Brain in a vat - Factbites

Brain in a vat - Factbites
Where results make sense
About us | Why use us? | Reviews | PR | Contact us

Topic: Brain in a vat

Note: these results are not from the primary (high quality) database.

In the News (Wed 23 Dec 09)

Northern Trust

Marvin Harrison

Peter Chernin

Gary Locke

Match Play

Penelope Cruz

Mickey Rourke

AR Rahman

Danny Boyle

Hugh Jackman

	Brain in a vat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		The concept of the brain in a vat was used to drive the plot of an issue of Doom Patrol, while helmed by Grant Morrison.
		Putnam contends that by "brain" and "vat" the brain in a vat must be referring not to things in "our" world but to elements of its own "virtual world"; and it is clearly not a brain in a vat in that sense.
		In the first chapter of his Reason, Truth, and History Putnam claims that the thought experiment is inconsistent on the grounds that a brain in a vat could not have the sort of history and interaction with the world that would allow its thoughts or words to be about the vat that it is in.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Brain-in-a-vat_theory (1250 words)

	Brain-in-a-vat - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		It is drawn from the idea, common to many science fiction stories, that a mad scientist might remove a person's brain from their body to suspension 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.
		Putnam contends that by "brain" and "vat" the brain in a vat must be referring not to things in "our" world but to elements of its own "virtual world"; and it is clearly not a brain in a vat in that sense.
		In the first chapter of his Reason, Truth, and History Putnam claims that the thought experiment is inconsistent on the grounds that a brain in a vat could not have the sort of history and interaction with the world that would allow its thoughts or words to be about the vat that it is in.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Brain-in-a-vat_theory (952 words)

	The “Brain in a Vat” Argument [Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy]
		Reflections on Putnam, Wright and brains in a vat.
		One immediate problem is determining the truth-conditions for “we are brains in a vat” on the assumption we are brains in a vat, speaking a variation of English (call it Vatese).
		The thought-experiment stipulates that brains in a vat would have qualitatively identical thoughts to those unenvatted; or at least they have the same “notional world.” The difference is that in the vat-world, there are no external objects.
	www.iep.utm.edu /b/brainvat.htm (4689 words)

	Brain in a Vat
		On Twin Earth, a brain in a vat is at the wheel of a runaway trolley.
		Assume that the brain's choice, whatever it turns out to be, will serve as an example to other brains-in-vats and so the effects of his decision will be amplified.
		The brain is causally hooked up to the trolley such that the brain can determine the course which the trolley will take.
	www.mindspring.com /~mfpatton/Tissues.htm (714 words)

	Philosophy Information
		But in fact you are a brain in a vat on Mars, and the world you think you see around you isn't real: its merely a virtual reality.
		Perhaps you aren't a brain in a vat.
		So it seems you don't know that you are not a brain in a vat, that you are on Earth, that you have a body, etc.
	www.heythrop.ac.uk /philosophy_portal/general/q1.htm (723 words)

	Open2.net Forums: What is the difference between brain and mind?
		The brain is involved, but in truth recollecting the past, reflecting on the present and planning the future with all its emotions of happiness, sadness and frustration takes place in the sixth mental consciousness.
		But it may be be that mind causes brain: that the brain is a blank slate and is written on by experience AND AN OBSERVER (body and mind (or soul or self)).
		The brain is physical, the mind is really not.The brain consists of all the tissues and cells and chemical, but the mind is unconscious.
	www.open2.net /forum/thread.jspa?forumID=23&tstart=0&threadID=1327&trange=15 (5934 words)

	Terence Kuch: Essay 1
		Brain, you will recall, believes he is living a full life but in fact is just — a brain in a vat, fed by tubes of nutrients and participating in an illusory world generated by philosophers concerned with problems of the self.
		If this still sounds plausible, consider: if we were now to give Brain a body and set him loose in the real world, virtue and character will still be his only moral qualities and, with respect to Brain as a moral agent, he might as well go back to his vat.
		But the answers are not at all clear here, and cannot be got around by saying something like "Your emotions affect your acts in ways you may not understand, so there are really no 'agent only' emotions." This observation may be true, but its relevance is to psychology rather than to philosophy.
	www.shef.ac.uk /~ptpdlp/essays/kuch1.html (2633 words)

