I. Ambivalence
“The Matrix is a computer-generated dreamworld
built to keep us under control.”
Morpheus, early in The Matrix
In dreaming, you are not only out of control, you don’t
even know it…I was completely duped again and again the minute
my pons, my amygdala, my perihippocampal cortex, my anterior cingulate,
my visual association and parietal opercular cortices were revved up
and my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was muffled.
J. Allan Hobson, The Dream Drugstore,
p.64
The Matrix is an exercise in ambivalence,
and at the very heart of that ambivalence lies the Dream.
In our dreams,
we are not in control. Real dreaming, unlike many popular philosophers’ fictions,
is an altered state, closely related to the states induced by chemical manipulations
such as the use of (certain) medical
or recreational drugs. The dreaming brain is not like the wakeful brain.
Normal sensory input is blocked, attentional capacities are impaired or
lost, memory is distorted, reasoning and logic are weakened, narratives
run wild, self-reflection is dampened or destroyed, emotion and instinct
are hyperstimulated, and forms of ‘top-down’ willed control
and decision-making diluted and easily overwhelmed .2
It may seem as if all of this is simply a direct effect of the blockage
of sensory input, but this is not so. Instead, profound changes in
neurochemical activity also occur, and these in turn compromise what
J. Allan Hobson calls our ‘critical self-awareness’.
The result is that even though the goings-on in most dreams would
cause us (were we awake) to suspect trickery or to question our sanity,
in our dreams we simply accept them as normal, as real life! One
way to keep people ‘under control’ as Morpheus put it,
is to keep them (in this specific sense) out of (self) control. One
of the issues I want to explore is: to what extent are the experiences
of normal matrix-bound humans (matrixers) genuinely dream-like, where
to be genuinely dream-like is (in part) to display this dampening
of critical acuity? I shall call this normal, critically compromised
dream-state ‘uncritical dreaming’.
But there is, of course, another image of dreaming, and this is the
image that has so far received most attention in these essays. This
is the view of dreaming that links up with Descartes’ famous ‘malicious
demon’ thought experiments, and with standard philosophical
discussions of what we can (and cannot) know. These explore the question,
what can we really know on the basis of our actual experience? Dreaming,
thus construed, is not really like dreaming at all: it is a state
in which all the sensory experiences might be just as they are
in waking, and our critical faculties as bright and active as ever.
I shall call this kind of ‘dreaming’ industrial
strength ‘deception’, so as to distinguish it from real
dreaming.
The (apparent) deception practiced by the machines, we can now see,
comes in two potential varieties. First, there is the industrial-strength
version. Here all the sensory inputs that assail your brain are just
as they would be were you living and moving in a world of persisting,
external, independent people, cities, cars and objects, and you yourself
are as alert and critical as ever. Second, there is the ‘uncritical
dreaming’ version, where the flow of sensory images and data
is actually not all as it should be.3 Things may morph and change,
scenes shift, identities alter. Here, weirdness may be rampant yet
generally unremarked, since your abilities to judge that all is not
as it should be are fatally impaired, due to the critical-dampening
effects of the neuro-chemical alterations distinctive of sleeping
or drugging. The genius of the Matrix (I shall argue) is its ability
to balance, both thematically and cinematically, on a knife-edge
between these two versions of events.
The industrial strength version
invites an important response, ably advanced by David Chalmers in
his paper on this
site. According to this response, industrial strength ‘deception’ is
not really deception at all! Matrixers subject to this kind of manipulation
really do inhabit (so the argument goes) pretty much the world they
believe themselves to inhabit. ‘Industrial strength matrixers’,
as I shall call them, really do live in cities and roam a planet
much like earth. Later in this essay I will further defend this view,
arguing that (still assuming industrial strength ‘deception’)
Matrix-based human intelligences would count as being as fully and
richly embodied as you and I. Despite those (other) bodies we see
suspended in the machine-feeding womb, industrial strength matrixers
really do use their head and eyes to scan the visual scene and their
legs to move around. According to this view, the body in the Matrix
is not a dreamt body, at least not in any ordinary sense of dreaming.
It is a real body, realized in the non-standard medium of bits of
information. With the point made for the visible body, the parallel
result for the wider world (of cities, cars, sky and dust) may become
a little easier to swallow.
We can then return to the nature of dreaming. For part of the ambivalence
at the heart of the Matrix is, I think, an abiding ambivalence about
the nature of dreaming itself. Real dreaming, to repeat, involves
profound changes to the cognitive system deployed in normal wakefulness,
changes that systematically deprive us of much of our normal critical
acuity. In real dreaming, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex is compromised: ‘muffled’ in that opening quote
from J. Allan Hobson, Director of the Neurophysiology Laboratory
at Harvard Medical School. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is (among
other things) the ‘executive brain’ that helps us organize
our thinking, critically assess our own gut responses and maintain
at least a modicum of top-down control. The kind of state that Morpheus
calls ‘a computer-generated dreamworld’ hovers uneasily
between such true (profoundly cognitive acuity diminishing) dream
states and something much closer to unknowing-yet-fully-awake participation
in a form of multi-agent immersive virtual reality: an ‘interactive
virtual environment’ as Morpheus also puts it.
