the matrix philosphy kicks ass its really interesting
everything that platos says on the allegory of tha cave makes sense
everything that hilary putnam said in brain in a vat makes sense
robert nozicks experience machine makes sense
peter ungers evil scientist makes sense also and all the other ones u should read them its cool i made a paper on them and i took a philosophy class and we looked at that 2
Jesus, you are doing well if you actually understand Putnam. That's a very basic analysis they give of his work there, as they thrmselves admit, though I am sure you studied him in more detail in your class.
For those of you who don't know, Putnam had an interesting take on the 'What if we are all just brains in a vat and none of this is real?' question.
The thing he posed was that if we WERE brains in a vat, would we be able to truthfully SAY that we were? And he rather neatly goes on to say that we could not.
It gets complicated there, but he points out basicallly that just because someone says something it does not necessarily means the person understands what he is saying... crap, I'll have to give examples now...
Right, something a person says can be nonsense, that is obvious. If I all a bed a chair, that is nonsense, because the bed is a bed, not a chair. And if I say the word 'flargenabbleniblick', that is nonsense because there is no such thing.
But the THIRD way to be nonsensical is the important one here. Say there WAS such a thing as a 'flargenabbleniblick' and I just didn't know it, thinking it was a nonsense word. Someone, who did know what it was, coming into the room to hear me say it would think "Ah! He is talking about flargenabbleniblicks!" He might even come over and ask me what my favourite flargenabbleniblick is, and I would be bewildered.
So the point is that although I APPEARED to be making sense to this person, I was actually talking nonsense. I didn't know what a flargenabbleniblick was, I would have used the word whether it existed or not. Putnam called this a lack of 'causal connection'. You cannot use a word meaningfully unless your brain has a causal connection to what the word actually means. So if it turns out that a flargenabbleniblick is actually a type of drink, I cannot have any causal connection to its true meaning until someone tells me that.
ANYWAY. Putnam's point is that a brain in a vat experiencing only simulated happenings has NO causal conneciton to anything in the real world. He has never been there, everything he has seen has been simulated. He might SAY "I am just a brain in a jar" but he has no causal connection to brains, jars, or even, really, 'am'. He could not successfully imagine a real world with brains in jars- would be would be imagining is a simulated world with brains and jars. FOr all he knows, real-world brains might be triangles.
And so it is in The Matrix. No-one in the Matrix has any causal connection in thr real world. As Morpheus says, "No-one can be TOLD what the Matrix is." He is right- for people that have lived in it (people born in Zion could be told any time). Morpheus can explain to Neo all he likes what it is, but Neo's brain is completely incapable of truly understanding what it is until he sees it and experiences 'real' and makes the causal connection. And before that point he could say "I am just a naked body in a pod attached to a computer Matrix'. but his brain won't be thinking of a real body in a real pod. It would be thinking of a computer simulation of a body in a computer simulation of a pod, which is conceptually a different thing. It CANNOT think of a real body in a real pod. It does not know how. It does not even realise that it cannot do it.
Mind you, that is all very interesting but it never struck me as greatly relevant. All Putnam says is that you would not TRULY understand what the real world is like. He doesn't say you could never know that the one you were in was false.
We really have to analize our lives coz there is some things that we have to disci=over by ourselfes. We always do what other tell us to do... like Neo with the oracles. Think about it we follows our parents, teachers, neightbors, friends rules, coz this is the way the the persons of ythe past told them to do and they tought us that rules. So.. we r living by the words of the past. who know for surely they were RIGHT????????????????????????????????? HUH????? Maybe we should start to belive what we want to belive about the world....... as we know or wanted to know.
Hello all,
I'm at work right now so I haven't had the oppurtunity to read through this whole thread yet. I just wanted to throw a quick 2cents in. In a way, we all exist in a "matrix" so to speak. Not the one from the movie of course but something along those lines. You see, its pretty obvious that everything you know to be "reality" can be broken down into numbers. Binary for example: 1's and zero's, on and off's, yes's and no's, red pills and blue pills. Theres patterns of these numbers, systems of patterns and so on.... I apologize if this all has been said here already. When I get home, I'll have to come back and elaborate. Bad news Krazz, there really is no "escape". Theres arelady "systems" functioning to prevent anyone or anything from surpassing "them." Some may think theres ways, but just like in the movie, its already figured in as part of the "control" system.
All feedback is welcome!
Talk to you guys later (or yesterday.... hehehe.....)