In some not too distant future a war has been fought between human beings and the intelligent machines they created. The machines have won and now Earth is shrouded in perpetual darkness, the sun having been deliberately cut off by the humans in a vain effort to starve the machines of inexhaustible energy. How this was achieved is not made clear but the tactic has rebounded savagely on the architects. The atmosphere is now unnaturally dense with, presumably, the dust and detritus of some catastrophic global act. Carbon based fuel has long been exhausted. But not all is darkness in this world; without sunlight almost all organic life has perished, but through their cleverness human brains have survived and herein lies the salvation of the machines. When fully conscious, that is to say, when fully alert and exercised, human brains generate ceaseless electrical fields and it does not go unnoticed by the machines that a fully occupied brain can produce enough energy to illuminate a 40-watt bulb. In this energy deficient world the victorious machines need power and fully occupied human brains can generate a readily available source of machine vigour. Hence the victors feed off the vanquished. Human are reared like factory creatures in an enormous machine and constitute, in their entirety, a vast rechargeable battery which can power the artificial intelligences. How the humans are actually produced, in the absence of normal sexual relations, is not made clear in the narrative, but once engendered they are kept in a state of 'sleep', their bodies immersed in reservoirs of vital fluids, their brains and minds perpetually stimulated and directed by their captors. As the manipulated brains 'dream' their lives the machines graze upon their nourishing electrical fields. It is clearly an efficient and impressively logical use of the vanquished by the victors, untrammelled by any kind of moral considerations.
The artificially induced mental lives of the human cows are set in an infinitely complex virtual world known as The Matrix. The Matrix is conceived by the machines as a coherent and internally consistent narrative which is shared by all the human brains plugged into it, so that each brain perceives a completely natural world filled with all the detail a human might expect in his day to day existence. All his hopes are there, his desires, his needs, his fears and hates, his loves and pleasures, all his projects, dispositions, jealousies, ambitions, his religiosity and scientific scepticism, his faiths, his disappointments, his pain and dreams and illusions – all these are here and experienced. There are mountains and oceans, sunsets and starry skies, political parties, wars, famines, sunburn, sex, cancer, schools and universities, holidays, money and death. The world is in every detail as rich and interesting as we would expect it to be.1 But the brains that have all this experience, along with their bodies, are in fact floating in baths of fluid deep inside the bowels of some gigantic farm machine controlled by other machines. One brain is 'watching a late twentieth century sci fi movie in a multiplex', another is 'arguing with his wife', and yet another is 'dreaming of independent wealth and freedom' – but there is no cinema, or wife, or daydream; there is only the fluid filled baths, the experiencing brain, the grazing machines and The Matrix. Or is there even this?
Fortunately for the captive battery humans there is a residue population of war survivors holding out against the machines. They are hidden somewhere deep beneath the devastated planet surface and they know about The Matrix. The artificial intelligences, however, know of its existence but not where it resides and the film narrative turns to detailing the efforts of a small band of 'awakened' human desperados and their attempts to circumvent the Matrix, all the while battling against the efforts of the machines (in the form of the Agents [the historically interesting 'men in black']) to keep the existence of the Matrix a secret. Their mission is to unplug humanity from its virtual existence and reveal to it the true nature of reality.2 The film ends with the hero, Mr. Anderson (Neo, to give him his hacker's name), being transfigured into a crusading messiah and the audience left in no doubt that although there is a fight ahead, the artificial intelligences, so clean and coherent in relation to their human enemies, will eventually meet with retributive justice.
This, in essence, is the plot of the movie 'The Matrix' .From the philosophical point of view it is of interest because it deals - albeit in a very superficial way – with the age old dichotomy of Appearance and Reality. The conviction that such a distinction can be made leads to intense debate in the fields of epistemology (theory of knowledge) metaphysics (how things are) and philosophy of science concerning the status of our claims to knowledge – the adequacy of our representations. On a basic level our conviction that it is possible to distinguish between Appearance and Reality leads us to question whether what we see, think and feel is true or illusory. Even in the fields of Ethics and political philosophy we are led to distinguish between true good and apparent good, between justice and merely the semblance of justice. And in our most desperate moments we might even be led to believe that all is illusion and that the universe consists only of appearances.
