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Comment by bronzeage | Hacker News Reader

I find it pretty easy to convince the world exist. If you assume you yourself exist, and think, and if you assume the contrary, that the world out there doesn't exist, you should ask yourself what alcohol and drugs are.

Because if the world out there doesn't exist, these things shouldn't effect the way you think. If something is simulating the world for you, you have to assume every time you drink, that thing alters the way you think somehow, which means it can access your actual real brain, whatever it is.

Then that brain of yours, even if it's outside the world, must be so similar to all the other brains you see, which are effected similarly by those same substances.

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> you should ask yourself what alcohol and drugs are.

A way of inducing an altered state of consciousness, just like sleeping and meditating. This isn't problematic for the "brain in vat" scenario.

If the brain is in a vat, why is it affected by alcohol outside the vat?

Sleeping and meditating are both internal to the brain, but alcohol only becomes internal to the brain if it has some physical access to the brain.

For the brain in a vat theory to work, the computer controlling the simulation would have to monitor the amount of alcohol that is in the bloodstream of the simulated being, and adjust the alcohol in the vat accordingly?

I'm confused.

IF a consciousness was housed in a black box (a brain, but we're ignoring it's internals) AND that black box had inputs connected to a computer that can send signals to the black box that it WOULD interpret as signals of sight, sound, touch, hunger, intoxication, etc.

THEN how is one suppose to conclude that they are not just a consciousness in a box because they 'feel' drunk after they 'feel' they've ingested alcohol.

There's no need to monitor alcohol levels because the alcohol hasn't been proven to exist!

I think your confusion arises from the fact that this discussion is about two different thought experiments: the brain in a vat [1] (a la The Matrix) and proper solipsism (which implies no real world at all, not even a vat). [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_in_a_vat

Alcohol is part of the simulation. Don't get hung up on the biologically human brain in a physical vat scenario. That's only a tiny slice of what's being discussed.

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