Thinkpad x220 or t420s. You can get a USB3 port on the i5 t420s, but the battery life is generally shit.
x220, you need to get an i7 to get a usb3, but the battery life is great, and it's small, and you can upgrade to 16gb ram.
Stick with thinkpad. the 20 series is the last series to offer the classic keyboard. After that, e.g., x230, t430s, you get chiclet keys.
x61, x201, x220. Stick with those. I'd go with x220, but you could even get an x61, and put 8gb of ram in it...it's ddr2 though, so it will be expensive.
Are you sure about this? I have an i7 x220 and it doesn't come with USB3. I think I remember having a tough decision between the x220 (USB2 + nice keyboard) on the x230 (USB3 + chiclet keyboard).
On the contrary, in the medieval period, there was no notion of copyright whatsoever. The Order of Preachers, otherwise known as the Dominicans, would convene every year and openly share all of the technological advances they had made with the rest of the order, who would then return to their priories and implement the more effective agricultural/technological practices
Basically, if we really were brains in vats, then "we are brains in vats" couldn't ever be true, because the referents of our discourse wouldn't have any causal connection to real brains and real vats, and so it wouldn't even be possible, if one were a brain in a vat, to think the thought or propound the proposition "I am a brain in a vat", and so, it's necessarily false that we are brains in vats.
Yeah, no. We realized that trying to language-lawyer reality like that doesn't really work not too long (well, actually, entirely too long) after Zeno proposed his little paradox.
Instead of rejecting this argument out of hand, as "language-lawyering," allow me to suggest a different approach. It sounds like you and I agree that Putnam's argument doesn't actually tell us that we are not brains in vats. I think Putnam would agree with us as well. So what's the real point? Any discourse about whether we are brains in vats is hopelessly defective. Even if we accidentally issued the right string of symbols, or made the right sequence of noises, our statements would be objectively meaningless, because they are not causally related to the phenomena they would otherwise describe.
What's the use of this kind of thought? Here's a candidate: any philosophical debate that can be made the target of this pattern of argument is an argument that is not worth having. It cannot lead to real knowledge even if the disputants happen to arrive at what would be the right answer. This argument takes as a premise that the conclusion "I am a brain in a vat" is not causally related to the actual brain or the actual vat. This would seem to suggest, among other things, that there can be no concrete evidence for this claim--and Putnam is telling us that if we indulge in such a debate anyway we are not merely unlikely to hit upon the right answer, but that we are doomed to talk nonsense.
This is a fascinating argument, but not because it tells us much about whether we are brains in vats. Instead, it tells us something deep and interesting about linguistic meaning, and the mysterious relationship between statements and propositions.
Putnam is not actually saying that we aren't brains in vats. Rather, he is saying that we cannot form accurate and meaningful statements to that effect if we are.
The argument, as I understand it, turns on a statement's ability to refer. Putnam's point, as you nicely summarized it, is that in order to accurately describe the world (I make a point here of not talking about whether the statement is true) a statement has to be causally related to the things it describes in the right way. This seems plausible.
But this is different (on must theories) from saying that the abstract proposition that might be represented by such a statement cannot be true. It could be! The puzzle is just whether you could form a linguistic statement to properly express that proposition due to the reference problems Putnam points out.
Putnam's own example demonstrates the point. A bunch of ants cannot draw an image that represents Winston Churchill in the grass, because they cannot know what Winston Churchill is or (probably) what he looks like. Any similarity between an ant-made image, and a real image of Winston Churchill has to be merely coincidental. Ants cannot close the causal link that we normally require in order to say that an image "represents" something. But this doesn't mean that there is no such thing as an image of Winston Churchill. Or that an ant-made imagine cannot resemble Winston Churchill. It just means that ants can't form a representation of him!
Likewise, our putative inability to form an accurate statement to the effect that we are brains in a vat does not mean that we aren't brains in a vat. An omniscient being (perhaps the one who put us in the vats!) might, for example, read our silly HN posts about brains in vats and say, "gee, its incredible that this series of symbols actually matches the symbols that you would use to form a true statement statement about the world, if only the speaker were in the necessary causal relation to my vats in order to truly say such a thing." Likewise, we say about the ants "gee, its amazing that they managed to make an imagine resembling Winston Churchill even though they don't know what he looks like and therefore can't truly be said to have 'represented' him."
