5
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How does the 'Brain in a Vat Argument' differ from the 'Simulation Argument'?
One difference between the brain in a vat argument and the simulation argument is their motivations. The brain in a vat argument is motivated to support skepticism through doubting one's senses. The ...
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5
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Would an identical copy of me have the same thoughts as me?
The answer is a NO. And that's because you cannot occupy the exact same position in space with the original. Since you do not occupy the exact same position, the intarractions (with the environment) ...
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4
votes
How does the 'Brain in a Vat Argument' differ from the 'Simulation Argument'?
There is indeed a fundamental difference.
The Brain-in-a-vat seems within the reach of even human technology. In other words, it is a highly convincing and realistic scenario. A brain in a vat would ...
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3
votes
Would an identical copy of me have the same thoughts as me?
Due to the famous no-cloning theorem, it is impossible to create an identical copy of you.
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2
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Accepted
What are "Concepts" according to Hilary Putnam?
See page 17 :
But what are concepts ? [...] Concepts are not mental presentations that intrinsically refer to external objects for the very decisive reason that they are not mental presentations at ...
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2
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Does the brain in a vat problem shift the burden of proof?
The purpose of the brain-in-a-vat scenario is not to convince anyone that we might really be a brain in a vat; the purpose is to illustrate the fundamental disconnection between perception and reality....
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2
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Accepted
Would an identical copy of me have the same thoughts as me?
We do not know, and that is because we have not cracked either the hard or easy problems of consciousness.
What we DO know, is that it is likely that the thoughts would be very similar for the two &...
- 15.1k
2
votes
A terrifying variant of Boltzmann's brain
A Boltzmann brain doesn't need to survive for long. From Wikipedia:
The Boltzmann brain thought experiment suggests that it might be more
likely for a single brain to spontaneously and briefly form ...
- 2,847
1
vote
Would an identical copy of me have the same thoughts as me?
Externalists about mental content will insist on a negative answer.
You think to yourself: I want to get out of this tank. And your clone thinks to himself: I want to get out of this tank.
You are ...
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Does the brain in a vat problem shift the burden of proof?
The most straightforward way to refute an argument is to provide a counter example, and what you're calling "the brain in a vat argument" isn't an argument at all, so here's what I suspect ...
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Is reality a matter of perspective?
It's like the problems with the Justified True Belief picture.
And with Frege's sense of reference and Russell's denoting.
Consider instead Bayesian reasoning. Assuming the mother's priors were our ...
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1
vote
What is the most probable AI?
Humans will try to create artificial intelligence. Whether that is wise is an open question, but they will. The problem is that we can create quite powerful computers and powerful software, but the ...
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1
vote
What is the most probable AI?
Tangents
There are a couple of mistakes in your premise which aren't pertinent to the question you're asking; I feel the need to address them to begin with.
in order to function, even for a very ...
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A terrifying variant of Boltzmann's brain
Boltzmann brains are still talked about by prestigious physicists and philosophers so I don’t know why people are dismissing you. Leonard Susskind, Sean Carroll, and David Albert and many others ...
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A terrifying variant of Boltzmann's brain
I would like to give a different answer to this question.
A Boltzmann brain is a brain that has formed by chance (probability theory does not forbid that). Many things may be formed by mere chance, ...
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Chalmers'argument that the brain in the VAT does not lead to skepticism
Chalmers' point in "The Matrix as Metaphysics" is that the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis should be considered a metaphysical hypothesis rather than a skeptic's thought experiment.
Suppose we are in fact ...
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How do we know we could be brains in vats?
The skeptic's claim is not "We are certain that we could be brains in vats" - rather, it's "We are not certain that we are not brains in vats."
This claim is fundamentally different. To defeat it, ...
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How does the 'Brain in a Vat Argument' differ from the 'Simulation Argument'?
More of the same
There is little practical difference among the different scenarios. As christo183 points out, there have been many variations of the same thought experiment, and they all basically ...
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How does the 'Brain in a Vat Argument' differ from the 'Simulation Argument'?
Both arguments are skeptical about the "real" existence of the external world as we believe it to be, or seem to experience it, but there are some significant differences.
The Brain in a Vat doesn't ...
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Is this a good argument against Simulation and Brain in a Vat hypotheses?
This is a comment on the idea that a person, e.g. me, could really be a simulation running on a computer.
The idea that I'm a simulation assumes that the executing simulation has semantic content. I'...
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When does a brain transplant make something human?
Before delving into the meat of the question, I would like to argue that, semantically, "humanity" is probably a misnomer for the condition you are trying to understand. It implies the ...
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Was the Brain-in-a-Vat thought experiment explored philosophically before Putnam?
Stanisław Lem, the well-known science fiction writer (who wrote Solaris, which has had two movie adaptations, and who by the way also produced a fascinating non-fiction work called Summa Technologiae, ...
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