Review of "The Matrix and Philosophy"
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SECTION 1: HOW DO YOU KNOW?1. "Computers, Caves, and Oracles: Neo and Socrates"William Irwin(Assistant Professor of Philosophy at King's College, Pennsylvania)This is the editor's own ten-page introduction to the book. Apart from a general spiel on film as an introduction to philosophy, there is a comparison of The Matrix to the specific philosophy of Plato. This is an unfortunate choice, as the situation depicted in The Matrix is completeley tangential to what Plato wrote about. In Plato's scheme of things, there is a highly abstract world of real 'Forms' or 'Ideals', and what we observe in everday life consists of imperfect copies of those Ideals. For example, when I look at my desk and chair, Plato says, I am observing imperfect copies of the ideal chair and ideal table. The latter are, according to Plato, somehow more truly real because they are unchanging. The kind of situation that confronts us in The Matrix is quite different. A person in the Matrix world sees, not an imperfect copy of the real world, but a wholly false world. Plato would be a poor choice for any purpose nowadays, since his writings never achieved the logical rigour and conceptual clarity of modern philosophical writing. In respect of The Matrix, however, Plato is just plain irrelevant.
2. "Skepticism, Morality, and The Matrix"Gerald J. Erion & Barry Smith(Erion is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Medaille College. Smith is Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo.)In their chapter, "Skepticism, Morality, and The Matrix", Erion & Smith present a conventional argument against 'scepticism'. It is an argument of the kind that students have been listening to since J.L. Austin lectured on the subject in Oxford in the 1950s. In a nutshell, the argument is as follows.
As a preamble on terms, let us note that the word 'scepticism' (or 'skepticism' in America) merely means denial that a certain class of things exists, and 'realism' means the opposite -- that is, the assertion of their existence. Of course, you can be a sceptic or a realist about different things, at the same time. For example, a materialist is a realist of the material world and a sceptic of the mental world. Whereas a subjective idealist is vice versa: she is a realist of the mental world and a sceptic of the material one. Erion & Smith are using the academic shorthand of the unqualified word 'skepticism' to mean scepticism of the material world that our everyday perceptions seem to depict. For example, in everyday speech, I could legitimately claim that I am sitting at my desk typing this review into my laptop. But, in the way Erion & Smith use the word, a 'sceptic' would deny the genuine existence of the laptop computer and the desk, and in fact the whole world that contains this building. Now, the basic flaw in the argument that Austin promulgated and Erion & Smith regurgitated, is that they conflate actually knowing something with legitimately making a claim to knowing something. This difference -- between (a) actually knowing something and (b) merely legitimately making a claim to knowing something -- may at first seem a minor detail. But it is actually a philosophically crucial distinction, and glossing over this distinction has given Erion & Smith their platform for their attack on The Matrix. To illustrate this, consider the following scenario. I am on my daily commute to Farnborough and a fellow passenger asks, "When will we arrive at Newbury?", and I look at her blankly and inform her that she's on the wrong line, and that this train does not go to Newbury. Incredulous, she asserts that this is the Newbury train. To this I say, "Look, I travel on this train every day. We have just passed Woking and we're coming to Brookwood. I know that I am on a train going to Farnborough, not Newbury.". This is an entirely legitimate claim to knowledge, of precisely the sort that we may make in everyday life, or in the law courts, or in scientific debates. Yet it does not entail that I really did know that I was on the Farnborough train. For all I knew, Martians might have come in the night, dug up Farnborough and Newbury, and swapped the two towns around. Or I might be dreaming the whole episode. (By a bizarre coincidence, on the day after I wrote the previous paragraph, the train in fact failed to stop at Farnborough, and sailed straight through -- but to Basingstoke, not Newbury.) The key point is that, at the time when I made my knowledge claim, I was correctly following the social rules for using the English language. It was a legitimate claim to knowlegde. Or, as Wittgenstein would say, it was a valid move in the language-game. This use of the verb 'know' to make a knowledge claim is akin to the use of the verb 'own' to make a property claim. If I have paid a large sum of money through an estate agent and been given the keys to a house, then I can legitimately make the claim that I 'own' the house. That, however, does not entail that I really do own it. The estate agent might have been a confidence trickster, or there might have been a clerical error in the land registry. I mention this analogy to try to demystify the logic that applies to the verb 'to know'. For some reason, 'knowledge' and 'truth' get tied up with a bunch of metaphysical notions, whereas owning real estate manages to avoid such confusion. Erion & Smith correctly note the following empirical observations, which I do not disagree with. (a) We have a myriad beliefs about the everyday world, which we are quite convinced of, and we successfully make use of them -- day in, day out, throughout our lives. For example, that the sun rises in the morning and sets in the evening; that if you drop something then it will fall to the ground; and (in my case) that the 7:15 train from Waterloo goes to Farnborough. (b) We often make explicit claims that those beliefs are knowledge and, more often, we make statements that imply that we are regarding those beliefs as knowledge. (c) It is entirely normal in our society to make those knowledge claims. Their big mistake is to infer from those empirical data that we genuinely do have the knowledge that we claim to have. But this is simply a non sequitur: their conclusion just doesn't follow from their premises. I can, with social legitimacy, claim to know that I am in sitting at my desk -- but, in order for us to infer that that knowledge claim is true (i.e. that I really do know what I claim to know), we would also have to secure the premise that I really am sitting at the desk. But we obviously do not possess that information with certainty, nor could we ever possess it, nor can we ever possess the information that any other physical situation is such-and-thus -- and we cannot possess that information precisely because the total ensemble of our life-long experience could be generated by a virtual-reality system, such as the Matrix. It might help to clarify the argument if we get a more focused notion of what the verb 'to know' means. The standard approximation to a definition is this: 'knowledge' is justified true belief. That is to say, if (a) you believe that something is the case, and (b) you have good reason to believe it, and (c) it is true, then: we can say that you 'know' it. If you drop any of those criteria, then it is no longer what we call 'knowledge'. On the one hand, if you just take a guess, and that guess turns out to be true, then we do not say that you really 'knew' it. On the other hand, if you have a belief that you hold for good reasons, but it turns out to be false, then again we would not describe that as knowledge. Unfortunately, this approximation to a definition will not do as a full definition. We can easily think up odd cases, where the criteria are met but it is still not knowledge. The following is a paraphrase of an example that Michael Lockwood gave me: Mary wants to watch the soccer game at three o'clock. The match is between her home town of Cardiff and their rivals Aberdare, but she gets home late, and misses the kick-off: she switches on the television at five past three, and sees that a game of soccer has just started. According to the TV schedule, the game that is being broadcast is that day's match between Cardiff and Aberdare. As the game progresses, she recognises various players in the team. So, she forms the rational belief that she is watching the live broadcast. At the end of the game, she sees Cardiff win, and naturally forms the rational belief that Cardiff have won that afternoon's game. Unbeknown to Mary, however, the outdoor cameras are out of order, and that day's match was not televised. Instead, the television company broadcast last year's match instead, to fill the gap in the day's TV schedule. By chance, however, Cardiff did indeed win the match that day. So, we have the paradox that Mary has a rationally justified belief, which happens to be true -- but we would not say that she 'knows' that Cardiff won the game that day. We can add successive refinements to the proposed definition, in order to capture more precisely what we intend the verb 'to know' to mean, but that would take us off-topic. My point here is only to warn that the rule 'justified true belief' is a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowledge. The crucial element in the meaning of 'knowledge' is this: what is 'known' must be a fact. Your belief that something is such-and-thus must be true in order for it to count as knowledge. Now, since our observations of the world are all experiences, it follows that we are never in a position to determine the truth or falsity of any physical state of affairs. Remember that any physical events in the outside world are only inferred from your conscious observations. There is always the logical possibility that those experiences were produced in some way other than by the physical objects that they seem to portray. I have a visual experience of the interior of the desk in my library, but that could be produced by a dream, or an hallucination -- or by a virtual reality such as the Matrix. It is impossible for me determine whether this visual experience is produced by a 'physical library'. Although I may believe that I am in a library, I could never check whether this belief is true or not, hence I could never infer that the belief was 'knowledge'. To be sure, I can reach out and touch the books, and I can ask someone else to come in and tell me whether they too can see and feel the books, but as this could all be a virtual reality generated by something like the Matrix, then all these observations still fail to prove that I am in my library. We have, I believe, refuted Erion & Smith's claim on page 23: "Thus, you do indeed know (in the fullest sense of the term) many things about yourself and the world around you; your beliefs about these things are both true and thoroughly justified through your everyday experiences. You know, for instance, that you are not currently dreaming. You know that Descartes (like Elvis) is dead. And you know The Matrix is just a film."In fact, we have seen that the premises they give do not support their conclusion. We have also seen that their conclusion cannot be reached by any other line of argument. We are, as it were, locked in a sense-datum prison and we can never, even in principle, determine the existence of a physical world or what the contents of that world might be. The writers make some other comments to support their case, so let us examine them. On page 24, they write: "Bernard Williams ... soothes our fears of being locked in a perceptual Matrix-like dream-prison by pointing out that the fact that we can make a distinction between dreams and waking experiences itself presupposes that we are aware of both types of experience and of the difference between them."Erion & Smith conclude: "Thus, we can make sense of the distinction between waking and dreaming itself only if we really are awake sometimes, and since we can distinguish the two kinds of experience, it follows that there can be no serious reason to worry that our lives might be made up entirely of dream sequences that never end."Again, this is a non sequitur. This kind of reasoning is valid only for qualitative differences, not for logical or structural differences. Between waking and dreaming experiences, we