The moral ambiguity that permeates the Matrix is rooted in this same
balancing act between real dreaming and a multi-agent immersive virtual
reality in which the neural states of the average matrix dwellers
are (courtesy of the machines) really identical to those of awake,
active humans. Drift towards the former reading, according to which
the Matrix-dwellers’ cognitive states are neurologically akin
to those critically diminished states distinctive of real human dreaming,
and everything — ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — changes.
Not only does the previous argument for true embodiment in the Matrix
fail, but the
moral status of the machines’ experiment is immediately and
radically transformed. Instead of seeing the machines as maintaining
a kind of innocent immersive virtual reality, wherein human embodiment
and human intelligence is, in every way that matters, everything
it always was, the ploy of the machines becomes more like that of
pimps who keep their call-girls hooked on heroin. Thus cognitively
diminished, the girls do not question their state, and are not able
to plot a rebellion or plan an escape.
Drug-forcing pimps or master immersive reality programmers? It is
by maintaining a studied ambivalence between these two readings that
(I claim) The Matrix film sequence gains much of its power, its beauty
and its profound ability to puzzle.
II. Real Dreaming (Asleep in the Matrix)
Neo
believes, under the influence of Morpheus and of his own experiments, that
Matrix-bound humanity is in the grip of a delusional dream.
In the dream, the apparently sensed world seems real. It seems
like a place where the body moves, where the eyes roam, where flesh meets
flesh and sometimes lead and steel. But this, Neo comes to believe,
is simply a dream, a device to keep us quiet while the machines
patiently
suck energy from the preserved slumbering bio-mass. To prove
that it is a dream, Neo learns to subvert its logic: he becomes able
to turn back bullets, to fly, to defeat agents, and all this because
he wills it to be so.
In one important sense, however, this is no ordinary dream. For
in this dream (as Neo understands it) there is real contact between
multiple intelligences. When Neo speaks to Cypher, he does not
speak
merely to a construct of his own sleep-bound imagination, but
to another sentient being, with genuinely independent memories,
hopes,
fears and skills. Moreover, these multiple intelligences can
communally build persisting structures in their world. They can
build worlds
to live and act in. If Neo places a cup on a table in a certain
room, it will be seen by Cypher when Cypher enters that room
(unless someone
else moves it away first). A simple bio-mass of individually
dreaming humans could never achieve and maintain this kind of
interpersonal
and structural continuity and integration. So the machines must
be doing something (a whole lot in fact) to keep things in line.
Nonetheless, there is clearly something dream-like going on,
for only in a world not fully bound by the laws of (even simulated)
earthly physics could Neo fly, or turn back those bullets. In
a
normal Virtual
Reality simulation, you cannot bend the rules just by willing
it. By the same token, video-gaming would be a whole different
sport
were the underlying code directly susceptible to the will of
the players! Moreover, the movie is chock-full of images that
morph
and shift in ways not seen in waking life, again suggesting that
this
is not a perfect simulation of earthly physics, but something
less stable, lacking in firewalls, and prone to direct subversion
by
the minds of enlightened matrixers. The average matrixer, of
course, does not subvert, remains unenlightened, and seems to
be almost
sleepwalking
through a mundane, yet not unpleasant, life. This contrast is
perhaps most striking in the scene at the end of the first movie,
where
Neo, increasingly enlightened, steps out of the ‘phone box to see
hordes of ignorant matrixers moving in trance-like, clockwork fashion,
their images somewhat out of focus in a classic depth of field manipulation,
while that of Neo is crystal-clear, alert, and bemused by their unquestioning,
anesthetized progress through the world.
To try to clarify just what we are dealing with, it will help
to first take a hard look at normal human dreaming. Then we can
begin
to plot some differences and to explore the space of options.
A word of warning though. Familiar as they are, sleep and dreaming
are complex,
ill-understood phenomena. The sketch that follows is widely accepted
and heavily rooted in the best contemporary neuroscience and
psychopharmacology.
But it is not written in stone, and much remains unclear.
The three dominant states for the human brain are waking, REM
(Rapid Eye Movement) Sleep, and non-REM (NREM) sleep. Each state
has clear
physiological, pharmacological and experiential correlates.
In waking, we can occupy many states, from eyes-closed imagistic
musing to eyes-open, alert engagement with a potentially threatening
environment. The option of alertness and full critical engagement
is, however, typically present, even if we are engaged momentarily
in detached daydreaming.
In REM sleep our dreams (at least as evidenced by subsequent
report) are vivid, but their logic is weak. Here is a typical
enough report:
I was at a
conference and trying to get breakfast but the food and the people in line
kept changing. My legs didn’t work properly
and I found it a great effort to hold my tray up. Then I realized
why. My body was rotting away and liquid was oozing from it.
I thought I might be completely rotted before the end of the day, but I thought
I should still get some coffee if I still had the strength.
