Maybe You’re A Brain in a Vat

(And other uncomfortable possibilities)

This is your brain on philosophy.

For a long time, I believed there were answers to impossible questions like: “Why do we exist?”

That’s because Christians have a tradition of constructing answers to the unanswerable questions. The right answer to Why do we exist, for example, is To glorify God and to enjoy him forever. 

Obvs. 

In the Reformed Presbyterian congregation that my family joined when I was eleven, kiddos were catechized as a matter of course. So I memorized the whole of the Westminster Shorter Catechism –– a series of increasingly impossible questions tidily managed by short, straight-forward answers–– before I grew out of a training bra. 

Drunk on our epistemic hubris (Ask me anything! I’ve got the correct answer right here; It fits on a post-it and determines your salvation!), we then moved from the riddles of existence to the exacting tedium of doctrine. 

Doctrine: a principle or position in a branch of belief.

Doctrine is where Christians go to carve our dogmas at the joints and splinter into rigid ideological camps:

Some of us allow women to have positions of authority (but definitely not from the pulpit, are you kidding); Some of us believe God doesn’t want women to speak in church. 

Some of us baptize our converts by dunking them in a tub; Some of us sprinkle our infants with eternal team membership before their eyes can focus.

Some of us think every word of scripture is literally and historically true; Some of us treat the Bible like a strange, God-breathed collection of ancient literature.

Some of us believe children arrive on the scene totally depraved and incapable of any truly good act; Some of us think that’s only the case for liberals.

Once we have gerrymandered the Truth of Everything, we set our doctrinal distinctions alight (won’t let Satan blow it out: no) and self-righteously hold our little fires to the feet of our opponents. We nail our answers to their doors and congratulate ourselves for being the ones who got it right –– the vital remnant in a world of wrong.

A Different Kind of Question

I first decided to study philosophy years ago because I wanted to learn more sophisticated ways of confirming the right answers I thought I already had. 

But instead of asking, “Why do we exist?” our little undergraduate cohort of budding thinkers started with, “How do we know we have hands?”

Imagine my surprise when the answer turned out to be:

“You don’t know, bitch. Maybe you’re a brain in a vat.”

Lazy Philosophy 101

I know, that sounds weird. Let me back up a little:

Once upon a time, a philosopher named Putnam proposed a thought experiment (philosophers love that shit) to test what we can know. 

What if, he said, you’re actually just a disembodied brain in a vat of nutrient slime hooked up to a powerful supercomputer? 

The supercomputer sends electric pulses through brain-you, artificially generating an entire world of impressions and experiences. As a result, you believe you exist: here, where you have hands, and prefer vanilla ice cream, and just got a lackluster credit score. 

Given all your experiences, you have every reason to believe that you actually do have hands, along with all the rest of it. 

But you don’t. You’re a cerebellum floating in a vat of techno-snot being systematically deceived by some kind of A.I. overlord. Everything you think you know is wrong.

(If this sounds like the Matrix, you’re tracking.)

Skepticism or Dogma: You Can’t Have Both

Putnam’s anxious little thought experiment is just a gooier take on Descartes’ worry that our experiences are constantly manipulated by some kind of powerful demon. Given that possibility, Descartes fretted, maybe we can’t trust anything we think we know.

Putnam and Descartes both introduced their skeptical scenarios in order to refute them, because they wanted to build the case that the intellect is basically trustworthy (the alternative would be a major professional liability, I guess). 

I won’t go into Putnam’s logic-chopping refutation here because it’s hella boring. But the ever-humble Descartes solved his demon problem with real flair by proving that: 

1. God exists; and 

2. God is good. 

A good god would not deceive us, he said. Therefore, we can trust that our experiences are true. Easy peasy.

…

Which is great, if you buy his arguments for the existence and goodness of God. I didn’t, and Descartes’ contemporaries didn’t, either. It was the epistemic skepticism that stuck, for me.

Now here I am all these years later, still holding everything I believe very, very loosely. If I can’t even say with confidence that I have hands, I’m definitely not going to insist with confidence that specific modern religious dogmas are True: say, that life begins at conception, or that the gays are somehow doomed, or that God won’t just go ahead and save everyone in the end (because why the hell wouldn’t he).

And I figure that if God really does exist, and is benevolent, and isn’t deceiving me, and intended to equip me with a reliably rational mind that can discover truth, he probably didn’t go to all that trouble because he hoped I would swallow a laundry list of simple answers to impossible questions. Especially when a lot of those answers require me to be an asshole, against my better judgement.

But whatever: What could I possibly know about it? 

Probably nothing.