i am an idiot maybe this will help it is the fist paragraph of my essay
I believe the purpose of John Pollack’s thought experiment is to evoke questioning of reality. The “brain in a vat” concept gives way to questioning of reality and actuality of existence. In the story the protagonist goes on to search for one of his good friends, and upon finding him he discovers his friend Harry’s brain being hooked up to a super computer in a vat. After being caught we discover that Mike is the reason Harry has been abducted, it was all a ploy to get Mike to the clinic. Mike than finds out that his brain has already been taken out three months ago, he is let go with emerging questions of his own reality, if he still has his brain in his body, or if he is living in a computer program. What this thought experiment is trying to illustrate is if we can prove that we are in our own controlled reality or if we are being deceived into thinking we have control over our own reality. There are many concepts of reality, such as we are living in a dream world, or we are in a computer program, a figment of someone else’s imagination, or we are a character in a story. John Pollack uses skepticism in his “brain in a vat” concept to show that you can’t honestly answer or negate some of these possibilities, or possibly prove that you are in control of your reality.
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