BRAINS IN VATS? DON'T BOTHER!

Episteme ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-199
Author(s):  
Peter Baumann

ABSTRACTContemporary discussions of epistemological skepticism – the view that we do not and cannot know anything about the world around us – focus very much on a certain kind of skeptical argument involving a skeptical scenario (a situation familiar from Descartes' First Meditation). According to the argument, knowing some ordinary proposition about the world (one we usually take ourselves to know) requires knowing we are not in some such skeptical scenario SK; however, since we cannot know that we are not in SK we also cannot know any ordinary proposition. One of the most prominent skeptical scenarios is the brain-in-the-vat-scenario: An evil scientist has operated on an unsuspecting subject, removed the subject's brain and put it in a vat where it is kept functioning and is connected to some computer which feeds the brain the illusion that everything is “normal”. This paper looks at one aspect of this scenario after another – envatment, disembodiment, weird cognitive processes, lack of the right kind of epistemic standing, and systematic deception. The conclusion is that none of these aspects (in isolation or in combination) is of any relevance for a would-be skeptical argument; the brain-in-the-vat-scenario is irrelevant to and useless for skeptical purposes. Given that related scenarios (e.g., involving evil demons) share the defects of the brain-in-the-vat-scenario, the skeptic should not put any hopes on Cartesian topoi.

2015 ◽  
Vol 206 (3) ◽  
pp. 222-222
Author(s):  
Peter Fenwick

Out-of-body experiences, in which the person feels they are viewing the world from outside their body, may be spontaneous or triggered by pain or fear, due to failure to integrate proprioceptive, tactile and visual information in the right parieto-temporal junction. They are similar to autoscopy, namely seeing your body in extra-personal space. But out-of-body experiences can occur in a near-death state during a cardiac arrest and be remembered even though brain processes are distorted or absent. Reliable accounts of patients who have acquired verifiable information while clinically dead suggest that consciousness may not after all be limited to the brain.


Author(s):  
Antonio Mastrogiorgio ◽  
Enrico Petracca ◽  
Riccardo Palumbo

Innovations advance into the ‘adjacent possible’, enabled and constrained by the current state of the world, in a way that is unpredictable and not law-entailed. Unpredictability is the hallmark of the idea that innovation processes are contingent and embodied in the interaction between individuals and artefacts in the environment. In this chapter, we explore the cognitive and behavioural factors involved in exaptive innovation processes by using the notion of ‘extended cognition’. Extended cognition builds on the hypothesis that cognitive processes are not limited to the brain but also extend into the physical world as the objects of the environment facilitate, integrate with, and even constitute specific cognitive processes. We argue that exaptive innovations can be better understood by focusing on practicality and procedural knowledge from an extended cognition perspective. Artefact manipulation is not merely pragmatic but also epistemic as it enables specific reasoning processes that lead to the discovery of new uses.


2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (70) ◽  
pp. 103-131
Author(s):  
Alexsandro Rodrigues ◽  
Leonardo Lemos De Souza

