not reality we experience; our perceptual beliefs about the world are quite mistaken, for the source of our experiences is a mere machine, the braino, which creates hallutionations. In such a predicament we might have just the sort of perceptual beliefs we now have, based on experiences exactly similar to those we now have. But our perceptual beliefs would be altogether false.
The imagined situation is exactly similar to ours with respect to the reasons or evidence we would have for our perceptual beliefs. Experience is virtually the same in both cases. Consequently, if we lack knowledge in one situation, we must surely lack it in the other. Obviously, we lack knowledge when we are controlled by the braino, for then our perceptual beliefs are false. Hence, we also lack knowledge in our present situation. More precisely, our perceptual beliefs fail to constitute knowledge in either case.
We believe that we are not controlled by such a machine, and if we are fortunate in this belief, then no doubt many of our perceptual beliefs are true. It is, however, good fortune and not good evidence that we should thank for correctness of these beliefs.
We are just lucky if there is no Dr. Know controlling us with a braino; and from that good fortune may result the further good fortune that most of our perceptual beliefs are true. it is just a matter of luck, however, and nothing epistemologically more glorious than that.
If a belief is true as a result of luck, then it is a lucky guess--not knowledge.
Adapted from Keith Lehrer - Philosophical Problems and Arguments: An Introduction - by James W. Cornman, Keith Lehrer, George Sotiros Pappas
https://www.amazon.com/Philosophical-Problems-Arguments-Introduction-Cornman/dp/0872201244
http://tinyurl.com/areyouinthematrix
Descartes Evil Demon Hypothesis (1641)
Origin of the Matrix
Argument
Is it possible, ...that what we think of as reality is nothing more than an elaborate hoax?
“It is at least possible that there is an all-powerful evil demon who is deceiving me, such that he causes me to have false beliefs, including the belief that there is a table in front of me and the belief that two plus three equals five,” wrote Descartes. The all-powerful evil demon, he argued, could feed us whatever experiences he chooses. “I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.”
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/dvorsky20090409
The evil daemon presents a complete illusion of an external world, including other people, to Descartes' senses, where in fact there is no such external world in existence. The evil genius also presents to Descartes' senses a complete illusion of his own body, including all bodily sensations, where in fact Descartes has no body. Most Cartesian scholars opine that the evil daemon is also omnipotent, and thus capable of altering mathematics and the fundamentals of logic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_daemon
Descartes skeptical argument is an argument that raises the possibility that something we take for granted we may have no real reason to believe.
In the “First Meditation,” Descartes introduces a skeptical scenario called the deceiving demon argument. This argument gives us reason to believe that no external world exists; in particular, it raises the possibility that some sort of malicious, demonic non-God, has “employed all his energies in order to deceive me” (Descartes 15). This demon has, purportedly, put us in a dream-like state where he feeds us all of his ideas, making up what we think of as our external world. For this reason, an external world may not exist at all: “the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds, and all external things [may be] merely the delusions of dreams which [the demon] has devised to ensnare my judgment” (Descartes 15).
The first premise of the deceiving demon argument is that a “malicious demon … [could have] employed all his energies in order to deceive me” (Descartes 15). The only way to attack the validity of this premise is to state that it is impossible that a deceiving demon could exist. For example, one objection could state that God, with his infinite benevolence, could not allow a malicious demon to deceive us. However, it is possible that the demon himself planted the idea of God in our head in the first place, undermining the objection. While Descartes later tries to prove the existence of God through the use of objective reality and the Causal Principles, there is no reason why the malicious demon could not have planted those concepts in our head as well, which is the second premise; namely, that any rationalization against the existence of the demon could have simply come from the demon in order to deceive us about his existence–i.e. Idea X may show that a demon could not exist, but since idea X could have been planted in our head by the demon himself, idea X cannot truly show that a demon could not exist–and thus we have no reason to believe that the demon does not exist. And, thus, the conclusion is that “all external things [may] merely [be] the delusions of dreams which [the demon] has devised to ensnare my judgment” (Descartes 15).
http://anemptybasket.wordpress.com/2008/01/22/descartes-and-the-deceiving-demon-argument
A.I. In the Vat
AI lives in a world far closer to the “brain in a vat” philosophers have imagined than anything we’ve seen evidence for in psychology or neurology.
When an AI system creates something on its own that wouldn’t have existed otherwise, such as a novel image or text, it’s not translating thought into action: it’s hallucinating.
AI doesn’t interact with the world. It has no senses; it cannot see, taste, touch, hear, feel, or smell. It interprets data. If you power a robot with AI, the robot does not have senses. It just interprets data.
When AI is trained to generate novel output, like for example an AI that creates unique paintings in the style of Van Gogh, it’s not actually painting a picture. It’s hallucinating new data interpretations based on previous datasets. The goal of such an AI is to closely imitate style without reproducing original paintings, so it just mashes a bunch of data around until it creates a satisfactory output.
What AI does, in these cases, isn’t very far off from infinite monkeys banging on infinite typewriters to eventually produce Shakespeare. Only its easier for the AI, because it’s supposed to produce anything but Shakespeare so long as it reads like Shakespeare.
AI cannot magically cross over into our world and see what we’re talking about or experience a painting like we would, so it’s relegated to perpetual hallucination until such a time as we discover how to make it sentient.
Humans, on the other hand, are incredibly adaptive. We have five senses and innumerable neural pathways by which to process them, yet our idea of base reality remains unfettered by the loss of one or more of our senses. Those born or living without sight can still visualize things, those without hearing can still process information temporally, and even Ian and Kim, who cannot sense touch, have a developed sense of physical embodiment.
Brain research makes it seem less likely we’re living in the Matrix
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