Take The Red Pill

Philosophy, Neurology and Perception Versus Reality

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Morpheus — The Matrix (1999)

What if I told you that you’re living in the Matrix?

What if I told you that you don’t have free will?

What if I told you you don’t know anything?

What if I told you that scientists, physicians, psychologists and philosophers have been contemplating these questions for the last 2400 years?

Over the next few pages, I hope to make the case that we are indeed living in a matrix, one created in our own minds and curated by the sensations we feed into it. I guess the best place to begin is at the beginning.

“To them, I said, the truth would be literally nothing but the shadows of the images.” — The Allegory of the Cave ~ Plato

In this seminal work of the legendary Greek philosopher Plato, he tells the story of a group of prisoners held in a cave, with shadow puppets in firelight their only concept of reality. They came to equate these shadows as the real and natural world. When an outsider frees one of the prisoners and takes him out of the cave, he reels in culture shock. It’s a lot like when Neo gets freed from the battery pod in The Matrix.

It’s an easy leap to see the Cave and its larger work, The Republic, as the first version of The Matrix. As with the film, The Republic is an ambitious melding of philosophy, metaphysics, epistemology, psychology and the essence of human nature. It supposes that the highest form of human nature is to save and elevate others. In leaving the cave for the natural world, the prisoner took the red pill and his mind escaped along with his body. When the prisoner returns to free his compatriots of the bonds that hold them in the world of shadow puppets, they greet him with derision and threat of bodily harm or even death. The other prisoners were the blue pills, content to remain in the Cave, dreaming the simulacra of shadows for the rest of their lives. Just like Cypher in The Matrix, they would rather stay in their comfortable cocoon than face the unknown. More about Cypher later.

“If learning the truth is a scientific’s goal, then he must make himself the enemy of all that he reads” ~ Ibn al-Haytham

Ibn al-Haytham was a man after my own heart. Born in what is now Southern Iraq in 965 CE, Alhazan, as he was known, was a scientist and advisor to the Caliph of the time. He made a boast that he could build a dam to regulate the flow of the Nile. The claim was of course impossible and he faced execution for his failure. So he asked himself, “what would Brother Terry do?” and pleaded guilty by reason of insanity. His imminent death was averted, and he was placed under house arrest for ten years. It was a productive decade indeed.

While in confinement, Alhazan conducted many thought experiments. The most famous one involved building a camera obscura, a tiny light box that captured images, that was a forefather to the reflex cameras of today. Alhazan was most certainly familiar with the Allegory of the Cave and all of Plato’s works. He also wrote his seminal scientific work, The Book of Optics, while in confinement. The book disproved the Greek theory that the eyes emitted light to capture images, reversing the conventional wisdom of the time. His work in the field of sight and perception became one of the foundations of modern brain science. Pretty cool for a guy who tells the world that he’s soft in the head, eh?

“What might be said of things in themselves, separated from all relationship to our senses, remains for us absolutely unknown” ~ Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant was a happy boy. The year was 1755 and he was lecturing in logic and metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. These were halcyon days for the German rationalists of the academy, who presumed that pure reason could solve any question of philosophy, be it the existence of God, the nature of the soul, or even the meaning of life. What a time to be alive. And then came the first German translation of David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Hume’s claim was disastrous for the rationalists. In a nutshell, he posited that sensory experience is all that matters. Causation is but a trick of the mind, neither proven nor perceivable. The foundation of metaphysics was shaken to the core. Hume told the rationalists, “Not so fast, my friends. Put that deductive reasoning in your pipe and smoke it. That’s the only thing it’s good for.” In Kant’s own words, the book woke him from his “dogmatic slumber.” He was shaken enough to answer the call to arms.

What does one do when he sees his chosen profession going up in smoke? He ruminates for a quarter-century on a transformative answer. The result was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in which he posited that our minds form complex models of reality, known as phenomena. To counterbalance that, he conjured the noumenon, the idea of “thing in itself,” whose true nature can never be known. In other words, our minds can perceive what something might be, but we can never know its true nature, a hollow vessel of deduction that can be added to but never filled. This explosion of, you guessed it, pure reason, has been handed down and built upon since its first publication. Metaphysics was saved! Yay!

