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The Brain in a Vat Argument
- thenerdfiles 13y agohttp://www.hist-analytic.com/MooreExternalWorld.pdf http://www.hist-analytic.com/MooreExternalWorld.pdf
- yaddayadda 13y agoIn related news, the universe is a hologram - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6883611 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6883611
- fennecfoxen 13y agoThat's not what that means. "The universe is a hologram" means that the universe's physics is implemented with a data store that has fewer dimensions than what the universe offers its contents. Which is interesting, but orthogonal to it being a "simulation". Holographic-looking phenomena already recognized by science include black holes: The maximum entropy -- the same as the maximum information content -- of an area of space is achieved when that space is a black hole. And the entropy of a black hole is proportional to its surface area. Fascinating. Not really "related" news though. Unless you want to go for poetry, but poetry mixed with cosmology and quantum physics is a great recipe for misunderstanding physics.
- throwaway_yy2Di 13y agoWow, what a tangle of verbosity. Yes, you could be a brain in a vat. Or you could be a brain on a biped. Obviously you cannot distinguish between these two possibilities merely by thinking about them, because your thought processes are equally compatible with either scenario (by construct, by the premise of the question). A simulation good enough to be indistinguishable from reality, cannot be distinguished from reality -- that's the definition. The fun thing about this quack philosophy is that's it's falsifiable, that in a couple decades, we'll actually have brains in vats, and kids will play games where they shuffle a kid's brain around and have him guess if he's in a vat or not. And with the higher-end iVats, they'll never be able to tell. And they'll totally ridicule the tenured philosophy faculty, they'll be so mean, what the hell have you been doing with your grant money?
- southpawgirl 13y agoThe brain in a vat that you predict in a couple of decades could be a brain in a vat that thinks they have put a brain in a vat. This type of assumption is _not_ falsifiable (like $deity existence and so on) therefore open to speculation, based on each one their own heuristics and belief, but not rock-solid science. I personally believe that the brain in a vat doesn't pass Occam's razor... but I have no proof.
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- Nursie 13y agoOccams Razor is a good general rule, but you're right, not proof. The related "This is all a simulation" argument is interesting, especially as computer power increases. If we ever get to the stage where we can simulate even a simpler sentience in a far smaller universe at a fraction of real speed then how do we know that's not exactly what's happening with us... ?
- MarkPNeyer 13y agoif you believe that we can reach this stage, and that we will create simulations when we do, it seems wildly implausible that we are _not_ in a simulation - because that would imply we'd be the first people anywhere, in any universe, to do such a thing.
- Nursie 13y agoWell yes, as a thought exercise I started idly wondering the other day how, if/when we reached the stage of development ourselves, we might go about making contact with the next layer up... Probably make a decent sci-fi short story. Now if only I had the talent or patience for writing...
- rowyourboat 13y agoThis is the kind of philosophical argument I cannot understand. The question is essentially: "Given that it is impossible to know X, how could you know if X"? There is nothing to think about. The scenario answers its own question.
- frobozz 13y agoYour boiled-down version of the question leads on to the following questions: * Why is impossible to know X? * How can we prove that X impossible to know? * How close to knowing X can we get? * What else can't we know? Is there a model for these kinds of unknowable? * Given that we can't individually perceive X, can we infer X by other means? Is it valuable to do so?
- nhaehnle 13y agoI think the even more interesting question would be: * Might any of these questions be answered in such a way that the answer ought to influence our future behaviour? If the answer to that particular question is No, then why bother with the others? If the answer seems to be No, it makes sense to delegate bothering about it to a few philosophers in their ivory towers ;-)
- voyou 13y agoThe question is more like "We usually think we know X, but it looks like it's impossible to know X; what's going on?" That is, the real question is, what is it about our understanding of "knowledge" that leads to this apparent contradiction?
- rowyourboat 13y agoAh, ok. That makes a bit more sense. Although if it is truly impossible to know X, but everything works as if X holds, we might just take the easy way out and assume that X until proven otherwise. But that may be my personal philosophy.
- chiph 13y agoApologies to David Byrne. You may find yourself living as a brain in a vat You may find yourself in another biped body You may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile You may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?
- mgunes 13y agoIn "Pandora's Hope", Bruno Latour goes to great length to attack the artificial subject-object and nature-culture separations that are the legacy of the Cartesian paradigm. It's a highly intriguing book. Here's the foreword, which deals directly with the brain-in-a-vat: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/70-DO-YOU-BELIEVE-IN-REALITY-GB.pdf http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/70-DO-YOU-BEL...
- sambeau 13y agoThis is a modern updating of Decartes's Demon concept from 1641. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evil_demon
- hyperpape 13y agoThe trope of a Brain In A Vat is an updating of it, yes. But the linked article is really about Putnam's argument that the thought experiment is somehow defective.