Excerpt quoted in Blackmore (2004) p.340
Here is another description,
this time from Helena Bonham-Carter, while she was expecting a baby
with movie director Tim Burton:
“I dreamed I gave birth to a frozen chicken. In my
dream, I was very pleased with a frozen chicken.”
Quoted by Lynn Hirschberg (2003)
In NREM sleep, if we dream at all, the
dreams (again, as evidenced by waking report) are more like faint and
mundane thoughts or fuzzy rememberings.
All these states (waking, REM-sleep, NREM sleep) are correlated with
specific patterns of neuro-chemical activity. A useful tool for displaying
the pattern
is Hobson’s AIM model. Hobson is a leading sleep researcher interested
in the relation between waking, sleeping and the kinds of altered state
experienced during psychosis and drug-use. The AIM model characterizes
different states as
points in a three dimensional space, whose axes are:
(1) Activation Energy
(2) Input Source
(3) Mode
Normal wakefulness is characterized by
high activation (as measured by EEG for example) corresponding to fairly intense
experience, external
input sources
(the
brain is receiving and processing a rich stream of sensory signals
from the world, rather than being shut down and largely re-cycling its
own activity), and a distinctive
mode. Mode here names a balance between brain chemicals, especially
amines
and cholines. Amines are neurotransmitters such as noradrenaline
and serotonin, whose
action is known to be essential for normal waking consciousness (they
are essential to the processes that enable us direct attention, reason
things
through, and
decide to act). When these are shut off, and other neurotransmitters
(cholines, such as acetylcholine) dominate, we experience delusions
and hallucinations
(if we are awake) and vivid, uncritical dreaming (if we are asleep).
In this
way
it is the amine/choline balance that determines how signals and information
(whether externally or internally generated) will be dealt with and
processed. When the
balance (as in waking) favors the amine-based (aminergic) system,
we are rational, alert to our surroundings, easily able to direct our
own actions
and to rapidly
and critically appraise our situation. When the balance favors the
cholinergic system, our focus shifts inwards, emotion and analogical reasoning
begin
to dominate, and critical control and judgment wane. In REM sleep,
the aminergic systems are
totally deactivated and the cholinergic hyperactive. This is an extremely
altered
cognitive state. Only extreme forms of psychosis or serious medical
or recreational drug use can induce this kind of state in non-sleeping
humans. In normal
waking states, the ratio of aminergic to cholinergic activity varies
across a large
continuum. In non-REM sleep, all the systems (aminergic and cholinergic
alike) are dampened and (mostly) inactive.4
This is not to suggest (far from it) that the best state for a human
mind would be one of almost-complete aminergic dominance. Instead,
the power,
subtlety
and beauty of wakeful human intelligence seems to have much to do
with the precise
details of the ever-shifting balance between the two systems. But
in normal waking the mode (defined as the ratio between the activity
of
the two systems)
leans
towards the aminergic. Whereas in REM sleep, with acetycholine dominating,
experience becomes increasingly dissociative, displaying “amnesia,
hallucinations, bizarre mentation, anxiety, and loss of volition
control” (Hobson,
p. 91). All this, we now know, is matched by a shift in regional
blood flow from (in waking) dorsolateral
prefrontal cortex to (in REM sleep) subcortical limbic structures
(some of which are mentioned in the opening quote). Here too, the
psychological and the physiological
march (unsurprisingly, surely) in step, with dorsolateral prefrontal
cortex implicated in analytic reason, inhibition and executive control,
and the limbic structures
dominating for emotion, instinct and association.5
Bottom line: The kind of sleep in which we experience vivid dreaming
is, typically at least, a state in which aminergic systems essential
to critical
reason are
deactivated. This state is a far cry from normal wakefulness. The
reason we (often) don’t know we are dreaming is not because the dream simulates waking reality
(the immersive Virtual Reality option) but because we are cognitively diminished
in ways that block voluntary attention and critical engagement and that promote
a kind of face-value acceptance. In REM sleep we are, in a real sense, drugged
witless by our own brains. And the cure, as Hobson and Neo would probably both
agree, is simple: it is called waking up!
Is it possible that the machines are electrically or chemically altering
the states of the brains of their human power-cells, so as to partially
or totally
deactivate the aminergic system and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex?
To compromise these would be to compromise the matrixers capacities
for critical
engagement
and analysis in a very profound way. Certainly, we sometimes see
images of the humans suspended within the machine’s grid in what seem to be advanced
stages of REM sleep. If this is what is going on, those human brains are, in
a fairly precise sense, permanently drugged. What Neo has achieved is then well
compared (as other essayists have noted) to the state known as lucid dreaming.
In lucid dreaming, a very few subjects are able to become aware that they are
dreaming, without actually awakening. They may even be able to take control of
the dream itself, forcing in directions previously requested by an experimenter
or simply for their own enjoyment.
The full AIM (Activation/Input/Mode) profile of the lucid dreamer
is still unclear, but Hobson speculatively suggests that one key
may be
a kind of
prior-to-sleep priming in which the lucid dreamer prepares to recognize
the delusional REM
dream
state as it develops. REM sleep actually enhances priming effects,
in which (for example) prior exposure to one word makes recall of
another quicker
or more likely.