are aware of systematic differences of content between certain periods of time. On the one hand, there are certain extended periods (called 'waking life'), which possess strong internal consistencies that recur over successive periods; and, on the other hand, there are short periods of chaotic and inconsistent experiences (called 'dreaming'). (In addition, the latter are preceded by experiences of going to sleep and followed by experiences of waking up.) The former ('waking life' episodes) can be modeled by a single physical world, which is expected to carry on in a consistent manner into the future, and is expected to be consistent with what we learn of other people's experiences. Hence we associate with the notion of 'waking life' an assumption that those experiences are produced by an external, non-mental reality, whereas 'dreaming' experience is produced by the mind. Now, common words such as 'dreaming' and 'waking' acquire their meaning from everyday use rather than the dictates of philosophers, so there is no explicit delineation of which components of this complex meaning should count as the 'definition'. Nevertheless, the central element of the meaning of 'waking life' is that the apparent physical world is supposed to be the cause of the orderliness of the waking experience. Therefore, this is normally construed as the essential and necessary condition. Another reason for not regarding the presence or absence of orderliness as the differentiating mark between waking and dreaming is that dreams vary in their degree of coherence -- from complete chaos to complete consistency throughout the duration of the dream. That is to say, the presence of chaos cannot be a defining feature of the dream. So, when someone says that a certain experience is a dream, what does that claim mean? The effective conventional interpretation is that the experience was not produced by the physical world as depicted in that dream. Therefore, this concept of a dream is indeed intelligible, even to someone whose whole life has been a dream. Erion & Smith assert that you must have had both dreaming and waking experiences to be able to understand the distinction between dreaming and waking. But we have now seen that that is not so. Since the difference is abstract, it can be understood both by someone who has never dreamed and by someone who has never been awake. As an aside, we might note that any argument of the same type -- i.e. that followed Erion & Smith's logic -- would be valid only if we were discussing qualitative features of experience. For instance, you could not understand the distinction between 'blue' and 'red' unless you had had the visual experiences of those colours. In contrast, waking and dreaming are characterised not by the quality of experience but by the supposed cause of the experience. Erion & Smith also use another, very common, line of argument. They assert that those who claim that life could be a dream are using higher standards for certainty than anyone would normally use. On page 24, they write: "Since our knowledge -- of where we are sitting, of what we are doing, of what the world around us is like -- does not require philosophical certainty, but only those sorts of strong, context-appropriate justifications which we employ for everyday and scientific purposes, it follows that we can use the good reasons we have for believing in the external world to justify our claims to knowledge ... about the existence of this world ...."They are getting muddled here between knowledge and the socially legitimate grounds for making knowledge claims. Of course, different standards of evidence are called for in different social situations. For example, in British law, a criminal case requires proof beyond reasonable doubt, whereas a civil case requires only the balance of probabilities. This does not mean that, when we convict someone of a crime, we have a different and stronger form of knowledge than when we find him guilty of civil infringement. In fact, in neither case do we genuinely know that he is guilty. We believe that he is guilty, and the grounds of our belief determine which form of knowledge claim it is permissible for us to make. In contrast to both of those case, imagine a seminar in literary criticism that is discussing a detective novel. After studying the text, the students arrive at beliefs as to whether certain characters are guilty or not. If what is written in the text entails that an individual perpetrated the crime, then the social rules of literary criticism entitle us to make a knowledge claim, such as "I know that Moriarty is the culprit". Let me give one more example. In running a clinical trial to test some drug, we may perform a placebo-controlled trial in which we randomly give half of the patients the drug and the other half a placebo. We would never, in practice, find 100% of those with the drug get better, while 0% of those with the placebo do. More typical percentages might be 12% and and 10%. Medical statisticians must then decide whether that difference is due to the play of chance or due to the efficacy of the drug. How they do this is to suppose that the drug is completely lacking in efficacy (the 'null hypothesis') and then work out how likely it would be that such a big difference (12% versus 10%) could have arisen by chance. If that likelihood falls below a certain conventional threshold (say, chances of one in a hundred), then it is legitimate to say that the drug is efficacious. Thus the medical statisticians have their own criteria for making a knowledge claim. In each of these cases, people have a certain belief that something is the case, and they apply appropriate standards to decide whether they can legitimately make a claim that that belief is knowledge. It would be wrong to say that there are different standards of knowledge: in each case, the belief can actually be knowledge only if the belief is actually true. The belief is either true or false: there are no degrees of validity. Furthermore, given that all of these beliefs are, by hypothesis, justified, each belief is either knowledge or not knowledge, depending on whether the belief is true. This does not involve standards or degrees of knowledge. There is only one kind of knowledge, but there are different standards for claiming knowledge. So the argument that the 'sceptic' is using wrong standards (i.e. applying over-strict standards of knowledge) when assessing claims for the existence of the material world, must be rejected. Could we distil a weaker argument, that the 'sceptic' is applying over-strict standards for making knowledge claims? Not at all. The sceptic has no objection to the legal profession pronouncing its verdicts, or clinicians announcing that a drug works or fails to work. Nor, in the right context, does the sceptic raise any objection to existence claims for everyday things. The sceptic has no objection to saying that there there is a kitchen beyond my library door. The sceptic's assertion is specifically a metaphysical one. Where the materialist claims that, ultimately the material world exists, the sceptic denies that we can know this. So, the materialist claims not just that 'there is a kitchen' (in the normal, everyday sense), but that 'there is a material kitchen' that cannot directly be observed by the conscious mind, but which somehow gives rise to our visual, tactual, and other perceptions. It is the latter claim that the sceptic denies. There is a subtle, but not too difficult, distinction to make here. It will help if we make use of Ludwig Wittgenstein's idea of a 'language-game'. A language-game is a closed system of social and linguistic activity, and the linguistic expressions possess their significance or meaning by virtue of the role they play within the language-game. Take, for example, the simple sentence, "I see my mother". This has quite different meanings according to which language-game it occurs in. In the language-game of looking through a photograph album, it means that I see a flat, static photographic image of her. In the language-game of watching my wedding video, it means that I see a moving, electronic videographic image of her. In the language-game of looking out of the window at a crowded street, it means that I see her directly. In the language-game of a visualisation exercise, it means I see an internal visual image of her. In the language-game of looking through a box of sealed wedding invitations, it means I see her name on an envelope. It is absurd to take the meaning of an expression from one language-game to another. In the language-game of looking at photograph album, it would be absurd to suppose that my 'seeing my mother' in the album means that she has been squashed flat and inserted between the leaves of the album. In a similar way, a lot of silly confusion has been produced in academic philosophy by mixing up the language-games to do with physical existence. When I say that the library door leads out to the kitchen, the meaning is clear within the language-game of informing a fellow reader whether she can get a cup of coffee or not. Within that language-game, it is true to say that the kitchen exists. Within the language-game of a philosophy debate, however, the same expression may carry a completely different meaning: there, I may correctly say that the kitchen does not exist, meaning that the posited non-mental entity that the materialist calls the kitchen does not exist. This has nothing to do with relativism, or statements being true 'for' one person and not 'for' another. It is to do with a linguistic short-hand for qualifying the meaning of expressions. We could achieve the same result with circumlocutions. Instead of saying simply "I see my mother" and letting the context determine the meaning, I could explicitly say, "I see a photographic image of my mother". And, as for the kitchen, I could say "If you walk out through that door and turn right, you will have the visual image of a coffee-maker and the olfactory sensation of coffee, etc etc.". Only in rare situations is there ever any genuine risk of confusion, and in those situations common sense tells us what degree of explicit qualification is needed to disambiguate the expression. Only in academic philosophy do we find people making what Gilbert Ryle called 'category-mistakes' by mixing up the meanings of different language-games. Here, people are ideologically driven to defend metaphysical doctrines rather than to communicate effectively in an active language-game. For instance, when a materialist says that your conscious mind is an illusion produced by information processing in the brain, he does not seem to be trying to convey anything useful. Rather, he is illustrating a metaphysical point. Erion & Smith say that the 'sceptic' is using the wrong standards for knowledge claims when the sceptic says that the kitchen does not exist, but in doing so Erion & Smith are transposing an expression from an ontological discourse into an everyday discourse. In undergoing that transposition, the expression changes the meaning associated with it. In everyday speech, of course it is true that the kitchen exists, because in that context or language-game, the expression refers only to people's ordinary sense experiences: it means that you will see the kitchen furnishings and smell and taste the coffee. In the philosophical discourse, on the other hand, we can say that the kitchen does not exist because it has the following, very different meaning: that the supposed material object that is depicted by the experience of the kitchen does not exist. This distinction is surely quite plain in virtual realities such as the Matrix. If you are in a library in the Matrix world, it would be quite correct for you to tell a fellow reader that the kitchen exists. If, however, you were trying to explain to a new recruit that the world is virtual, you might correctly say the kitchen does not 'really' exist, it is just a projection from the databases in The Matrix computers. Films such as The Matrix bring out these distinctions so clearly and dramatically, that I am staggered that philosophers are still trundling out the same, tired old category-mistakes. If the film can educate students away from such restrictive and mistaken ways of thinking, then it will make an excellent contribution to improving the calibre of philosophical debate.
