Explain in simple words, what is the meaning of the "brain in a flask" experiment?

One Answer

1. The point is to simultaneously, first, demonstrate the dependence of a person on his senses and everyday experience, and, secondly, to question the truth of his knowledge about the world around him.

   The essence of the experiment is that if you imagine the brain of a person in whom all the impulses from the senses were replaced by artificial signals from a computer, which are fake, but indistinguishable from the real ones, then from the point of view of the brain there should be no ways to determine whether his sensations are real, or he is “in a flask”, that is, in virtual reality. Such a brain will consider the artificial world to be real and will not notice the substitution.

   Now let's imagine that we are such “brains in flasks”, and our task is to detect this.

   Due to the fact that any way to check the reality of the world around us will somehow involve our senses, such a check can always be intercepted, and its results can be distorted by simulation in order to convince us of the truth of the “picture”that is being pushed to us.

   

   As a result, we get a paradox in which we can only be content with what we have and consider what we see to be real, but without the right to assert its truth. This attitude is characteristic of philosophical skepticism and solipsism, which can be studied separately.

   The solution to the “brain in a flask” paradox lies in the very design of the experiment, its internal inconsistency or even impossibility. Judge for yourself.

   1. There are several concepts with a similar message that are equally unprovable, but almost incompatible with each other. All of them claim the existence of another, “real “world outside of the”unreal” one that we perceive:

   • A brain in a flask, or a Matrix where the reality is a laboratory, or a super-civilization, and our world is just a computer simulation
   • Plato's cave, where the reality is the world of ideas, and our world consists only of cast shadows on the wall of the cave in which we are imprisoned
   • Descartes ' evil demon, who sends out cunning illusions in order to hide reality from the observer
   • Hindu shakti Maya, consisting of magical snakes that are intertwined in the form of objects around us in order to hide the real essence of things

   These concepts do not fit together and cannot all be true at the same time. That is, either they are all false, or only one of them is plausible, and it is impossible to say with sincerity which one, because of their fundamental unprovability.

   2. Let's say there is a certain possibility to divide the surrounding world into true and false, real and simulated, for example, the Earth of the Future and the Matrix. If this is so, then there is nothing to prevent applying exactly the same train of thought to the revealed “real world” and declaring it in the same way as another Matrix that is just as false, and which has an “even more real” world external to it, and so on ad infinitum. The result is a kind of infinite “matryoshka” of nested false Matrices, which practically did not leave any place for the “true” reality. This in itself contradicts the initial idea that it is possible to distinguish some “more real” world.

   Based on these two considerations, we can conclude that the idea of a “brain in a flask”, a “matrix” or a “world of ideas” is nothing more than an interesting puzzle that has no relation to reality.

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