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Tuesday, 13 February 2007 17:37 |
 | | Marc Mullinax |
MARS HILL ó Now, something completely different. Iíve run across the ìbrain in the vatî (BIV) concept as Iíve tried recently to teach Socratesí famous preachment on why the unexamined life is not worth living. In the teaching Iíve discovered a brand new drug.
The BIV idea is indebted to Descartes, but illustrates ideas of Socrates, Platoís Allegory of the Cave, and other fascinating premises about what an individual can really know. It goes like this:
Imagine
that science can remove your brain, suspend it in a special vat that
would keep it alive, and then wire it to a special program that
stimulates it in an infinite variety of ways (much like our world
stimulates our brains). Your brain would then still be experiencing,
but virtually, by electrical impulses. Through your brain you continue
to sense what appears to be normal conscious experiences.
That is,
stimulate your brain a certain way, and youíre running the opening
kickoff in the Super Bowl for a touchdown, winning the Nobel Prize,
hiking on the moon, being famous, living out your fantasies ...
whatever ... you ... want.
Since a BIV
operates the same as if it were in a skull, and electrical activity is
its only way of interacting with its environment, then it is not
possible to tell, from the perspective of that brain, whether it is in
a skull or a vat.
If you are not
sure that you are not a BIV, then you cannot rule out the possibility
that all of your beliefs about the external world are artificial or
virtual. You could be living a program, a lie, or virtual reality.
Since it is nigh-impossible to rule out your being a BIV, you cannot
have good grounds for believing any of your beliefs.
This is the
ultimate stance of the skeptic: we live in a dream world. You are just
dreaming that you are now reading on p. 21 of the Asheville Daily
Planet. There is no eyeball, no body, just a stimulated BIV.
Whatís wrong
with this idea? We could be living a drug addictís life. Whatever you
want is this new drugís name. Imagine your brain stimulated as strongly
and as long as ìyouî want. Electrical signals stimulate the brain
either way, so why not put it on the narcotic, ìWhatever you wantî? Why
not have it all, all the time?
Whoís doing the
stimulation of our brains? Well, if we are slutted out to the culture,
without a mind to call our own, we might as well be a BIV hooked up to
anything. And if through some feedback process we get to do ìwhatever
we want,î then our lives remain essentially determined by others, and
we remain a morass of unexamined desires that enable us to evade
response-ability.
Once on this
ìwhatever you wantî drug, would the BIV ever want to question its
addictive reality? I doubt it. We rarely understand addictions enough
to decode how they work on us. The solution to this BIV scheme (if
true) is really to know ourselves by asking the most uncomfortable
questions. I cannot tell if we are one big simulation game. Skepticism
may be the only way out; skepticism coupled with an examined life.
While believers may be happier, give me skepticism any day for
understanding belief. Skepticism is not denial; being addicted is.
Is the BIV
farfetched? Maybe. Good science fiction, such as the Holodeck simulator
in ìStar Trek: The Next Generation,î ìThe Matrixî trilogy, ìThe Truman
Showî and ìVanilla Sky,î start a long list of plausible scenarios that
say, ìmaybe not.î What, and who, stimulates your brain? Seems important
to know.
ï
Dr. Marc S.
Mullinax, chairman of the philosophy and religion departments at Mars
Hill College, can be reached at mmullinax-at-mhc.edu.
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