The Matrix

"Yes. I happen to have my copy of the screenplay right here. Whether it’s still available through bookstores I don’t know. It’s rare for a Hollywood blockbuster movie like The Matrix to pose really rather fascinating philosophical questions and conundrums. This is a film that was written by the Wachowski sisters and pursued through a trilogy, although for me it was always the first film that was by far the best. The Matrix was set up in such a way that they could open it to some wonderful special effects, but the idea is a very simple one, it’s what philosophers call a ‘brain in a vat’ scenario. How do you know that your brain isn’t actually in your body, but sitting in a vat wired up to a computer which is delivering signals to your brain, which you then interpret as sensory experiences? What you see, what you touch, feel and hear is all a set of signals that are giving you the illusion of living in a reality. That’s the premise of the movie, that Neo (Keanu Reeves) wasn’t actually living his life, he was sitting in a vat contributing to a human battery cell and the machines were in control. Fans of the movie enjoyed it for all sorts of different reasons, but few, perhaps, would have picked up the connections to the postmodernist philosopher and commentator Jean Baudrillard. There’s actually a scene, early on in the film, where Neo gets a knock at the door. He part times as a producer of illicit software—for what purposes we’re not clear—and he reaches for a couple of disks in a book. The book is a called Simulacra and Simulation and it’s by Jean Baudrillard. The book is saying that there’s a sense in which the lives we’ve created have become unreal. He’s a French philosopher (so his criticisms are of course always of America) and he points, in one passage on post-war American consumerism, to those great gas-guzzling cars that were built, fashioned with fins and lights that looked like rocket ships. These cars were completely absurd from the point of view of physics, those fins would slow the vehicle down rather than speed it up, and he’s saying this is part of the creation of an illusion, an illusory reality whereby what you feel becomes more important than any kind of practical benefit. Our sense of what we would regard as reality becomes less and less important and it becomes about a different set of experiences. “It would have been a disaster for the standard model of particle physics if the Higgs boson hadn’t been found” There’s that thread running through The Matrix as well. There’s a wonderful scene where they’re all gathered around in the hovercraft that they’re living in after Neo has been pulled out from his battery cell, where they’re discussing chicken. And they’re wondering, if you’re sitting in your pod being fed these signals, how did the machines know what chicken tastes like? Well, maybe it’s because everything tastes like chicken. All of these little philosophical conundrums: if you’re being fed an illusion of reality directly to your brain, how does whoever’s doing the feeding know what your experience is meant to be like, because these are very uniquely your experiences. How do they know how you know what chicken tastes like? So, for me, The Matrix as a film and as a screenplay opens up a whole bunch of questions that, again, have been the traditional fare of philosophers down the centuries—but in a way that’s accessible. For me, that’s important. I’m a science popularizer, so making these complex ideas accessible to people who haven’t got a degree in philosophy is, I think, a great thing. Just even pondering the question can lead an individual who’s fascinated by this kind of stuff in all sorts of different directions. The Matrix was screened back in 1999, more than 20 years ago, and I hope it has encouraged at least some people to say, ‘I’d like to find out a bit more about that’ and gone into deeper texts, or taken a course. I can only imagine that it’s been good from that point of view. For me, it’s a stepwise process. The Construction of Social Reality gets us to question the significance of what philosophers would call the ontological status of objects in our reality. Once you start questioning, that’s the sign of an awakening of an interest and a spark of curiosity that is easy then to feed. That’s social reality. Then you start to look at physical reality and the way that we process information delivered by our senses as human beings. We start to question the reality even of mountains and rivers and trees and streams and other things that we can see in our immediate environment. That leads you to questions like brain in a vat and other things that are fascinating but don’t necessarily have any easy answers that you can give. It’s just a set of philosophical questions you can explore. Before we bridge from The Matrix to science, I personally would want to take another step, to a period in philosophy which is known as the classical modern period. So classical modern philosophers include René Descartes, David Hume, Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley and John Locke. It’s that period from the 15th century through to the early 18th century. A lot of very powerful philosophies were generated in that period and one of my favourites comes from Immanuel Kant . You’re confronted with this issue of, how do you know what’s real? How do you know you can trust your senses? That was Descartes’s launching off point, and he came up with his solution, which is “I think therefore I am.” But throughout the history of philosophy , there’s been this polarization between those philosophers who want to give priority to ideas, to the way we think, and those philosophers who came somewhat later in history, who wanted to put experience up on a pedestal, like the philosopher David Hume . There’s clearly a conflict here. We have ideas and we have experience. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Kant was one of the first, in my view, to successfully bring these together. And you can begin to see the origins of my personal metaphor for scientific reasoning. You can’t just imagine that because you can have an idea of something it must exist in reality. That was Plato ’s world of ideas, that at some level of reality everything we can think about—Gandalf or unicorns or Westeros—must exist somewhere; versus the only thing that exists is experience, everything else that we conjure from our understanding of experience is fabricated by us. Hume was big on saying that there’s no such thing as causality. We just happen to have an association between this happening and then that happening and when we see this happening and then that happening, and then this happening and then that happening over and over again, we tend to identify that as a causal mechanism; this causes that. He says that that’s metaphysics . All we experience is this and then that. So you’ve got this extreme view—this later became known as empiricism or positivism—that experience triumphs everything and you can only draw knowledge from what you experience. Kant brought these together. He said that in order for us to understand things like causal mechanisms—this and then that—his logical structure was to say that we have, in our own minds, intuitions of space and time. Space and time don’t exist in reality, it’s what we bring to our set of perceptions, our understanding of the nature of the world. Space and time are something innate in us and in the way the mind works and we draw on those experiences. So, you can’t divorce the two. It’s not all about experience on the one hand, and it’s not all about ideas on the other. Kant says we’ve got to bring these two together and he had a philosophy which allowed that to happen. He also agreed with Hume in the sense of saying, ‘Let’s be absolutely clear. We can have no knowledge of things in themselves’. In other words, if you imagine the Moon: is the Moon there when nobody looks? That’s not an easy question to answer, because of course the minute you don’t look at it, you can’t tell whether it’s still there or not. But the point Kant was making is that it’s true. The answer to that question is, ‘No, we can’t know that the Moon is still there when nobody looks, but, on the other hand, in order for things to exist at all there has to be something that appears. In other words, if we are going to go on appearances, then underneath those appearances there must be something that is. And although it’s an assumption—that the Moon is still there when nobody looks—it’s a perfectly valid assumption. I don’t think anybody’s going to lose any sleep over it. You’re not going to want to get out of bed on a Monday morning because you’re not sure whether the Moon is there when nobody’s looking. Kant agreed that our experience is limited, by definition. We can’t know the reality of something that we don’t perceive—and I don’t mean perceive directly with our own senses. I mean, we don’t even perceive it with the aid of instruments like a telescope or a big particle collider and however we analyze the data that come out of the particle collider. I mean everything, by whatever device we use to look at something, we have to accept that we are seeing it as it appears, not in itself. And that leads you logically to start to think about what physics has to say about this."