Ali Khalilian Najafabadi

The brain-in-a-vat thought experiment has long occupied a central place in modern epistemology. First popularized in contemporary analytic philosophy through the work of Hilary Putnam, the scenario invites us to imagine a disembodied brain sustained in a laboratory vat and connected to a computer that simulates all sensory inputs. If such a brain received perfectly coherent signals, it might believe itself to inhabit a real world indistinguishable from our own. The philosophical lesson traditionally drawn is skeptical: if our experiences could be generated artificially, how can we know that we are not ourselves envatted? While much of the debate has focused on epistemology, on knowledge, justification, and the limits of certainty, the thought experiment rests on deeper metaphysical assumptions about consciousness. It presumes that experience can be fully realized within the boundaries of a brain, independent of any broader ontological or relational context. This paper challenges that presupposition. From the standpoint of a mind-at-large ontology, the central issue is not whether a brain in a vat could know the world, but whether it could experience anything at all. Mind-at-large perspectives including forms of idealism, panpsychism, process philosophy, and enactive cognition, understand consciousness as fundamental, relational, or world-involving rather than as an isolated product of neural computation. If experience arises not solely within brains but through participation in a wider field of mind or being, then the brain-in-a-vat scenario loses both its plausibility and its philosophical force. Instead of a neutral skeptical test case, it becomes a theory-laden artifact of an internalist conception of mind. By examining the assumptions underlying the thought experiment and contrasting them with relational ontologies of consciousness, this paper argues that a radically envatted brain would lack the conditions required for experience to arise at all.

This paper argues that intentionality is not a sui generis mark of the mental but an embodied and neurally realized phenomenon. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodied perception and the Schneider case, I first motivate a functional split between motor intention and sense of agency in experience. I then point to neuroscientific evidence indicating both overlap and network-level dissociation between these functions. If this dissociation affords superior explanatory power over non-naturalistic alternatives, the Brentano mark of the mental is weakened and naturalized readings of mind are strengthened—without committing to crude reductionism. I present a numbered core argument and address key objections (correlation ≠ ontology; anti-reductionist phenomenology; plurality of intentionality types), clarifying the scope: the claim is a conditional metaphysical conclusion grounded in explanatory considerations, not an identity thesis.