#pangean

The Scientific Research Notes Of S. Sunkavally (years: 2002-2011).

PHILOSOPHY: The Brain in the Vat

In philosophy, the brain in a vat (alternately known as brain in a jar) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of our ideas of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness and meaning.

Common to many science fiction stories, it outlines a scenario in which a mad scientist, machine, or other entity might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer which would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those the brain normally receives.

According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the "disembodied" brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, such as those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world.

Since the brain in a vat gives and receives exactly the same impulses as it would if it were in a skull, and since these are 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. Since the argument says one cannot know whether one is a brain in a vat, then one cannot know whether most of one's beliefs might be completely false. In principle, it is impossible to rule out oneself being a brain in a vat, there cannot be good grounds for believing any of the things one believes.

The brain in a vat is a contemporary version of the argument given in Hindu Maya illusion, Plato's Allegory of the Cave, Zhuangzi's "Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly", and the evil demon in René Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy.

The end-Permian mass extinction

The end Permian mass extinction occurred 251mya and marked the end of the Palaeozoic era. The loss of life is currently estimated to consist of 95% of the marine fauna and around 70 to 77% of the known terrestrial fauna (where the fossil record is inevitably less complete). This article will provide an overview of the many events and processes that played a part and a discussion whether they can…

I now have no home. Forgive me, yet I have always thought I would. Now I do not. An orphan. An emigrant. A true Pangean, finally ... I do not have the words yet for this reversal. I will soon. 

I do have these words, and I chose them carefully, and they are real, and as far as I can tell there is no error in the logic:

Fuck the ‘Baby Boomers’. Fuck ‘America in Late Capitalism’. Fuck ‘Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism’. Fuck money. Fuck people who only think about, can only relate to money. Fuck metaphysics. Fuck metaphysicians who only think about money. Fuck humanity for its terminal lack of imagination. Fuck.