If personhood resides in brain structure then a brain-in-a-vat would be a person. Presumably its personhood would be postulated on the grounds of it having some sort of subjective experience. But that’s not an empirical fact so I don’t think personhood residing in brain structure can be classed as an empirical fact either.
if you’re treating “brain in a vat=person” as a reductio, you’ve either got a lot to learn, or you’ve got a lot of explaining to do before this crowd’s going to take you seriously.
It’s not an empirical fact that a brain-in-a-vat has subjective experience. It’s a thought experiment. Thought experiments don’t establish empirical facts.
“It’s not an empirical fact that a brain-in-a-vat has subjective experience.”
If we could watch what the BIAV gets up to in its simulated world, we could see it interacting with its simulated environment. This would give us the same level of confidence in its having subjective experience as we have for any normal person.
If personhood resides in brain structure then a brain-in-a-vat would be a person. Presumably its personhood would be postulated on the grounds of it having some sort of subjective experience. But that’s not an empirical fact so I don’t think personhood residing in brain structure can be classed as an empirical fact either.
if you’re treating “brain in a vat=person” as a reductio, you’ve either got a lot to learn, or you’ve got a lot of explaining to do before this crowd’s going to take you seriously.
It’s not an empirical fact that a brain-in-a-vat has subjective experience. It’s a thought experiment. Thought experiments don’t establish empirical facts.
“It’s not an empirical fact that a brain-in-a-vat has subjective experience.”
If we could watch what the BIAV gets up to in its simulated world, we could see it interacting with its simulated environment. This would give us the same level of confidence in its having subjective experience as we have for any normal person.