by Jonah Thomas <jethomas5@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
May 15, 2008 at 01:04 PM
"bukvich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
" <bukvich@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> > =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 How DO you know you aren't a brain in a vat, anyways?
>=20
> You can't know in the sense that you know the area of a circle is pi r
> squared or the pythogorean theorem, but the notion that we are brains
> in vats is very very very very very very far fetched. Therefore we are
> pretty sure we are not.
What do you use to decide that the idea is far fetched?=20
You go from your experience? "From everything I know about the world,
brains in vats are very rare but people and animals running around loose
are not rare at all. So Bayesian analysis indicates ...."
But if you argue from experience, there's the chance that all of your
experience is stuff that's been fed into a brain in a vat. How much
should you rely on that?
If you want to reason that it's far fetched from first principles then
you have a more complex job to do, but maybe you could come up with
something interesting.