You’re in bad shape. It looks like you’re developing a soul. ~ Yevgeny Zamyatin

The year was 1921. The aftershocks of the Russian Revolution reverberated through the new nation. One of the original Russian dissidents, Yevgeny Zamyatin spent most of the preceding years under suspicion, blacklisting and occasional confinement by the nascent communist state. Once a dedicated Bolshevik, Zamyatin grew weary of the group’s policies and the excesses that followed the destruction of the former Russian way of life. He used his talent and notoriety to create works satirizing the marching orders of the new regime. This culminated in the book WE, a satire so biting that it was banned in his home country until fifty years after his death.

WE tells the story of D-503 through a series of journal entries that document every aspect of his life. D-503 is the perfect citizen of OneState. He’s a scientist, tasked with building the Integral, a rocket designed to spread the dogma of the OneState to the stars. D-503’s journal is to be a part of their missionary time capsule. As such, he records every waking thought and action. As we find out later, some things should remain unwritten.

The citizens of OneState are ruled by numbers. The Table Of Hours, a schedule that is revered like a Bible in this religion-free society, tells ten-million people when it is time to rise, walk, eat, sleep, have sex and probably even shit. The last hour of the day is preserved for sex, but only on certain days of the week. It’s also the only time they are allowed to close the shades in their glass houses. There are no exclusive sex partners and no such thing as love. Love equals corruption.

D-503 is happy in his existence. He follows the rules and the Table of Hours. Never stepping out of line. Then I-330 appears out of the blue. She is everything that D-503 is not. She both intrigues and revolts him. She seems determined to break every custom and courtesy. She smokes and drinks, both forbidden in OneState, and she wears clothing that doesn’t conform with the standard. It’s the type of titillation that OneState cannot condone. D-503 becomes obsessed with her. If we’re using The Matrix as an analog, I-330 is his Trinity. In the Biblical sense, she is the Eve to his Adam. In a few risque moments she shatters his staid conformity.

WE is the subversive text that launched the next century of dystopian stories. It set the bleak tone that we have come to associate with novels of the genre. There are no happy endings. Goliath stamps out David and OneState returns to its status quo. WE is perhaps the bleakest story of all. In the end, D-503 didn’t need an Oracle to tell him that he wasn’t The One. All it took was a surgical procedure. And who doesn’t love a little brain salad surgery.

“What we see is the solution to a computational problem, our brains compute the most likely causes from the photon absorptions within our eyes.” Hermann von Helmholtz

In 1867, the German physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz published Treatise on Physiological Optics. His original line of study was the way we perceive color, not only the red that we see in its many hues, but the way we anticipate it when we hear or see the word “red.” I’ll never see “red” the same way you do, and vice versa. On a sensory level, our worldviews will never totally synchronize. His central theme became known as unconscious inference, the way the human brain models and comprehends the natural world. The idea of unconscious inference scales out to almost every aspect of our thought. What this means, in a nutshell, is that your brain doesn’t need you to tell it what to do, it already knows the answer.

Should it surprise us that von Helmholtz was a devotee of Kant? Not in the least. When Hume told us that all knowledge comes from sensory experience, he overplayed his hand. Kant was so enraged by the concept that he went nuclear on it, essentially rebuilding the entire field of epistemology. Then along came old Herm, who took Kant’s ideas and proved some of them empirically. In doing so, he launched the Neo-Kantian movement and a whole new line of thought.

“A book is a loaded gun in the house next door. Burn it. Take the shot from the weapon. Breach man’s mind. Who knows who might be the target of the well-read man?” Beatty in Fahrenheit 451

Imagine a world where intellectual freedom is a crime. A world where 24/7 entertainment consumes every waking hour of the masses, and where free thought and curiosity are not only discouraged but punished. Books are banned, protests criminalized, vaccines demonized, and free thought banished. The message from above? Your every thought is dictated by the state. In this authoritarian environment, the dogma becomes an opiate for the masses.

This is Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Guy Montag is a fireman, tasked with seeking out books and putting them to the flame. He relishes the sight of paper turning to ash. Until one day his own curiosity gets the better of him and he saves a book from the pyre. This starts his descent from hero to zero, turning him into the object of his greatest scorn. In 451, the Cave transformed into an entertainment echo chamber. How does that differ from what we have today, with our game consoles and flatscreens and talking heads who never shut up?

It’s easy to dismiss Plato and Ray Bradbury as the eminent storytellers of their time. Their scenarios seemed so far-fetched as to seem like fantasy and science fiction. But were they just entertainers, or oracles to the present? Naysayers will call them fabulist fictions. Scholars, scientists and philosophers will tell you otherwise. This is precisely why intellectualism is continuously under attack. Plato found this out when Socrates was deposed. Bradbury watched it play out on live television from the U.S. Congress. When thought becomes critical, it endangers the mechanisms of power.