APPEARANCE AND REALITY
The initial force of the Appearance/Reality dichotomy comes from what is known as the argument from illusion Take this as an example. Person A sits in a bar with a pint of Guinness before him. It has been recently poured and beads of condensation glisten on its chilled side. It is a black, Roman pint. We may ask, what is the relation between A and the pint of Guinness? It can be described in the following way: there is the perceiver A and the object of perception (pint of Guinness). A's perception of the object is due to a causal relation; the object causes A to see it due to a complex physical process of light emissions, optic nerve stimulation and cortical assimilation etc.
Let us now take person B. B is lying in bed. He is warm, comfortable and asleep. But in his sleep he is sitting in a bar and before him there is a chilled pint glass of Guinness beaded with condensation and collared like a Roman priest. The description of the causal relation between B and the object of B's perception is here far more problematic. But the result is the same. Both A and B perceive a pint of Guinness in all its detail. Both drink it and relish it. Qualitatively their experiences are indistinguishable – yet A's perception is veridical and B's hallucinatory. If this is the case, as it appears to be, what conclusions can we draw? Can we, in fact, ever be in a position where it is possible to say: this is Reality and that is mere Appearance?
Let me first take the story back as far as Plato and consider his great allegory of the cave.
Socrates: Now compare our condition with this: Picture men living m a cave which has a wide mouth open towards the light. They are kept in the same places, looking forward only away from the mouth and unable to turn their heads, for their legs and necks have been fixed in chains from birth. A fire is burning higher up at their backs, and between it and the prisoners there is a road with a low wall built at its side, like a screen over which puppet players put up their puppets.
Glaucon: All that I see.
Socrates: See, again, then men walking under cover of this low wall carrying past all sorts of things, copies of men and animals, in stone or wood and other materials; some of them may be talking and others not.
Glaucon: This is a strange sort of comparison and these are strange prisoners.
Socrates: They are like ourselves. They see nothing but their own shadows, or one another's, which the fire throws on the walls of the cave. And so too with the things carried past. If they were able to talk to one another, wouldn't they think that in naming the shadows they were naming the things that went by? And if their prison sent back an echo whenever one of those who went by said a word, what could they do but take it for the voice of the shadow?
Glaucon: By Zeus, they would.
Socrates: The only real things for them would be the shadows of the puppets.
Glaucon: Certainly.
Socrates: Now see how it will be if something frees them from their chains: when one is freed and forced to get on his feet and turn his head and walk and look towards the light – and all this hurts, and because the light is too bright, he isn't able to see the things whose shadows he saw before – what will he answer, if someone says that all he has seen till now was false and a trick, but that now he sees more truly? And if someone points out to him the things going by and asks him to name them, won't he be at a loss? And won't he take the shadows he saw before as more real than these things?
Glaucon: Much more real.
Socrates: And if he were forced to look straight at the light itself, wouldn't he start back with pained eyes? And if someone pulled him up the rough and hard ascent and forced him out into the light of the sun, wouldn't he be angry? And wouldn't his eyes be too full of light to make out even one of the things we say are real?
Glaucon: Yes, that would be so at first.
Socrates: He would need to get used to the light before he could see things up there. At first he would see shadows best, and after that reflections in still water of men and other things, and only later these things themselves. Then he would be ready to look at the moon and stars, and would see the sky by night better than the sun and the sun's light by day. So, at last, I take it, he'd be able to look upon the sun itself, and see it not through seemings and images of itself in water and away from its true place, but in its own field and as it truly is.
Glaucon: So.
Socrates: And with that he will discover that it is the sun that gives the seasons and the years, and it is the chief in the filed of the things which are seen, and in some way the cause even of all the things he had been seeing before. If he now went back in his mind to where he was living before, and to what his brother slaves took to be wisdom there, wouldn't he be happy at the change and pity them?
Glaucon: Certainly, he would.3
Although the purpose of the allegory is to illustrate the "four states of mind", the two degrees or kinds of belief and two degrees of knowledge, it does at the same time serve to show the basic distinction between what is taken for reality and what is really reality. Although Plato doesn't talk in terms of Appearance and Reality, clearly the allegory of the cave can be interpreted loosely in these terms. The cave is the realm of appearances, for the prisoners see nothing but shadows and take these for real objects. It is a virtual world, like the world of the Matrix where things are not what they seem. All is insubstantial and deceptive. But when a prisoner is released and dragged to the surface, and is shown the sun and all that the sun illuminates, then he knows the insubstantiality of all that he has seen before – recognizes all that he has previously perceived as mere shadow and falseness. At first he is blinded by the revelation, but soon his senses become accustomed to the real world and he is anxious to return to his erstwhile companions and tell them of the sun-drenched surface. But they think him crazy, think him mad. And why should they believe him if they have no real grasp of what it is he is trying to tell them!
