In Philosophy
In philosophy, the brain in a vat is any of a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas about knowledge, reality, truth, mind, and meaning. A contemporary version of the argument originally given by Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy (i.e., that he could not trust his perceptions on the grounds that an evil demon might, conceivably, be controlling his every experience), the brain in a vat is the idea that a brain can be fooled into anything when fed appropriate stimuli.
The inherently philosophical idea has also became a staple of many science fiction stories, with many such stories involving a mad scientist who 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 science fiction stories, the computer would then be simulating a virtual reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the person with the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences without these being related to objects or events in the real world.
Read more about this topic: Isolated Brain
Famous quotes containing the word philosophy:
“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to.—The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“A writer must always try to have a philosophy and he should also have a psychology and a philology and many other things. Without a philosophy and a psychology and all these various other things he is not really worthy of being called a writer. I agree with Kant and Schopenhauer and Plato and Spinoza and that is quite enough to be called a philosophy. But then of course a philosophy is not the same thing as a style.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)