“I visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans. And I am rooting for the machines.” — Claude Shannon

In 1948, the mathematician Claude Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication, in which he calculated the rate of something he called “Information Entropy.” His playful quote above underlines his prescience into the future. Most of us know the word entropy from the Second Law of Thermodynamics, where it is defined as the amount of disorder present in a system. For Shannon, the Information is our model (expectations) of the natural world, and the Entropy is what happens when surprise is entered into the equation. The Entropy forces a recalculation of our Information. If von Helmholtz tells us that our brains are almost on autopilot, then Shannon asks us, what happens when we hit turbulence?

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” — 1984

Around the same time that Shannon was perfecting his war on entropy, George Orwell was publishing 1984. The seminal treatise on authoritarianism, 1984 was the story of the fictional country of Oceania, where total surveillance, doublethink and thoughtcrimes are the rules of the day. The book was a clear descendent of WE, a fact that Orwell alludes to in his 1946 book review. He also cites Brave New World as part of the same canon. Taken as a trio, they laid out the blueprint for all the novels to come.

In the very first scene of 1984, the “two minutes hate” and “hate week” are revealed as the novel’s intellectual version of what the bombastic Purge franchise brought to the silver screen. The citizens of Oceania were encouraged to hate all enemies of “the party.” The level of paranoia in 1984 is over the top. Everyone suspects everyone else as a spy or a double agent and in some cases they are not wrong.

“What does all this have to do with the Matrix, Brother Terry? I came for the Matrix.” Fear not, fellow traveler. Here we go.

“Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or substance. It is a generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” Simulacra and Simulation

In 1981, the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard published the groundbreaking essay Simulacra and Simulation. If you think back to the opening scene of The Matrix, you see Neo grabbing a hollowed-out book where he keeps his pirated disks and cash. You guessed it. That’s S&S. Baudrillard lays out all the reasons why the natural world has devolved into a simulation of itself. As Morpheus introduces Neo to the Matrix, he takes a clue from Baudrillard when he says, “You’ve been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today. Welcome to the desert of the real.”

In Baudrillardian worldview, the desert of the real is hyperreality. Just saying the word hyperreality implies something good. What it means is the opposite. The natural world devolves in four stages from tangible object to reasonable facsimile to barely recognizable to complete simulation. Hyperreality is the magic trick that makes us believe pumpkin spice coffee creamer is made from pumpkins. It’s the lie that promises us we all have the same odds of achieving the American Dream. The desert of the real bears no resemblance to the natural world. Baudrillard was forecasting the 21st Century, where our thoughts, hopes and dreams are curated by the talking heads, politicians and ever-present social media themes.

“I thought I was witnessing the creation and the end of the world…It was like watching a being break away from the species.” ~ Emmanuel Levinas, a witness to the davos Disputation Debate

It was a monumental collection of minds. In March and April of 1929 hundreds of scholars descended on the Grand Hotel in the sleepy little town of Davos, Switzerland. The goal was multifold. The Davos Disputation was billed as a conference to interpret the work of Immanuel Kant, and the collective understanding of humanity. At the same time it was met to heal the wounds of WWI and bring together the various schools of European Philosophy. In the words of Joe Biden, “It was a big effing deal.”

The main event of the Disputation was a heavyweight brawl between two of Germany’s best, Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer. Heidegger viewed Kant as a metaphysician who defined the limits of the world, making it a fixed horizon. He argued that as a Dasein (the Being itself), we are thrown into this finite world, defined by our fears, limitations and anxiety, and we must fend for ourselves. No one will save us. These conditions of humanity included why we exist, and also why anything exists. This he called Being. Everything else (beings) was just scenery. Arguably, it was the start of the modern existentialist movement.

Cassirer took a different route. He argued that humans are not defined by the skin and blood and bones of our existence. That through our culture and the tools of language. myth, arts and science, we elevate our species. In a sense, he was saying “it takes a village.” He viewed Kant as a philosopher of science who defined how our minds make sense of the world. As such, he eschewed Heidegger’s idea of a fixed horizon and argued that Kant enabled an ever expanding horizon with new territory to explore.

The debate boiled down to one simple question. What is more important, the Being or the Village? The two men never debated again. With the rise of the National Socialists, many Jewish intellectuals, Cassirer included, fled Germany for the west. Heidegger joined the Nazi party, leaving many of his friends behind, even removing a dedication in one of his books to remove a Jew. The two men battled in print for the rest of their lives. While their shared legacy was most visibly the Disputation, their most lasting legacy was a student that they each influenced, Hannah Arendt.

