Brain in flask

Assume that, if desired, the human brain can be separated from the body immediately after birth and placed in a flask, skillfully designed for this purpose. In this flask, the brain receives nutrition and support, and it allows it to grow and develop. Along with this, electronic signals from a computer that simulates a completely fictional world are fed into the brain, and motor signals from the brain are intercepted and used to modify this imitation properly. In this case, the brain may have a mental state of DyingFor {Me, Hamburger) (a passionate desire to get a hamburger), even though it does not have a body that would feel hungry, as well as taste buds to taste, besides in the real world for the brain (but actually imitated), it would simply not be a hamburger. Would this mental state be the same as the brain experiences in a living body?

One way to resolve this dilemma is to use the hypothesis that the contents of mental states can be interpreted from two different points of view. In an approach based on a broad analysis of the contents, mental states are interpreted from the point of view of an omniscient external observer who has access to information about the entire situation and is able to notice any differences in the world. Therefore, when a broad analysis of the contents of the feelings of the brain living in the flask, can be distinguished from the feelings of the "ordinary" person. And with a narrow analysis of the contents , only the internal subjective point of view is taken into account, and with this approach, the feelings experienced by both the brain remain the same.

The assurance that a hamburger is a desired food has a certain character of connection with a specific object, since there must be someone who has confidence in this property of a hamburger. Turning to this kind of reasoning, we enter the field of cognition of quality, or our own experience (in the English-language literature, the term qualia is used to refer to this concept, derived from the Latin word, which translates roughly as “just such”). Suppose that, as a result of some kind of disturbance in the nerve paths of the retina and brain, by some face X is perceived as red that color which the person perceives as green and vice versa. In this case, seeing the same traffic light signal, they both act in the same way, but the experience they perceive should be somewhat different. Both of these persons may agree that the perceptions they received suggest that "the light at the traffic lights is red," but these perceptions themselves remain different. It is therefore unclear whether this indicates that they have the same or different mental states.