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WHAT IS THE MATRIX - REALLY?

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This text is © Peter B. Lloyd, 1999

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The Matrix has received a lot of publicity, mostly because of the special effects. While these are admittedly excellent, what interests me more are the ideas that form the background to the film.

In the film, the phenomenal world with which we are familiar is a phantasm generated by computer systems which interface directly with people's brains. In this envisioned future, we all live our entire lives in a virtual reality, except for a few individuals who somehow escape the system. Our physical bodies are stored in vats of some fluid, and each human has a comparatively small number (fifty?) of bioports implanted into the nervous system. The computers interface with the brains via these bioports.

The planet has been taken over by robots, after a nuclear war made the world uninhabitable by normal means. The robots are farming human beings for their energy, and feeding them a virtual reality.

The virtualisation of everyday life
The first idea that I want to focus on is that of the whole of everyday life being lived out in an illusory environment. Normally, we assume that we are minds that inhabit solid, three-dimensional bodies that move around a three-dimensional world, interacting with other solid bodies - such as the Earth, and tables, and chairs. There are two levels of distancing ourselves from this background assumption. The first level is to recognise that our experiences are not veridical: the objects that seem to represent may not really be there. There is a second, deeper level, which is to recognise that the very concept of solid matter is incoherent: there simply cannot be a physical world out there.

The film takes us to the first level, and even here it is not comprehensive in its attack on naive realism. The world in which Neo, and the rest of humanity, initially lives is a virtual one; but he wakes up and finds himself in another world, which he is told is the real world. So the regression stops after a single leap. Whilst watching the film, I kept expecting it to end by revealing that the supposed real world - the on which the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar battle against the computers - was itself another virtual reality: that there was a second world beyond that one. And that there was yet another world beyond that one again. This is what happened, in a confused sort of way, at the end of David Cronenberg's film, "eXistenZ".

But that regression did not occur. Maybe it will in the sequel. I fear, however, that the Hollywood men in suits decided that that would be too much of a head trip. Certainly, Cronenberg made a hash of the idea in his film. It is not, however, too hard a concept to handle. Given that the Wachowski brothers have a firmer grip on narrative that Cronenberg, I think they could have shown us an endless regress of virtual realities without losing the plot.

Nevertheless, from a philosophical point of view, the film has done a good job in placing in general circulation the idea that the world around does not necessarily have a physical basis. This is not, of course, a new idea. It is found in the ancient Upanishads of India, especially as codified in Shankara's commentary on them. Somewhat nearer to home, George Berkeley placed the virtuality of the everyday world at the centre of his philosophy - three hundred years before The Matrix hit the screens.

Qualia
It is clear that someone in the script-writing department had either been doing some serious homework - or some serious thinking. There is a good scene in the canteen, when the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar are relfecting on the insipidity of their food. One of the crew (sorry, I can't recall his name) wonders how the robots figured out what different foods tasted like. How, for instance, could a mindless robot ever known what it is like to taste cooked chicken? As this guy realised, they could never know that. Qualitative experiences - what philosophers call 'qualia' - can exist only in conscious minds. Since the computers are assumed to have only intelligence and not consciousness, they could never know what anything tastes like. So, this crew member concludes that perhaps the taste of chicken that everybody was experiencing in the virtual world had no resemblance at all to the real taste of chicken. In fact, since nobody was still alive from before the nuclear holocaust, nobody would know for sure what the taste of chicken was. The computers must have just made a guess about the taste when they coded up the matrix.

But why just tastes? Surely the same applies to smells? And what about colours? How could a mindless computer ever know what it is really like to see the colour red, for instance? For sure, the computer would know all about the wavelength of light and how it affects the light-sensitive cells of the human retina. But the actual conscious experience of seeing the red colour itself? There is no way that the computer could ever know about that. So the arrangement of colours in the virtuality could also have been completely different from what they used to be in the real world before the nuclear disaster. In the context of the film, however, they would find it difficult to pull off that stunt - just because the film itself shows (or, rather, purports to show us) what it is like inside the virtuality. If "The Matrix" were a novel rather than a film, then the author could easily introduce the notion that all the sensory experiences - tastes, smells, colours - inside the virtuality could be completely different from those formerly experienced in the real world. In fact, if the directors had used monochrome film when showing scenes inside the virtual reality, and colour in the scenes of the reality, then they could have introduced some notion of comprehensive shifts of qualia. (The Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky did this in his film "The Stalker", and the German-American director Wim Wenders did it in his film "Wings of Desire". Admittedly these were not virtual reality films, but they did deal with the concept of multiple phenomenal worlds.)

