Subjective Reality… Are You A Brain In A Vat?
The latest trend being pushed by philosophers and scientists alike is that nothing is objectively real, and everything is relative or subjective. Let’s step through this and put this sophistry to bed. If you believe everything is subjective and there is no such thing as objective truth than you can justify any behavior as it is only subjective to “societal norms”. In this way, you can justify all the evils as nothing more than society not normalizing them and determine what is right and wrong and can postulate that a different society with different norms would find these things perfectly okay and it's only your interpretation that makes these things wrong. You will hear this kind of stuff coming from many different sources. It is an attempt to enshrine relativism. Relativism is when the mind determines what reality is not something external. With this kind of belief in place, bad things are only bad because we interpret them this way (or that the physical is the result of the mental, so its only wrong because we think it is wrong). It is an attempt to make the supreme rule the interpretation not what is. This is sophistry at its finest. If you can convince people the only thing that is real is what they believe is real you can fully control them by manipulating what they believe is real.
What they are doing is blurring the line between objective reality (what is) and subjective reality (how we interpret what is) and in fact, they are attempting to completely remove the concept of objective reality. If we want to be intelligent thinking people with free will (the ability to think for ourselves and act upon those thoughts) we have to try our best to understand objective truths in order to accumulate knowledge about objective reality. The sophists that are trying to stop you from even looking for objective truths to understand objective reality are the same ones manipulating our perceptions of objective reality and assuring we only get stuck with some false interpretation of reality that ensures our free will is suppressed and controlled by those that control what we believe reality to be (stuck in subjective reality that they manipulate). This is done by controlling and limiting the information we have access to. The vast majority of the objective truth is hidden from the public eye and is classified or hidden underneath many layers of esoteric doctrine which is almost impossible to get the root understanding. The war is (and always has been) on the mind of the masses by those with the power to control information. The old saying knowledge is power is very true and we are excluded from knowing anything worth knowing. The little bit they do let out is buried in dry boring books on dusty shelves long forgotten or behind locked doors with many guards in front of them.
Let’s use Descartes's famous brain in a vat analogy and expand it to a much more likely meaning. If you are not familiar with it, it summarizes, “how do we know we are not brains in vats with some demon feeding us all that we observe?” his answer was “I think, therefore I am.” Now do the elite philosophers really believe its possible to be brains in vats and we must debunk this theory? I would offer that they don’t that it is really an analogy for what we clearly see going on today. If you control all the information that people receive (just like the demon feeds the brain what it wants them to observe) than the person is nothing but a brain locked in a vat and under the control of those that control what the information/disinformation. If you have studied the esoteric philosophies and the mystery schools (Freemasons/Rosicrucians/etc.) you will eventually conclude that at the highest levels it’s all about manipulation of the mind (and defending your mind from manipulation) and this analogy by Descartes is a perfect representation for it. His answer is also perfect. I think, therefore I am not a brain in a vat. I think therefore I have free will. I think therefore I am not under somebody’s control. I think, therefore I am. Which he does not say but can be directly assumed from the statement that the inverse is also true. I don’t think therefore I am not. I don’t think there for somebody else controls me. I don’t think therefore I am nothing more than a brain in a vat.
We must first learn how to think. It is more than logic. Intuition is a crucial part of thinking and being able to connect with objective reality. Without good intuition, those that wish to do so can control your perceptions and convince you that you are a brain in a vat (or just part of a computer simulation to update the metaphor to the modern day) or whatever other subjective reality they wish to create for you. After you learn to combine logic and intuition you must search for information in the places that are not publicized as these are that the real information is hidden (it is also hidden among mystical or “evil” labels to dissuade the curious from delving into these areas. It will never be on the nightly news or any other easily accessible media. You must trust your instincts and then use your logic to see if where they have taken you is consistent with your observations (and you must delve much deeper than the mere surface or obvious observations as these are always limited to deny access to true knowledge), if it is you are on the right track to objective reality. You must remember there are many more sides to everything then the 2 or 3 sides being presented and you have to think and reason outside the box (or vat in this case) they have put you in only then will you be free.
