University of Tasmania, Australia

Professor Jay Garfield,

of Smith College

will present a paper entitled; 

"I am a Brain in a Vat, Or Perhaps a Pile of Sticks by the Side of the Road."

Abstract:
I am a brain in a vat.  I am also not a brain in a vat. I both am and am not a brain in a vat.  I am neither a brain in a vat nor not a brain in a vat. Each of these claims is true. So are their negations.  But nothing paraconsistent is going on here, just some good old-fashioned phenomenology. In Trisvabh?vanirdeśa, Vasubandhu deploys the analogy of an illusory elephant, conjured for an audience by a magician using a pile of sticks as a prop. Many have taken the point of his analogy to be idealist, meant to show that the external world is as nonexistent as the elephant.  But that is the wrong.  Unpacking the analogy with care, using Putnam's Brain in a Vat hypothesis as a lens, we find a subtle Buddhist phenomenology that has a lot to say about how to naturalize our discourse about consciousness.

All welcome