3. "The Matrix Possibility"David Mitsuo Nixon(Graduate instructor at the University of Washington, Seattle)In a way, Nixon starts off where Erion & Smith finish. Near the end of the previous chapter, the authors of that piece suggested that, in order to claim meaningfully that some experience is a dream, you must have had both dreaming and waking experiences in the past. Therefore, they say, it can never be meaningful to claim that your whole life is a 'dream' (or, as Morpheus actually says, that you have lived in a dream world). Nixon develops a similar argument. He says that, if all of your beliefs about the world are false, then you have no reliable framework for assessing new evidence that is supposed to reveal the falsity of all prior beliefs. So, after taking the red pill, Neo is presented with new evidence (that is, he sees the Nebuchadnazzer and listens to Morpheus' spiel, and so on), but really he has no basis for judging whether any of it is credible, because everything that he thought he knew -- about how the world works -- is now supposed to have been fabricated by the Matrix. The two approaches are similar in the following respect: Erion & Smith say the complete absence of any waking experience would prevent your ability to understand the concept of a dream; Nixon says the complete absence of any veridical experience in your life undermines your ability to trust any concepts at all (even the very concept of your experience's not being veridical). The central flaw in Nixon's argument is that Neo finds that his new, real world stands in a privileged position with regard to his old, virtual world. The Nebuchadnazzim can observe the Matrix world through their monitors, whereas people in The Matrix cannot observe the 'external' world that contains the Nebuchadnazzer. Likewise, the Nebuchadnazzim can enter and exit the Matrix world pretty much at will, but the denizens of the Matrix world cannot insert and remove people in the world of the Nebuchadnazzer. What if the Nebuchadnazzim had not possessed this privileged access to the Matrix world? Then Nixon's argument might have had some plausibility. There would then have been some mileage in Nixon's suggestion that, when Neo takes his red pill, he actually goes on an hallucinatory trip. But the brute cinematic fact is that the Wachowski brothers did write into the film script the Nebuchadnazzim's privileged access to The Matrix. And hence Neo does have very strong evidence that the world of the Nebuchadnazzer is real and that of The Matrix is unreal. . Onboard the Nebuchadnazzer, he is shown other virtual reality systems that are used for training, which the Nebuchadnazzim can bring him into and out of at will, and they can select which virtual world he goes into. He even gets to meet the programmer (Mouse) who offers to customise a virtual world for him (featuring the lady in red). Thus the world of Nebuchadnazzim is demonstrably privileged over the virtual worlds, yet none of the virtual worlds have privileged access to the world of Nebuchadnazzim. The privileged status of the world of the Nebuchadnazzim makes it rational for Neo adopt as a working hypothesis that that is the real world, and that the world he grew up in is virtual. Neo also acquires a lot of circumstantial evidence to support this belief. After taking the red pill, he wakes to find himself wired up like everybody else. His body has a bioport giving access to his brain, and various other, smaller apertures. The method by which the Nebuchadnazzim enter the virtual worlds involves plugging a cable into the bioport at the back of the neck. This is consistent with, and therefore corroborates, the notion that the virtual worlds are generated by a computer system that exists in the world of the Nebuchadnazzim. As Nixon would rightly point out, this circumstantial evidence would not, by itself, have sufficed to establish that the Nebuchadnazzic world is the real one. But they do provide corroboration for that conclusion. To illustrate the latter point, consider that The Matrix might have been programmed to produce a world in which one's brain is situated in the belly. (Well, why not? Aristotle beieved the belly was the seat of thinking. Why does the brain have to be in the head?) If that had been the case, then Neo, after taking the red pill, would have been very surprised to find that he had a bioport in the back of his neck. He would have had a frisson of cognitive dissonance, and begun to wonder whether the red pill was not really some sort of dream-inducing drug, just as Nixon suggests. In such a scenario, Neo would have had to do some hard thinking. He would have needed to reflect on the privileged status of the Nebuchadnazzim's world in relation to the other worlds, and conclude on that basis alone that that new world is the real one. And he would have had to let go of his lifelong belief that his brain was in his belly and accept that it is really in his skull. Taking this line of thinking further, one could certainly have cinematographic fun playing with the virtual physiology of denizens of the Matrix. Taking one's cue from the bar scene in Star Wars I, the Wachowski brothers could have supposed that people's avatars in The Matrix could take all sorts of bodily forms. On swallowing the red pill, people in this case we would have one heck of a surprise to discover the true nature of their bodies. It is also conceivable that the Matrix world could have been programmed with a different set of phyiscal laws. There might have been a clerical error in the design office of the Matrix-builders, and Newton's law of motion might have been programmed as saying that force is proportional to the square of acceleration, or the gravitational constant might have been double its true value. Fun though this is, it has no impact on the philosophy. Fundamentally, whatever differences might have been programmed into the Matrix world, Neo can still rationally infer that the world of the Nebuchadnazzim is the real one, just because of its privileged status in relation to the others. And hence Nixon is wrong in his main thesis of denying what he calls the 'Matrix Possibility'. Nixon would, however, be right in claiming that Neo needs to be more cautious than he is in making inferences in the real world, which is a wholly new world to him. He does not know, ab initio, how accurately The Matrix simulation matched the real world. During his recuperation, we will have had much time to experiment with the materials of the real world. If there is a snooker table on the Nebuchadnezzar, he could soon establish that Newton's laws of motion still apply. There would probably be some old radio kit lying around, so he could check out Maxwell's electromagnetic laws. Once he has established that the basic laws of physics that he had learnt at college in the Matrix world still apply in the real world, then he could safely go back to his lifelong habits of making inferences just as he would have done in the Matrix world. To be sure, there are likely to be some areas of physics where the Matrix would not be accurate. Suppose, for instance, that inside the Matrix world there is a particle physics laboratory, with a huge particle accelerator. The results that scientists observe in this (virtual) instrument will only be as good as the Matrix builders' own knowledge of physics, which will inevitably be limited. When Neo eventually gets to Zion, and reads up in the popular science magazines about the latest discoveries in their (real) particle accelerators, he may be surprised to find that a lot of the data produced by the virtual particle accelerator inside the Matrix world is false. Again, this is fun to explore, but has no impact on the philosophical concerns that Nixon raises. By the way, one area in which Neo can be confident of his inferences straight away, without needing to do any experimental research, is the important area of human psychology. Since human behaviour in the Matrix world is driven by real human brains, Neo will find that people behave in much the same way in the real world as they did in the Matrix world. So, if Trinity smiles sweetly at him, he can interpret this correctly, without worrying whether this means something different in the real world from what it did in the Matrix. Neo certainly need not worry about Nixon's suggestion that Morpheus' head might fly off when he is angry. In his enthusiasm to damn The Matrix, Nixon seems to have overlooked that the Matrix is populated with real people with real brains. Let us return to a secondary claim in Nixon's chapter, a claim that is redolent of the dusty anti-scepticism of the academics. He writes on page 33: "But if he believes the story about the Matrix, then everything he has learned about how to interpret his experiences must be thrown away."Not so. First, all the mathematics and abstract reasoning that Neo has learnt will apply in both worlds. Indeed, they would still apply even if the Matrix had been programmed to simulate the world very differently from the way it actually is. Second, beliefs about human psychology still apply because the same kind of human brains exist inside the Matrix as outside it. Third, beliefs about the relationships that exist amongst experiences in the natural world carry over from the Matrix to the real word. As it happens, the Matrix has been programmed to yield a realistic simulation of the real world. Hence all of Neo's beliefs about how to interpret his experiences carry across to reality. For instance, if Neo sees a flame, he knows that he will get a sharp pain in his skin if he puts his finger in it. All of the interpretive beliefs that we have about the world around us are actually of that form: they are beliefs about the relationships between experiences -- in this example, the relationship between the visual appearance of a flame and the tactile pain sensation. Nixon, however, follows the traditional academic mistake of thinking that our everyday interpretive beliefs are about physical objects. In fact, they are not. They are, rather, about patterns of relationships between perceptions. As such, they carry straight over from the Matrix world to the real world. We can see that this is so by reflecting on how people actually behave when they engage with the world. The key question is: what, in practice, are the 'truth grounds' of people's everyday beliefs? What tests do people apply to assess whether a belief is true? Take, for instance, the belief that it is raining outside now. If you go outside and see and feel small drops of water falling from a dark, cloudy sky all around you, then you have established the principal truth grounds for the belief that it is now raining. You do not refer to any supposed material water falling in a material atmosphere. In other words, you do not go outside of your experiential observations -- what you can see, feel, and smell. You do not gain some direct access to the physial realm in order to check that it is 'really' raining. Pragmatically speaking, the truth grounds are principally your observations of the patterns of vision and touch. Of course, the truth grounds are not just your observations in the moment, but your observations throughout all time, and everyone else's observations throughout all time. Needless to say, it would impose an unwieldy burden on communication if we had to refer to those infinite series of observations just to say that it is raining. That is precisely why we package up that myriad of observational patterns into the expressive medium of statements that denote physical states of affairs. The philosopher's mistake is to misconstrue such statements as indicating that the beliefs are actually about the physical world: they most certainly are not. Our everyday beliefs are about the sensory world, but we speak of the physical world as a convenient way of packaging those beliefs. In the language-game of everyday life, this causes no confusion, because we are all socialised to play proper roles in that language-game. Philosophers, however, misguidedly break the rules of the language-game and try to assert that the physical things really exist in their own right. Let me suggest an analogy. Astronomers, in describing the positions and movements of stars and planets across the sky, conventionally refer to the 'celestial dome'. The ecliptic, for example, is defined as the intersection of the Earth's equator with the celestial dome,and the stars are described as if on the surface of the celestial dome. This is more than a figure of speech, it is a fully worked out mathematical fiction. Astronomers talk of the celestial dome as if it were really there, yet none of the them believes for one moment that there is an actual dome above us. In precisely the same way, the whole physical world is really a convenient fiction that expresses facts about the perceived world, and it is incorrect to suppose that the physical world has any independent existence. Even if you do not buy into the subjective idealism that I have just outlined, it is nonetheless uncontentious that, in everyday life, beliefs about the world around us are really about observable patterns -- and not about the physical world. So, whether you are in a virtual world or in the real one, your interpretive beliefs (such as: if you see a flame and put your finger in it then you will feel a sharp pain in your finger) have the same content. Therefore, Nixon is wrong in saying that, in a virtual world, all or almost all our beliefs are false. As I acknowledged above, the Matrix need not, necessarily, have been an accurate simulation of the physical world. the Matrix architects could have indulged their imagination and programmed the Matrix to be a surreally different world. Hence, a carefully ratiocinative response for Neo in this situation is to be appropriately cautious at first, and to explore the new world that he finds himself in, testing whether the laws of nature that he has learned to apply within the new world. As the film makes clear, the virtual world is indeed modelled on the real one and hence all of the interpretative knowledge that Neo has acquired over his life is still valid. Perhaps Neo should have been more cautious, and should have set about a systematic programme of research to find out the patterns of his new world. Nevertheless, the extreme view that Nixon advances -- that everything that Neo has learned must be jettisoned -- is wrong.