Thanks for reading :)
Oz
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Hi ozzz169. I spend many years reading many many academic journal articles, and outside of a couple classes in the history of science, I didn't encounter any talk about the brain in a vat problem.
I'm a fan of Descartes and Francis Bacon, and I like the idea of starting with a blank slate, but be careful of re-admitting ideas without careful scrutiny. I'll give you an example. When you talk about being "under the control" of another person, this is not something that you can determine by armchair philosophy. Psychologists, sociologists, and marketing researchers will tell you that you are subject to influence from society and events around you. If you say that a person is or is not under somebody's control (you could probably elaborate on what you mean by that), it is an empirical question. That means you are talking about things in the real world, and to test the validity of the claim, you would have to collect and carefully scrutinize data (or find studies where people did that).
If you keep heading in this direction, you might continue to learn more things that will help you achieve what you are seeking.
Read my other articles I got into it a lot. you won't find this stuff in your journals or anywhere else if you only stay on the surface level. you have to understand the esoteric level. There is more than one level to most religions and philosophies and agendas you won't see until you broaden your areas of study. if you want peer-reviewed studies you won't find them. I thank you for reading, my main interest is in how we are manipulated by the powers that be. If you think they are going to make these things easy to find you are wrong. but a lot of it is pretty easy to see if you understand what your looking at. I give many examples in my articles.
being under someone else control (the way I am using it) is not like hypnotised but rather having their thoughts limited and their access to true information limited to the point that all the descions making (and thoughts) are limited to a small fraction of things that are predetermined and acceptable to those pulling the strings, so to speak. This is where Deecartes's brain in a vat comes in with the demon feeding it ideas. the demon is the creature controlling what the brain has access too, and I am suggesting there are people in the real world limiting our access to and feeding us false information that essentially reduces us to brains in a vat. If you approach my articles with a left brain dominace you will not get much out of them. balancing intution with logic is very important in understand the world as it is, and not the tiny fraction we are allowed to have access to. hope this helps. it is not anything you will learn in your 101 philosophy course, and I have spent years tying together all of the unexplainable things going on to come up with a coherent picture of the world that explains all the contradictions I have found.
if you see a commertial and you buy something you have no need for, is this not controlling someone else actions? politicians studing words and phrases to convince people to agree with them is this not controlling peoples thoughts and actions? they do polls on all these things, it is scientificly proven it is possible to control peoples actions through propaganda and other methods. I would be careful if I was you ignoring the reality all around you and getting lost in your psychology and sociology articles. There is a much bigger picture out there and that is what I deal with.
I can see that metaphorically, yes.
yes, I was thinking of something like this in my first reply. we are on the same page here.
ha! I'm pretty far outside the box! as in, no academic future for someone who thinks like me! I learned from journal articles, but i see a combination of self-imposed limitations and funding realities that stifle some kinds of research or discussion that is against the state or against prevailing culture... similar to what you are saying, but perhaps with a different slant to it.
It goes much much deeper than mere commercial and polls, that is just the most obviously true and easy to demonstrate. It goes much much much deeper. Religions are a huge example. If your religious imagine people of a different religion and keep in mind the believe it just as strongly. They grew up in that system, so their reality is limited to this religion. But it goes deeper still. History is nothing but lies for the most part. the news is mostly lies and disinformation. The movies are loaded with messages that repeat over and over in a sublte fashion and have measurable changes over time. Music is the same. Culture is created from the top, the celeberties are picked for reasons and promoted to put out certain message they want people to follow. I could go on and on, we are kept busy and feed endless amounts of entertainment so we never have time to learn to think. the average person is fully under control of those at the top setting these agendas. (and if you don't believe there is an agenda how do you explain the same messages being put out across different platforms all at the same time, that is an agenda and where does it come from... the top)
though you are semi right, the brain in a vat is an update to the demon feeding us our thoughts, which is further updated by the latest craze of computer simulation. I just like the brain in a vat as it shows containment of thoughts. but the original was demons giving us the thoughts and everything we interpret. its all the same concept. so I am guilty of mixing a couple different versions together. ;)