from the real world, how can we know that the movie is fiction? How can we know that we are not trapped inside the Matrix ourselves? This chapter uses The Matrix to raise the skeptical problem – how can we have knowledge at all, if we cannot even know that the world exists? And does the modern philosopher Descartes present a working solution to the skeptical problem?
This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back.
– Morpheus† 1
Before meeting Morpheus, Thomas Anderson was just a regular guy at a regular job trying to make ends meet. Sure, he led a sort of double life, spending much of his time behind a computer keyboard, hacking under the screen name “Neo,” but even then he was not so different from the rest of us. Neo took this world to be the real world – just as we do. But as it turned out, he was wrong about so much. He thought that he was living at the end of the twentieth century, that he had hair, that the sun was shining, that he knew his parents, and that all of his acquaintances were actually human. Yet none of this was true. To put it bluntly, Neo had no idea what the world was really like. Neo's predicament illustrates the need to “question reality” – which is arguably the main philosophical message of the first Matrix film. The Matrix urged us not to take the world at face value, and it showed us how deceptive appearances can be. However, most people feel quite confident that we are not in the Matrix. They feel certain that our most basic beliefs are not mistaken. But what justifies this sense of confidence? After all, Neo's situation was, on the face of it, no different than ours. His world seemed just like our world. Should he have known that he was living in a dream? Despite the fact that he is sometimes chided about his intelligence by the Oracle (“Not too bright though”) and by Agent Smith (“I see that you are still using all the muscles but the one that matters most”), there were no tell‐tale signs that Neo should have noticed in order to realize that his world was illusory. Without the help of Morpheus, I expect that he would never have known.
By taking the red pill, Neo encountered an age‐old philosophical problem: How do you know what is real? Or, worse yet: Can you know what is real? This is called the problem of skepticism. A skeptic is a person who believes that we can never know what the world is really like because there is always the possibility that we could be radically mistaken about most of our beliefs, just as Neo was. Most people are not plagued by such skeptical doubts. Neo certainly wasn't. Prior to that red pill, he would never have supposed that his whole life was an illusion. Even when he saw it with his own eyes he had trouble believing it, and ended up puking his breakfast onto the floor. Nevertheless it is fair to say that for years Neo had been restless – plagued by a vague and amorphous feeling that something was not quite right with the world. Maybe you have had that feeling too. The question is: How seriously should you take it?
The Skeptical Dilemma: Cartesian Dreams and Demons
Wake up, Neo.
– Computer screen†
The seventeenth‐century French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician René Descartes is famous for taking such skeptical worries seriously, so perhaps he can shed some light on Neo's situation. Descartes took on the project of trying to determine which of his beliefs could be maintained with absolute certainty. He employed what is famously known as his method of doubt. He began by discarding all of his beliefs and resolving to allow them back in, only if it could be shown that they were absolutely certain. Rather than try to prove that any of his beliefs were actually false, which can be quite difficult to do (imagine the work involved in trying to prove that sentient machines aren't secretly plotting a war against us at this very moment), he simply checked his beliefs to see if they admitted any room for doubt. If a belief could be doubted, Descartes withheld his assent from it. It may seem a bit crazy to throw out all of your beliefs at once, but Descartes was not suggesting that a person should live their entire life this way. Rather, he thought that since he had come to accept so many beliefs, most of which were adopted uncritically during his childhood, it would be smart to sift through them at least once in his life, in order to discover which of his beliefs were “rock solid.”
Employing this method, Descartes reached some startling conclusions, which, hundreds of years later, provide the basic framework of the Matrix films. One of Descartes's first big conclusions was that there was absolutely no way to be sure that he wasn't dreaming at any given moment. In his Meditations on First Philosophy he wrote:
How often, at night, I've been convinced that I was here, sitting before the fire, wearing my dressing gown, when in fact I was undressed and between the covers of my bed! … I see so plainly that there are no reliable signs by which I can distinguish sleeping from waking that I am stupefied – and my stupor itself suggests that I am asleep!2
Is it possible that you might be dreaming right now? Some people do not buy it. They argue that there is a difference in “feel” between dreams and waking life.3 Surely, they say, my experience at this moment is too crisp and vivid to be a dream. But while most of us have had fairly lucid dreams in which we realized that we were dreaming, you have probably also had the experience of being totally caught up in a dream, such that you had no idea that the events were not real. Can you be absolutely sure that this is not one of those times? There appears to be at least a slight possibility that this could be a dream.
Some people say they can prove that they are not dreaming. They attempt this by setting certain limits on dreams, for example, that they cannot be in‐color, or that it is impossible to read in a dream. But most people do recall colors from their dreams. And I distinctly remember a dream in which I read – though I must admit that it took quite a bit of effort. Maybe you also recall reading in a dream. But whether you have or not is really beside the point, for there is simply no reason to believe that it is physically (or mentally) impossible to do so.
Skepticism Within the Matrix
Real is just another four‐letter word.
– CypherSS
Of course the Matrix films take the whole dream scenario to its logical limit. They ask you to consider whether your entire life might be a dream. As Morpheus puts it:
Have you ever had a dream … that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?
Is there any way to be sure that your whole life has not been a dream? I do not think that there is. Typically, we call some experiences “dreams” and others “reality” by contrasting them. Experiences that we call “real” are consistent and predictable. For example, people do not just get up and fly away in “real life” while they sometimes do in dreams. And it is not unusual for the experiences we have in dreams to jump around from one time and place to another, while those events we call “real” do not. But if your whole life has been a dream, then there is nothing to contrast these experiences with. In this case, the “dreams” that you recall each night are just dreams within the dream. And that contrast still holds. Even if your whole life has been a dream you could distinguish your nightly dreams from your “waking experiences” much of the time. But how do you know that you are not in Neo's predicament – that even your waking experiences are simply more dreams – just more predictable ones? Morpheus's suggestion seems correct. If you have never awakened from the dream to see what “real life” is actually like, you would have absolutely no way to discern that you are dreaming.
So the skeptical problem is not just a problem for Neo. It is also a problem for us. If there is no way to tell if your whole life has been a dream, then what makes you so sure that it is not? You too should