Consider the premises “When I had vivid experiences in the past I was almost always not dreaming” and “I am having vivid experiences now.” Based on these premises it may seem natural to then conclude “I am not dreaming now.” This is step is made by inferring inductively
(as opposed to deductively, since the conclusion does not necessarily have to be true given the premises), but one may ask whether this type of inference is justified. This is exactly what the inductive skeptic does – he or she poses the question, “why should I infer inductively?”
Appealing to one’s intuition that the two premises are good evidence of the conclusion produces no progress, as the inductive skeptic can still reply “Why should I trust my intuition, and why does that
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Can I be sure that my experience of the screen in front of me guarantees that there exists a screen in front me? Is it possible that this experience exists without corresponding to an actual, objectively existing entity? This challenge is largely built upon the brain in a vat thought experiment, a modern variation of
Descartes’s evil demon thought experiment which he uses to conclude that although I exist I could be deceived about every other aspect of my experience. The modern thought experiment says that one can conceive of a situation in which a scientist has placed a brain in a vat containing a solution that will sustain the brain’s life. The scientist has hooked this brain up to various wired circuits sufficiently complex enough to perfectly emulate the signals that the brain would receive from the rest of the nervous system while one goes about one’s day. In principle, it is possible to match the electrical inputs that the brain would receive in a normal circumstance and convince a brain in a vat that it is in such a normal circumstance. The conscious