I believe that through living in a matrix or being a brain-in-a-vat, you are ultimately alienating yourself from the world and missing out on the true experience of life. In this paper I will argue that life is not only comprised of the mental state, but rather the combination of a physical and mental existence. There are three reasons that justify my stance on life and existence. The rejection of a matrix and the brain-in-a-vat scenario is simply due to the fact that the experiences generated by these machines are nothing more than neural interactive simulations that are designed and controlled by humans. These machines limit society to a manmade reality where there is no deeper existence than that which can be established by human thought. Through succumbing to human invention and control, we relinquish all power to the machine creators. We not only surrender our bodies, but our minds as well. I think that in order to …show more content…
I concur with Robert Nozick that by selecting an experience-only life, you would be sentencing yourself to some sort of suicide since everything you experience through the machine would be a replication of the real world, rather than a reflection of a genuinely made person’s life. Being in a situation such as a matrix or becoming a brain-in-a-vat would force humans to daydream their lives away and believe that these machines are a viable way of living. However, I don’t accept the idea that dreams or machine-generated experiences can ever truly be substituted for a form of life. I have a natural desire for truth, reality, and knowledge, regardless of the unpleasant circumstances that come along with it. Therefore, my life in a matrix would be meaningless since there is no true knowledge due to the fact that the world of the matrix would be created on the basis of a fake