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Arendt, arguably the preeminent female philosopher of the 20th Century, was not present in Davos. She was completing her doctorate at the time of the Disputation.She would go on to critique both their positions, ultimately merging and expanding the concepts. She was particularly critical of Heidegger’s “Being toward Death,” his sense of existential dread. Searching for the antidote, she invented the concept of natality. In her view, we are born twice. The first time we are born biologically, the second time we are born when we decide to “reinvent ourselves” as something more. She was sympathetic to Cassirer, but she felt his Village a dead end rather than a way out. She used her natality to reinvent the Village as a stage where people and ideas were given free rein to grow. It was the perfect blending of two warring factions.

“What’s with all the philosophy? I came here for bullet-time, bending spoons, martial arts and final battles?”
“Kids these days. All you want is instant gratification. Fine! Here you go.”

The Kid: “What?”
Captain Mifune: “You have to open that gate. Cut the counter-weights. You can do it. Hurry, there’s no time.”
The Kid: “Captain, I… I didn’t finish the training program.”
Captain Mifune: [smiles] Neither did I.” And then he dies.

It should surprise no one who has seen any of the matrix movies in the last 25 years that they follow a very simple pattern. It’s called the Hero’s Journey, made famous by Joseph Campbell, and repeated over and over again for the entirety of humanity. Other examples of the Journey are the Odyssey, Lord Of The Rings and Star Wars. If we really want to get spicy, we can throw the Bible in there. The story of Jesus Christ of Nazareth is a classic example of the Hero’s Journey.

When talking about the Hero’s Journey, it’s really easy to focus on the actual heroes Odysseus, or Frodo, or Luke Skywalker. But I want to talk about some of the characters that fit into the framework of the Davos Disputation. When Ernst Cassirer talks about myth and storytelling the analog in the matrix is obviously Morpheus. Without Morpheus the story doesn’t go forward. Neo doesn’t get found. The machines win. End of story. Beside Morpheus is the Oracle. While Morpheus paints with a broad brush, she is surgical. She gives Neo just enough information to keep him moving in the right direction. Together, they are his Village.

Heidegger told us about the Dasein, the Being itself. In the Matrix, it’s tempting to call Agent Smith the Dasein. He’s only in it for himself for much of the franchise. But ultimately, what can he truly attain for himself. If I have to choose a Dasein for the series, I’m picking The Architect. He’s the titular brain of the Matrix, and everything he does is to keep its Being in a state of homeostasis. He doesn’t want it to be better, he wants it to be uncorrupted. He’s also aware of the one thing that everyone else does not. Neo is the reset button that reboots the Matrix. His rise is essential to the health of the Matrix.

I thought long and hard about Hannah Arendt and natality before I chose who should carry her shield. Ultimately, I chose Michael Karl Popper, aka The Kid. Through most of the franchise, The Kid is a joke, a punchline who is not taken seriously by Neo or the crew of the Nebuchadnezzar. In Revolutions, He joins the APU corps as a runner, putting himself at risk when he could’ve been hiding with the women and children. When Captain Mifune is mortally wounded in the final battle, The Kid climbs into his APU and uses the guns to open the gate for Captain Niobe and the crew of the Hammer. In this moment, he defines natality, the spontaneous rebirth into something greater than oneself. If there’s an altruistic hero in the Matrix, I’d say it’s the kid.

“We’re always chasing away uncertainty, always chasing away expected surprise, always chasing away epistemic entropy, always on the move.” — Karl Friston

In the 1990s Karl Friston, a young English neuroscientist at the University College London, became interested in the work happening in the lab next to his. Geoffrey Hinton’s work on the thermodynamics of machine learning. Friston spent the next few years testing the applications of the same idea on real brains. In 2010, he published The Free-Energy Principle: A Unified Brain Theory, in which he posited that the brain optimizes by limiting its exposure to free energy.

Taking a hint from Claude Shannon, Friston established that the brain is constantly updating its predictive model of the natural world. Just like in the Matrix, where Cypher predicts the taste of a bite of steak, the brain is predicting the sights, smells, colors and textures of the world around it. The entropy comes when the actual experience doesn’t live up to our predictive model. In this case the brain adjusts automatically, so it is ready for the next time. This is called Bayesian brain function, based on Bayes Theorem, a mathematical equation that updates our prediction engine based on observed effects. In effect, our brain is telling us what to think before thought becomes necessary.