Pre-sleep preparations may, Hobson suggests, prime6 a more complex
association between the signature (fuzzy, delusional) character of
REM sleep and
the realization that you are indeed sleeping. A kind of positive
feedback cycle
can then take
root, so that the primed realization of dreaming is fed by each encounter
with new unlikely or delusional elements. At this point the mode
balance may shift
a little, so that some dorsolateral prefrontal involvement becomes
possible.
Not too much, or the vivid dream state would be lost. Not too little,
or control would be lost and dreamt delusions would (as usual) be
taken as
real. This
is a testable hypothesis, using PET neuroimaging to reveal fluctuations
in neural
regional blood flow during lucid dreaming. But it has not yet been
tested.
Might Neo have been somehow primed, before the machine-induced sleep,
in this kind of way? Or perhaps, by some kind of neuro-chemical accident,
Neo, Morpheus
and a few others are simply immune to the suppression of their aminergic
systems? The Matrix as uncritical dream, and Neo as lucid dreamer.
Such views at first
seem to make good sense. But only if we assume that the state of
the typical
matrixer is indeed a real dream state. Such a reading, it should
now be clear, is problematic for a number of reasons. For one thing,
there
is
strong narrative
continuity (major plot items do not just come and go without explanation).
There is also good interpersonal agreement (what Neo does, Trinity
sees, and so on).
But most obviously of all, the typical matrixer simply does not seem
to be unusually uncritical. For sure, they are not constantly reflecting
on
their
life and analyzing
its worth. But, and this is crucial, within the movie truly unusual
happenings are indeed usually spotted as such. The security guards
are as amazed
as we are when Neo and Trinity, armed to the teeth, burst through
the gates.
When
Neo stops
bullets, or flies, the typical matrixer is astounded. This is not
the reaction of an uncritical dreamer.
Colin McGinn, in his paper on this
site, is at pains to highlight
the many layers of dream-like quality that permeate the movie, and
to depict
Neo
as a lucid dreamer.
But in the chemically and cognitively precise sense just outlined,
life in the Matrix is simply not like life in a dream, and Neo is
nothing like a
lucid dreamer.
The typical matrixer does not display the full cognitive signature
of
uncritical dreaming, and it therefore seems unlikely that the machines
are actively
maintaining the brains of their human power cells in the standard
(aminergic-off, hyper-cholinergic)
REM-sleep mode. Whatever else the machines may be doing, they do
not seem to be acting merely like drug-pushing pimps. It is not that
Neo
is special
because
he has his wits available, but rather, because he is beginning to
really use them and to question (guided by Morpheus) so much that
he previously
took for
granted.
In section 4, I’ll consider a midway option in which elements
of real dreaming combine with elements of immersive simulation. For
the moment, however, we are
again face to face with the productive tension at the very heart
of the Matrix. For McGinn is surely right, despite all this, to remark
the genuinely dream-like,
shifting and sometimes disconnected visual and dramatic qualities
that repeatedly surface. The point I now want to make, and will return
to at the end, is that
this tension is distinctive of our normal waking life as well! For
our waking experience is itself the product of that constantly shifting
balance between
the aminergic and cholinergic systems, a balance that alters and
evolves minute-by-minute during any normal day. As Hobson puts it “it
is as if we are designed to be rational (but cool) and irrational
(but hot) by turns” (p.97). The Matrix film sequence, by repeatedly shifting between narrative and visual
modes proper to critically engaged waking reality and then to delusional
sleep, is able to
explore the whole spectrum of positions in Hobson’s AIM three-space.
In so doing it gives us insight into the inherently unstable nature
of human awareness
itself.
3. Industrial Strength ‘Deception’ (Awake
in the Matrix).
In real dreaming, we often believe ourselves
to be in places we are not, doing things we are not. On the face of it, life
in the Matrix
is an
endless dream.
According to this very natural view, most humans in the matrix
are doubly deceived. They are deceived about their physical surroundings,
believing
themselves to
live in cities and to roam the Earth, when “in fact” they
are suspended in an energy-sucking machine-made womb. They are
also (still on the face of it)
deceived about their own bodies, believing themselves to be moving
their limbs, flexing their muscles, and scanning the scene with
their eyes and heads, when “in
fact” their bodies are still, their heads are fixed, their
eyes closed. Such, at least, is the dominant interpretation of
the true state of Matrix-based
humanity.
But there is an alternative. To bring it into view, we need to
imagine that the machines are not simply guiding (and somehow,
rather puzzlingly,
making
intersubjectively
coherent) the real dreamings of the slumbering bio-mass. Instead,
suppose that they have created a detailed simulation of the physics
and structure
of the
normal human world, and that they are closely and continuously
monitoring the neural
activity in the brains of their human power cells. These brains
are fed signals that correspond exactly to the ones they would
receive
were they
awake and
acting in the world, and the virtual world updated in ways that
conform to those actions.