4. "Seeing, Believing, Touching, Truth"Carolyn Korsmeyer(Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo))Her biographical note at the back of the book says that Korsmeyer "writes in the areas of aesthetics and philosophy of art, feminist philosophy, and emotion theory; at the moment she is especially interested in disgust." It should therefore not surprise us that there is a lack rigorous argument, or even a clearly defined thesis, in her chapter. Aesthetics is not exactly a hotbed of rigour. She begins and ends her chapter with discussions of mental experiences having serious, life-or-death impacts on people. She starts with reports of individuals who died in their sleep -- because they were visited by bad spirits, according to their ethnic traditions (they were Hmmong), or because they believed they were having fatal nightmares according to Korsmeyer. She ends with the climactic scene of The Matrix, in which Neo is first killed when his virtual body is shot by a virtual person (Agent Smith) and then revived, along with his virtual body, by the intervention of a real person (Trinity). She does not, however, attempt to go beyond merely noting these two phenomena. (This seems to be the postmodern approach ro writing: just throw some ideas together without marshalling them into a cogent argument.) With respect to the question of how these deaths and that resurrection are brought about, she writes tangentially. On the nightmare-induced deaths of the Hmmong, she says: "The soothing assurance 'It's only a dream', relies on the tacit premise that what you only see can't harm you, because nothing in the dream has actually touched you. Injury and death require a palpable interference with the living tissue; surely a mere dream cannot exert such power. Or so we hope." She does not say why she, or whoever it is that she thinks might hold such a belief, would think that injury and death require a "palpable"attack. The phenomenon of heart attack is, tragically common, and widely known about; and it is equally well known that sudden physical exertion or mental trauma can induce a heart failure. Given the widespread awareness of psychological triggers of heart attack, how Korsmeyer could suppose that anyone seriously believes that injury and death require a "palpable" cause is astonishing and suggests that her writing precedes her thinking. If we wanted to press the point, we could enumerate a range of lethal but impalpable things: throughout history murderers have known of potent chemical poisons can can injure and kill in impalpably small amounts; and nowadays it is known that imperceptible nuclear radiation can kill immediately in high doses, or cause fatal damage in lower doses, ultraviolet solar radiation can trigger fatal skin cancer, infra-red radiation can bring about heat stroke perhaps fatally, microwave radiation is also known to be dangerous and potentially fatal; and, more prosaically, other forms of high energy such as high electrical voltage or intense sound, can also destroy a human body. So, Korsmeyer's emphasis on 'touch' being needed for fatality is wholly unfounded. Probably the idea that she was trying unsuccessfully to express was that a physical, rather than, mental cause is needed to produce death. (Her emphasis on touch, though, is not just a haphazard mistake but plays neatly into her scheme of focusing on the senses.) But, as we have already noted, it is common knowledge that mental states of shock and trauma can trigger heart failure. So, retreating further, we might suppose that Korsmeyer was trying to differentiate between purely mental causes, such as dreams (as she supposes) and causes that are mental but work a physiological chain of cause and effect (such as heart attacks triggered by trauma). Yet, according to the best theories that modern science can conjure up, all mental activity -- including dreams and nightmares -- ultimately rests on electrochemical activity in the brain. And given the intimate connection between the brain and the rest of the body through both neural and endocrinal pathways, it is hardly a leap of the imagination to suppose that mental states can impact the health of the body. If we retreat further in search of some sense in Korsmeyer's writing.,we would have to suppose that she is differentiating between a telekinetic power of the mind to harm or kill and the mere mental powers of the brain. Although this would violate the foundations of modern science, it is a coherent position to defend and one that I would have sympathy with. Unfortunately, Korsmeyer shows no signs of engaging with the arguments needed to defend a claim of telekinesis. Furthermore, she shows no signs of even realising that such as bold position is entailed by what she has written. The bulk of Korsmeyer's chapter comprises a compilation of observations on sensory matters in The Matrix. Yet there is no general thesis or argumentation. There is a curious distancing from philosophy. For example, on page 42, she writes, "This plot premise permits the film to raise not only venerable philosophical problems about the relation of mind and body and the uncertainty of knowledge, but also more contemporary paranoias about political power in a cyber-infected world" and again on page 43, "Although these moments are perhaps too-convenient transition devices from scene to scene, like the dreaming argument they raise questions about whether valid inferences may be founded on any given perceptual experience." She shows a reticence to treat directly of substantive philosophical debates. And, when she touches on such issues (in her section "Some Classical Philosophical Problems"), she reveals a very weak grasp of them, with the key points slipping through her fingers. On page 43, she states that the philosophical problem posed by the brain-in-a-vat (or, equivalently, a body-in-a-vat) thought-experiment is that "only electrical impulses provide us with a mental life". In fact, the almost universally accepted thesis of modern neuroscience is that the whole of mental life is`identical with, or at least closely grounded in, electrical signals in the brain. The point of the thought-experiment is to suppose that those signals have been crafted by an external intelligence, as opposed to being yielded up organically by sense organs. That Korsmeyer misunderstands the central philosophical experiment on which the The Matrix rests is discouraging. She then writes, "Are grounds for this kind of suspicion even remotely justified?", but this is irrelevant to the Cartesian argument. It is not about whether we have, or should have, such a suspicion; or whether any such suspicion is justified or not. The Cartesian point is just this: the thought-experiment is a logical possibility, therefore our knowledge of the external world cannot be an indubitable certainty. (To be sure, Descartes then goes on to propose a theological route to bypass that doubt. Nevertheless, the key point of the doubting experiment itself, and hence of the brain-in-a-vat experiment, is nothing to do with likelihood, but only to do with possibility. It is possible that none of our sense data are produced by the objects they depict.) Moving on in time from 1643 to 1710, we find the highest development of the Cartesian thought-experiment in Berkeley's writing, which points out that, since we can never directly know anything of the supposed material world, that world is indistinguishable from a fiction. Again, Korsmeyer's discussion of suspicion and justifications for suspicion are beside the point. Continuing in her muddle, Korsmeyer writes, "any kind of sense perception can be subject to occasional illusion. Might we in fact be such thoroughgoing victims of illusion that every single sense perception is caused not by contact with objects in the external world but only by intervening stimuli in our brains". There are two points to note here. First, this brings us back to Korsmeyer's ignoring of developments in neuropsychology over the past three hundred years. As we noted earlier, the modern scientific understanding is that external stimuli (triggered by the eyes, ears, and so on) produce electrical signals in the brain, which in turn yield conscious experience (by some wholly unknown means). Korsmeyer seems to think that, in a normal act of perception -- such as my seeing the chair in front of me -- there are no electrical signals but that the conscious mind leaps out of the brain and engages directly with the chair. Why else would she seek to contrast normal perception with the notion that sense perceptions rests on electrical signals in the brain? The second point to note is that the 'occasional illusion' that she alludes to is a red herring. The allusion is to such phenomena as a stick seeming bent when half immersed in water. That is considered an 'illusion' in so far as the physical state affairs that it would betoken to a naive observer (namely, that of a bent stick) does not match reality (a straight stick in water). (Yet, to an experienced observer, who knows the relative refractive indices of air and water, it correctly betokens a straight stick in water.) So, these occasional illusions are mistakes in the physical interpretation of mental perceptions. In contrast, a virtual reality is not a massive collection of such errors of interpretation but rather a depiction of a wholly non-existent world. As the natural-language philosophers such as J.L.Austin rightly noted, it does not make a lot of sense to suppose that everything that one has ever seen is an optical illusion, for we successfully integrate our perceptions in our everyday active engagement with the world. In a virtual world, rather, we are mistaken not in our apprehension of what we see, but in our philosophical belief about the nature of the depicted world. If, inside a virtual world, I see a stick half immersed in water, then I might naively think it bent, but then discover upon pulling it out that it is straight. Thus, within that (virtual) world, we have the normal notion of 'occasional illusion', which is a quite different concept from the depiction of a non-existent object. The relevant analogue of virtuality is not the 'occasional illusion' but the dream or hallucination. On page 43, Korsmeyer writes, "There is a school of thought that maintains that any such hypothesis is ultimately incoherent, even self-refuting." Well, yes, there are 'schools of thought' for just about everything (there is even a Flat Earth Society). Who cares? Korsemeyer does not say whether she agrees or disagrees with that 'school of thought', or what on earth their grounds might be. Given that the principal premise of The Matrix is one that millions of movie-goers found coherent and comprehensible, and capable of being grasped as a piece of background information in the course of an action movie, it is substantially counter-intuitive to suggest that it is 'incoherent'. Such a counter-intuitive assertion at least needs to be defended. (How would it be if, in an anthology on plate tectonics, an essayist were breezily to note that there is a school of thought that maintains that the sphericality of the world is ultimately incoherent, and then proceeds to examine the ramifications of that position without bothering to explain why we should spend even a moment dwelling on such an outrageous notion.) Early essayists in this volume (Erion & Smith, and Nixon) put forward arguments for what Korsemeyer airily throws in, and I have put forward counter-arguments above. Following that 'school of thought', Korsmeyer writes "How does one even posit that one is a brain in a vat -- or a casualty of the Matrix? This supposition is only possible if one has a vantage from which it is clear that one is not a brain in a bat." As millions of fans of The Matrix know, this is simply false. It is perfectly possible to posit our being brains in vats, irrespective of whether we are so or not. Her claim arises from a philosophically induced misconstrual of the main premise of The Matrix. Korsemeyer, however, not only takes this 'school' as granted, but even imputes it to the Wachowski brothers. She writes, "In this respect, the movie is bound by a constraint that limits all dreaming plots ...: the narrative point of view is necessary to the Matrix". Her argument is wrong in all respects:
