Perhaps the most challenging of the skeptic’s claims is that we have no way of distinguishing the real world from hallucinations. Most of us have had dreams we thought were real while we were in them. Movies like The Matrix raise the question of how we know anything is real. This is often called the “brain in a vat” problem. When it comes right down to it, can I be sure that I’m not just a brain in a vat in someone’s laboratory, in a long-running dream state or being fooled by carefully planned illusions? Or maybe I’m a bit of computer code, an artificially intelligent character in some massive, hyper-detailed version of the Sims. How would I know?
And that’s the question for this week’s journal. Is there a way out of the skeptic’s challenge? I’d like your own ideas–don’t look up what other people have said. Is there anything that we can know for sure? (If so, what? How do we know it’s true?) Or is it best to follow Sextus Empiricus’ advice and just withhold judgment on everything?
