Before breaking out of the Matrix, Neo's life was
not what he thought it was. It was a lie. Morpheus described it as a
"dreamworld," but unlike a dream, this world was not the creation of Neo's
mind. The truth is more sinister: the world was a creation of the
artificially intelligent computers that have taken over the Earth and have
subjugated mankind in the process. These creatures have fed Neo a
simulation that he couldn't possibly help but take as the real thing.
What's worse, it isn't clear how any of us can know with certainty that we
are not in a position similar to Neo before his "rebirth." Our ordinary
confidence in our ability to reason and our natural tendency to trust the
deliverances of our senses can both come to seem rather naive once we
confront this possibility of deception.
A viewer of The
Matrix is naturally led to wonder: how do I know I am not in the
Matrix? How do I know for sure that my world is not also a sophisticated
charade, put forward by some super-human intelligence in such a way that I
cannot possibly detect the ruse? The philosopher Rene Descartes suggested
a similar worry: the frightening possibility that all of one's experiences
might be the result of a powerful outside force, a "malicious demon."
"And yet firmly implanted in my mind is the long-standing opinion that
there is an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am. How
do I know that he has not brought it about that there is no earth, no sky,
no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, while at the same time
ensuring that all these things appear to me to exist just as they do now?
What is more, just as I consider that others sometimes go astray in cases
where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, how do I know that
God has not brought it about that I too go wrong every time I add two and
three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if
that is imaginable? But perhaps God would not have allowed me to be
deceived in this way, since he is said to be supremely good; [...] I will
suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of
truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has
employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the
sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things
are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my
judgment." (Meditations, 15)
The narrator of Descartes' Meditations concludes that none of
his former opinions are safe. Such a demon could not only deceive him
about his perceptions, it could conceivably cause him to go wrong when
performing even the simplest acts of reasoning.
This radical worry seems inescapable. How could you possibly prove to
yourself that you are not in the kind of nightmarish situation Descartes
describes? It would seem that any argument, evidence or proof you might
put forward could easily be yet another trick played by the demon. As
ludicrous as the idea of the evil demon may sound at first, it is hard,
upon reflection, not to share Descartes' worry: for all you know, you may
well be a mere plaything of such a malevolent intelligence. More to the
point of our general discussion: for all you know, you may well be trapped
in the Matrix.
Many contemporary philosophers have discussed a
similar skeptical dilemma that is a bit closer to the scenario described
in The Matrix. It has come to be known as the "brain in a vat"
hypothesis, and one powerful formulation of the idea is presented by the
philosopher Jonathan Dancy:
"You do not know that you are not a brain, suspended in a vat full of
liquid in a laboratory, and wired to a computer which is feeding you your
current experiences under the control of some ingenious technician
scientist (benevolent or malevolent according to taste). For if you were
such a brain, then, provided that the scientist is successful, nothing in
your experience could possibly reveal that you were; for your experience
is ex hypothesi identical with that of something which is not a
brain in a vat. Since you have only your own experience to appeal to, and
that experience is the same in either situation, nothing can reveal to you
which situation is the actual one." (Introduction to Contemporary
Epistemology, 10)
If you cannot know whether you are in the real world or in the word of
a computer simulation, you cannot be sure that your beliefs about the
world are true. And, what was even more frightening to Descartes, in this
kind of scenario it seems that your ability to reason is no safer than the
deliverances of the senses: the evil demon or malicious scientist could be
ensuring that your reasoning is just as flawed as your perceptions.
As you have probably already guessed, there is no easy way out of this
philosophical problem (or at least there is no easy philosophical
way out!). Philosophers have proposed a dizzying variety of "solutions" to
this kind of skepticism but, as with many philosophical problems, there is
nothing close to unanimous agreement regarding how the puzzle should be
solved.
Descartes' own way out of his evil demon skepticism was to first argue
that one cannot genuinely doubt the existence of oneself. He pointed out
that all thinking presupposes a thinker: even in doubting, you realize
that there must at least be a self which is doing the doubting. (Thus
Descartes' most famous line: "I think, therefore I am.") He then went on
to claim that, in addition to our innate idea of self, each of us has an
idea of God as an all-powerful, all-good, and infinite being implanted in
our minds, and that this idea could only have come from God. Since
this shows us that an all-good God does exist, we can have confidence that
he would not allow us to be so drastically deceived about the nature of
our perceptions and their relationship to reality. While Descartes'
argument for the existence of the self has been tremendously influential
and is still actively debated, few philosophers have followed him in
accepting his particular theistic solution to skepticism about the
external world.
