Meditations on the Mind-in-a-Vat

I don’t exactly remember where I heard about it first, but I am thinking of the “mind-in-a-vat” thought experiment. I want to play with it a little.

So there’s this mind in a vat, not a brain mind you, but a mind in a vat. Oh, lets just say that a mind is an instance of Substance concieved under the attribute of thought. Ok. So I guess we have a thinking thing in a ”thought vat.” What is a thought vat? Obviously it’s a container. What sort of container? It is a container of thoughts made of thought itself. How is this possible? I don’t really know. This is just a thought experiment, and I am speculating wildly . Let’s just say that thoughts themselves are quasi-atomic and generally rhizomatic in their behavior. Thoughts, hmm, just like braincells (the extended version of thought?), link up, sync, and connect to each other in a multitude of ways. A mind would be a unity of many thoughts. A mind vat would also be a unity of many thoughts. Their borders may interweave. The mind and vat may become a mind-vat (as opposed to a mind and/in a thought vat). As the mind thinks, and I guess the vat would in some way think, too, new textures emerge that were there only as possibilities or as possibilities of possibilities, etc. Then the question is “what is thinking”? Do thoughts make noise? Is their “flow” smooth or turbulent? They come in all sorts of varieties. Morbid thoughts, happy thoughts, thoughts about sunny days. They morph into each other. Does a thought ever stay the same except for only an instant? Or is it the case that thoughts have a more substantial existence with attributes that change sometimes and stay the same at other times? The relationship between thought and meaning is  a tricky one! It’s kind of like the slippery relationship beween signifier and signified. If thoughts “link up” and “sync” with each other, then it would seem that there is a constant process of meaning creation. New meaning emerges as time goes by. The question still remains, perhaps it will always remain…, just exactly how does time go by? And so I shall end this meditation with a quote from Saint Augustine.

 What, then, is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks me, I do not know. Yet I say with confidence that I know that if nothing passed away, there would be no past time; and if nothing were still coming, there would be no future time; and if there were nothing at all, therer would be no present time. – Augustine, Confessions, Book XI, CH XIV.

Thus, there’s always something…

Why, oh why?

Why do I keep putting off the Republic analysis? My guess is that I have a fear of error or of not covering enough ground as I want. I know, as Hegel might ask, is this fear of error not the error itself? There is no reason, however, to let my anxieties get the best of me. Now temptations are another story. There are so many websites out there that claim to have legit summaries and analyses of the text, and they want to present their interpretation as official. In my view, all perspectives should be rational (or emotional when called for) but only provisional. Truth, as it may seem to many, in my view is an evolving process or project. This is not to say that what I think or say about something, even if it contains flawless reasoning, is an apodictic truth. Kant wanted this kind of thing in his theory of cognition (haha, here I go again!). Kant is surely no enemy of mine, but when I get too close to him I start thinking that what he says about the structure of human cognition is the Truth (I am still making, and will perhaps will be forever making, my way through the vast desert of the first Critique.). This happens to me with Hegel, too. However, for some reason, Hegel (at least in Phenomenology of Spirit and Science of Logic) is more practical and down to earth than most. But, then again, Hegel can seem to be the utmost paragon of the “What I have to say is the God inspired and endorsed Truth” approach to philosophy as can be imagined. Didn’t he say something to the effect (not actually what he said) of the Logic of the/his Concept was like the anatomy and physiology of God displayed out there on the table for all to see. Perhaps I am missing the mark entirely, though.