Each day, these brains would go through just the same chemical
cycles as normal human brains, moving systematically through
Hobson’s AIM space: from awake
(aminergic systems highly active, so-called Sleep-On neurons inactive, critically
alert) to N-REM sleep ( forebrain Sleep-On neurons fire,7 aminergic and cholinergic
systems inactive, more or less dreamless) to REM sleep (brain-stem REM-Sleep-On
neurons fire, aminergic systems shut off, cholinergic systems highly active,
vivid dreaming can occur, and critical and executive faculties extremely dulled).
Do matrixers really dream and awaken, or do they only dream they
are dreaming and awakening? In the industrial strength version,
it seems
more accurate
to say they really dream and awaken. The states of their brains8
in Matrix-sleep, on this version, differ from the states of their
brains
during Matrix-waking
in just the same ways as ours do between wake and sleep. By contrast
if, in
a real dream, we dream we fall asleep, there is no such neuro-chemical
shift. So
too, if (in a real dream) we dream we are awakening, that does
not itself activate the dormant aminergic systems that would
actually awaken us
and restore our
critical acuity. Once again, the differences between the two
versions are striking.
The machines, on the industrial strength version I am now pursuing,
create a detailed immersive virtual reality that is sensitive
to the actions
of all the
users, and they ensure that my actions encounter obstacles and
generate systematic sensory feedback exactly as they do in the
normal world.
That would include,
for instance, generating the whole panoply of signals distinctive
of muscle tiredness after an arduous rock climb, and those distinctive
of hunger,
and of the satiation
of hunger by food (recall Cypher’s infamous steak), and
so on. (Notice that on the real-dream version none of this is
necessary: instead, Cypher only
needs to believe he has enjoyed a steak. These are different
states.)
On this industrial strength version, I claim, matrixers are genuinely
embodied and are able to eat, act, wake, sleep and dream in a
world that is every
bit as real as they imagine (though its deep physics is, as David
Chalmers in his
essay on this site points out, not quite as they think).
To make this stick (or even to make it begin to seem plausible)
we can start by looking a bit harder at what it means to have
a body,
and at
what having
a body does for a mind like ours. With this understanding in
place, it should be
possible to see how the human intelligences in the industrial
strength Matrix could be embodied intelligences through and through.
They
would be embodied
not in virtue of those organic shells feeding the machines, but
in virtue of the
crucial role of eye-movements, head-movements, and limb-movements
in altering the inputs to their brains and nervous system, and
in virtue
of the way
the world presents itself both as a resource for action and as
a source of limits
on action.
Consider a fairly typical example of embodied action: solving
a jigsaw puzzle. First, I arrange the pieces on the table in
front
of me,
perhaps placing
the predominantly red pieces (bits of an image of a rocket) in
one pile, the green
(bits of an image of the jungle) in another, the pieces with
one straight edge in a third, and so on. To solve the puzzle,
I then
combine a variety
of tactics.
One tactic involves repeatedly looking from the pieces to the
half-completed puzzle. During these periods, my eyes make repeated
movements (known
as saccades) that bring different aspects of the scene into foveal
view. (Human
vision
depends heavily on moving a small high resolution are, known
as the fovea, around the
scene, so as to retrieve information as and when needed). Another
tactic involves picking pieces up and trying them out, to see
if they really
fit in certain
locations. Yet another tactic involves reasoning about the shape
of the missing pieces:
there must be one there with a wiggly edge and half red and half
green. So I again scan the scene, with this image in mind, hoping
to find
such a piece.
In this kind of problem solving, the body and world play important
roles.9 Instead of creating a full image of the half completed
puzzle in my
mind’s eye,
and then looking over the pieces, I repeatedly shift gaze from the real puzzle
to the pieces. This saves my brain from encoding (no doubt badly) all that complex
detail. And when I have isolated a candidate piece, I make the final decision
by actually trying it out for fit. At this point, the world may fight back, refusing
to allow a piece to fit, however much I want it to. This is an example of what
Dreyfus and Dreyfus10 call running up against a boundary condition in our attempts
to cope with the world (I’ll return to Neo’s, and the agents’,
abilities to bend such rules in a moment). Moreover, notice that I started out
by organizing the workplace in a way that then helps reduce my problem-solving
load (making the various piles). All this is what Cognitive Scientist David Kirsh
calls ‘the intelligent use of space’.
Now all of these ploys and strategies are available, quite straightforwardly,
to the average industrial strength matrixer. She can use the
external world (as constituted by the machines detailed and action-responsive
simulation)
to reduce
the problem-solving load for her own cognitive processing. She
can use body and eye movements so as to leave lots of important
detail ‘in the world’,
retrieving information as and when needed for a specific action. She can intervene
so as to organize the workspace in ways that then persist, independently of further
cognitive efforts on her part, and that (for example) save her searching for
red pieces among the green by keeping all the red ones in a pile, and so on.
Consider, finally, the sense of presence, of where we are. There
is a wonderful thought-experiment due to the philosopher Daniel
Dennett. Dennett
tells
the story of a U.S. citizen who agrees to participate in a secret
experiment.