In a novel, we could go a step further. There is a rare psychological disorder called synaesthesia, in which sense data that most of us perceive in one faculty are actually experienced in another faculty. So, for instance, these people may see sounds, and hear colours. In the virtual reality created by the computers, we could imagine that the machines could have made a dog's ear of the coding, and made sounds visible and light audible. Needless to say, no Hollywood film is ever going to allow anything as weird as that - quite apart from the sheer technical difficulty.

There is a further consideration that arises here. How do we know that we all have the same experiences anyway? Maybe nature has herself already scrambled our qualia? Maybe the taste sensation that you get when you eat chicken is completely different from what someone else tastes? How could you ever tell? You cannot get inside the other person's mind and experience her sensations. So, maybe we all have systematically different fields of qualia already? The only way out of this conundrum is through telepathy - which is another can of worms.

Sentient agents
One of the extraordinary ideas of the film are the sentient agents - autonomous programs that present themselves inside the virtual reality of the matrix as secret agents dressed in black, with dark glasses and wired earphones.
This concept links in very nicely with the idea of a 'metamental daemon', which I propose in my book as a model for the true nature of phenomena that variously manifest themselves as angels, fairies, or ufos and aliens. The correspondence is made more acute by the presentation of these sentient agents as 'men in black' (MIB). The MIB were first brought to the world's attention by the journalist John Keel in his book "UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse" (1970, reissued 1996). Basically, people who had close encounters with ufos or the associated aliens often had repeated visits by mysterious and untraceable men in black. In real life, the metamental daemons are not limited to the men in black, but can appear in any form. Of course, in a film we need some convenient means of recognising these beings, hence the film's sentient agents always manifest themselves as men in black. Real life, however, is not that simple.

In the film, two distinct concepts are mixed up. On the one hand, there is the idea of a metamental daemon functioning as a 'strange manifestor' - presenting itself directly to the mind of the percipient as e.g. a man in black. On the other hand, there is the concept of possession - a discarnate mind taking over a body. I think it was just script-writing laziness that led them to meld these two ideas. It allows them to pull some cheap deus ex machina tricks in which agents can suddenly spring up anywhere. (Consider, for instance, the tubeway scene, in which a tramp is possessed by an agent.) Also, the scenes in which we see the possessed person turning into an agent, or vice versa, are quite klunky: the special effects were not at their best in those morphing scenes.

Déjàvu
There is an odd scene in which Neo sees a cat walk past a door twice in a few seconds, and describes it as déjà vu. This is explained by Trinity as a glitch in the matrix software, which apparently occurs when a change is made in the virtual reality code. In this case, the computer has suddenly bricked up the windows of the building in which they were standing. First of all, as a point of terminology, what Neo experienced was not genuine déjà vu: that expression refers to the weird feeling that you are repeating an experience. It does not refer to actually seeing something happen again.

I'm not so sure about the basic idea here. It implies that the virtual reality is being operated by the computer in the same as if it were showing a three-dimensional film, which is played in a predermined way. If you splice a film carelessly, you may indeed get a discontinuity: you might miss a bit out, or you might repeat a bit. The virtual reality, however, cannot be like that. Our lives are not predetermined: life is not pre-scripted. The virtual reality provides an environment in which players such as people and cats can engage with the apparent environment and with each other. So I see no reason why making a change to the environment would - or indeed could - cause any events to be repeated.

So, what is the matrix really?
According to Berkeley, and a lot of other mystics and metaphysicians, this world - the one you are in right now - is illusory. The ancient Hindu term for this was 'maya'. The actual experiences are, of course real - but the physical world that they seem to depict is just not there. What is driving this virtual reality, then? Well, within the Vedanta system of the Hindu religion, the ultimate agency behind the maya is 'Brahman'. According to Berkeley, who lived in a Christian community in the eighteenth century, it is God. In both cases, however, it is clear that the entity driving the virtual reality does not have the anthropomorphic qualities that traditional religion ascribes to God. For this reason, I have called it the 'metamind' in my book.

So, what is the metamind? The metamind is a vast mind, or at least a mind-like entity, that created the whole of the manifest world and is running the show even now. Within this virtual reality there are small, ordinary minds such as you and me. We communicate normally via the metamind, so that we have the illusion that we are communicating via a physical medium, such as sound waves, or the internet connection.

