What is it like to be in the Matrix?

Philosophers commonly assume that what its like to have an ordinary experience could be replicated exactly by artificial means; what it’s like to smell the ocean and what it’s like to have one’s neurons stimulated by an appropriately constructed machine would be exactly alike. This assumption has led many to doubt that the objects we perceive could play any fundamental role in explaining what the phenomenal character of perceptual experience is. In this blog post Dr Heather Logue challenges this assumption by undermining two attractive arguments in its favour.

In my previous blog post, I explained how contemporary philosophical theorising about perception is oriented around scenarios like the one depicted in the film The Matrix. In that scenario, the humans’ brains are being stimulated by a complicated machine in order to generate experiences as of living their lives in an ordinary world, when in fact they are lying in vats of goo serving as batteries for their robot overlords.

It is typically assumed that the poor humans trapped in the Matrix would nevertheless have perceptual experiences that are just like the ones you’re having right now. These experiences shove the world in your face (and all over your body)—presumably, you’re enjoying a vivid impression of the screen you’re reading this on, and perhaps the firmness of whatever you’re sitting on as you read it, the birds chirping in the background, the taste and smell of the coffee you may be sipping (etc.). But that description is a bland understatement. What it is like for you to have these experiences (their “phenomenal character”, as philosophers call it) is a matter of you being confronted with these things, in a way that you aren’t if you just think of or imagine them. In contemporary philosophy of perception, it is common to assume that the “right sort” of neural stimulation (whatever that is, exactly) is sufficient to generate this kind of “in your face” phenomenal character—this is why the subjects in the Matrix can have experiences exactly like ours, despite being perceptually cut off from the world around them.

But what makes us so sure that this is what would happen if someone’s brain was plugged into a Matrix-style apparatus? If we stimulated the right parts of a subject’s brain, might it be the case that it results in…nothing? Or that it results in something, but a pale shadow of what it’s like to really perceive what’s going on around you (something more like thinking or imagining than perceiving)? In the rest of this post, I’ll briefly sketch a couple of the most tempting reasons for thinking that brain stimulation of the right sort is all you need for “in your face” phenomenal character, and why I don’t think they are decisive.

The first reason is the occurrence of dreams. If the kind of neural activity involved in dreams is sufficient for “in your face” phenomenal character, then it seems plausible that the kind of neural activity involved in a Matrix-generated experience is sufficient for “in your face” phenomenal character too. However, it’s not obvious that dreams really do have “in your face” phenomenal character. It is true that we sometimes think they do while we’re having them, and when we recall them after the fact. But we are generally rather cognitively impaired and confused while we’re dreaming. (I once saw a meme that brings this out in a particularly funny way, which I can’t seem to find anymore. But it said something along the lines of the following: the best thing about dreaming is waking up wondering what the hell you’re going to do with all of those giraffes and meth, only to quickly realise that it’s not an actual problem.) In short, the claim that dreams are an actual example of entirely neurally-generated “in your face” phenomenal character is not beyond question—what it’s like to dream might just be one of the many things that we’re confused about while we’re dreaming.

Another reason for thinking that brain stimulation of the right sort is all you need for “in your face” phenomenal character stems from a commitment to neural determinism—roughly, the idea that the neural state that one is in at a particular time is completely determined by the neural state that one was in the moment before. Given that the neural state you’re in right now causes you to believe that you’re seeing a blog post, neural determinism entails that replicating that kind of neural state in a subject in a Matrix apparatus would also cause that subject to believe that they’re seeing a blog post. And it would be really weird if a subject believed that they’re seeing a blog post if they weren’t also having an experience that seems exactly like seeing a blog post (i.e., an experience with “in your face” phenomenal character)! However, it’s not obvious that we should accept the neural determinism thesis that underpins this line of thought. Some theorists (including my CTP colleague Helen Steward) have argued that we have no reason to believe that neural determinism is true, and very good reasons for believing that it’s false.

In summary, it’s not as obvious as we typically take it to be that being in the Matrix would be exactly like perceiving the real world around us. It may well be that being in a state that feels like it’s shoving the world in your face requires genuinely perceiving things in the world.

Dr Heather Logue is an Associate Professor in the School of Philosophy, Religion, and History of Science at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on issues in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. She currently has a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship to finish her book World in Mind, which elaborates on the ideas in this blog post.