For Plato it is moral as well as an epistemological tale. The sun represents Goodness and the prisoner's journey to the surface the arduous journey of the human soul seeking out Truth. For our purposes, though, the cave is the Matrix and all that we perceive therein is a deception – an appearance of reality – a virtual reality – but not reality itself. It takes Morbius and his friends to drag Neo kicking and screaming out of the cave before he can distinguish Appearance and Reality. In this case there seems to be no Goodness, no sun to illuminate. Reality here is altogether black and horrific – a world ruined by aggression and warfare, a world dominated by intelligent machines feeding off actively engaged human consciousnesses farmed in reservoirs of fluid nutrients.4 Reality is a nightmare which drives at least one of the 'awakened' to prefer the world of Appearance to that of Reality. It's Plato in reverse!
But we can move away from parables, myths, allegories and popular twentieth century movie fictions to the more objective view of scientific investigations. What has scientific research to tell us about how things are and how they appear to be? In the end science can tell us very little, but it can make us wonder about the nature of Reality – that is, of what lies outside of ourselves – of what might be called 'the objective universe'.
During the 1930s a young fourteen year old girl known as J.V. had the following experience. It is summer and the day is perfect. J.V. is walking through a meadow of tall grass, following her brothers who are some distance ahead. Suddenly a shadow falls across her path and there is a rustling of grass. J.V. turns and sees a faceless man, his face sponged out by the bright sunshine, and he is holding something indistinct but writhing. He says: "How would you like to get into this bag with the snakes?"
The strange, but important, thing is that J.V. Is not walking through the grass meadow, but is in fact lying, fully conscious, on an operating table in the Montreal Neurological Institute, and standing over her Wilder Penfield is exploring her exposed brain with electronic probes.5 He is, in fact, trying to find a way of relieving J.V. of her violent epileptic seizures.
So, the situation is this. A fourteen year old girl who suffers from violent epileptic seizures is lying in an operating theatre. She is fully conscious and her temporal lobe is being explored by a neurologist who is using electrodes attached to an EEG machine. In order for the physician to find the area of the brain responsible for the seizures, the girl must guide him by reporting what sensations she has as he probes the specific surface area of her brain. As Penfield touches a certain part of the temporal lobe suddenly, and with complete vividness, J.V. finds herself in the grass meadow being terrorized by the snake-bag-man.
The encounter with the snake-bag-man had actually occurred seven years previously and although J.V. was not physically harmed, she had been very frightened and the event had come to haunt her dreams. The trauma of the event came to be inextricably linked with the epileptic fits.
Penfield's experiment is of fundamental importance because it shows that the mental life (at least part of the mental life) of an individual can be mapped onto the cerebral cortex (which is the most recently evolved layer of the human brain and associated with higher order consciousness). By placing his electrodes on other parts of J.V's brain he managed to evoke other experiences – some of a vivid memory type, others of mere colour sensations etc. In principle at least, it seemed that a sufficiently wise and adept physician could so manipulate the brain to produce, in rich and vivid detail, a whole 'life' of experience, all completely lucid and coherent.
This idea of brain manipulation is not new – it can be traced back to at least Descarte's discussion of the logical possibility of an omnipotent and malevolent demon which deliberately deceives human minds into thinking and doing the things they think they think and do. In its most modern incarnation the deceiving demon scenario is known as 'brains in vats' and one can clearly see that this is the premise which underlies the narrative of 'The Matrix'.
Here we get to the heart of the matter. Consider the following: one night you fall deeply asleep. Into your room, silently, enters a team of surgeons who administer a general anaesthetic. They shave your head and cut away the top of your skull. Now with consummate skill and patience they sever your optic nerves, all other nerves entering your brain and finally the brain stem leading to the column of nerve fibres which run the length of your backbone. Carefully they lift your brain from your head and place in a vat of fluid nutrients. This will keep your brain (and you) alive for the time being. But the surgeons have to act quickly – they need to get you and your brain back to their laboratory before you die. A helicopter waits outside and you and your abductors rush away into the demonic night.
