Brain in a vat

Uncommon card · No. 138336

In philosophy, the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness, and meaning. Gilbert Harman conceived the scenario, which Hilary Putnam turned into a modernized version of René Descartes's evil demon thought experiment. Following many science fiction stories, the scenario involves a mad scientist who removes a person's brain from its host body, suspends it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connects its neurons by wires to a supercomputer that provides it with electrical impulses identical to those a 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, like those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the...

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