The citizen
is Dennett himself, and in the experiment Dennett’s brain is removed, kept
alive in a tank of nutrients, and equipped with a multitude of radio links by
means of which to execute all its normal bodily control functions. Dennett’s
body (which is to be used to explore a dangerous area) is equipped with receivers
and transmitters, so that it can use its in-built sensors (eyes, ears, etc.)
to relay information back to Dennett’s brain. As the technicians in the
story put it;11
“Think of it … as a mere stretching of the nerves. If your brain were just
moved over an inch in your skull, that would not alter or impair your mind. We’re
simply going to make the nerves indefinitely elastic by splicing radio links
into them.”
There is a way of thinking of what the
machines have done (in the industrial strength version) that is a lot like
this. But instead of using the brain to
control a standard body exploring distant and dangerous parts of the standard
world, they have ‘stretched the nerves’ all the way into a fully
immersive virtual reality, allowing the brain to control a kind of body-double
avatar.12
With his brain safely excised and re-located, and the radio links established,
Dennett awakes. He sees the nurse, who leads him to the room where his brain
is being kept. The experience that ensues is puzzling. There is Dennett,
standing up, staring at his own brain. Or is he? Perhaps, he muses, the proper
thought
is “here I am, suspended in a bubbly fluid, being stared at by my own eyes …” Try
as he may, Dennett cannot seem to place himself in the tank. It continues to
seem as if he is outside the tank, looking in. Dennett’s point-of-view,
as he moves, seems securely fixed outside the tank.13
Where is Dennett? Is he
really in the tank of nutrient, really outside the tank looking in, or really
no-place at all (or both places at once)? Such questions need have no clear-cut
answers. But what does seem clear is that human location should not be taken
to be a function of facts about the location of the brain. After all, wherever ‘you’ are,
it surely isn’t inside the top of your own head! Human presence, instead,
is better understood as dependent upon our capacities for dense, closed
loop control. By that I mean control (of some kind of body) such that as the body
moves, the brain receives rich and detailed feedback. It is this kind of feedback
cycle and closed loop control that supports skilful action. Skillful action then
enables us, as the computer scientist Paul Dourish puts it, to engage in ‘inhabited
interactions’.14 The difference between an inhabited and a non-inhabited
interaction is just the difference between, for example, having to carefully
plan, monitor and execute a reach for a coffee cup, and ‘just reaching’,
as we expert coffee-cup grabbers do. Inhabiting the body, we are able to fluently
use movement and action as parts of our own problem-solving routines.
Putting all this together, I can now offer a proposal for how to think about
the body and the world:
(1) The body is a controllable and inhabitable resource.
(2) It is located (or its parts are located) in one or more co-ordinate spaces,
and its actions (or the actions of its parts) evolve in time.
(3) Experiences of dense, closed loop control involving this resource yield
a robust sense of presence, and of ‘inhabiting’ the body.
(4) It is a resource capable (via these ‘inhabited interactions’)
of being skillfully used to transform a problem space, and to exploit properties
and features of the world.
(5) The world is the place where such embodied actions encounter boundary
conditions and are forced to conform.
And finally:
(6) Real space is wherever
perception and embodied action occur.
Space, body and world are in this
way all inter-defined. According to this
formula, industrial
strength deception is a contradiction in terms.15 The world of the industrial
strength matrixer is a real world. It acts as a boundary condition for
skilled action, and it is populated by real bodies whose inhabited
interactions play
the very same problem-transforming roles as our own.
IV. The Hybrid Matrix
There
is a clear problem for any full Industrial Strength reading of the Matrix.
Such readings make it hard to understand how Neo can (as Morpheus puts it) ‘bend
the rules’. If your brain was getting its inputs from, and feeding its
outputs to, this kind of immersive virtual reality set-up, there should be no
room to break the laws of physics just by willing it so. Worse still, rampant
rule-bending seems to deprive the world of its ability to function as a boundary
condition, and this would undermine my attempts to argue for genuine embodiment
and presence inside the matrix. It is as if you really could make the jigsaw
puzzle piece fit just by wishing it so, in which case the world is surely not
playing the cognition-enhancing role I described.
By contrast, the real dreaming model makes rule-bending easy to understand,
perhaps along the lines of lucid dreaming mentioned in section 2. But this
model fails
to account for the kinds of preserved critical acuity that we do see
in the Matrix: the fact that Neo’s flying is seen by everyone as something
remarkable, as proof of superhuman prowess, and is not simply accommodated
courtesy of dampened
critical and executive processing.
Certainly, with a bit of ingenuity, we could probably come up with patches
for each of these models. For example, someone who favors the industrial strength
model could depict Neo as a kind of ‘psychological hacker’ whose
willpower somehow alters the underlying code, bypassing rich and detailed restraints
that really do apply to the average person. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (in their paper
on this site) offer a version of this, in which Neo’s belief that a spoon
is bending forces the system to conform. Similarly, someone who favors the ‘real
dreaming’ option might argue that the machines somehow link all the sleepers
into a single web, maintaining the standard (critical acuity diminishing) REM
sleep chemistry but thus forcing the sleepers to dream a single dream.
