Am I Just a Brain in a Vat?
The stuff of college-dorm bull sessions includes questions like: How do I know I'm not just a brain in a vat in some lab? or How do I know the world didn't begin the day I was born? or How do I know that other people aren't really robots? or Could "The Matrix" be true?
Contemplating these things can be fun, especially when under the influence of certain chemicals. But don't take them too seriously. Why not?
Beyond the fun, such questions can be meant to raise doubts about fundamental beliefs regarding the world we experience every day and see no need to question. The one sowing the doubts feels that he has the advantage: he throws down a challenge, thinking he has put his listeners on the spot. Well, let's see you prove you're not just a brain in a vat!
But the doubter, or skeptic, bears a responsibility that he can't escape so easily.
But the doubter, or skeptic, bears a responsibility that he can't escape so easily.
As Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in On Certainty, "What we can ask is whether it can make sense to doubt [the proposition under challenge].... Grounds for doubt are lacking! Everything speaks in its favor, nothing against it."
So the skeptic, if he wants to be taken seriously, can't just raise a doubt and then go to bed. He has to justify his doubt: "you might be wrong" is not an argument. To leave it at that is to be nothing but a prankster.
The skeptic also cannot claim to doubt everything because to raise any particular doubt he must stand on firm ground somewhere or else he could not even use language, which is a social institution with all that that supposes. He cannot float in midair.
Here's how this relates to the God question: some theists, when pressed to defend their claim that God exists, respond, "Well, you also can't prove fundamental things that you believe in. You take it on faith that you're a person with a body, but maybe you're just a brain in a vat and everything you perceive is just the result of a mad scientist's creation." If the atheist is unprepared, he could be stumped. Does he also believe things he cannot prove?
We have seen that this is not the case. No "faith" in involved. Your existence as you appear to others and to yourself is entirely plausible, and as Wittgenstein put it, "Grounds for doubt are lacking! Everything speaks in its favor, nothing against it." That's the proof.
The same cannot be said for God, the existence of which is implausible -- not to mention logically impossible. Grounds for doubt are ubiquitous! Nothing speaks in its favor, everything against it.
Forget the stuff of dorm-room bull sessions. "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." --1 Corinthians 13
Here's how this relates to the God question: some theists, when pressed to defend their claim that God exists, respond, "Well, you also can't prove fundamental things that you believe in. You take it on faith that you're a person with a body, but maybe you're just a brain in a vat and everything you perceive is just the result of a mad scientist's creation." If the atheist is unprepared, he could be stumped. Does he also believe things he cannot prove?
We have seen that this is not the case. No "faith" in involved. Your existence as you appear to others and to yourself is entirely plausible, and as Wittgenstein put it, "Grounds for doubt are lacking! Everything speaks in its favor, nothing against it." That's the proof.
The same cannot be said for God, the existence of which is implausible -- not to mention logically impossible. Grounds for doubt are ubiquitous! Nothing speaks in its favor, everything against it.
Forget the stuff of dorm-room bull sessions. "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." --1 Corinthians 13
"The same cannot be said for God, the existence of which is implausible -- not to mention logically impossible. ... Nothing speaks in its favor, everything against it."
ReplyDeleteWhat happened before the Big Bang? Or what is the point of it all, if the Big Freeze (heat death of the universe) theory is correct? And how about the possibilty of mathematically, theoretically possible multiverses? Or quantum entanglement and Schrödinger's cat? These do not speak in favor of the Bible conception of a god, but they do raise questions about what is "logically possible"?
I don't think I must have answers to your questions to wonder why they raise questions about logical possibility. Didn't Schrödinger imagine his cat in order to show a problem with one conception of the quantum level? For there to have been a Big Bang, didn't there have to be something that went Bang!? Your second question looks like question-begging: who says there's a "point of it all"? Spinoza rejected such a thing. Nature just is what it is. We human beings make our own points, I would think.
ReplyDeleteOne more thing: whatever the answers to your questions, Joe, won't it be the case that they will either be true or false?
ReplyDeleteI was going to try to answer (in parts), but yesterday I watched an interview with Roger Penrose where he discussed things like the Big Bang and Schrödinger's equations. Yes, for the Big Bang to have occurred, there had to have been something. The theory is that about 14 billion years ago *all* the mass in the universe was compressed (in a way analogous to what happens when you compress a gas inside a tube), but the mass was not in the form of atoms or even subatomic particles like electron (those only got formed later as the whole mess/mass cooled down). However, the generally accepted theory is that we have *no idea* what happened before that initial state. Penrose and a few others think that somehow (I still don't understand how), the continued expansion of the universe, gets back to the initial state (like a Big Collapse) and it cycles again. But this is in a way even harder to comprehend, just like things having more than three dimensions is hard.
ReplyDeleteAbout either true or false, I'm not sure. My understanding of the famous cat (quantum superposition) is that it can be either dead or alive and we don't know until we open the box, or the photon can go through one slit or the other, but all we can do is express a probability. Penrose also has something to say about quantum mechanics and why he thinks there's still "something missing".
I am not a physicist, so I am going to go there. The physicists of course will say that there's much still to learn. All I can say is that if the laws of logic were not axiomatic truths, we couldn't talk about the Big Bang. Language presupposes logic and reason. Yet people do talk meaningfully about it. Ergo... Whatever is is (something specific), and whatever was was (something specific). Things can change over time. Regarding the cat, Schrodinger's point was that if a certain quantum theory was right, then until you open the box, the cat is both alive AND dead because both potentials coexist and the situation won't be actualized (won't collapse) until it is observed.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a physicist but I play one on the 'net.
DeleteIt may be of interest to you this interview of Richard Dawkins, by the same guy (Lex Fridman) who interviewed Penrose (they do talk about him also): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5f-JlzBuUUU . One amusing moment, particular with respect to your writings here, is when Dawkins talks about pursuing truth and Fridman comments that "truth is a funny word; reason too".
Thank you, Joe! I did not know about these interviews. I will be watching them.
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