Once in the laboratory you (your brain) still in your bath of nutrients, are prepared for 'reconnection' to a sensory input machine. Previously this has been your organic body, but now it is a sophisticated computer which will 'feed' your brain with impressions. With precision and infinite care every nerve fibre which enters your brain is attached to an equally fine electrode which in turn is linked directly to the computer. There are now millions of these electrodes hooking you up the computer which wit begin soon to send electrical impulses into your brain in specific patters, just as your original nervous system did. The result wilt be that when you wake up you will be in bed. You will stretch and yawn, get up, stagger to the bathroom, oblate, look in the mirror and inspect your face as one does, get dressed, breakfast, kiss your loved ones goodbye, leave the house, feel the sun on your face and the wind in your hair, suffer the slight indigestion from the rushed cornflakes and toast, feel apprehensive about the examination you are going to sit in one hour's time and blush because the girl next door waves. You do and feel all these things. But do you? You certainly feel things, but you do not do anything because you are now a brain in a vat
– but you don't know this. Cleverly there has been (from your point of view) complete continuity of experience from the moment you went to sleep to the moment you wake up. Your present experiences are entirely consistent with those experiences of yesterday. When you went to sleep you passed through your initial dream sleep into unconsciousness. During this period of unconsciousness you underwent (without your prior knowledge) serious surgery – your brain being removed efficiently and carefully into a vat of sustaining fluids and your nervous system replaced by an advanced computer. The period of unconsciousness then passes into a dream sleep and eventually you wake up and begin a new day. As far as consciousness is concerned the period from the moment you fell asleep to the moment you wake up is seamless.
The day passes well enough and you now find yourself attending a Decimus Society meeting. You are sitting down and you are feeling the slight headiness of alcohol and of trying to attend to the ideas being presented. But there is no Decimus Society, or paper, or seat. Everything that has happened to you today has been illusory –everything you have seen and felt and heard and smelt has been an illusion. Yes, you have been thinking, but the sensory input stimuli you have received correspond to nothing outside of your brain.
Can you prove otherwise? Pinch yourself You feel pain. But this proves nothing – it is all fed to you – it is all part of the illusion. So where does this leave us? It leaves us with the impossibility of proving that we are not brains in vats! Now, if this is the case, how can we justify our belief in an external world – that is, how can we justify our belief that a world exists independently of our perception of it and one which causes those perceptions?
Your consciousness should now be transfixed; could this all be a dream from which I might at any moment awake, or could this all be a dream from which I wit never awake? In the 4th century BC Chuang-tzu dreamt he was a butterfly – but then when he awoke he wondered if he might not be a butterfly dreaming he was a man.
Some dreams are so vivid and indeed lucid that one can never be sure that what you are experiencing under these conditions is dream or reality. And of course this is the problem – there does not appear to be any sure test to distinguish vivid/lucid dreaming from perceptions received in the 'real' world under normal circumstances. On the other hand we generally have no problem in making the distinction because our dreams have that quality – that 'dream' quality which is sufficiently remote from our waking experience to assure us that what is dreamt is not real.
But the brains-in-vats experiment is different. Here what your brain experiences is not a dream at all, in the strict sense. Your brain is awake and asleep during the normal sequence of events, as it would be if it still nestled inside your head. The difference is that when your brain is awake it sees things, hears things, smells things, tastes things and touches things – but you have no eyes, ears, nose, tongue or limbs!
Descartes discusses this kind of perceptual deception in his Meditations.6 In this work he supposes that all of what we take to be the external world, including our bodies, is an illusion deliberately created by an 'evil genius'.
"I will suppose that... 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 judgement. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses, but as falsely believing that I have all these things."
Descartes' purpose in devising this thought experiment was not to seriously suggest that this indeed was the case; he merely presents the scenario as a logical possibility because he is interested in arriving at some feature of human experience which could not possibly, under any circumstances, be put in doubt, and once arrived at this feature would constitute certain knowledge and from this foundation the rest of reality could be derived.
This kind of demonic deception is clearly an abstract or metaphysical fantasy physically conceived or realized, at least in part, by the Penfield experiments. Penfield, of course, was a neurosurgeon attempting to alleviate the symptoms of violent epileptic seizures, not an 'evil genius'. By probing areas of the patient's cerebral cortex he was able to produce in the patient's mind experiences more vivid and real than mere dream or memory – and all the while the patient was fully conscious and reporting back. In this sense each patient had the experience of a dual consciousness in which he was aware of lying on the operating table whilst reliving, in perfect detail, events of the past.