One of the more interesting contemporary challenges
to this kind of skeptical scenario has come from the philosopher Hilary
Putnam. His point is not so much to defend our ordinary claims to
knowledge as to question whether the "brain in a vat" hypothesis is
coherent, given certain plausible assumptions about how our language
refers to objects in the world. He asks us to consider a variation on the
standard "brain in a vat" story that is uncannily similar to the situation
described in The Matrix:
"Instead of having just one brain in a vat, we could imagine that all
human beings (perhaps all sentient beings) are brains in a vat (or nervous
systems in a vat in case some beings with just nervous systems count as
‘sentient’). Of course, the evil scientist would have to be outside? or
would he? Perhaps there is no evil scientist, perhaps (though this is
absurd) the universe just happens to consist of automatic machinery
tending a vat full of brains and nervous systems. This time let us suppose
that the automatic machinery is programmed to give us all a
collective hallucination, rather than a number of separate
unrelated hallucinations. Thus, when I seem to myself to be talking to
you, you seem to yourself to be hearing my words…. I want now to ask a
question which will seem very silly and obvious (at least to some people,
including some very sophisticated philosophers), but which will take us to
real philosophical depths rather quickly. Suppose this whole story were
actually true. Could we, if we were brains in a vat in this way, say or
think that we were?" (Reason, Truth, and History, 7)
Putnam's surprising answer is that we cannot coherently think that we
are brains in vats, and so skepticism of that kind can never really get
off the ground. While it is difficult to do justice to Putnam’s ingenious
argument in a short summary, his point is roughly as follows:
Not
everything that goes through our heads is a genuine thought, and far from
everything we say is a meaningful utterance. Sometimes we get confused or
think in an incoherent manner — sometimes we say things that are simply
nonsense. Of course, we don't always realize at the time that we aren't
making sense — sometimes we earnestly believe we are saying (or thinking)
something meaningful. High on Nitrous Oxide, the philosopher William James
was convinced he was having profound insights into the nature of reality —
he was convinced that his thoughts were both sensical and important. Upon
sobering up and looking at the notebook in which he had written his
drug-addled thoughts, he saw only gibberish.
Just as I might say a
sentence that is nonsense, I might also use a name or a general term which
is meaningless in the sense that it fails to hook up to the world.
Philosophers talk of such a term as "failing to refer" to an object. In
order to successfully refer when we use language, there must be an
appropriate relationship between the speaker and the object referred to.
If a dog playing on the beach manages to scrawl the word "Ed" in the sand
with a stick, few would want to claim that the dog actually meant to refer
to someone named Ed. Presumably the dog doesn’t know anyone named Ed, and
even if he did, he wouldn’t be capable of intending to write Ed’s name in
the sand. The point of such an example is that words do not refer to
objects "magically" or intrinsically: certain conditions must be met in
the world in order for us to accept that a given written or spoken word
has any meaning and whether it actually refers to anything at
all.
Putnam claims that one condition which is crucial for
successful reference is that there be an appropriate causal connection
between the object referred to and the speaker referring. Specifying
exactly what should count as "appropriate" here is a notoriously difficult
task, but we can get some idea of the kind of thing required by
considering cases in which reference fails through an inappropriate
connection: if someone unfamiliar with the film The Matrix manages
to blurt out the word "Neo" while sneezing, few would be inclined to think
that this person has actually referred to the character Neo. The
kind of causal connection between the speaker and the object referred to
(Neo) is just not in place. For reference to succeed, it can’t be simply
accidental that the name was uttered. (Another way to think about it: the
sneezer would have uttered "Neo" even if the film The Matrix had
never been made.)
The difficulty, according to Putnam, in
coherently supposing the brain in a vat story to be true is that brains
raised in such an environment could not successfully refer to genuine
brains, or vats, or anything else in the real world. Consider the example
of someone who has lived their entire life in the Matrix: when they talk
of "chickens," they don’t actually refer to real chickens; at best
they refer to the computer representations of chickens that have been sent
to their brain. Similarly, when they talk of human bodies being trapped in
pods and fed data by the Matrix, they don’t successfully refer to real
bodies or pods — they can’t refer to physical bodies in the real world
because they cannot have the appropriate causal connection to such
objects. Thus, if someone were to utter the sentence "I am simply a body
stuck in a pod somewhere being fed sensory information by a computer" that
sentence would itself be necessarily false. If the person is in fact not
trapped in the Matrix, then the sentence is straightforwardly false. If
the person is trapped in the Matrix, then he can't successfully refer to
real human bodies when he utters the word "human body," and so it appears
that his statement must also be false. Such a person seems thus doubly
trapped: incapable of knowing that he is in the Matrix, and even incapable
of successfully expressing the thought that he might be in the Matrix!
(Could this be why at one point Morpheus tells Neo that "no one can be
told what the Matrix is"?)
Putnam's argument is controversial, but
it is noteworthy because it shows that the kind of situation described in
The Matrix raises not just the expected philosophical issues
about knowledge and skepticism, but more general issues regarding meaning,
language, and the relationship between the mind and the
world.
Further Reading:
Dancy, Jonathan. Introduction to Contemporary
Epistemology, Blackwell, 1985.
Descartes. The Philosophical
Writings of Descartes, tr: John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald
Murdoch. Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Nagel, Thomas. The
View from Nowhere, Oxford, 1986.
Putnam, Hilary. Reason,
Truth, and History, Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Strawson,
P.F. Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties, Columbia University
Press, 1983.
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