Last week we talked about Mind Body known as Dualism. I would like to expand on this subject a bit more and talk about another philosophical view.

One of my favorite books is called “The Mysterious Stranger”. It’s a short story by Mark Twain that is unusual compared to his other works. He wrote several versions of this book over the course of 30 years but never officially completed any of them. Through his manuscripts a completed version has been published that best tries to complete the story the way Mark Twain would have if he completed it. This version is known as “No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger”

The story is about a boy named Theodor who ends up meeting another boy named Satan who can perform magical feats and foresee the future. The book deals with issues such as moral sense and religion among many other topics. The ending of the book is the most intense however. Here is an excerpt…

Strange, indeed, that you should not have suspected that your universe and its contents were only dreams, visions, fiction! Strange, because they are so frankly and hysterically insane - like all dreams: a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice and invented hell - mouths mercy and invented hell - mouths Golden Rules, and forgiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites this poor, abused slave to worship him! . . .

"You perceive, now, that these things are all impossible except in a dream. You perceive that they are pure and puerile insanities, the silly creations of an imagination that is not conscious of its freaks - in a word, that they are a dream, and you the maker of it. The dream-marks are all present; you should have recognized them earlier.

"It is true, that which I have revealed to you; there is no God, no universe, no human race, no earthly life, no heaven, no hell. It is all a dream - a grotesque and foolish dream. Nothing exists but you. And you are but a thought - a vagrant thought, a useless thought, a homeless thought, wandering forlorn among the empty eternities!"

This is a great example of Metaphysical Solipsism. Solipsism is an epistemological position that knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind is unjustified. This means that the external world and other people’s minds cannot be known which means they might not exist. The only thing you can prove that exists is your own mind.

A thought experiment called “Brain in a Vat” is an argument used for solipsism. This thought experiment proposes having your brain removed from your body, suspended in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and having your neurons hooked up to a supercomputer with wires. The supercomputer would then simulate reality which would allow the person with the "disembodied" brain to continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences without them being related to objects or events in the real world.

Because a brain in a vat exactly replicates the same impulses as if it were in a skull, and since these impulses are the only way of interacting with the environment, then it’s not possible to tell from the perspective of the brain whether it is in a skull or a vat. And since you cannot rule out one’s self from being in a brain or a vat, there cannot be good grounds for believing any of the things one believes.

Another older view which is similar in a way to the Brain in a Vat is Zhuangzi’s Butterfly dream. Zhuangzi said he once had a dream where he thought he was a butterfly and had no recollection of anything else except being a butterfly. He then woke up and realized he was back to himself. This made him wonder whether or not he had dreamed being a butterfly, or if he was a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi.

This is a more out there view of philosophy and one that not many people agree with. But it might make you wonder… Is that person really a person? Or just a philosophical zombie I created?