'What's wrong with the matrix'
I got this e-mail from my mom:
You might be interested in a nice article in May 19 The New Yorker that discusses academic philosophy and the premise of the "Matrix" movies. (I know, I'm a couple of weeks late with this, but I just ran across the article.) It's called "What's wrong with the Matrix" and it's by Adam Gopnik. Some highlights: For the past four years, a lot of people have been obsessed with the movie "The Matrix." As the sequel, "The Matrix Reloaded," arrived in theatres this week, it was obvious that the strange, violent science-fiction film, by the previously more or less unknown Wachowski brothers, had already inspired both a cult and a craze. (And had made a lot of money into the bargain, enough to fuel two sequels; "Matrix Revolutions" is supposed to be out in November.) There hasn't been anything quite like it since "2001: A Space Odyssey," which had a similar mix of mysticism, solemnity, and mega-effects. Shortly after its mostly unheralded release, in 1999, "The Matrix" became an egghead extase. The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek's latest work, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real," took its title from a bit of dialogue in the film; college courses on epistemology have used "The Matrix" as a chief point of reference; and there are at least three books devoted to teasing out its meanings. ("Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in 'The Matrix' " is a typical title.) If the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, whose books-"The Gulf War Did Not Take Place" is one-popularized the view that reality itself has become a simulation, has not yet embraced the film it may be because he is thinking of suing for a screen credit. (The "desert of the real" line came from him.) The movie, it seemed, dramatized a host of doubts and fears and fascinations, some half as old as time, some with a decent claim to be postmodern. To a lot of people, it looked like a fable: our fable. [. . .] Long before the first "Matrix" was released, of course, there was a lot of fictional life in the idea that life is a fiction. The finest of American speculators, Philip K. Dick, whose writing has served as the basis of some of the more ambitious science-fiction movies of the past couple of decades ("Blade Runner," "Total Recall," "Minority Report"), was preoccupied with two questions: how do we know that a robot doesn't have consciousness, and how do we know that we can trust our own memories and perceptions? "Blade Runner" dramatized the first of these two problems, and "The Matrix" was an extremely and probably self-consciously Dickian dramatization of the second. In one of Dick's most famous novels, for instance, "The Three Stigmata of Palmer Erdrich," a colony of earth-men on Mars, trapped in a miserable life, take an illegal drug that transports them into "Perky Pat Layouts"-miniature Ken and Barbie doll houses, where they live out their lives in an idealized Southern California. Like Poe, Dick took the science of his time, gave it a paranoid twist, and then became truly paranoid himself. In a long, half-crazy book called "Valis," he proposed that the world we live in is a weird scramble of information, that a wicked empire has produced thousands of years of fake history, and that the fabric of reality is being ripped by a battle between good and evil. The Dick scholar Erik Davis points out that, in a sequel to "Valis," Dick even used the term "matrix" in something like a Wachowskian context. In the academy, too, the age-old topic of radical doubt has acquired renewed life in recent years. In fact, what's often called the "brain-in-the-vat problem" has practically become its own academic discipline. The philosopher Daniel Dennett invoked it to probe the paradoxes of identity. Robert Nozick, famous as a theorist of the minimal state, used it to ask whether you would agree to plug into an "experience machine" that would give you any experience you desired-writing a great book, making a friend-even though you'd really just be floating in a vat with electrodes attached to your brain. Nozick's perhaps too hasty assumption was that you wouldn't want to plug in. His point was that usually something has to happen in the world, not just in our heads, for our desires to be satisfied. The guerrilla warriors in "The Matrix," confirming the point, are persuaded that the Matrix is wrong because it isn't "real," and we intuitively side with them. Yet, unlike Nozick, we also recognize that it might be a lot more comfortable to remain within the virtual universe. That's the decision made by a turncoat among the guerrillas, Cypher. (Agents of the "machine world" seal the pact with him over dinner at a posh restaurant: "I know this steak doesn't exist," Cypher tells them, enjoying every calorie-free bite. "I know that when I put it in my mouth the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.") A key feature of "The Matrix" is that all those brains are wired together-that they really can interact with one another. And it was, improbably, the Harvard philosopher and mathematician Hilary Putnam who, a couple of decades back, proposed the essential Matrixian setup: a bunch of brains in a vat hooked up to a machine that was "programmed to give them all a collective hallucination, rather than a number of separate unrelated hallucinations." Putnam used his Matrix to make a tricky argument about meaning: since words mean what they normally refer to within a community, a member of the vatted-brain community might be telling the truth if it said it was looking at a tree, or, for that matter, at Monica Bellucci. That's because the brains in that vat aren't really speaking our language. What they are speaking, he said, is "vat-English," because by "a tree" they don't mean a tree; they mean, roughly, a tree image. Presumably, by "Monica Bellucci" they mean "the image of Monica Bellucci in 'Malena,' " rather than the image of Monica Bellucci in " Matrix Reloaded," brains-in-vats having taste and large DVD collections. Like most thought experiments, the brain-in-the-vat scenario was intended to sharpen our intuitions. But recurrent philosophical examples tend to have a little symbolic halo around them, a touch of their time-those angels dancing on the head of a pin were dancing to a thirteenth-century rhythm. The fact that the brain-in-a-vat literature has grown so abundant, the vat so vast, suggests that it has a grip on our imagination as a story in itself. And there, in retrospect, might lie the secret of the first "Matrix": beyond the balletic violence, beyond the cool stunts, the idea that the world we live in isn't real is one that speaks right now to a general condition. For the curious thing about the movie was that everybody could grasp the basic setup instantly. Whether it occurs in cult science fiction or academic philosophy, we seem to be fascinated by the possibility that our world might not exist. We're not strangers to the feeling that, for much of our lives, we might just as well be brains-in-vats, floating in an amniotic fluid of simulations. It doesn't just strike us as plausibly weird. It strikes us as weirdly plausible. [. . .] |
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