Introduction In 1981, philosopher Hilary Putnam proposed this hypothetical scenario: all people are just brains suspended in a vat of fluid. The brains are hooked up to a powerful computer system capable of recreating any possible reality by use of electrical signals that imitate sensory information. Finally, imagine all of the brains are able to interact within the same virtual paradigm (exactly how we sense the environment and live with each other now) but have no idea the reality they are being fed is a simulation. In a situation eerily similar to the now cult classic film trilogy The Matrix, released just a few years after Putnam’s discussion, we are all trapped in a simulation and are both unable to escape it, and, as Putnam argues, …show more content…
Although it is also related to the second critique, it is worth mentioning that the human brain, in its enormous power, is quite limited. We have a remarkable compacity for learning and memorizing patterns, shapes, faces, languages, etc. But, we end up recycling much of what we see and understand at an early age and reapply it later on. Research has shown that even our dreams, often viewed as unique or random, are short clips of manipulated actual events featuring people we have already seen. In this sense, we can start to see how dreams are their own kind of simulation. As we sleep, our brains are in an altered state. They receive little information from our five senses, rather they rely on internal electrical impulses to create a “world” we interact with. Much like the overall simulation, our dreams tend to star ourselves and people we know interacting with things we understand and remember in our everyday life (even if they are fanciful, such as dragons, monsters, or superhuman powers). It is not possible to dream about things for which we have not seen or thought of at some other point. We can add to or manipulate anything we like, but there are only a limited number of base concepts from which our dreams, and thus reality, are