Brains in a vat

Brains in a vat

Parking info: The parking lot may be busy; u can find street parking on Mayview Ave residential area instead.

Are we brains in a vat? Can the world be a simulation?
In this session we discuss Putnam’s philosophical argument that we are NOT brains in a vat.
Putnam shows that philosophy gives a conclusion for this question, rather than science.
A copy of the paper is here:
[Brains in a Vat - Hilary Putnam.pdf](https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/Brains%20in%20a%20Vat%20-%20Hilary%20Putnam.pdf)

In the analysis of brains in a vat, Putnam also raises the following questions:

• What is a reference? Can “brain” refer to an object outside of this world.
• What criteria accounts for a legitimate reference?
• Turing test for reference. Can a computer or a machine be able to refer? If a chatbot can talk about apples that are indistinguishable from a human, then can the chatbot refer to apples?
• Can reference be a neural state of the brain?
• Can “Water is H2O” be false on a twin earth where the liquid covering the planet contains 3% of alcohol?
• During a criminal investigation, I as a witness said “the criminal wore blue shirt”, but after many other witnesses said that “the criminal wore green shirt”, I changed my mind and said it was indeed a green shirt. Was my mental state different before I changed my mind? Did I perceive a blue or green shirt?
• How can we refer to extraterrestrials? Are we directly referring to an entity that we never encountered? Or it is not a reference at all: extraterrestrials means a classification of objects that does not come from earth, i.e. if such an object shows up, we would classify it as extraterrestrials, but until then it is not a reference.

A preliminary conclusion from these analysis is that truth is framework dependent, i.e. “objects” do not exist independent of conceptual schemes. This is a rejection of metaphysical realism.