July 10: You exist, but are you living?

 See that book? I bought it at the Coles store in Cornwall about five years ago. It was in the bargain bin. I was wary about buying it because St. Paul warns believers to be careful that they don't ruin themselves through philosophy. But I was also encouraged by something the late Christian apologist Walter Martin once said, which is that philosophy isn't really anchored to anything and that philosophers will happily waste their lives swimming in an ocean of relativity.

Anyway, true to the title of Ben Dupre's book, it really does have 50 philosophy ideas, though it's debatable that everyone really needs to know them. My nine-year-old son is happy watching Caillou right now. I think that for the time being, he's happier being ignorant of Socrates' cave allegory.

The very first chapter in that big ole book is the "brain in a vat" theory. This idea suggests that the universe is an illusion, that you are just a brain in a vat somewhere, and everything you encounter - other "human beings", emotions, falling stars, McDonalds commercials - is just your brain being artificially stimulated. My friend, Michael Nenonen, introduced me to this idea when I was in my early 20s. I hated it. I still hate it even though I can't prove that it's false. I am only aware of my own awareness and so other people could be computer programs or illusions or what have you. This was a dangerous realization for Dwayne Hoover, one of the two protagonists of Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Breakfast of Champions. For me, it was presented as a counterargument for the existence of God.

But I think the brain in the vat argument demonstrates the likelihood of God, though the God of this scenario likely wouldn't gel with the monotheistic Christian God that I believe in. Okay, now I am going to lay out a sequence of statements that I think are perfectly logical. In his inevitable reply, Michael Nenonen will tell me how wrong I am (he will quote Jean Paul Sartre and Donald Trump along the way.)

1. If I am a brain in a vat, someone had to make the vat.

2. If I am a brain in a vat, someone had to create me (my brain.)

3. If someone went to all this trouble to put my brain in the vat and wire it up to make me think I am living the life I am living now, then that person is very intelligent to come up with such an amazing program.

4. That person, by the way, would be God, seeing as how the word God means "mighty" and that person would, by virtue of his office, be mightier than me.

5. This God would probably be a deistic God, one that doesn't intervene in human affairs, though it's also possible that what I have come to believe as "prayer" is a sort of primitive communication program between subject (me) and scientist (whoever put my brain in the vat.)

6. If I am a brain in a vat, then the scientist should run a program that makes the Flames win the Stanley Cup next year and another program that makes brussel sprouts taste like T-bone steak and another program that makes Amanda Marshall give me a backrub and another program that will stop AV from calling me a butthead for making that Amanda Marshall comment.

7. If anyone disagrees with me, it becomes patently obvious that the brain in a vat theory is a load of hooey. That's because if you are engaging with me, then there are two minds at play, which means that I am not a brain in a vat and that we really do interact with each other. *

8. If I believed I was a brain in a vat and that everyone else is just a program or an illusion or whatever, I would launch ad hominem arguments against "anyone" who disagreed with me. That's because there is no "anyone." You're just a fleeting illusion, a subroutine in this existential software, and I don't have to worry about hurting your feelings because you don't have any.

*Unless all our brains are in a supercomputer somewhere, which would make a megagod out of whatever intergalactic computer scientist who found the cajones to hammer out such a sprawling piece of software.) 

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That's about all I'm going to do with the brain in the vat theory. I can't disprove it but I'm going to go about living my life as if it's false. More meaning that way. Eeeeee!