“What’s Really Going To Bake Your Noodle Later On Is, Would You Still Have Broken It If I Hadn’t Said Anything?” ~The Oracle, The Matrix (1999)

Stanford University neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky has been doing cutting edge research in the actual architecture of the brain, most notably the amygdala, limbic system and pre-frontal cortex. Taking clues from his decades in Kenya studying baboons, Sapolsky built a complex model of not only how the brain functions, but also how environmental factors play a part in every decision we make. He makes the case that every experiential factor we’ve had since the beginning of time, be it evolution, genetics, prenatal environment, upbringing, hormone balance or socialization, plays a part in the decisions we will make today. Therefore, there is no free will.

Most of all, Robert Sapolsky is a storyteller, and the story that he propagates is the idea that our thoughts are so steeped in past conditioning and learned response that we don’t have anything resembling free will. In the Matrix, the Oracle doesn’t tell Neo that he is The One. Instead, she leads him to that conclusion with breadcrumbs of inspiration in the dark forest. In Sapolsky’s view, our brain is using ancestral knowledge, past experience and predictive modeling as a version of neural breadcrumbs to guide our every decision

“Cut to the chase, Brother Terry. What does any of this have to do with me living in a construct. I didn’t expect to be here all day.” All right, let me wrap this up.

“Am I a fruitcake? I don’t know. Perception is reality, so if I sit here and say, “I’m not a fruitcake, I’m a lemon cake,” it doesn’t matter. What you see me as in your world is what I am; it doesn’t matter what I am — do you know what I mean? To me, I know what my real problems are — and they’re certainly not about cake. And that’s just the way it is.” — Macy Gray

The construct that I’m talking about is the way your mind perceives the outside world. We all have these slight idiosyncrasies that make us unique as our fingerprints. No two of us have exactly the same neuropathways that dictate how we see the world unfolding around us. So when we go to see a football game featuring our favorite team, you and I will not have the same experience. One of us might be thinking, “winning is the only thing” while the other might be thinking, “I hope Jimmy Linebacker has the greatest game in the history of football.” They might both lead to the same result, but you and I have different priorities of how we want to see the game unfold.

This concept of “subtle differences” bleeds into every aspect of our lives. If we see a Tesla driving down the road, you might think “cool car” or “must be a tree hugger” and I might think, “what a jackass” or “fuck Elon.” If we see a guy walking around in a blue hat with a black M on it, you might think “Go Blue” and I might think “Muck Fichigan!” if we’re listening to a Taylor Swift song, you might think, “she’s so cool” or “I love her music!” and I might think, “who is this?” if I think anything at all. So as you can see, even if we agree on 99% of our hopes, values and dreams, we still have differences in our world view.

We begin interpreting the world almost from birth. Every sensory input contributes to the model that emerges. My model is mine alone, and yours reflects you. Over the course of time, our brains are constantly reframing our model over and over, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute, just like playing with Legos. Our constructions might even be exactly alike, save for a random blue Lego here, or a red Lego there, marring the otherwise identical construction. In some cases, your Lego castle might be building vertically while mine is proceeding horizontally. Our castles might have the same number of pieces, each one the same color, but they might be in a slightly different order. And if we accept that the castles equate to our minds, then the different order illustrates the micro-differences in our preferences. Our preferences color our perceptions. And our perceptions color what we view as our “reality.” And our reality is a precise representation of all that our minds extrapolate at this very moment in time.

“We’re all hallucinating all the time; when we agree about our hallucinations, we call it reality.” — Anil Seth

I’ve mentioned five scientific thinkers amongst all my philosophical dreamers during the course of this bloviation. As we’ve progressed, we saw how each stood on the shoulders of the one before him, building our understanding of perception and subjective reality. If these gentlemen were to produce a love child, they’d probably name him Anil Seth. Kant created the noumenon, the thing that cannot be known, von Helmholtz told us about unconscious inference, Shannon speculated on entropy and surprisal, Friston used free energy mathematics and Bayesian correction to build his model, and Sapolsky told us our choices are hardwired and there’s nothing free about our will. Taken as a whole, the group concludes that the mind and the senses are symbiotic. The senses provide the raw material and the mind uses its prediction engine to interpret what it means. If the input is unique, the mind recalibrates the model. As their progeny, Anil Seth bundled all the ideas in his theory of controlled hallucinations.