Between these two extremes, however, lies some of the most interesting ground
of all, the ground of what I am calling the ‘Hybrid Matrix’. On the
hybrid model, the matrixers’ world is indeed a kind of immersive virtual
reality, but one that has been rather lazily programmed. Instead of recreating
a deep and fully constraining physics, we can imagine that the machines’ simulation
is patchy, and depends on a lot of quick and dirty tricks.16 For example, instead
of running a complete, continuous full simulation of all locations and objects,
they may only have programmed detail to unfold and update where one or more matrixers
happen to look (a standard move, in fact, in ordinary Virtual Reality simulations).
They may also not have bothered much about fine-grained continuity. Perhaps minor
objects can come and go quite freely. On this model, the machines (like cinematographers!)
just make sure that nothing major, and in anyone’s focal attention, behaves
strangely. We humans are surprisingly oblivious to unexpected scene-changes and
non-central continuity errors anyway, as a large recent literature on “change
blindness” clearly demonstrates.17 It is almost as if we are built to live
in a lazily programmed world! In addition, lazy programming, as we all know,
is also a royal invitation to hacking. The lazily programmed Matrix is at once
an eminently hackable Matrix, as Neo, Trinity and Morpheus know so well.
To further support lazy programming, we might even imagine that the machines
have tilted the chemical balances in the hosts’ brains just enough to make
them even more unlikely to attend to much fine detail, or to pursue rigorous
and sustained environmental examinations. Such tilting would not yield genuine
chemically-sleeping brains, but they would not be fully alert brains either.
All this would just underline the guiding politics of the Matrix, which is a
politics of awakening from dull, unthinking conformity and thus of escape from
invisible, corrosive, but surprisingly violable constraints.
Would a lazily programmed Matrix still count as a real world, according to
the argument of the previous section? I think it would, just so long as the
lazy
program was stable enough, and powerful enough, to impose some boundary conditions
and cognitively exploitable order in most normal circumstances. It would be,
as David Chalmers has suggested, just like a real world with a rather lazy
God and a surprisingly patchy ultimate physics!
Which model is correct? Is the Matrix a consensual dream-world, a multi-agent
immersive virtual reality simulation or a lazily programmed hybrid? I do not
think we should seek an answer to this question. The power, beauty, and philosophical
depth of the Matrix all derive from its ability to show us our world under
many guises. At times, it shows us our world as a genuine dream-world, dominated
by
(strangely consensual) delusions. Such a world is ultimately unconstraining
but hard to fathom, and maximally resistant to critical attention. At other
times,
it shows us our world as boundary condition, as a hard-edged arena for rational
thought and embodied action. At still other times, it shows us a hybrid world,
poised unsteadily between the two extremes. Just as normal wakefulness comes
in many grades, characterized by the shifting balance between the aminergic
and cholinergic systems, so the movie constantly shifts from one state to another,
morphing between delusional dream and immersive virtual reality. By flipping
between, and mixing among, these two perspectives it finally reveals our own
world as a potent cocktail of genuine boundary conditions, delusions, and mutual
constructions.
This is where we need to end. Ours is a world in which much of what we ordinarily
think constrains us is not truly binding. But this freedom does not reveal
our world as a simple dream world, but rather as a real world, rich with the
possibility
of renewal and reconfiguration. By refusing to conform to any single interpretation,
the narrative, structure and filmic texture of the Matrix sequence all encode
the same message: take nothing for granted, don’t write yourself in stone,
just wake up.
Andy
Clark
Footnotes
1. Thanks
to David Chalmers, Christopher Grau, and Tyler Waite for helpful
comments and suggestions.
2. This list is based
on the Table 3.1 “Physiological Basis of Differences between
Waking and Dreaming’ in J. Allan Hobson (2001) p.57
3. I do not mean
to suggest that the distinction between real dreaming and industrial
strength ‘deception’ will help us evade skeptical uncertainty.
Rather, my concern will be to explore how making this distinction
affects our view of what the machines are doing, and of the moral
status of their manipulations.
4. The above paragraph
condenses, and slightly oversimplifies, the views found in Hobson
(2001), Blackmore (2004). See also Roberts, Robbins and Weiskrantz
(1998) and Siegel (2003).
5. Once more, this
is in no way to privilege one system over another for effective reason
and intelligence, which demonstrably depends on the proper temporally
evolving balance of the two, but just to note the different contributions made
by each.
6. One thing may be
said to prime another when exposure to the first makes the occurrence
of the second more likely. The term is mostly used in psychological studies in
which unconsciously perceived stimuli make subsequent conscious choices faster
or incline them in one direction rather than another.
7. For more on
this, see Siegel (2003).
8. There
is an interesting question here concerning what we should take to
be the brain of an industrial strength matrixer. Is it the brain
of the human in the
machines power grid? Or is it the brain that is specified in the immersive reality
simulation itself (e.g. the one we would see were we to observe matrix-bound
neurosurgery!)? One way to proceed is to think of the brain in the grid as the
ultimate (and unexpected) physical realization of the brain in the simulation
(for a defense of this line, see Chalmers paper on this site). This is ok if
we really are dealing with the full strength version, since any practice of neurosurgery
inside the matrix would need to be synched either to real changes in the brains
in the grid, or (at the very least) to changes in the input and output signals
that correspond to those that such surgery would have induced.