	Cyberspace
		Brains in a vat philosophical argument against the idea that we could be in cyberspace and not know it by Hilary Putnam
		This argument is the direct predesessor of the modern ideas of brain in a vat and many popular conceptions of cyberspace take Descartes ideas as their starting point.
		This is perhaps one of the most popular arguments in all of philosophy, for a discussion of it see brain-in-a-vat.
	www.lecommerce.net /wiki/index.php?title=Cyberspace (5882 words)

	stephanie: Final Proposal
		Of course, you'll have to research it by watching all the classic brain-in-a-vat movies like Donovan's Brain, also City of Lost Children.
		Also, the brain will probably have to be cabled to the bust (power/video in/video out).
		I don't quite get how you are going to fit a projector into the brain - there's not a lot of room in there.
	interactive.usc.edu /members/stephanie/archives/001167.html (527 words)

	sanford_demonsbrainszombies.doc
		Hilary Putnam in a famous essay entitled "Brains in a vat" writes "The person's brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive." It's as if the brain were as easy to keep alive as a bacterial culture.
		The brain in a vat story is not burdened with any quasi-theological assumption, and it connects in many ways with popular science and science fiction.
		The absence, not the presence, of neural stimulation, causes phantom pains Once one grants the premise that proximal neural signals to the brain can have radically different causes, it is easy to construct a classic brain in a vat hypothesis.
	www.studentorg.vcu.edu /philclub/papers/sanford_demonsbrainszombies.doc (6265 words)

	TooMuchSexy.blog - Brain-in-a-Vat and the Existence of God
		The human is not a brain in a vat, and therefore the sentence is untrue.
		To show we are not brains floating in a vat being fed all experiences, we must prove that this very idea is absurd and thus could never exist.
		The idea of humanity actually being brains in chemical vats, being fed false sensory information, makes just as much sense as the statement, “All generalizations are false.” If all generalizations are false then our generalization is true, invalidating itself.
	www.toomuchsexy.org /index/weblog/comments/brain_in_a_vat_and_the_existence_of_god (3629 words)

	Notes from November 4, 2002
		A brain, that for all practical purposes, is just like a brain in a vat.
		That is, the brain is running something like a software program that simulates the real world so that the brain (in its vat) can interact with it.
		Brain, The (1996) Better know as Head of the Family; yes in vat, but really, really big head--who believes he also has giant brain.
	home.att.net /~leefrank/newnotes/nov04_02.html (2208 words)

	An unaverted explosion
		Either we think of the vat operators’ interference as something that really governs the brain’s choices and threatens their rationality-but such interference would be painfully noticed by the subject, in conflict with the postulated indistinguishability between envatted and embodied first-person experiences.
		4-5 in Consciousness Explained: convincing a subject reduced to a brain in a vat that she is lying on the beach listening to music, blind and paralyzed but for one finger, which she is free&emdash;or so she thinks&emdash;to wiggle at will.
		[1] For the sake of (the skeptic's) argument, let us therefore concentrate on the claim that the vat scientist can evade combinatorial explosion by imposing choices on the brain and hence limit the number of ‘input’ sequences to be calculated.
	www.philosophy.su.se /texter/dennett.htm (1481 words)

	:: NextWave ::
		In the hypothetical situation that you ARE a brain in a vat, the reflection and the mirror would both be fake.
		In epistemology, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment countenances the notion that you are actually just a disembodied brain in some sort of suspension, attached by wires to a supercomputer that provides electrical input that simulates the existence of a real world, and responds to the brain's output in an appropriate way--a sort of simulated reality.
		Again, in the hypothetical situtation that you ARE a brain in a vat, just because you say you are not, does not mean you are what you see in the mirror.
	www.nextwavefaithful.com /forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=790 (1854 words)

	Call Me “Holmes” (though I won’t call myself that”)
		Instead, my brain is in a vat of nutrients (which keep it alive), the nerve endings have been hooked up to a supercomputer, and my experiences as if of physical objects are caused by electronic impulses produced by the supercomputer, rather than by the genuine article.
		According to Long, because ‘I’ denotes the embodied-in-the-image person (or brain) rather than the experience-transcendent brain (in the experience-transcendent vat), the statement (or corresponding thought) “I am a brain in a vat” is again false in every context in which it is uttered, if one is a brain in a vat.
		After all, the BIV hypothesis is that I am a brain in an experience-transcendent vat, not a brain in a vat-in-the-image.
	people.uleth.ca /~peter.alward/papers/holmes.htm (3364 words)