Por uma política de leitura aberta de mundos: o buraco negro e o fim do mundo como possibilidade de nascimentos crianceiros Resumo: Este artigo é resultado de conversas afiadas e tecidas nos inconformismos e rebeldias desde as margens dos buracos negros de vidas em dissidências. O texto busca tensionar os buracos fechados pela polícia do sistema sexo-gênero na manutenção de seus privilégios e que não nos permite, via políticas públicas, acessar histórias em gêneros e sexualidades diferentes das tradicionais narrativas feitas para meninos e meninas de um certo tipo. Há subjetividades circulando entre nós nos espaços educativos que convocam os corpos, os gêneros e as sexualidades ao direito de nascerem, crescerem, florescerem e coabitarem o mundo, as escolas, as memórias e as narrativas hegemônicas das políticas curriculares na literatura infanto-juvenil. Exercitando perguntas que não se conformam com as histórias contadas, apresentadas e curricularizadas diariamente, o artigo faz problema sobre os modos de ler heterocêntricos que privilegiam o cérebro. Propõe, então, leituras buraco-negro. Estas apostas políticas, feitas de políticas anais e suas revoluções, buscam despreguear as relações de poder e as literaturas. Palavras-chave: Leitura como atividade. Gênero e sexualidade. Buracos negros. For an open world reading policy: the black hole and the end of the world as a possibility for births of childhoods Abstract: This article is the result of sharp conversations woven into nonconformities and rebellion from the margins of black holes in dissenting lives. The text seeks to tension the holes closed by the sex-gender police in maintaining their privileges and that does not allow us, through public policy, to access stories in genres and sexualities different from traditional narratives made for boys and girls of a certain type. There are subjectivities circulating among us in the educational spaces that call the bodies, genders and sexualities to the right to be born, grow, flourish and cohabit the hegemonic world, schools, memories and narratives of curriculum policies in children's literature. Exercising questions that do not conform to the stories told, presented and curricularized daily, the article questions the heterocentric ways of reading that privilege the brain. It then proposes black hole readings. These political bets, made up of anal politics and their revolutions, seek to unravel power relations and literatures. Keywords: Reading as an activity. Gender and sexuality. Black holes. Por una política de lectura de mundo abierto: el agujero negro y el fin del mundo como posibilidad para el nascimiento de las infâncias Resumen: Este artículo es el resultado de conversaciones agudas entretejidas en no conformidades y rebeliones desde los márgenes de los agujeros negros en vidas disidentes. El texto busca tensar los agujeros cerrados por la policía de género y sexo para mantener sus privilegios y eso no nos permite, a través de políticas públicas, acceder a historias de géneros y sexualidades diferentes a las narrativas tradicionales hechas para niños y niñas de cierto tipo. Hay subjetividades que circulan entre nosotros en los espacios educativos que llaman a los cuerpos, los géneros y las sexualidades al derecho a nacer, crecer, florecer y convivir con el mundo hegemónico, las escuelas, los recuerdos y las narrativas de las políticas curriculares en la literatura infantil. Ejercitando preguntas que no se ajustan a las historias contadas, presentadas y curriculadas diariamente, el artículo cuestiona las formas heterocéntricas de lectura que privilegian el cerebro. Luego propone lecturas de agujeros negros. Estas apuestas políticas, formadas por políticas anales y sus revoluciones, buscan desentrañar las relaciones de poder y la literatura. Palavras clave: Lectura como actividad. Género y sexualidad. Agujeros negros. Data de registro:  11/12/2019 Data de aceite: 26/08/2020


2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony Brueckner

Há um argumento cético clássico derivado das Meditações sobre a filosofia primeira. Este artigo oferece uma formulação contemporânea padrão do argumento, pretendendo mostrar que ninguém sabe qualquer coisa sobre o mundo extramental. A obra de Hilary Putnam na filosofia da linguagem e da mente parece fornecer uma resposta a uma versão atualizada do argumento cético cartesiano. Em sua maior parte, este artigo é dedicado a uma análise e crítica das meditações anti-céticas de Putnam. PALAVRAS-CHAVE – Descartes. Putnam. Ceticismo. Cérebros em cubas. Externalismo de conteúdo. ABSTRACT There is a classical skeptical argument that derives from Descartes’s Meditations on first Philosophy. This paper offers a standard contemporary formulation of the argument, which purports to show that no one knows anything about the world that exists outside our minds. The work of Hilary Putnam in the philosophy of language and mind seems to afford an answer to an updated version of the Cartesian skeptical argument. The bulk of this paper is devoted to an analysis and critique of Putnam’s anti-skeptical meditations. KEY WORDS – Descartes, Putnam, Skepticism, Brains in vats, Content externalism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
Iain McGilchrist

Discusses the role that attention plays in constituting the world, rather than reducing phenomena to the brain level. Discusses the different kinds of attention delineated by the divided hemispheres of the brain. On the one hand the left hemisphere specialised in grasping and manipulating the world, whereas the right hemisphere specialises in relat-ing to and understanding the world. Discusses how reliance on one or the other kind of attention has cultural, psychological and social implications.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (2(4)) ◽  
pp. 135-145
Author(s):  
Dominik Stosik

In this analysis the author sets out to examine the concept of freedom of speech on the internet, drawing upon the development of the World Wide Web, the Big-Data-Trade-Off-Dilemma and the nothing-to-hide argument fallacy. A key finding is the observation of a multitude of emerging challenges in the field of ethics, privacy, law and security. Furthermore the most recent exertion of influence on the freedom of speech, that is to say astroturfing should adduce as an instance to demonstrate the possibilities of manipulating public opinion. Further on, the analysis of governmental military enhancement programmes and the example of a recent entertainment programme production shall serve as a visualisation that the research on unprecedented signal resolution and datatransfer bandwidth between the brain and electronics might be far more close to reality than one might be expecting. The results suggest that the freedom of speech is preceded by the freedom of thinking. Its manipulation on a bigger scale (e.g. national elections) could serve as a new way of psychological warfare and therefore the freedom of thinking, or the right to a free mind should remain unviolated.


