#5 Your life is not what you think it is
The Matrix movies have made an incredible impact on how people think about the idea of living in a simulacrum of life. And the idea that we are not living a life that is “real” goes all the way back to at least Plato and his allegory of the cave.
In each case, the unreality of life presented was intended as an allegory. In the case of the Matrix, its authors later explained that it was an allegory to living a life as a transgendered person. In the case of Plato, it was living a life as a philosopher. In both cases, the authors felt that they were, in some sense, living a false life in order to adhere to social norms. (Philosophizing was actually pretty dangerous in Plato’s time with Socrates a notable victim.)
Social norms are hardly the only source of that feeling that life is fake. Language itself is filled with half-truths, convenient generalizations that help us to delineate the world while at the same time avoid its chaos of unique circumstances. Literate cultures such as ours find this magnified by the written word which gives language persistence and generalization. Indeed, anthropologists have shown that people from literate cultures can better understand syllogisms than those from illiterate cultures where logical statements like “for all” and “there exists” are difficult to comprehend amidst the ever changing perceptions of a life lived without a persistent method of information storage beyond memorization.
The constant stream of biased news reports in our own society shows that, despite greater access to evidence than ever before, what is said and what is perceived are growing further apart than ever.
It is even said we now live in a post-truth era.
Pilate asked Jesus Christ, “What is truth?” (John 18:38)
Is this question sarcastic? Dismissive? Or simply a literary device to make the reader reflect? Perhaps it is all of them at once.
The cynical in our society answer with the first or the second. Truth is irrelevant. This goes further than saying the world is what it is. It says it doesn’t matter what the world is. And surely that just adds to the lie.
Others will reflect on what the truth is and come to one of three conclusions:
Those who look to tradition or authority will find they have been told the answer and are happy with that.
The more emotionally guided will find that the answer lies in their own feelings or intuitions and they need look no further.
The curious, with me, find that the answer is “out there” somewhere waiting to be discovered and start looking for it.
But what might we find?
Modern philosophers have tried to argue that our own universe may be a simulation using Bayesian arguments, suggesting that, for whatever reason, some superadvanced civilization would be more likely to simulate us than we would be to evolve naturally. There is absolutely no evidence of this and proponents of Bayesian arguments are notorious for superimposing their own preconceived notions onto reality since they naturally involve making guesses about what is likely to be true without any evidence. This way of thinking is provocative but a dead end both philosophically and scientifically.
Nevertheless, such arguments are, perhaps, unconsciously recognizing that there is something unreal about our own existence. If not a simulation, then what could it be?
Science is a way of peeling back the unreality of the world and peering into the truth that underlies appearances. Physics in particular has been able to tell us a great deal about what matter, motion, time, and force are.
Consider something simple like the color of the fall leaves in my backyard. Physics tells us that color is actually related to the wavelength of visible light. Hence, a red leaf reflects wavelengths longer than those of a green leaf. Color is a property, not of the leaf alone, but of how the leaf interacts with light and also with the eye.
And this is true of much of reality: what we think of as intrinsic properties of the world are merely effects of multiple causes coinciding. Thus, reality is not so much things being as things interacting and if all things are interaction, then perhaps there really are no things, just interaction itself.
The most essential interaction for any truth to be perceived is with the mind. In this mysterious realm, all our perceptions end up, all truths are validated, and all questions are asked.
What makes people aware? Does consciousness exist apart from the body? Yet, if it weren’t for the body providing feedback to the consciousness, would consciousness exist? I.e., without something to behold, does the beholder exist?
Perhaps the body or more properly the brain is like a vessel and the mind is water, filling it. When the vessel is broken, the water spills out and drains away, perhaps to reform again one day. This is the Descartesian dualism of the ghost in the machine.
Alternatively, consciousness is the effect of the interaction of mind with matter. And if there are no “things” such as mind and matter to begin with, only interaction, might all consciousness be part of the universe’s own interconnectedness? The ultimate interaction.
Perhaps the mind is like a story about the vessel of the body (or brain) that the universe makes in order to know itself. As the painter paints the vessel, the writer adds to the story. When the vessel is broken, the story remains. Knowing is as much a part of the universe as existing and all knowledge remains within the universe (according to quantum conservation of information). Thus, our consciousness (we might even venture to call it our soul) is emergent from the brain rather than living in the brain, a story that is told, and then put away for another time.
Indeed, consciousness could, as Penrose has suggested, be a result of the quantum entanglement of the brain with itself causing it to become self-aware via its global connectedness, in which case, consciousness is not unique but endemic to the universe. It is only in the brains of higher organisms, however, that it achieves the level of organization to create genuine self-awareness.
Could the universe, with its high level of organization at the scale of billions of lightyears, be aware of itself in this way through the instantaneous connection of entanglement? Nobody knows.
Consciousness is critical to answering the question: what is truth? Because truth is irrelevant without it. But you can also ask: what is a lie?
According to science, a lie is something that goes against evidence. The evidence contradicts it. In logic and mathematics, it is something that violates logic. It is a logical contradiction.
It is much easier to prove something is a lie (or “false” to use a more neutral term) than that something is true. You just have to find evidence to the contrary. In mathematics, all you need to cause the most complex assertion to come tumbling down is one counterexample. Consider Euler’s Sum of Powers conjecture, proposed in 1769 by the greatest mathematician who ever lived, Leonard Euler. It stood for 200 years until a single counter example disproved it in 1966. If Euler had been able to prove it, of course, we would have known no such counterexample exists.
In science, away from the crystal palaces of mathematics, theories are only as good as the evidence that supports them. They aren’t true so much as not yet proved false. We don’t know if they are yet lies.
Maybe that is what is really fishy with reality. We don’t know anything is true except the products of our own minds: pure logic and mathematics, where proofs can wall off statements from destruction. Everything else we perceive or hold dear are merely conjectures waiting for counterexamples.
This is the battle between, on the one hand, language and mathematics, which is formed of logical statements and definitions, and, on the other, perception, between the pure order that the human mind would have and the controlled chaos that is reality. Truth is only possible when we escape reality into the mind, but it is a truth that then has only a tenuous connection to lived experience.
Indeed, this is what both Plato and the Wachowski Sisters were fighting: a battle of language versus reality, but they were on opposite sides. For Plato, the world of forms, where the order of the philosopher’s mind was king, was reality. This world, formed of statements, definitions, and logic, contained truths while the world of perception was only lies and half-truths.
The opposite is happening in the Matrix’s commentary of gender. As deeply couched in allegory as it was, there was buried a message about society’s orderly definitions and expectations the Matrix represents and the messiness of reality.
Thus, while Plato seeks to escape the real world into a world of perfect order, Neo seeks to escape a world of perfect order to the real world. Most human beings necessarily exist somewhere between the two.
Hameroff, Stuart, and Roger Penrose. “Orchestrated reduction of quantum coherence in brain microtubules: A model for consciousness.” Mathematics and computers in simulation 40.3–4 (1996): 453–480.