	Semantic Challenges to Realism
		That we are not brains in a vat is thus a contingent a priori truth for such realists who see the brain-in-the-vat argument as conflating epistemological questions of what can be known a priori with metaphysical questions as to what is and is not genuinely possible.
		It may well be that if we were Brains in a Vat we could not express the thought the unenvatted express when they say ‘we might be Brains in a Vat’ but this does not prove this thought is inexpressible tout court for such a Brain.
		They may either forswear commitment to Brains in a Vat or else deny the Semantic Externalism which allegedly implies we could not think that we were Brains in a Vat were we to be so.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/realism-sem-challenge (8579 words)

	CHAP1.HTM
		Malgenius' hypothesis was that a healthy human brain could be attached to his supercomputer, and that a "virtual-life" program could be simulated on the brain-computer system.
		It turned out that your brain had survived the crash unscathed, and Malgenius wanted to use it to test his new hypothesis.
		Just before the life support was shut down your brain was surgically removed and placed in an artificial environment.
	www.eou.edu /~jjohnson/CHAP1.HTM (2557 words)

	Creatures 3 Brain Information
		I've been experimenting with the noun lobe and I can now manually work through the svrules for that lobe and get the same values that the brain in a vat works out for the neuron values of that lobe.
		My genetics editor for C3 only displays limited information on the various genes related to brain lobes.The Brain-in-a-vat program, available at the Creatures Developer Network, has lots of useful information and I recommend getting that.
		I've done quite a bit of digging into the C3 brains and brain related genetics and I'll be putting the information here as I work things out.
	www.double.co.nz /creatures/creatures3/brain.htm (851 words)

	Phenomenal Intentionality and the BIV
		Hereafter when we speak of the Brain in a Vat (for short, the BIV), usually we will mean this particular synthesized brain in this particular setup—a specific version of the generic brain-in-vat scenario.
		“The Brain in a Vat as a Metaphysical Hypothesis.”
		In the course of their scientific investigations, they synthesize a structure out of organic molecules that happens to be an exact physical duplicate of your own brain; they hook it to a computer in such a way that its ongoing brain-activity happens to exactly match your own, throughout its existence.
	dingo.sbs.arizona.edu /~thorgan/papers/Phenomenal.Intentionality.and.BIV.htm (9166 words)

	Deming, Skepticism, and Brain-In-A-Vat Customer Service
		Perhaps he is not a brain in a vat after all There is no way he can be sure.
		Meditating about this case, it may occur to you that you might be a brain in a vat, too.
		He at least has a clue to his precarious situation -- Margot told him he is a brain in a vat.
	deming.eng.clemson.edu /lists/den.list/98.01/msg00108.html (1651 words)

	PHIL3218 Pre-Honours Seminar Course Outline
		In the first case, he is famous for a 'functionalist' theory of mind, arguing the non-identity of mind and brain states, and in the latter case he has come up with some of the most striking images in philosophy such as the coherency of the thoughts of a brain-in-a-vat reflecting on its brain-in-a-vat status.
		It is not this part of Putnam's philosophy we are concerned with, and you need to keep this in mind if you are doing any further reading on Putnam.
		A great deal of Putnam's philosophical work is in the field of the philosophy of mind and language.
	teaching.arts.usyd.edu.au /philosophy/phil3218/PHIL3218200505.html (1852 words)

	Response to Brain in a Vat
		If I were a brain in a vat, I would not know that the realist theory of Truth is True; for, the very nature of being a brain-in-a-vat, as Putnam describes it, denies the possibility that I might know Truth.
		He preserves my brain in a vat of nutrient solution, while electrodes feed it neural stimulations that produce the kinds of sensory impressions and thoughts I would have if I were an ordinary embodied human being.
		Some have suggested that a mind would be able to make this distinction and so would not be taken in by the evil genius of the brain-in-a-vat argument, thus retaining the ability to assert True descriptions about objects outside the mind.
	www.spelunkephobes.4t.com /response_to_brain_in_a_vat.htm (2804 words)

	Exam.html
		Advances in neurosurgery now make it possible to remove the brain from a living human and maintain that brain in a vat of liquid that provides sufficient nourishment to keep the brain functional.
		You could, for example, activate the optic areas of the brain to mimic exactly the patterns of neural activity produced when you read text, or look at television, or marvel at a beautiful sunset.
		Questions to be answered by you: Would this brain-in-a-vat have a mind?
	www.psy.vanderbilt.edu /faculty/blake/183/Exam.html (334 words)