Seth, professor of neuroscience at the University of Sussex, claims that everything we see and experience is a controlled hallucination that extrapolates sensory data and interprets it in ways that agree with our understanding of the world. Even before we encounter the sensory data, our mind is already calculating what we are about to see or feel. The physical world is the noumenon, the shadowy unknowable, and the hallucinations are our simulacra of the real. We might not know what it’s like to be a bat, but our mind gives us a simulacrum anyway. It tricks us into thinking we have all the answers. In this manner, our mind is always ahead of the curve until we encounter a surprise so great that it shocks us into a reboot. These reboots are essentially our glimpses outside of the cave.

Our minds are as unique as our fingerprints. They might be as similar as Beavis & Butthead or as different as Trump and AOC. I might see the bat as vermin, and you might see it as an essential element of our connected world. But the fact of the matter is, neither one of us know what it’s like to be a bat. And by extension, neither of us knows the true nature of the physical world, we can only know our unique expression of it.

“I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.” ~ Cypher, The Matrix (1999)

In many ways, understanding Cypher is the key to unlocking the core themes in the first Matrix movie. Released from the technicolor pseudo-life of the construct for nine years, he becomes weary of the scrappy existence of Zion, and longs for the illusion of luxury and excess that is found in the lucid dreams of the tanks. He tires of holding the machines at bay. His model has devolved from hope into constant misery. He’ll do anything to return to the illusion, up to and including selling out his crew and the remnants of humanity. And he nearly succeeds.

What Cypher is attempting as he makes a deal with the devil, is an exercise in free will. He sees it as an either/or decision, when it’s just a choice between masters. It’s a choice between comfort and discomfort. By choosing comfort, he gives up the illusion of free will. But if he chooses to stay on the Nebuchadnezzar, how much free will does he keep? What looks like free will is just a choice between the lesser of two evils. The difference comes when you factor in the lives of his crewmates. His jealousy and greed ultimately seal his doom.

If we go back to the questions I asked you at the beginning of this long bloviation, what can we conclude? Are we living in a matrix of our own making? We stitch ourselves into tight spaces that we identify as our “self.” Many of the micro-decisions that we make are based on the model of reality that our minds have built over the entire course of our existence. Or if you believe Sapolsky, our pre-existence plays an important part as well. Our very idea of free will boils down to small incremental course corrections in our daily lives. Few of us find the wherewithal to make truly life altering decisions in the moment. Can we call this fulfillment?

So, I’ll leave you with one final question (or maybe two): If you’re offered the choice, do you take the red pill like Neo and forge into the unknown, or the blue pill like Cypher, and choose the comfort of the known? And does the choice truly matter? It’s a trick question. Neither pill takes you where you want to go. There’s no choice in the matter.

Bobby Sapolsky would tell you that your “free will” doesn’t exist. And maybe he’s right. We think we know a thing, but Kant tells us the thing is unknowable. To hear folks from Plato to Seth tell it, the objects of the physical world are a collection of holograms in our mind. We see a red Ferrari, or even hear the word, and our mind conjures up the holograms, complete with notes and tidbits. As we see and learn more, the hologram adds layers. But there is no real limit to the layers that can be added. You can touch it, you can drive it, you can buy it, but you can never “know it.”

“You’ve been bloviating for a long time, Brother Terry. What’s the answer? Are we living in a Matrix or not?”

Well, grasshopper, I’ve just told you that a thing is unknowable, so it follows that if the mind is a thing, it’s impossible to know. But if I had to guess, I’d say no, we are not living in the construct of some mad architect. Our minds is probably more like a virtual art gallery, where all “things” have their own exhibit, and the exhibits keep changing in perpetuity.

But what do I know?

If This Baked Your Noodle — Suggested Reading

The Fiction

• WE — Yevgeny Zamyatin. The original. Everything else is a cover version.
• Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury. Short, brutal, and uncomfortably current.
• 1984 — George Orwell. You probably already have it. Read it again.

The Philosophy

• An Essay on Man — Ernst Cassirer. His most readable work. The case for the Village.
• The Human Condition — Hannah Arendt. Skip to Part V. That’s where natality lives.
• Simulacra and Simulation — Jean Baudrillard. Read Chapter 1. Then go watch The Matrix again.

The Science

• Being You — Anil Seth. Start here. He wrote it for people who don’t have a PhD, which is most of us.
• Determined — Robert Sapolsky. He will take your free will, explain why you never had it, and somehow make you feel okay about that.
• Behave — also Sapolsky. The longer version. Worth every page.

For the Truly Brave

• Being and Time — Martin Heidegger. Nobody said the red pill was easy.