9. For more on
this, and many examples from development and robotics, see Clark
(1997).
10. See their paper
on this site. Their view, like my own and that of David Chalmers,
is that there is an important sense in which industrial strength matrixers really
are embodied and coping with a wider world. Dreyfus and Dreyfus, however, pursue
an interesting final twist concerning our ability to (as they put it) ‘open
up new worlds’. I highly recommend reading both these essays these essays
in full.
11. From D. Dennett
(1981)
12. Technologies
of this stripe are by no means inconceivable. Just a year or two
ago, the neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis conducted
a study to understand the way signals from cerebral cortex control
the motions of a monkey’s limbs. An Owl Monkey had 96 wires
implanted into its frontal cortex, feeding signals into a computer.
As the monkey’s brain sent signals to move the monkey’s
limbs, this “neural wire-tap” was used to gather data
about the correlations between patterns of neural signal and specific
motions. The correlations were not simple. But the patterns, though
buried, were there in the signals. Once these mappings were known,
the computer could then predict the intended movements directly from
the neural activity. The computer could then use the neural signal
to specify the movements of a distant robot arm (an electro-mechanical
prosthesis in an MIT laboratory six hundred miles distant). The system
used a haptic interface, part of a multi-sensory Virtual Reality
system used to touch, feel and manipulate computer generated objects.
The machines, we can imagine, have simply taken this technology to
the natural limit, developing advanced neural wiretaps allow the
matrixers to explore and act upon a common virtual world. For a large-scale
exploration of these new technologies, and of what it ultimately
means to be human, see Clark (2003).
13. The
feeling shifts, however, when Dennett’s body is subsequently
trapped by a rockslide, entombed far beneath the earth’s surface.
At first, Dennett feels tapped beneath the surface. But then the
radio links themselves begin to give way, rendering him blind, deaf
and incapable of feeling. The shift in point-of-view was immediate;
Whereas an instant before I had been buried alive in
Oklahoma, now I was disembodied in Houston … as the last radio
signal between Tulsa and Houston died away, had I not changed location
from Tulsa to Houston at the speed of light?
Dennett (1981) p.317
14. See
Chapter 4 of Dourish (2001). This idea is drawn from phenomenology,
and has roots in the work of Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and others.
15. Christopher
Grau (personal communication) asks whether such a view is too strong,
amounting in effect to a simple redefinition of the real, rather than a substantial
account. But my claim is not that any consistently imagined world counts as real
(a claim that David Chalmers may actually be closer to making). That’s
why I stress the importance of genuine (not merely imagined) boundary conditions,
and of the agent actually being able to offload computational work onto the environment.
These are not mere matters of what the agent thinks they are doing, but matters
of fact. My line, roughly, is that to perceive a real world is to perceive a
genuinely useable cognitive resource. Even a lazily programmed matrix (see section
4) might provide for that, for example by allowing people to really find out
that one jigsaw puzzle piece (simulated) doesn't fit into one space (simulated),
and by allowing the use of intelligent saccades directed at a stable scene (kept
stable by real-world physics or good simulation) as a problem solving tool. As
the amount of lazy programming (and thus instability and unreliability) increases,
this 'signature of the real' gets eroded. All this is the case whether or not
the agents actually notice anything. It is not, on my account, a matter of seeming
to use a stable external world as a cognitive resource, but of actually doing
so.
16. Special
thanks to David Chalmers for encouraging me to expand on this possibility.
17. For
a review, see Simons and Levin (1997).
References
Blackmore, Susan (2004) Consciousness: An Introduction. (Oxford
University
Press,
NY)
Chalmers, David (2003) “The Matrix as Metaphysics” (on this site).
Clark, Andy (1997) Being There: Putting Brain, Body and World Together
Again. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Clark, Andy (2003) Natural-Born Cyborgs: Minds, Technologies and the Future
of
Human Intelligence. (Oxford University Press, NY)
Dennett, D. (1981) “Where Am I?” in Dennett, D. . Brainstorms.
(Sussex:
Harvester Press, 1981)
Dourish, P (2001) Where The Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction.
(MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
Dreyfus, H. and Dreyfus, S. (2003) “The
Brave New World of The Matrix” (on
this site)
Hirschberg, L. (2003) “Drawn to Narrative” New York Times Magazine,
Nov 9, 2003.
Hobson, J. Allan (2001) The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of
Consciousness. (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA)
Kirsh, D. (1995). The Intelligent Use of Space. Artificial Intelligence. 73:
31-68
Roberts, A., Robbins, T. and Weiskrantz, L. (1998) The Prefrontal Cortex:
Executive
and Cognitive Functions. (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Siegel, J (2003) “Why we sleep” Scientific American, November
2003
p. 92-97
Simons, DJ, & Levin, DT (1997). “Change blindness”.
Trends in Cognitive Science, 1, 261-267.
Honderich, Ted. 1993. How Free Are You? Oxford: Oxford University Press.