	81. Brains in Vats
		Suppose a smart but malicious scientist is able to capture several people, without their knowing it, and take their brains out and put them in vats of nutrients to keep them alive.
		Could such a brain tell it was a brain in a vat?
		If you were such a brain-in-a-vat, would you be able to discover it?
	people.uncw.edu /stanleym/bewitch/81.html (175 words)

	The Philosophy of the Matrix
		For if you were such a brain, then, provided that the scientist is successful, nothing in your experience could possibly reveal that you were; for your experience is ex hypothesi identical with that of something which is not a brain in a vat.
		Instead of having just one brain in a vat, we could imagine that all human beings (perhaps all sentient beings) are brains in a vat (or nervous systems in a vat in case some beings with just nervous systems count as ‘sentient').
		Likewise, in The Matrix version of the brain in the vat situation, those who have been hauled from the vat into what they experience as the everyday world can see that what they took for granted about the causal ground of their experience before was mistaken.
	www.onwardoverland.com /matrix/philosophy.html (21356 words)

	walker.htm
		For if I am a brain in a vat then `vat' means in my language something like a type of computer generated image; but I am not a brain in a computer generated image.
		Foot note 7_45 One anti-skeptical view put forward is, very roughly, that there is a contradiction in saying that `I am a brain in a vat'.
		Thus, the evidence that I have for the belief that I am presently sitting at a desk writing this paper is also logically compatible with the suggestion that my brain is floating in a vat full of nutrients and a computer is generating for me the illusion that I am sitting at a desk.
	www.sorites.org /Issue_14/walker.htm (10326 words)

	MIND Exchange
		If his monitoring of Neo's brain activity is able to show the presence of purposiveness in physically nondeterministic processes, he would have to infer the presence of human volition.
		If, however, you accept the entire physical-causal hierarchy of the human being as included in the definition of the self (this would then include the unconscious mind and the brain processes and all the way down to quantum and beyond), then determinism is an integral part of what constitutes the self and its obvious “free-will”.
		Suppose that someone were to cut all the motor nerve fibres from your brain, so that your brain could not move a muscle.
	www.kurzweilai.net /mindx/show_thread.php?rootID=17493&o=date (11620 words)

	shortwrite.doc
		In fact, because I know that, I can rule out the possibility that I’m just a brain in a vat.
		My argument is just the reverse of yours: If I couldn’t rule out the brain-in-a-vat scenarion, I couldn’t know what my present situation is; I do know what my present situation is; so I can rule out that scenario.” Part 1: Reconstruct Gemma’s counter-argument in the above passage.
	www.unc.edu /~theis/Exp&R/shortwrite.doc (366 words)

	Proceedings and Addresses: January, 2002 (Volume 75, Issue 3): Abstracts of Colloquium Papers
		These defects in awareness are themselves cognitive deficits due to brain disease and can be understood within the context of our larger understanding of overall human brain function, particularly with regard to the role of the frontal lobes in self-monitoring and self-awareness.
		We will then present a series of brain injury cases derived from the clinical experience of one of the authors.
		In each clinical example, exquisitely well-preserved self-direction will be noted, whereas the ability of the patient to act with full autonomy will have been clearly diminished by the patient's disease in each instance.
	www.apa.udel.edu /apa/publications/proceedings/v75n3/colabst.asp (12687 words)

	generation5 - Can I Prove I Exist?
		The brain-in-a-vat, God as a benevolent deceiver, evil genius and ‘The Matrix’ analogies are all instantiations of the same problem that I will call the problem of contextual existence.
		The rest of our body is used by the brain to solve it’s own shortcomings - to keep itself alive (heart and lungs for oxygen and blood), to gain data from the outside world (eyes, ears and tactile sensors) and to use its physical extensions (arms, legs and fingers) to move and influence its surroundings.
		Our mental processes are in turn a physical process in our brain; therefore if reductionism must be applied to this concept, then the brain (along with anything necessary to keep it alive - although this could be artificial) is all that is necessary to ‘be’.
	www.generation5.org /content/2001/tech-exist.asp?Print=1 (932 words)

Try your search on: Qwika (all wikis)

Topic: Brain in a vat

Ads by Google

Related Topics

In the News (Wed 23 Dec 09)