Brain in a Vat?

Your next step is to read Rene Descartes.

Cogito ergo sum, and all that....

Forgive me, but the topic title makes me think of the old film, The Brain that Wouldn't Die

"Brain in a vat" is a Russian doll -like scenario of conditioned worlds being nested in conditioned worlds, an endless repetition that accordingly never resolves itself with an unconditioned source. That is, you at least have knowledge that the "next" reality which enables your own is going to be the same-old presentation: A spatiotemporal situation of "becoming" -- of mutable, relational interdependent entities with locations in an extended "place". It indicates the atrophy of contemporary philosophy, that some departments output such degenerate metaphors for the original quest of classic thinkers, accordingly missing the boat.

Wholly expected, since the early days of the 20th-century era consisted of "Just say no to the history of ideas", an anti-philosophy (alternative) asserting departure from the tradition descended from Socrates' most influential pupil. By the time the Anglophone movement re-discovered some value of the past and developed a half-arse disciplined history of philosophy again during the late '60s to '70s (wallowing less in stereotypical misrepresentations), the brain damage was already done. Defective models like "BiV" paraded about as superficial fodder. Kant actually tied-up the loose ends of Plato's project many decades before.

But the field is like art or literature. Creativity is the litmus test for a philosopher, his/her own ideas must be invented and introduced, or at least appear to not be outright plagiarizing. Guaranteeing the bulldozing over of either solution or "base platform for understanding", and philosophy's continuing deterioration or detour into intellectual, recreational games that lack former seriousness in application to addressing the garbled situation of "be-ing" and "knowledge" we find ourselves in (apart from the influence of "human affairs" ideologies -- moral, political, etc.; an area of society still quite receptive to creative literature). In essence, a broad swath of it having surrendered to one of its former sub-categories, of crowning natural philosophy King and content to be its royal catamite.

My brain is pure computronium.