Brains in Vats? Don't Bother!

Acta Analytica

Hilary Putnam has famously argued that “we are brains in a vat” is necessarily false. The argument assumes content externalism (also known as semantic externalism and anti-individualism), that is, the view that the individuation conditions of mental content depend, in part, on external or relational properties of the subject’s environment. Recently content externalism has given rise to the hypothesis of the extended mind, whereby mental states are not only externally individuated but also externally located states. This paper argues that when content externalism is combined with the extended mind hypothesis it is robbed of its anti-skeptical power. Given the extended mind hypothesis, the supercomputer and the envatted brain can be regarded as aspects of the extended mind of the evil scientist. On this view, the thought contents of the coupled brain-computer-scientist system do not differ from those of a normal human. But without a difference in thought contents Putnam’s anti-skeptical argument crumbles.

Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 1992

Analysis, 2000

provides an anti-sceptical argument which highlights the kernel of Putnam's argument against such hypotheses as that we are brains in vats. Wright claims that his formulation is effective against a certain range of sceptical hypotheses, namely, those which we can understand. I argue that the argument can be made more generally applicable, providing a uniform refutation of a class of sceptical hypotheses. To be more precise, I claim that such a uniform refutation is available on condition that the original argument holds. There has been some discussion of whether the restricted applicability of the argument constitutes a failure in its ability to furnish a refutation of metaphysical realism. The generalization I offer should suffice to dismiss that worry. However, as I explain, for rather different reasons the argument still won't be effective against all forms of metaphysical realism nor, indeed, against all forms of scepticism.

Contemporary discussions of epistemological skepticism-the view that we do not and cannot know anything about the world around us-focus very much on a certain kind of skeptical argument involving a skeptical scenario (a situation familiar from Descartes' First Meditation). According to the argument, knowing some ordinary proposition about the world (one we usually take ourselves to know) requires knowing we are not in some such skeptical scenario SK; however, since we cannot know that we are not in SK we also cannot know any ordinary proposition. One of the most prominent skeptical scenarios is the brain-in-the-vat-scenario: An evil scientist has operated on an unsuspecting subject, removed the subject's brain and put it in a vat where it is kept functioning and is connected to some computer which feeds the brain the illusion that everything is "normal". This paper looks at one aspect of this scenario after another-envatment, disembodiment, weird cognitive processe...

Journal of Consciousness Studies

The present paper criticizes Chalmers's discussion of the Singularity, viewed as the emergence of a superhuman intelligence via the self-amplifying development of artificial intelligence. The situated and embodied view of cognition rejects the notion that intelligence could arise in a closed 'brain-in-a-vat' system, because intelligence is rooted in a high-bandwidth, sensory-motor interaction with the outside world. Instead, it is proposed that superhuman intelligence can emerge only in a distributed fashion, in the form of a self-organizing network of humans, computers, and other technologies: the 'Global Brain'.

Radical sceptical possibilities challenge the anti-realist view that truth consists in ideal rational acceptability. Putnam, as part of his defence of an anti-realist view, subjected the case of the brain in a vat to a semantic externalist treatment, which aimed to maintain the desired connection between truth and ideal rational acceptability. It is argued here that self-consciousness poses special problems for this externalist strategy. It is shown how, on a standard model of first-person reference, Putnam’s brain in a vat will be mistaken in its rational self-ascription of externalist predicates. The natural response, which employs an alternative model of first-person reference, is shown to have the equally realist consequence that there are enquiry-transcendent truths about the self.

2012

Abstract: The present paper criticizes Chalmers's discussion of the Singularity, viewed as the emergence of a superhuman intelligence via the self-amplifying development of artificial intelligence. The situated and embodied view of cognition rejects the notion that intelligence could arise in a closed" brain-in-a-vat" system, because intelligence is rooted in a high-bandwidth, sensory-motor interaction with the outside world.

Analysis of neurobiological brain research In book: Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology: Perspectives and Prospect, Chapter: The Brain in the Vat as the Epistemic Object of Neurobiology, Publisher: Amsterdam University Press, Editors: Jos de Mul, pp.335-355