It takes little imagination to conceive of the next possible step of sensory and perceptual manipulation of the kind that lies at the core of 'The Matrix' narrative. If neurological research continues apace, with its present rate of success, then it should be possible to probe not only the regions of the cerebral cortex but also the deeper regions of the mammalian and reptilian brain – the cerebellum and brain stem. Such comprehensive probing would throw into doubt all of our perceptions. Maybe my mind is at this moment being manipulated so that I think comprehensive mind control is only a future possibility when in fact it is a present reality, and this is not the end of the 2Oth century but the middle of the 22nd.
These speculations throw up what philosophers call 'the problem of knowledge' which might be rephrased as 'how do we know anything for sure?'
If our minds are our brains – that is, if it is the case that what we are as psychological beings simply is the operation of our brains – that brain activity and experience are one and the same thing, then the whole of our experience is equivocal. Why? Because there are several explanations for that experience. We suppose that the whole of our experience is a stream of nerve impulses, a flood of electrochemical discharges washing over and through our brains, and we commonly suppose that such impulses are caused by objects existing outside of our brains – outside of our bodies, independently of our perceptions. So, there is a tree out there in the external world and I do not see this object until a complex series of physical events take place on the macro and microscopic level at or near the speed of light. I 'see' the tree when my temporal lobe is in a certain physical state. This is what we assume and take for granted. But Descartes' meditations, Penfield's experiments, brain-in-vats fantasies –all these point to alternative explanations of human experience, explanations of equal explanatory potency. If we are inclined to dismiss the 'evil genius' explanation or the brains-in-vats explanation on grounds of implausibility, then perhaps we should look to our prejudices and predisposition for the need for truth and certainty.
Make sure you understand the puzzle. What is at stake here is the credibility of the positivist ideal that everything can be determined scientifically. Science is essentially an empirical enterprise – that is, it places great weight upon the evidence supplied to us via the senses. However, the brains-in-vats thought experiment undermines the very idea of sensory evidence. It is impossible to know that you are not a brain in a vat on the grounds of sensory evidence. And if you believe you are not a brain in a vat then this belief cannot be disproven, empirically. Such a belief is said to be 'evidence-transcendent'.
So, we cannot know for sure whether the external world exists. Our knowledge of anything, therefore, is severely limited and may in fact be entirely false. Einstein and Leopold Infeld put it this way:
"In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could (my emphasis) be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison."7
From the epistemological point of view we are like men groping in the dark, trying to make sense of our sensory evidence and hoping that our emerging picture of reality is accurate. We can never be certain about our models of reality – they may all be false. We must, therefore, be satisfied with what can be achieved epistemologically – and that is the coherence and practical value of our models. We can never be sure that our models correspond to reality out there (assuming it is even meaningful to talk of such a thing), but if our models cohere - if they make sense, have explanatory potency and issue in practical and technological spin-offs, then why worry too much about whether they are true or false. Do they work? This at least is the more unreflective and positivist key question. Besides, the models we live with and direct our lives by may well be more comfortable than the reality that lies outside and beyond them. In 'The Matrix' one of the 'awakened' finds reality so oppressive he turns on his comrades-in-arms, saying he prefers the deception of the machines – at least in the deception he can eat good meat and drink fine wines and admire beautiful women.
Footnotes
Technically it doesn't mailer what this induced world looks like. Human brains
that have known no other world will take whatever perceptions they experience
as 'natural'. What matters is the complexity and richness of experience for
it is the richness and depth of experience that generates the electrical activity,
not the specific content.
Twist here is this: that the human characters who have escaped the machines
and now live in and out of The Matrix as part of their offensive drive against
tyranny, might yet be still plugged in. Their sense of freedom and their minor
victories against the machines might all be manufactured by The Matrix. They
think they are unplugged but how do they know? Perhaps there never was a war
between humans and machines in the first place – this also is part of
The Matrix.
Book V11 (514 -517). "'The Republic of Plato' A Version in Simplified English",
by I.A.Richards., Litt.D.
The ethical implications of how a superior species might treat an inferior one
are discussed in Meat- Eaters Ride the Waves of Phlegethon by NF Lambkin, Proceedings
of 'The Decimus Society' 1999.
Penfield, Wilder. The Cerebral Cortex in Man in "Archives of Neurology
and Psychiatry", 40:3 (Sept. 1938).
Descartes, Rene. Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, 1641. (See in particular
the First Meditation: OF THE THINGS OF WHICH WE MAY DOUBT)
Einstein, Albert, & Leopold Infeld. The Evolution of Physics. New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1938.