Brain In A Vat Theory: An Analysis

Created in 1981 by Hilary Putnam the Brain in a Vat theory is about a science fiction possibility of our brains quite literally being in a vat. Hilary Putnam uses referencing or representation, the Turing Test, the rules of language and a host of examples to establish that the statement “we are brains in a vat” is a self-refuting statement. He asks the question “Could we, if we were brains in a vat in this way, say or think that we were?” (Putnam 1981, p7) and comes to the conclusion that we couldn’t be. He proves his argument by focusing on the concept of referencing by saying that people whose brains are in a vat cannot think or refer to what we (people who are not in the vat world) can refer to.
Suppose an evil scientist has taken your brain out of your body and put it into a vat that has all the nutrients to keep the brain alive. The nerve endings are connected to a super computer that has the power to make you hallucinate and believe that everything is normal. Everything that you see is what the computer wants you to see and is a result of electronic impulses and stimuli to the nerve endings. The computer has the ability to make you feel things as well. For example, if you lift something, you will see yourself lifting the object along with feeling the weight of the object. The computer makes you believe that nothing has changed and that you are living the same life as you were before except that this reality is completely false. There is also a possibility that a person in this …show more content…
The images we see are nothing but the electronic impulses from the computer. And thus if while living in the vat world we say that “we are brains in a vat” then all we are saying is that we are brains in a vat in the image that we see and is thus not true. Hence we are brains in a vat is