(There is a parallel line of argument that you might run about our ability to know something, since knowledge, it is often said, has to be related to the external world in a certain way in order to be more than a mere belief.)
Just to be clear, your penultimate paragraph does not rule out there being no knowledge distinct from belief, even if some people believe that their beliefs are related to an external world in in a certain way that somehow validates them as real. For example, many humans have created representations of gods and believe them to be realistic, but we are under no logical compulsion to agree.
From the first episode of The Magicians, two students reason about being a brain in a vat:
Quentin: "Am I hallucinating?"
Elliot: "If you were, would asking me help?"
So, I either I don't understand Putnam's argument or it's plainly wrong.
I recognize that when we say "We are brains in the vat" it seems, at the surface, self-referentially false. Because if we are brains in a vat, we wouldn't have the experience of being brains in a vat--- we'd have the experience of walking around and being people. But I can make a statement like: "Despite my experiences, I think that I am a sentient being that is contained inside a vat."
His argument that the word "vat" refers to different things in "vat-English" and normal English doesn't matter. The concept held behind vat & brain are fundamental enough that they would be self-generating among a community of sentient beings. If we say: "I am a sentient meatcomputer inside a vase filled with liquid food" we may be saying something different, but we are still expressing the core idea.
Even though the simulated world might be vastly different than the host world, language allows abstractions such that we can make the statement.
Putnam goes on to entertain the idea of a twin earth where beeches and elmes are switched, or a world where water has a different chemical forumula than H2O. That is a better starting point, but it doesn't help. I can simply generalize my statement: "I am a sentient being experiencing a hallucination, and the brain which executes my thoughts are self-contained in an environment I cannot perceive, but which nurtures my brain while networking stimulus with it."
I'd like to add a thought experiment to this. Imagine you have two vastly different communities with vastly different chemistry, and possibly operating with more than 3space and 1time dimensions. What would happen if, by the act of an Angel, both communities were given the rules for chess?
The names of the pieces don't especially matter--- if one community never had a bishop, we can simply pick a different word. Or call it piece #4.
With enough games played and thought put into it, the communities would discover tactics. They would compare and contrast the Queen's Pawn vs King's pawn. They would figure out 3-move checkmate. They would understand why en passant was a good rule to be added. And despite have different words and names for all of these concepts, these concepts still refer to the same things. Even if one world played chess with stone pieces, and the other world used leashed rabbits with hats.
A great example of this is when I went to China and play Go (or Weiqi, as they call it). I spoke 10 words of mandarin, and they spoke zero english. I was able to play a couple of games without having any shared language about the game. In the second game, an older chinese guy would sometimes yell at me and move the stone I had just played--- essentially saying: "no, that's not the best move, HERE it is." I didn't always understand why it was the best move, but often it was plainly clear that I was incorrectly read the truth of the board.
So. The act of thought supersedes what we immediately refer to in language, by it's ability to abstract. boom!
In your thought experiment, you are presupposing many common factors; we can understand this better perhaps because you are positing "3+ dimensions" so we can think "the dimensions we see plus a couple more" which makes it seem like the other community is a superset of ours.
Likewise, in your former, generalized statement, it works if you continue to think of "our universe". The entire notion of anything remotely resembling a brain, or anything like what we understand to be cause and effect (like, nurturing something to keep it functional, or even the very concept of "functional"...) existing in the host environment (whatever that means! :) ) makes the abstract statement devoid of meaning.
x220, you need to get an i7 to get a usb3, but the battery life is great, and it's small, and you can upgrade to 16gb ram.
Stick with thinkpad. the 20 series is the last series to offer the classic keyboard. After that, e.g., x230, t430s, you get chiclet keys.
x61, x201, x220. Stick with those. I'd go with x220, but you could even get an x61, and put 8gb of ram in it...it's ddr2 though, so it will be expensive.