Asymmetrical Information

I saw the last Matrix movie. Save your money. It wasn't worth it.

As for philosophy, those guys are on an obsessive compulsive search to get an answer to "the big question...you know, about life, the universe, everything." Well, the answer is 42. That is all you need to know. Anything else will just drive you batty thinking about it. That's why your brain hurts when you read articles like this.

The irony is that the "reality" of The Matrix is "experienced" as you sit in a large test tube while essentially an analog program is played for you. The only difference is that the program is experienced collectively.

Is it irony, or the point? Is it a metaphore or an analog? Epistemological or political?

Brain cramp or BS?

Either way, I enjoy your blog.

I personally thought Steyn had the best final word on the whole Matrix thing:

"Is Matrix a myth for the ages? No. I doubt it will resonate through the end of the decade. Why then did so many intellectuals go ga-ga for it? Because it confirms their view of the world: huge corporations manufacture a reality that sedates the masses and only a handful of supersmart humans know enough to spot it. Needless to say, the film series confirming the great thinkers’ worldview is itself made by a huge corporation, which suggests they – and not the philosophy profs – are the really supersmart guys. Or, as they would say, The Ones."

"For over a quarter of a century, philosophers had been talking about “brains in vats”—the idea that all our experiences might be delusions produced by electronic stimulations of the brain."

Er, right. VR/Holodeck/"Brain in a vat" type stories go back more than 50 years that I know of, probably much longer. "What is real" vs. "What is illusion" vs. "Higher Reality" philosophy discussions go back millenia. The only thing new about "Matrix" is that they had great special effects. Even the first movie didn't make sense - Humans as BATTERIES?? Give me a break! Now if the machines needed biological components for their computers, or keeping humans alive was part of their core programming, that would be something else.

It was fun to watch, but hardly original.

VR,

I think the "brain in vat" notion is distinguishable from other, older postulations since it provides a plausible (at least in theory) mechanistic explanation for such "reality as illusion" notions. I always thought of most of that philosophical stuff you refer to as a little intriguing, but ultimately uninteresting since it was completely metaphysical and thus limited to eternally be the province of undergrad coffee shop babbling.

However, suppose we were all just a bunch of brains in vats receiving electrical signals. I can see how that would actually be possible w/in the normal physical contraints of direct sensory world, and that realness makes it a somewhat chilling idea.

At least, IMHO.

Well actually no-one has ever suggested we AREN'T brains in vats recieving electrical signals. The question is whether we are in mobile vats we call "skulls" or something else.

The idea of brains in vats goes back, in a way, to Descartes and his famous demon (the argument that resulted in "cogito ergo sum" - there's some things that a brain in a vat can't be deceived about).

The Economist is (for once) right; although the general concept obviously owes much to Descartes' "malicious spirit" (and arguably to Plato's cave), the specific image of a brain in a vat dates back to an argument Hilary Putnam came up with about a quarter of a century ago.

Putnam's specific argument was one about language, not metaphysics. His point (brutally oversimplified), is that if one has a "causal theory of reference" (that our words refer to things by virtue of the causal connections between things and our behaviour), then it is impossible to coherently express the sentence "I am a brain in a vat", because if you were, then you wouldn't have the right kind of causal connections, and thus you wouldn't be able to refer to brains or vats.

This isn't a bit of speculation about the metaphysical possibility that we are all brains in vats, which indeed cannot be logically ruled out. It's just a (rather controversial) argument that the very use of language presupposes a lot of shared concepts and reality, so that when someone claims "I might be a brain in the vat", it is not possible for us to take seriously the idea that he is literally claiming this.

Bishop Berkeley? (1685 - 1753)

I'm not sure why anybody bothers to talk about whether reality is "real" or a superb illusion crafted to make us think it is real. As far as I can tell, reality has seemed real. Whether it is or not is moot unless there is some way to find out for sure. Given that (at least so far) there is not, talking about it is rather pointless.

It's like creationists who say that God made the universe 6,000 years ago but made it look like it was billions of years old. Okay, so what's the difference? Shouldn't we play along?

I guess philosophers have to have something to do.

Bolie IV

As a Solipsist I am very disappointed with myself vis-a-vis the third movie.

Reminds me of a quote (tho I can't remember who said it):

"I am a solipsist. I wonder why more people aren't?"

Here's an old argument of mine against reality being a simulation:

In the real world things like the strength, elasticity, heat capacity and colour of materials are all determined by the laws of quantum mechanics as applied to electrons and nuclei. In principle you could deduce all of these properties just from the laws of motion of the particles, but that would take quite ridiculous amounts of computer power. What's more, in everyday life you never notice all these things are derived from the same underlying cause. In a simulation it would be good enough to just give objects believable properties by fiat: you could just say that the object reflects light in some particular way, and bounces in some manner when you drop it, and breaks if you hit it hard enough. This would need much less computing power than simulating things in exacting detail - it's just a refinement of the way computer games work today.

Now, if scientists in the simulation start studying how things work, then they'd only find the rules that the writers of the simulation had imposed. The rules for how materials reflect light wouldn't have anything to do with the rules for how hard they are, which in turn would have nothing to do with their thermal properties. All the measurements might be approximately the same as the values that would be measured for real materials built of electrons and protons and neutrons, but more careful experiments would disprove that theory, because they'd track how the kludged-together rules work in the simulation, not the actual real-world physics that the rules have been chosen to approximate. Every type of phenomenon would have it's own branch of science, and there wouldn't be the sort of beautiful fitting together of diverse fields that we see in our world. There simply wouldn't be any underlying structure.

Rich,

That was something I always wondered about The Matrix. Thinking about it, I had eventually concluded that the way the machines built the Matrix was to emulate the real world from the sub atomic level.

But then I remembered what Morpheus said in the first movie: (paraphrasing) "The Matrix, like any other compouter program, is built upon a system of rules. Rules like gravity."

That sounds a lot more like your "kludged-together" system of design. It bothered me then. It bothers me now. But mostly b/c I don't have better things to do.

Rich,

That was something I always wondered about The Matrix. Thinking about it, I had eventually concluded that the way the machines built the Matrix was to emulate the real world from the sub atomic level.

But then I remembered what Morpheus said in the first movie: (paraphrasing) "The Matrix, like any other compouter program, is built upon a system of rules. Rules like gravity."

That sounds a lot more like your "kludged-together" system of design. It bothered me then. It bothers me now. But mostly b/c I don't have better things to do.

I always wondered about the reason why, at least according to Reloaded, we needed all these untold legions of programs to control everything in the Matrix world. With good enough modelling, you'd only need one to model the entire world, maybe a few extras for whatever reason (Agents, etc.).

It definitely does seem like if you were quantum physicist circa 1999 within the Matrix that you'd be able to figure out that for whatever reason, scientific "law" got broken all the time in ways that were computationally simpler.

But, who knows. The world inside the Matrix is in some kind of weird temporal stasis so that it's always 1999, so maybe they erase the memories of scientists every time they have a new breakthrough. Or maybe there are no scientists. Seems like in the Matrix world the most intellectual activity one can do is hack programs.

I heard a rumor the Matrix is actually the next version of Microsoft Windows.

They had a great opportunity to wrap in some philosophy in the last film and the Wachowskis let themselves down.

Perhaps the question they should have sought to answer was "when is enough?"

(Answer: one movie. thank you kindly.)

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