The reason for moving the narrative standpoint out of the Matrix and into the real world is to enable the film to show, rather than tell, the story. This is the priority in any dramatic art. It is thus not a philosophical constraint but a dramatic one. After her disappointing attempt to engage with metaphysics and epistemology in the section "Some Classic Philosophical Problems", Korsemeyer moves on to ethics in the section "Judging Reality". She states the basic problem thus: "What is perceptual experience, such that it can judged not only real but also worthwhile -- worth living for?" This is a somewhat confusing way of stating it, as it entangles three distinct questions as if they were going to lead to the same answer. The three questions are:
Korsmeyer reckons that The Matrix offers two answers: first, that perceptual experience is valuable if it is "free from the interfering illusions of the Matrix" and, second, it is valuable if it is "that which provides the most vivid and pleasurable experience". She associates the former with Morpheus and the Nebuchadnazzim's official line; and she associates the latter with Cypher and Mouse. This dichotomy may seem plausible as a first take on the film-makers' intentions, but on closer inspection it can be seen to be flawed both from the perspective of human psychology and with reference to the motivations of the film's characters. For a person to be motivated to carry out any kind of work, there must be some experience of pleasure, be it sensual or intellectual, that rewards the effort. Even on the simplistic line of interpretation that Korsemeyer is following, it is psychologically unrealistic to suppose that people would be driven to endure years of austerity and struggle for the sake of a proposition. Rather, it is the sense of pride of achievement and the intellectual pleasure of knowing that one is free from Matrix that motivates. So, it is a false dichotomy to suppose that one valuation rests on what yields pleasure, and the other not. For, they both yield pleasurable experience, but the pleasurable experiences are of different kinds: one is sensory, the other is intellectual. (The latter might be likened to the pleasure of winning at chess, or climbing a mountain.) There is, however, a bigger flaw in Korsemeyer's interpretation of the film. For, it is evident from Neo's closing speech that his vision of the future is not a permanent departure from the Matrix into the 'desert of the real' but an enlightened empowerment: his aim is to give everybody the knowledge and power to use the technology of the Matrix as a tool: to be able to come and go at will, and to control what happens in the Matrix to as great an extent as possible -- for example, to fly into the sky, as Neo does at the end. So, taking the film on its own terms, and accepting what Neo says, we have to reject Korsmeyer' narrowly drawn reading of the film' valuations as hedonism versus ascetism, and replace it with a distinction of blind and disempowered hedonism with visionary and empowered hedonism. Korsemeyer spends the rest of her paper (page 45 to 52) in a bizarre exercise of interpreting the film's treatment of the five different senses as if they revealed different evaluatory perspectives. This is almost entirely a matter of simple assertion, devoid of argumentation to support or deny either the comparative assessment of senses, or her reading of the film as resting on such a comparative assessment.
SECTION 2: THE DESERT OF THE REAL5. "The Metaphysics of The Matrix"Jorge J.E. Gracia & Jonathan J. Sanford(Gracia is SUNY Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Sanford is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville)This article is an exercise in Aristotelianism. The authors' outline of the project is that "metaphysics tries (1) to develop a list of the most general categories into which into which all other categories may be classified and (2) to establish how the less general categories are related to these." In case this sounds as if it could be a somewhat sterile exercised, the authors immediately clarify the point: "The task of metaphysics, then, is twofold: First, to develop a list of the most general categories and, second, to categorize everything else in terms of these." So, it is indeed a sterile exercise in cataloguing. The missing ingredient in this recipe is the dynamic: that is to say, how does such a world work? Robert Pirsig, in his classic work "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" illustrates the disappointing limitations of the Aristotelian approach to one particular area, namely motorcycle mechanics, which is to catalogue all of the parts of a motorbike, whilst failing to engage with the concepts of how all those parts work together -- and, most importantly, failing to grapple the central understanding of what the motorbike is doing, namely converting petroleum into speed. Gracia and Sanford's catalogue churns through such vacuous statements as "whatever is real is unreal, and vice versa, and everything is either real or unreal." Unsurprisingly, nothing of note emerges from this Gradgrindean project. Sadly, even their project of cataloguing all the bits and pieces that make up the Matrix -- limited though this project is -- goes awry. On page 63 they claim that "there seems to be no way to reconcile the real with the unreal". What they mean by this gnomic sentence is that the catalogue of things within the virtual world of the Matrix is disjoint from the catalogue of things in the real world, and as tidy Aristotelian cataloguers they would prefer to have a single catalogue, rather than two disjoint catalogues. Their apparent difficulty, however, is just a consequence of their using a dumb catalogue rather than a smart catalogue. The things in the Matrix world -- the tables and chairs and other furniture of the world -- are all virtual constructs that are wholly grounded in databases in the Matrix computer. Really, those objects are artefacts of the manner in which we conceptualise the information and software in the Matrix computers. Strictly speaking, the objects in the Matrix world should not be catalogued as things co-equal with the objects in the real world. If they are catalogued at all, they should be put into a separate and dependent catalogue, every item of which maps to facts about the data and software in the Matrix computers. If the authors had done this, then their suggested "dualistic" metaphysic would never have arisen.
6. "The Machine-Made Ghost: Or, The Philosophy of Mind, Matrix Style"Jason Holt(Holt teaches philosophy at the University of Manitoba)A difficulty I found with Holt's chapter is that he does not tell us how the various sections of his essay are intended to connect. (Or, maybe the sections are not actually meant to connect with each other. Maybe they are mean to be free-standing mini-essays within the chapter. After all, joined-up thinking is not in fashion in certain genres of modern writing.) There are four parts to it: (1) a discussion of philosophical issues raised in the Matrix; (2) a statement of the mind-body problem; (3) an argument that machines can have conscious minds; (4) an argument for physicalism (or 'materialism' as Holt calls it). One might have hoped that part (2), on the mind-body problem, might have something to do with part (1), on The Matrix. Unfortunately not. On page 66, Holt enumerates the philosophical problems that arise in the film, but then says, "While, in The Matrix, these are the most obvious ports of philosophical access, they're not what I'm going to talk about." In fact, he does not really talk about the film at all. He talks about the mind-body problem. In the course of discussing the mind-body problem, he happens to use elements of The Matrix to make illustrations. But the elements of The Matrix that he uses are not really the key, important elements of the film. They are marginal. In section (3), he discusses whether machines can be conscious, and he cites the example of the computers that drive the Matrix. He asks whether those computers can be conscious -- but, he does not relate that question to anything that is pertinent in the film. He does not, for example, relate it to the one single scene where there is even a suggestion that the machines possess consciousness, namely where Agent Smith takes off his earphone and talks man-to-man to Morpheus. As far as Holt's mini-essay goes, he could have replaced his reference to the Matrix computers with a reference to any other computers from science fiction or real life, and the mini-essay would be unchanged. Holt writes that "What's not so obvious, though, is what you have to admit if you accept that Matrix scenario, though not actual, is nonetheless possible. Artificial minds are possible. That's what you havr to admit", but that is just a non sequitur. In section (4), there is essentially no reference to the film at all. The mini-essay in that section might as well have been lifted from some other work by Holt that was not specifically about The Matrix. There is a cursory reference to the film at the beginning of the section, but even that gets the implication wrong. On page 71, he refers to Mouse's question, "How do the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like?", which Holt categories thus: "This is the problem of other minds". Actually, no, that is not the key problem that Mouse was alluding to. Rather it was whether or not a machine can ever know what Tasty Wheat tastes like, even for the machine's own self. The question of whether Tasty Wheat tastes the same to the machine as it does to us, is obviously secondary to whether Tasty Wheat tastes like anything at all to the machine. So, this chapter is not a proper essay as such, but a set of mini-essays with only the most tenuous connections to each other or to the film The Matrix. But what about the mini-essays (3) and (4) considered in their own right? They do not really make particularly cogent arguments for their respective conclusions. On page 71, Holt succeeds in almost touching upon the central argument against the 'strong AI hypnothesis' (i.e. the hypothesis that machines can be conscious by virtue of carrying computations of certain kinds). He writes, "You might think, for instance, that computers only do what they're programmed to do, while we, by contrast, are autonomous, creative, living beings." Let us leave aside the vague concepts of 'autonomous', 'creative', and 'living', and focus only on the simple, objective fact that the computers do what they are programmed to do. Holt's subsequent points are irrelevant to this basic point: it is irrelevant to this that a computer may be programmed to program itself, that it may learn new things, that it may use pseudo-random number tables, or environmental inputs such as clock pulses, to simulate creativity. The key fact is that what the computer does at a given moment in time is strictly and completely determined by the computer's state and its inputs at the previous moment in time. For, in that case, the computer's behaviour, including any linguistic output, is determined only by the programming and not by any putative consciousness. This is undoubtedly the strongest argument against the 'strong AI hypothesis', and in my opinion is decisive. Yet, Holt does not engage with this question. Finally, argument (4) is a vague variation on the dual-aspect theory of the conscious mind. Holt claims that consciousness "reduces" to a "kind of perspective". He leaves it wholly undefined what he means by this. He says that the right kind of perspective has "meaning" but casually acknowleges that this is equally undefined. Holt has, in fact, presented no argument to defend his claim that conscious minds do not exist (which, if we are to call a spade a spade, is just what physicalism, a.k.a. materialism, amounts to). He says, "How does the brain create such meaning? Maybe self-scanning does the trick. Maybe it's something else. But whatever it is, we can now make sense of mind-brain identity. The brain makes a kind of perspective to which consciousness reduces." This is pure bluster: Holt is claiming to have solved the hard problem without even formulating any positive theory.