- actualdc1 13y agoIn my experience (as a student of philosophy at a strong university program), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is the go-to reference resource for such articles. Here's their version: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externalism/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism-content-externa...
- hyperpape 13y agoI think it's a slightly better article in this case. But neither one is really suitable HN. They both presuppose too much background, I think.
- leephillips 13y agoThe question of whether you are living in a simulation is not merely up for grabs. There is a fascinating argument here[0] that approaches the problem probabilistically; the conclusion is that you probably are. [0]http://people.uncw.edu/guinnc/courses/Spring11/517/Simulation.pdf http://people.uncw.edu/guinnc/courses/Spring11/517/Simulatio...
- voyou 13y agoBostrom's simulation "argument" is really embarrassingly stupid. "The real world might be a simulation" is not only not probably true; it's false by definition, because the real world is definitionally not a simulation.
- mcguire 13y agoAccording to Paul Nahin[1], Richard Feynman had a probabilistic argument that Fermat's Last Theorem was true, which can be dated to before 1963 because Feynman later wrote that Morgan Ward (who died in 1963) told him that "the same argument would show that an equation like x^7 + y^13 = z^11 would be unlikely to have integer solutions..."[2] [1] Number Crunching, 2011. [2] The remainder of the quote is, "...but they do, an infinite number of them!"
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoIt doesn't matter how the idea comes to us; we can still argue and come up with truth.
- analog31 13y agoIn my case, the vat contains coffee. ;-)
- infinity 13y agoYes, this could be the case. Or maybe some vats contain the outside-of-the-vat-world analogue of LSD or other psychotropic substances. Which leads me to the following questions: If I am indeed a brain in a vat, how far can I trust my own thought processes (like a logical argumentation)? And taking this further, could it be that I am only a part of a brain in a vat where the other part has already been replaced by computer controlled cyborg implants changing the way information is processed? The impression that an argument is logically correct and plausible may be a phantom signal resulting from input into a specialized area in my remaining brain. Even the thought that I had a thought is then maybe wrong. How would it feel to have the convincing impression that I am having very deep thoughts right now without ever been able to perceive one single aspect of these thoughts?
- paternalist 13y agoLet me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.
- anon4 13y agoStop trolling random kids on the internet, Morpheus. Come to bed and ＹＯＵ ＮＥＥＤ ＴＯ ＷＡＫＥ ＵＰ
- JulianMorrison 13y agoDefining "know" something to mean "know the probability of something is exactly 1", then yeah, you can't do that. No amount of Bayesian evidence can raise a probability from uncertain to infinitely certain. So what you need to do, is tear up that useless definition of "know" and replace it with something sensible like "I know X if the evidence for it is very strong."
- jumbled 13y agoThen how do you know that the evidence is very strong? You'd have to have strong evidence that the evidence is strong, ad infinitum. That was essentially Plato's definition of knowledge, "justified true belief." Then a guy named Gettier came around and showed that you can have strong evidence supporting a belief, and still be wrong. Then a guy named Nozick[1] came along and provided his own definition of knowledge, and that brings us up to the early 1980's. There's an entire branch of philosophy dedicated to figuring out exactly what "knowledge" is, Epistemology. The "brain in the vat" problem has be considered in context[2]. [1]http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/#H3 http://www.iep.utm.edu/nozick/#H3 [2]http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/
- JulianMorrison 13y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff's_theory_of_inductive_inference http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff's_theory_of_inductiv... Crudely, you evolve a simplicity prior over every possible universe-predicting theory according to Bayesian updates on input evidence.
- LogicalBorg 13y agoIf I were a brain in a vat, why would the truth or falsehood of my beliefs matter? I can't interact with the world from the vat.
- dack 13y agoWhat does it mean for something to "matter" anyway? Does interacting with the world mean that your beliefs now matter? What if your brain-in-a-vat was hooked up to a computer that would encode your synapses on paper on the other side of the world? Does that "matter"? Not trolling, just trying to make sense of what you mean by your sentence.
- Nursie 13y agoMy thoughts exactly. If I am a brain in a vat, who cares whether I say "I am a brain in a vat", I'm a brain in a vat and my opinions on the matter are irrelevant.
- araybold 13y agoMy initial impression of Putnam's argument is that it carefully constructed in order to avoid confronting the crux of the matter. It is reminiscent of how Zeno's 'Achilles and the tortoise' paradox fails to actually consider the time when Achilles catches up with the tortoise.
- snarfy 13y agoOn a somewhat similar note, there is the simulation argument: http://www.simulation-argument.com/ http://www.simulation-argument.com/
- dspeyer 13y ago> For there is a good argument to the effect that if metaphysical realism is true, then global skepticism is also true, that is, it is possible that all of our referential beliefs about the world are false. But they're not going to tell us what the argument is. This extremely counter-intuitive claim seems to be the heart of their argument. I suspect they're using sloppy language to confuse the difference between knowledge and certainty, but since they never spell it out I don't know.