Question

At this very moment is there a test – any test – that you could perform, anything you could do to prove to yourself beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are not a brain in a vat hooked up to some electrodes (or whatever) that stimulate your brain in such a way that you truly believe that your perceptions accurately represent the world all around you; that that you walk, run, and ride about among other people in the world; that you touch, taste, and smell things that are really “out there”; that you talk, laugh, and sing with others; and that a full survey your memory would reveal a coherent life-story from early childhood up to the present moment?

Answer 1

Note: This response is in UK English, please paste the response to MS Word and you should be able to spot discrepancies easily. You may elaborate the answer based on personal views or your classwork if necessary.

(Answer) In order to prove that you are not stuck in a matrix, it would require a reference point. A test would need to be viable enough to prove that one’s sense of taste, touch, smell and even emotions are not induced by a computer simulation.

To check if a particular routine has any flaws or discrepancies, it is essential to run the routine either repeatedly or in relation to another routine. This would help spot any variance. Therefore, to make sure that the world is not computer generated like in a video game, it would be essential to know what the path looks like before you walk down the road. In a video game or a simulated world, a place would not exist until the subject would visit it. In such a scenario, one could assume that the place you are at right now will cease to exist once you leave it.

Let us say that a slice of pizza is a reference point. You could leave a slice of pizza in a classroom and then leave the place. If you were to come back later, the slice of pizza would still be there but it would be stale and could cause you a stomach ache. The assumption in this scenario is that the slice of pizza which was computer generated was fresh 2 days ago. The same slice of pizza is still computer generated but stale at the moment. If it truly is computer generated, then you wouldn’t get an upset stomach if you consume it. This is because this is the same computer simulation that made the fresh pizza and is the same one now. The difference is that this time, your brain needs to make this a believable world and so the computer has focused on a tiny detail of the pizza’s freshness. However, if you eat the pizza in a pseudo world, you wouldn’t truly be sick because it is not a real pizza and your stomach ache is also a few computer codes.

This test might help penetrate a few levels of suspicion but not truly confirm whether or not you are in a real world.