7. "Neo-Materialism and the Death of the Subject"Daniel Barwick(Associate Professor of Philosophy at Alfrred State College)Barwick's essay starts off badly by imputing to The Matrix an assumption that, in fact, the film does not make and that it arguably denies. He writes, "The film takes for granted (and celebrates) the truth of a particular theory of mind and personal identity, widely known as reductive materialism, the view that mental states can be reduced to (can be explained in terms of, are the same as, etc.) physical states." This is not the film's premise at all. Rather, the film proposes that the electrical inputs to the brain, which normally come from sense organs, be replaced by artificially induced inputs. What happens inside inside the brain, in respect of the person's conscious experience, is left unchanged hy this action. The film is, in the main, neutral in respect of different philosophical answers to the mind-brain problem. The only assumption it makes is that, whatever happens in our brains during normal perception will also be happening when the sensory inputs are replaced by synthetic inputs. How conscious experience is related to the brain does not enter into the film's basic assumptions. Whether conscious experience is an epiphenomenon of brain processes, or is the same thing as brain processes, or whether the conscious mind is different from, but interacts with the brain, or whether the answer is something else again -- the film is uncommitted. As I argued in my essay "Glitches in the Matrix", we can be sure that the Matrix's inputs are at the level of sensory inputs rather than some deeper level of processing, because when Neo wakes up in his pod, he has a full range of snesory capabilities. His sensory cortex must therefore have been receiving stimulation throughout his life. So, whatever inner brain processes are associated with consciousness, they operate in the same manner in the victims of the Matrix as they do in normal people. Barwick cites Morpheus in his defence. But Morpheus is hardly an expert. For he has already demonstrated his poor grasp of the underlying technology when he says that the enslaved human beings are used as a source of electrical power. As I argued in "Glitches in the Matrix", this is engineering nonsense. If Morpheus can be wrong about the main purpose of the Matrix system, it's not surprising that he can be wrong about the technical details. Bear in mind that Morpheus is an outsider, a rebel: he is not privy to the deliberations of the Matrix architects. Furthermore, his role is that of project manager. As anyone knows who has worked on big technological projects (or who has read the Dilbert cartoons), the beliefs of project managers are often bizarrely tangential to what the technical experts are actually doing. Even on this point, however, I fear that Barwick may be unfair to Morpheus. He quotes the following from Morpheus: "What is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by the brain." Barwick immediately claims that "This is a clear statement of reductive materialism." Not so. If Morpheus were a reductive materialist, he would surely have said, "... electrical signals in the brain", not "... electrical signals interpreted by the brain" Admittedly Morpheus is not being entirely explicit here, and his statement is open to interpretation. (And reductive materialism is a logically incoherent theory that is incapable or rational articulation anyway.) Nevertheless, the most likely interpretation of Morpheus' words is that he is referring to input signals from sensory organs, and their interpretation by the brain. Morpheus is, in fact, not discussing the relationship of the conscious mind to the brain, but rather the relationship of mind-and-brain to the external world. He is saying (quite correctly) that our knowledge of the supposedly real external world is mediated by electrical signals from the sense organs. If those inputs are replaced by artificial ones, then the external world that we construe by interpreting those signals is regarded by us as 'real'. Whether it is a true reality or a virtual reality, we cannot immediately tell. That, I believe, is what Morpheus was talking about. Although Barwick is thus mistaken in ascribing reductive materialism to The Matrix, he is correct in attacking reductive materialism as a theory in its own right. He cites Michael Tye's thought-experiment of 'black-and-white Mary', which is a somewhat flawed but nevertheless basically sound criticism of reductive materialism. Barwick's essay then takes a somewhat tortuous turn. He has argued that (a) The Matrix assumes reductive materialism, but (b) reductive materialism is wrong, and he now therefore confronts (c) the conclusion that the film does not make sense because it relies on a false philosophical premise. His proposed solution is that "The Matrix can work as written, provided the authors adhere to one additional principle: the intentionality of consciousness." Unfortunately he does not tell us what precisely 'intentionality' is. Philosophers who take consciousness seriously tend to fall into two camps: first, the Anglo-American school, who attach prime importance to 'qualia', the qualitative elements of conscious experience, such a colours, sounds, and smells; second, the Europeans, who attach prime importance to intentionality. One the one hand, the qualia are extremely well defined: we encounter them all the time when we are awake. We can mentally point to individual qualia, such as particular colours and smells. Conscious experiences are a clear and non-mysterious form of direct, empirical observation. Conscious experiences form the starting point of the normal, scientific empiricist approach to the world. The same cannot be said of intentionality. Intentionality is an elusive notion that is invoked by philosophers when they choose not to start off with empiricism. For example, when I look at the table in front of me, the empiricist's first question is: What exactly am I observing? What are the raw data? And the answer comes up pretty quickly: I am observing a brown parallelogram-shaped patch of colour in my visual field; and if I reach out with my hand, I observe a hard, cool, smooth texture. The existentialist philosopher will skip that stage of analysis and will claim thatI am aware of a desk, and that my mind reaches out and encounters the desk in some mysterious way. As Barwick puts it: "consciousness is like a transparency; when we try to single it out, we 'fall through' to its object. If we try to single out the consciousness that is conscious of a desk without thinking of the desk itself, we fail." The thesis of intentionality can maintain its pretence of credibility only as long as we are focused on using the things around us to get on with our various activities. For instance, I am now using the desk to hold up my laptop and my copy of William Irwin's "The Matrix and Philosophy" while I write this review. So I am not attened to my consciousness of the desk. If, however, I were to stop doing this, and get out my drawing pad, and start to sketch the desk, then I would focus entirely on my visual experience: I would the actual shape of visual patch, the patterns of light and dark, and so on. Thus, by shifting the focus of my attention from an activity that uses the desk, to my experience of the desk, I reveal the qualia that were there all along. I do not "fall through" to the desk, as Barwick suggests. By simply attending to our conscious experiences, we reveal the existentialists' notion of 'intentionality' to be a pre-theoretical and non-empirical fiction. Consequently, Barwick's attempt to save The Matrix from his supposed conclusion of unintelligibility, by invoking 'intentionality', fails. There is no such thing as intentionality (in the sense that Barwick is using the word). And, as we saw earlier, the problem that Barwick was trying to solve by invoking intentionality is itself a false problem. The film requires that people have conscious experiences, and that those conscious experiences are largely driven by electrical signals from the sensory organs, and those signals can be artificially synthesised. It's that simple.
8. "Fate, Freedom, and Foreknowledge"Theodore Schick, Jr(Pprofessor of Philosophy at Muhlenberg college)Schick begins with an astounding misapprehension of a central element of The Matrix. He writes: "Those in the Matrix have no control over their lives. Everything that happens to them is determined by the program feeding electrical impulses to their brains." This is completely wrong. Each individual is held in an informatic matrix (hence the name of the film ...) which provides a virtual world as an infrastructure for people to communicate and interact with one another. Consider two people, Jo and Bo, living inside the Matrix world: Jo exercises free will by inviting Bo out on a date. Jo is not compelled to make that invitation, but goes through all the usual deliberations and nervousness before taking that decision. Even more so, Thomas Anderson freely decides to take the red pill. So, what happens to those individuals is obviously not determined by the software. It is determined by normal human free will, exercised through the medium of the Matrix. Schick compares The Matrix to Robert Nozick's thought-experiment of the 'experience machine'. The big difference is that, in Nozick's experience machine, the other people are all virtual -- they are software constructs generated by the computer. In the Matrix, by contrast, the other people are real, conscious human beings. This obvious difference completely undermines Schick's argument. Most of Schick's essay consists of reflections on the notions of determiminism and free will. This seemss to be an elementary and uncontentious introduction to the philosophy. His treatment of the Oracle in The Matrix is fairly enlightened. He notes that the Oraclee's smoking could be an allusion to the fumes of the Oracle in Delphi. This must be one of the few perceptive comments in the whole of Willliam Irwain's book. It is not, however, one of any significance, since the Oracle's name already establishes unambiguously her symbolic connection with the Delphic oracle. Thankfully, Schick is sufficiently astute to realise that the film does not impute foreknowledge to the Oracle (unlike some commentators' conclusions). The film does not assume the nonsensical theory of predeterminism. Sadly, but unsurprisingly in view of the generally low calibre of material in Irwin's book, Schick does not take this as an opportunity to discuss subtle ideas such as Carl Jung's synchronicity and how this could mesh with the Oracle's role. Oh well.