This virtual reality is generally tied to fixed rules, which scientists have codified as the laws of physics. There are, however, what might be term loop-holes: 'nomological interstices' or gaps through which ordinary minds can operate outside the limits that are normally set by the metamind. There are some, slightly muddled, references to this in the film. For instance, Neo is taught that he can use his belief system to acquire and exercise paranormal powers such as telekinesis and very rapid bodily movements. (The latter, by the way, are quite absurd - and made to look absurd by being shot in slow motion.)

In parapsychology laboratories around the world, including Edinburgh University and Princeton University, it has been established that mental intentions can modify the occurrence of random events. This is inexplicable from the standpoint of physics, but it can be comprehended if we accept the Berkeleian theory that this world is a virtual reality with nomological interstices. I go into this in more detail in the book.

Fast exits
In "The Matrix", Neo and his colleagues can leave the virtual reality by being called up a telephone line. This strikes me as embarrassingly silly. Cronenberg had a much better exit routine in his "eXistenZ". There, a player can stop the virtuality game by crying "eXistenZ is paused!", at which point the player's virtual body slumps down as if dead, and the mind's stream of consciousness finds itself back in the parent - - immersed once more in familiar surroundings. In "The Matrix", the virtual body completely disappears. Why? As far as the virtual world is concerned, the body is just another physical object. Why should it vanish when the mind exits the matrix? Disappearing bodies always bother me in films. Why? Well, firstly it is a massive violation of the law of conservation of mass and energy. Yes, I acknowledge that these disappearances take place in a virtual world and that the mass and energy that are lost are only virtual. Nevertheless, a basic premise of robust virtual systems is that the laws of nature are respected. There are, as I have said, nomological gaps in the world - but a body cannot disappear through a gap: such a disappearance tears a gash through the nomological fabric of the virtual reality. Disappearances are therefore massively implausible.

A corollary of this is the bang problem. If a physical body is simply annihilated, if it simply vanishes, then the space it previously occupied would become a vacuum, and the surrounding air - which is at atmospheric pressure, of course - would rush in. This would almost certainly cause a loud noise. Yet disappearances on film are always silent. Also, I have worries about the computer correctly drawing the boundary of the body that is to be disappeared. The person's shoes are to disappear, but not the piece of ground he is standing on. What if he is standing on a piece of chewing gum? Would the chewing gum disappear too? If not, why not? But if the chewing gum disappears, does that mean the whole pavement would have to disappear too, as it is stuck to it? Some pretty smart processing is required to get the boundary of the disappearance right.

The film critic Takeshi Martinez has suggested that the space previously occupied by the disappeared person will be filled with air. His comparison is with conventional computer graphics packages. In those, you can delete an 'object', and the area it previously occupied will be filled in with the surrounding colour pattern. So, he says, the matrix computer will do the same when it deletes Neo or Trinity. Well, maybe that is the answer. But I remember times when I've been filling colour into a drawn shape on a graphics package, and I accidentally left a tiny gap in the boundary that I had drawn. Suddenly the colour leaks out through the hole and fills the whole screen. Likewise, my concern is that the chewing gum could act as a bridge and cause the computer to make the whole world vanish.

So, my feeling is that Cronenberg's exit routine is right: only the mind departs, and the body simply loses its animation.

What about real life? What happens when a mind leaves this virtual reality - the one you are in right now? Not very much, in fact. During an out-of-body experiences, which is a good approximation to exiting the normal virtuality, the body just lies there in a relaxed and unconscious state. Likewise, during dreams - even in lucid dreaming - when the mind completely logs out from this virtuality, the rest of us still see the body lying there.

Assessment
As a film, "The Matrix" has come in for a certain amount of criticism. Comments have been made about the absence of overt emoting in the actors - the paradoxically cool detachment of people who are supposedly embarked upon a guerilla war with grave consequences at stake. In fact, this heightens the dream-like surreality of the plot. It is part of a semiotic code that tells us that this is a film of ideas rather than feelings. The violence is sanitised and dehumanised: it is almost stylised into a choreography that only hints at real violence. It is rather disconcerting to watch these scenes against the backdrop of daily news reports of the atrocities in Kosovo. I would have preferred the omission of this trivialisation of death and wounding. Of course it is part of of the insatiable bloodlust of Hollywood that 'action' films must portray violence. There is so much more to The Matrix, that sadly we have to put up with aggression. The Matrix is - above all - a film about vision: about seeing reality, about seeing potential, about seeing possible futures.

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