Christopher Grau: Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Brain in a vat

Christopher Grau discusses Rene Descartes' claim in Meditation in Bad Dreams, Evil Demons,
and the Mind It could not be more than a hallucination of one's imagination that one may
perceive as fact. One statement that Grau points out in the argument by Descartes is how one
understands that what one feels is an awakened daily reality is not all part of a hallucination.
According to Christopher Grau, The core of most dreams we take as reality when dreaming, we
are unaware of the fact that if we are in the world of dreams or not. The key fact of the study
was to call attention to the predicament, which makes one wonder if any of us can be confident
that we have ever woken up. The notion that we take the entire world as just a dream is
relevant to the principle of the claims of Rene Descartes, the popular exponent of this concern.
He started his meditations to establish a solid basis for understanding by clearing the
metaphysical ground by doubting anything that might be questioned. We also blissfully neglect
the reality that we dream while we dream and the fact that dreams often appear as colorful
and true as real life. This will relate to the likelihood of dreaming, even now. He also notes that
the likelihood of dreaming cannot by itself throw doubt on anything that we feel we know, but
we can also infer that we have some understanding of the essence of reality. [1]
The concept of Evil Demon and brain in the vats can be clarified by the usage of the matrix film,
which implies that Neo’s life was a lie before breaking out of the matrix. Once we face this
likelihood of deception, our ordinary faith in our capacities to think, and our normal tendency
to believe the deliverance of our senses can both seem quite foolish. Descartes proposed the
horrific likelihood of all one's perceptions being the product of a vast external entity he called
the evil demon. He explains in meditations that suggest that none of his past beliefs are
reliable. As if the devil might not simply trick him with his perceptions, even the simplest
actions of reasoning could conceivably lead him to go wrong. It may also feel as though any
claim, proof, or facts one could bring forward could easily be another trick played by the devil.
The theory of the 'brain in a vat' implies that if you do not recognize if you're in the real world
or the dream world, you cannot be confident if your ideas about the world are valid. It also
appears like one's capacity to think is no safer than the deliverance of the senses that might be
assured by the devil demon or sinister scientist that the logic is almost as faulty as any illusions.
The very first step in coming out of the skepticism of the evil-demon was to first argue that one
cannot honestly doubt one's existence. He noticed that even in doubting and recognizing that
there must at least be a self that does the doubting, all thought requires a thinker. He also
believed that each of us has an understanding of God as an all-powerful, all-good, and eternal
being inserted in our minds by our intrinsic ideas of ourselves and that this idea could only
prove god exists. As this tells us that there is an all-good God, we can believe that he will not
encourage us to be too radically delusional about the essence of our thoughts and their
interaction with reality.
While the claim of Descartes for the existence of the individual has been immensely influential
and is still widely debated, few philosophers have supported him in embracing his basic
argument approach to the external world skepticism. Hilary Putnam has come to be one of the
most interesting current obstacles to the kind of radical skepticism implied by Descartes. His
argument is not so much to justify our normal claims to understanding but to challenge
whether, under some plausible hypotheses on how our language relates to things in the
universe, the brain-in-vat theory is coherent. He asks us to understand how our vocabulary
relates to the world's objects and finds a difference that is unusually close to the condition in
the traditional brain-in-vat narrative. The shocking response from Putnam is that we can't
coherently believe we're brains in vats, and so that kind of cynicism can never even get off the
ground. Though it is difficult to do justice to the ingenious argument of Putnam. He suggested
that often when we say things that are nonsense, we get confused or think incoherently. The
key thing to remember about the subconscious is that we don't know that we don't make sense
at the moment. We still seriously suspect that e is suggesting or believing that he was
persuaded that he had deep insights into the essence of truth. He was still persuaded his
feelings were both sensitive and meaningful as he sobered up and he saw only gibberish when
looking at his diary. He proposes that a name or a general word that is useless in the sense that
it struggles to link up to the universe can also be used. There has to be an acceptable
interaction between the speaker and the entity alluded to in other worlds as we use words. For
starters, if a dog plays the word "Tom" in the sand with a stick on the beach manage to scrawl,
few would choose to say that the dog wanted to refer to Tom, and even if he did, he wouldn't
intend to write the name of tom in the sand. The point of such an example is that words should
not apply to things "magically" to agree that a given written or spoken word has some meaning
and if it applies to something at all, certain requirements must be fulfilled in the world. Putnam
suggests that one prerequisite that is necessary for good reference is that there is an effective
causal relation between the referred object and the referring speaker.
It is a famously difficult job to determine precisely what should count as "appropriate" here, but
we can get some sense of the kind of thing expected by considering cases in which reference
fails in an improper condition. According to Putnam, the difficulty of coherently believing that
the brain-in-vat story is real is that brains raised in such a setting do not effectively apply to
actual brains, or vats, or anything else in the real world. Considering the case of those people
who when they speak about brownies, spent their whole life in the matrix, don't apply to the
true brownies. They apply to the machine images of brownies that were sent to their minds at
their best. Since they cannot have the proper causal relation to such objects, they do not relate
to actual bodies in the real world. Thus if someone is fed sensory input by a computer, if the
human is not stuck in the matrix, the phrase itself will be incorrect, then the phrase is false. The
claim of Putnam is controversial, but it is notable because it illustrates that the form of the
condition mentioned in the matrix poses not only the expected metaphysical dilemma of
knowledge and skepticism, but also a more general question of reality, language, and the
relationship between the mind and the world.
REFERENCES:

1. Grau, C. (2005). Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy
and The Matrix.