SECTION 3: DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE OF ETHICS AND RELIGION9. "There is no Spoon: A Buddhist Mirror"Michael Brannigan(Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at La Roche College in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)This is one of the better essays in William Irwin's compilation, "The Matrix and Philosophy". The first section, however, is rather clumsy. Brannigan brings in the Buddhist metaphor of the mirror, which is essentially about increasingly penetrating self-scrutiny. He over-plays the potential symbolism of mirrors in the film, pouncing on every mirror and claiming it as a symbol of Buddhism. But these isolated instances of mirrors generally have nothing else to do with Buddhism. The only remotely plausible case is that of the child holding up a spoon revealing Neo's reflection, although even in that case the Buddhist connection seems very contrived. If, however, mirrors are not specifically signifiers of Buddhism in the film, then there is little sense in Brannigan's launching into the discussion of mirrors at all. Brannigan gets to the core of the matter on page 103: "Does this mean that the world we see and touch does not actually exist? This metaphysical interpretation is what The Matrix is all about." This is what The Matrix is about, but it is not the most common Buddhist view: it is really only the Yogacara school that has this angle. As Brannigan notes, the Mahayana school (misprinted as 'Mayhayana' in the book) maintains that there is a real external world, and that the task of the Buddhist is to deconstruct the emotional and conceptual attachments that people project onto that world. For example, if you regard your home and family as sources of pleasure, then Buddhism tells you to stop doing that and to regard them with studied indifference. Just like the Stoics, the Buddhists reckon that if you don't care about pleasure and pain, then you will never be unhappy. Needless to say, this central Buddhist notion has no connection with The Matrix. Brannigan admits that The Matrix is not a 'Buddhist film' in any normal sense of the term. Most crucially, its aestheticisation of violence, and indeed glorification of it, is anathema to any kind of Buddhism. So, in fact, the connection between The Matrix and Buddhism turns out to be very tenuous. One element of one minor school of Buddhism happens to endorse the view that the physical world is virtual. That's it. So, although Brannigan has written a nice introduction to Buddhism, he has failed to establish any connection with the film.
10. "The Religion of The Matrix and the Problems of Pluralism"Gregory Bassham(Associate Professor of Philosophy at King's College, Pennsylvania)Bassham's essay starts by supposing that The Matrix is an apologetic for a particular religion, or maybe just a particular religious position, which he calls 'Neo-pluralism'. (The capital 'N' making it a pun on the Neo, a form of humour that exists only in academia.) This seems a rather ambitious extrapolation from the fact that there is a certain amount of religious iconography and symbolism in the film. Bassham discerns allusions to Buddhism and Christianity in the film. (He also mentiones Hinduism and Taoism on page 120, although he does not state that he can actually discern any specific allusions to those religions. Other world religions such as Islam, Judaism, and Shinto seem to be overlooked.) So, he wants us to believe, 'Neo-pluralism' is some syncretic combination of at least Buddhism and Christianity. But what are the doctrines of this supposed religion? Or what are the main platforms of this religious stance? He neglects to tell us. Consequently, Bassham places himself in the odd position of criticising a religious position without clearly identifying the defining features of that religious position. What, for example, would a 'Neo-pluralist' believe? Bassham does not say. So it is mysterious how he can conclude, on page 125, that "it reflects a view of religion or spirituality that, while fashionable, is very difficult to make sense of, or to defend." Well, an undefined view is actually impossible to either attack or defend. Bassham provides good reasons for rejecting pluralism as a personal religious stance. Different religious systems do indeed contradict one another in fundamental matters, so they cannot be all literally true. On the other hand, if we are to pick out particular strands of particular religions, and claim that that eclectic mix is better or truer than the original religions, then we would need some rational basis for doing so if we were to avoid the charge of being arbitrary. These are valid points that Bassham makes, but their relevance to The Matrix is hypothetical unless Bassham can establish that the film does somehow espouse religious pluralism. At the level of the literal plot, the film is non-religious. It doe not invoke God, nor any gods, or angels or demons, nor even any spiritual agency (such as 'the Force' in Star Wars). If we are to find anything religious in it all, then it has to by interpreting the contents of the film as an allegorical allusion to something religious. It is well know that the Wachowski brothers have acknowledged the presence of religious symbolism in the film, which has to be extracted and deciphered, and which a lot of people have applied themselve to extracting and deciphering. Bassham's own efforts in this respect throw up some good points ("Anderson" is etymologically the Son of Man), although it also throws some wobblies (Thomas Anderson can hardly represent the Biblical Doubting Thomas if he is also representing Jesus). So, we might reasonably suppose that something like the Christian position is being depicted symbolicaly. So, what about the other part of Bassham's pluralism? The Buddhist element is the weakest. Bassham writes: "This theme [Buddhist emptiness] is sounded most clearly in the Zen-like 'there is no spoon' speech of the Buddhist-looking child 'potential' in the Oracle's waiting room.". To be sure, this speech is redolent of Buddhism; but it is also in keeping with Gnosticism. In fact, the philosophical points of contact between Gnosticism and Buddhism have been noted by Frances Flannery-Dailey and Rachel Wagner in their essay on the Warner Brothers site (A HREF="http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_wakeup.html">Wake up! Gnosticism and Buddhism in the Matrix). Bassham rightly criticises pluralistic religious stances. But then, to be fair to the Wachowski brothers, wouldn't it be right to seek first for a singular, rather than pluralistic interpretation? Is there such an interpretation? Yes, it's the one that the Wachowski brothers themselves have been hinting at, namely Gnosticism. So, Bassham's essay is centrally an attack on a straw man: he misinterprets The Matrix as presenting a pluralistic stance of at least Buddhism and Christianity, and criticises pluralism for its incoherence. This could have been avoided by reading the film more carefully and seeing it as presenting a single religious stance, namely Gnosticism.
11. "Happiness and Cypher's Choice: Is Ignorance Bliss?"Charles L. Griswold, Jr.(Professor of Philosophy at Boston University)The general drift of Griswold's essay is that Cypher raises an interesting question in denying that living a truthful but uncomfortable life is better than living a false but sensually pleasant life. Unfortunately, he does not go beyond drifting in this essay. In the penultimate section, "Three Theses on Happiness", where we might hope to find an incisive statement of where his drifting has taken Griswold to, we find instead: "By way of fleshing out this view just a bit further, ..." A bit further? What, are clarity and definition rationed in academia? Continuing in this vague drift, Griswold;s first 'thesis' is that "tranquility is connected with the long-range sense of happiness ...". Fine, but is it necessary to state such a triviality, let alone present it as a thesis? Second thesis: "one fundamental view associates happiness with ataraxia (tranquility), and the other follows Aristotle in associating happiness with activity (energeia)". In short: happiness is either an active state or a passive state. Well, if we ever decide to abandon the law of excluded middle, we might find this thesis interesting. In the meantime, not. Third thesis: "neither of the two basic alternative views of happiness is alone adequate". In other words, happiness is sometimes an active state and sometimes a passive state. This is sterile logic-chopping IMHO.
12. "We are (the) One! Kant Explains How to Manipulate the Matrix"James Lawler(Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Buffalo)The idea of Kant explaining anything sounds like a non-starter, given the massive internal contradiction of Kant's own philosophy. And, like most of the contributors to William Irwin's compilation, "The Matrix and Philosophy" the connection between this philosopher and the film is tenuous to say the least. Lawler refers to the earlier version of the Matrix, which Agent Smith tells Morpheus about. In that world, "none suffered, [...] everyone would be happy", but humans rejected this world en masse. The simple psychological explanation would be that humans were bored by that version of the Matrix, which had no challenges and hence no sense of achievement. For Lawler, however, the failure of this first version of Matrix has something to do with Kant's notion that "every human being has a destiny to participate in the self-liberation of humanity". But what reason does the film give us for not thinking that people were just plain bored? What reason do we have for thinking that the human race suddenly hit upon Kant's philosophy of self-liberation. None, that I can see. And since Lawler offers no such reason, I must assume that he can't see any such reason, either. As part of the supposed project of collective human liberation, Lawler suggests that egos have to be broken down. "The basic choice of morality is a choice between two contradictory conceptions or Matrices of reality: there is the world of separate independent and competing egos, and the world of shared humanity." But what is there in the film to support this notion? The speech and actions of Neo, Morpheus, and Trinity centre on individuals acting in cooperation to achieve a shared objective, whilst retaining their individual, personal goals. Trinity still loves Neo in the traditional, exclusive manner and is not going to share herself with Cypher or anyone else. Morpheus maintains his position as leader, and Neo and Trinity acknowledge his role. Where is there any suggestion of egolessness? Lawler's Kantian rhapsody takes us further and further from the film: he says there is to be a third Matrix, in which everybody dissolves their individuality in seeking to bring God's kingdom to fruition; and people have to be immortal in order to have a notion of morality. In fact, the film neither entails nor requires any of this. People are individuals, and the film portrays indidividual responsibility and initiative in a good light; and the heroes of the film maintain their commitment to ther moral values in the face of eventual mortality. Lawler concludes that "For this world to exist, it is necessary that egotism be overcome, that we rise to an understanding of our essential unity with one another", but he provides no argument to support this thesis on its own, or as an interpretation of the film.
SECTION 4: VIRTUAL THEMES13. "Notes from the Underground: Nihilism and The Matrix"Thomas S. Hibbs (Associate Professor of Philosophy at Boston College)Unlike most of the pieces in William Irwin's anthology, this is a cogent and enjoyable piece of writing. What it shares with the other essays, however, is a lack of engagement with the film. In diametric opposition to Lawler's genuflectory Kantianism in the preceding essay, Hibbs writes: "The way to overcome the threat of nihilism in The Matrix is through the recovery of distinctively human traits and ways of living. Central among these traits is the sense of human beings as distinct individuals capable of loyalty, love, and sacrifice." This is certainly what the film portrays as the right thing to do. What is not so clear is that it portrays nihilism as a threat in the first place. Hibbs writes as much about Dostoyevsky as about The Matrix. And, in Dostoyevsky's writing, we do indeed find nihilism very clearly identified as an important problem. But in The Matrix? Where is nihilism portrayed? The great mass of humanity are contentedly unaware of their imprisonment in the Matrix, so any nihilism that they might privately be suffering is not a result of The Matrix (and, in any case, is not revealed to us in the film). Thomas Anderson, on, the other hand, is not so much threatened by nihilism as driven by a seemingly mystical notion that something is wrong with the world. Hibbs has written a good piece about Dostoyevsky and nihilism, but said very little about The Matrix.