1999 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-91
Author(s):  
Dorothy Gronwall

This optimistic book about recovery of function after brain injury or disease is written by three neuroscientists specifically to counter the belief that brain injury is permanent and that the brain cannot be repaired. They point out that this belief leads to often inappropriate or no treatment, which then makes it a self-fulfilling prophecy. However there is an increasingly extensive body of evidence from laboratories around the world that given the right conditions and specific chemicals, for example, normal function can be restored. This literature is highly specialized, highly technical, and often apparently unrelated to human recovery. It is also produced at a prodigious rate. According to a 1989 survey, fact-based knowledge doubled every 18 months at that time, and it was predicted that by the year 2010 it will double every 4 weeks. It is not surprising, therefore, that members of a health-professional team have difficulty keeping up with the clinical rehabilitation literature, and that they do not have the time or the energy to read studies on laboratory animals or tissue studies which are not seen as high priority or of relevance to their work.


2008 ◽  
Vol 364 (1519) ◽  
pp. 955-963 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos-Eduardo Valencia-Alfonso ◽  
Josine Verhaal ◽  
Onur Güntürkün

Brain asymmetries are a widespread phenomenon among vertebrates and show a common behavioural pattern. The right hemisphere mediates more emotional and instinctive reactions, while the left hemisphere deals with elaborated experience-based behaviours. In order to achieve a lateralized behaviour, each hemisphere needs different information and therefore different representations of the world. However, how these representations are accomplished within the brain is still unknown. Based on the pigeon's visual system, we present experimental evidence that lateralized behaviour is the result of the interaction between the subtelencephalic ascending input directing more bilateral visual information towards the left hemisphere and the asymmetrically organized descending telencephalic influence on the tecto-tectal balance. Both the bilateral representation and the forebrain-modulated information processing might explain the left hemispheric dominance for complex learning and discrimination tasks.


2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  

Many researchers believe that the brain is able to heal the body by most diseases without any outside help, but only if its hemispheres are synchronized. A sick person always presents, even if he or she is an infant or a child, in 100% of cases, the lack of synchronization of the cerebral hemispheres. As soon as we manage to synchronize the hemispheres, at least 10%, the brain (the best doctor in the world) begins not only to recognize the problem of health, it will also solve it. This is possible thanks also to the bio-resonance - the living body’s ability to enter in resonance with external acoustic action. The bio-resonance can be defined as the ability of a living organism to react to the vibrational external action. According to some of the most recent discoveries each organ of our body has its own particular frequency and its own rhythm. The frequencies and rhythms of each organ are well known, so it is possible to create programs in acoustic resonance with a particular organ or physiological system. The bio-resonance acts on the body through the brain, while the allopathic treatment does the opposite - it acts on the brain through body. This is why as serious researchers, we are called to engage in innovative and challenging programs, in order to find the right rhythms to communicate serenity and well-being, starting from a sector such as pediatry and neonatology.


Author(s):  
M. Sato ◽  
Y. Ogawa ◽  
M. Sasaki ◽  
T. Matsuo

A virgin female of the noctuid moth, a kind of noctuidae that eats cucumis, etc. performs calling at a fixed time of each day, depending on the length of a day. The photoreceptors that induce this calling are located around the neurosecretory cells (NSC) in the central portion of the protocerebrum. Besides, it is considered that the female’s biological clock is located also in the cerebral lobe. In order to elucidate the calling and the function of the biological clock, it is necessary to clarify the basic structure of the brain. The observation results of 12 or 30 day-old noctuid moths showed that their brains are basically composed of an outer and an inner portion-neural lamella (about 2.5 μm) of collagen fibril and perineurium cells. Furthermore, nerve cells surround the cerebral lobes, in which NSCs, mushroom bodies, and central nerve cells, etc. are observed. The NSCs are large-sized (20 to 30 μm dia.) cells, which are located in the pons intercerebralis of the head section and at the rear of the mushroom body (two each on the right and left). Furthermore, the cells were classified into two types: one having many free ribosoms 15 to 20 nm in dia. and the other having granules 150 to 350 nm in dia. (Fig. 1).


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