RE: Subjective Reality… Are You A Brain In A Vat?
Hi ozzz169. I spend many years reading many many academic journal articles, and outside of a couple classes in the history of science, I didn't encounter any talk about the brain in a vat problem.
I'm a fan of Descartes and Francis Bacon, and I like the idea of starting with a blank slate, but be careful of re-admitting ideas without careful scrutiny. I'll give you an example. When you talk about being "under the control" of another person, this is not something that you can determine by armchair philosophy. Psychologists, sociologists, and marketing researchers will tell you that you are subject to influence from society and events around you. If you say that a person is or is not under somebody's control (you could probably elaborate on what you mean by that), it is an empirical question. That means you are talking about things in the real world, and to test the validity of the claim, you would have to collect and carefully scrutinize data (or find studies where people did that).
If you keep heading in this direction, you might continue to learn more things that will help you achieve what you are seeking.
Read my other articles I got into it a lot. you won't find this stuff in your journals or anywhere else if you only stay on the surface level. you have to understand the esoteric level. There is more than one level to most religions and philosophies and agendas you won't see until you broaden your areas of study. if you want peer-reviewed studies you won't find them. I thank you for reading, my main interest is in how we are manipulated by the powers that be. If you think they are going to make these things easy to find you are wrong. but a lot of it is pretty easy to see if you understand what your looking at. I give many examples in my articles.
being under someone else control (the way I am using it) is not like hypnotised but rather having their thoughts limited and their access to true information limited to the point that all the descions making (and thoughts) are limited to a small fraction of things that are predetermined and acceptable to those pulling the strings, so to speak. This is where Deecartes's brain in a vat comes in with the demon feeding it ideas. the demon is the creature controlling what the brain has access too, and I am suggesting there are people in the real world limiting our access to and feeding us false information that essentially reduces us to brains in a vat. If you approach my articles with a left brain dominace you will not get much out of them. balancing intution with logic is very important in understand the world as it is, and not the tiny fraction we are allowed to have access to. hope this helps. it is not anything you will learn in your 101 philosophy course, and I have spent years tying together all of the unexplainable things going on to come up with a coherent picture of the world that explains all the contradictions I have found.
if you see a commertial and you buy something you have no need for, is this not controlling someone else actions? politicians studing words and phrases to convince people to agree with them is this not controlling peoples thoughts and actions? they do polls on all these things, it is scientificly proven it is possible to control peoples actions through propaganda and other methods. I would be careful if I was you ignoring the reality all around you and getting lost in your psychology and sociology articles. There is a much bigger picture out there and that is what I deal with.
I can see that metaphorically, yes.
yes, I was thinking of something like this in my first reply. we are on the same page here.
ha! I'm pretty far outside the box! as in, no academic future for someone who thinks like me! I learned from journal articles, but i see a combination of self-imposed limitations and funding realities that stifle some kinds of research or discussion that is against the state or against prevailing culture... similar to what you are saying, but perhaps with a different slant to it.
It goes much much deeper than mere commercial and polls, that is just the most obviously true and easy to demonstrate. It goes much much much deeper. Religions are a huge example. If your religious imagine people of a different religion and keep in mind the believe it just as strongly. They grew up in that system, so their reality is limited to this religion. But it goes deeper still. History is nothing but lies for the most part. the news is mostly lies and disinformation. The movies are loaded with messages that repeat over and over in a sublte fashion and have measurable changes over time. Music is the same. Culture is created from the top, the celeberties are picked for reasons and promoted to put out certain message they want people to follow. I could go on and on, we are kept busy and feed endless amounts of entertainment so we never have time to learn to think. the average person is fully under control of those at the top setting these agendas. (and if you don't believe there is an agenda how do you explain the same messages being put out across different platforms all at the same time, that is an agenda and where does it come from... the top)
though you are semi right, the brain in a vat is an update to the demon feeding us our thoughts, which is further updated by the latest craze of computer simulation. I just like the brain in a vat as it shows containment of thoughts. but the original was demons giving us the thoughts and everything we interpret. its all the same concept. so I am guilty of mixing a couple different versions together. ;)