14. "Popping a Bitter Pill: Existential Authenticity in The Matrix and Nausea"Jennifer L. McMahon(Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Center College)As McMahon rightly says, "Common themes that existential philosophers discuss include absurdity, alienation, anguish, and authenticity." So, er, why are we looking at existentialism in a book about The Matrix? McMahon's answer is: "While Neo's choice involves a number of these items, it is most clearly a choice between authenticity and inauthenticity". I think not. Inauthenticity, in the sense in which it is used in existentialism, is constituted by failing to act in a manner consistent with what one knows about the world. The film makes perfectly clear that Neo does not know what the Matrix is before he takes the red pill. Therefore, if he were to take the blue pill, then he may be guilty of cowardice but he is not embarking on a life of inauthenticity. Cypher is, arguably, embracing inauthenticity because he is re-entering the Matrix after knowing the truth. Even there, however, it is not at all clear, because according to the deal he makes with Agent Smith he will forget all about the Matrix after he has been re-inserted, and will therefore cease to be inauthentic. McMahon pushes hard to make us believe there is a significant existential factor in The Matrix: "both The Matrix and Nausea illustrate that authenticity is difficult not only because the truth it reveals is hard to stomach, but also because inauthenticity is the norm." The relevance of inauthenticity's being the norm is that there is social pressure to be inauthentic, and it is easy for people to slip back into comfortable inauthenticity. Clearly this is not the case in The Matrix. Once a person has been unplugged, she or he is isolated from normal society and cannot drift back into normal life. In order to rejoin the ignorant masses, an extraordinary effort is required, for example Cypher has to betray Morpheus in order to win a deal to be re-inserted. So, in this respect, The Matrix and Nausea diverge. This is really because The Matrix is not predominantly an existential film.
15. "The Paradox of Real Response to Neo-Fiction"Sarah E. Worth(Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Putnam University in Greenville, South Carolina)This is an interesting philosophical piece about the viewer's reactions to what is seen on the screen. It has nothing to do specifically with The Matrix (which is hardly a surprise in William Irwin's "The Matrix and Philosophy"), but it nonetheless runs through some valid issues. Why should it be that people enjoy watching scenes of violence in a film, which they would be appalled and revolted by if they saw those same scenes in real life or in a news bulletin? Worth argues that "We do not actively suspend disbelief - we actively create belief". This is an interesting piece, although, given the real scope of the subject, it is a remarkably tame. It is weakened by not addressing the increasingly blurred boundary between fiction and reality in the flood of violent pornography on the internet. Every day thousands of people receive spam in their email inboxes with links to online video footage of adults engaging in sexual acts with apparently underaged children. What proportion of participants are genuinely underaged, and what proportion are acting under coercion, perhaps under threat or actual experiece of serious violence, is not immediately apparent -- so the punters watch with a frisson of uncertainty as to whether they are watching fiction or reality. There are also web sites specialising in avowedly genuine video clips of violent crimes, such as the murder and decapitation of the Wall Street Journal's David Pearl. All of which blends in nicely with the sanitised television war footage of big explosions seen from afar -- easygoing family infotainment in which we see events where real human beings are blown to pieces or burned to death, but without seing any writhing bodys or flying body parts. What, I wonder, would Worth make of this vast and explosively growing genre of fictive, semi-fictive, and factive violence? Unfortunately that depth of philosophical inquiry would be out of place in William Irwin's light-reading editorial policy.
16. "Real Genre and Virtual Philosophy"Deborah H. Knight and George McKnightKnight & McKnight on the one hand acknowldge that "the very idea of a pure genre form is a theorist's fiction. Rather, the mixing of elements in genre film is the norm, not the exception", and that "The Matrix is unquestionably a mixed-genre film" which immediately raises the question of why anyone would want to carry out a genre analysis of The Matrix. The authors' answer is that "by considering the particular elements that make up the mix, we can find the narrative roots of The Matrix's more obviously philosophical themes". Well, it would be plausible to look at genre analyses for the style of plot and presentation, precisely because those are the aspects of a film that can be classified by genre. And that form of study would very likely be interesting and fruitful. But why conduct a genre analysis of the film's philosophical ideas? There are no genres in philosophy: the field tends to divide into schools and theories, not genres.The authors claim that "If we approach the philosophical aspects of The Matrix by way of the question of genre, we find that most of what counts as 'philosophical' is in fact already part of the film's inheritance". That would be a surprising and interesting conclusion if true. But it isn't. Genre inheritance is too blunt a mechanism too yield such high-resolution features as coherent philosophical ideas. Knight & McKnight note that The Matrix borrows from the science-fiction genres of the dystopian future, "particularly when dealing with the effects of techology on human identity". This is fair enough, but it leaves a lot of ground to cover from that broad-brush categorisation to the important philosophical idea that the whole of our normal waking experience is a virtual world controlled by an intelligence that coordinates everyone else's virtual world in single, synchronised virtual world. They write that "Many films have exploited the idea that the world of appearances is merely an elaborate illusion", but that is to miss the importance of the comprehensive nature of the virtual world that is portrayed in the Matrix. There are few films that do this: eXistenZ, and The Thirteenth Floor hardly constitute a genre. At the end of their essay, the authors claim to "have attempted to show is that the philosophical allusions found in The Matrix take their narrative significance from the film's genre inheritance", which is somewhat different from what they proposed to do at the start of the essay. There, they offered to find the roots of the film's philosphical themes, but here they claim they were only investigating the narrative significance of the philosophical themes. The latter is a much more limited objective. Even here, however, they seem to have had little success. The philosophical content of the film is a development of ideas that runs in parallel with the plot and the presentational stylistics. It requires its own analysis, distinct from studies of genre.
SECTION 5: DE-CONSTRUCTING THE MATRIX17. "Penetrating Keanu: New Holes, but the Same Old Shit"Cynthia Freeland(Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston)This is a perceptive essay comparing The Matrix with its big philosophical rival, eXistenZ. You would have to stretch the term 'philosophy' a long way from its analytic backbone in order to classify this as an essay in philosophy as distinct from cineastic criticism. I acknowledge that that's what some people do in academia, but that doesn't make it right. Philosophy and artistic criticism are distinct areas of scholarship. Freeland contrasts the sanitised violence and dehumanising brutality of The Matrix (such as the cold-blooded murder of police officers and security guards) with eXistenZ, where the "film's vivid scenes of penetration and biomorphic connection show that bodies can be both delightful and disgusting". Clearly, we are in the territory of artistic criticism, not philosophy, when she makes the following point, which in itself is perfectly valid: "The narrative arc of eXistenZ is different from that of The Matrix; where Neo/Keanu moves from a 'bad, dirty' state of being full of plugs to a 'clean, good' state of physical intactness. Instead, eXistenZ revels in scenes that show the penetration of game ports as a sensual, if messy and risky, physical business." Freeman concludes that eXistenZ does a better job of provoking philosophical reflection, and a broader range of philosophical reflections, than The Matrix does. I agree with this assessment, but if we ask a different question, How many people have been led to philosophical reflection by these films?, then The Matrix wins easily. It is plausible that The Matrix has generated more interest in philosophy than any other film. Freeland's valid criticisms notwithstanding, that is a worth-while achievement.
18. "The Matrix, Marx, and the Coppertop's Life"Martin A. Danahay and David Rieder(Danahay is Professor of English at the University of Texas at Arlington, Rieder teaches in the English department at the same institution)This bizarre essay is a work of imaginative fiction in its own right. The authors lay their cards on the table in the opening paragraph: "The Matrix does an especially good job of dramatizing the exploitation of the average American worker in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century America from a Marxist perspective." Their starting point is that the humans have been imprisoned in a power station, where they are performing some useful role for the owners. Immediately, however, The Matrix story and the Marx story diverge. The situation that Marx was addressing was one in which people worked -- in fact, laboured with long and arduous effort -- to produce goods for the owners of the factories and other means of production . In the Matrix, the humans do not labour for the machines. In fact, they are not even aware of the machines or their own contributions to the machines' economy. In whatever way the machines parasite themeselves upon the human beings, it does not intrude into the humans' lives. The humans are certainly not labouring actively for the machines. Marx's basic analysis therefore just does not apply. Danahay and Rieder claim that the alienation of the human race from their real situation matches the workers' alienation from their true economic role. But surely that similarity can be only superficial, since the cause of the alienation is completely different. In The Matrix, the true situation is completely invisible and does not intrude into people's lives (unless, like Neo, they deliberately try to hack the Matrix); in the factories that Marx observed, people were all too aware that their lives were being spent in mechanical labour, but were alienated from the genuine role of such labour. (That is to say, in reality, people worked not because it was genuinely necessary for their survival but so that the capitalists could make profits and live in luxury.)
19. "The Matrix, Simulation and the Postmodern Age"David Weberman(Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia)This a straightforward statement of the main philosophical points of The Matrix (albeit with some postmodern nonsense from the likes of Baudrillard thrown in). It might have been better to have made this essay the introduction to the whole book, and then move on from there.
20. "The Matrix: Or, the Two Sides of Perversion"Slavoj Zizek(Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia)Like all of Zizek's writings, this essay is incomprehensible. At twenty-seven pages, it's also by far the longest. Maybe William Irwin found it incomprehensible too, and hence he could not edit it down to the standard eleven or twelve pages that all the other essays were limited to. |