From: John M Grigg (starman125@lycos.com)
Date: Fri Sep 01 2000 - 21:53:14 MDT
Doug Skrecky wrote:
> "In fact, we have no way of knowing whether what we experience as >our lives is real or imaginary. For all we know, we could be nothing >but disembodied brains floating in a tank, everything we perceive >just input fed to us by some demented computer."
>
> -vat 12, specimen 5 (termination recommended)
Randy wrote:
You're getting pretty spooky with this, Doug.
What does it all mean?
(end)
At UAA in the class "philosopy of mind" this example was used by the professor early on. For some reason he used the scenario of a human brain being stolen by aliens from Alpha Centauri and given artificial outputs that are unrecognizable from the real thing. He challenged us to find a way to recognize such a deception...
The prof was a very charming fellow originally from England. No matter how stupid a comment was by a student he would say, "excellent point!" He seemed to really like MY questions and comments though... ;) Later in a "science on the cutting edge" lecture series he talked more about the nature of mind and existance to me and a group of largely made up of professors. They did not really grasp things much better than my class did....
John
Get your FREE Email and Voicemail at Lycos Communications at
http://comm.lycos.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:30:43 MST