Maybe we are living in the Matrix, in a sense.
If this were a more normal course in epistemology, we might spend the next few weeks exploring possible answers to the kind of global skepticism that Descartes generates in his first meditation. (If this idea appeals to you, you might want to take another class I teach called 'Early Modern European Philosophy.' (PHIL 376) In that course we read the rest of the Meditations, learning how Descartes solved his problem and how other thinkers tried to solve or avoid it.) But I've always found the sort of philosophical problem raised by Descartes rather unengaging. There is a family of problems that have a common abstract form: Since all I really know (or directly experience) is X, how can I claim to know anything about Y? Some examples (with their traditional names):
"The problem of the external world" -- Since the only things I directly experience are my own sensations, and these could be produced by a variety of causes (including some sort of virtual reality machine, as in The Matrix), how can I claim to know anything at all about the world outside my mind? How do I even know that there is a world outside my mind?
"The problem of other minds" -- The only thoughts and feelings I directly experience are my own. The only evidence I have about other people's thoughts and feelings is their behavior (including their verbal behavior). But this evidence is not at all conclusive (people can pretend and lie, I might be fooled by a real-seeming talking doll or robot). So how do I ever know what anyone else is really thinking or feeling? How do I even know that other people have experiences that are in any way similar to mine? How do I know that they have experiences at all? (Descartes writes, near the end of Meditation 2, "If I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I have just done, I say that I see the men themselves, just as I say that I see the wax; yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal robots? I judge that they are men. " - Bennett's translation) Perhaps I am the only conscious being in the world, and all the 'people' I meet are really robots (just behavior, no 'inside', no feelings, no consciousness).
"The problem of induction" -- All our predictions of what will happen in the future are based on our experience of the past. We assume that the regularities we have found in our experience so far will continue into the future, that the laws of nature will not change drastically overnight, for example. But what entitles us to make this assumption? The fact that things have been a certain way up until now does not prove that they will continue to be so. How do we even know that the sun will come up tomorrow?
OK. Enough examples. All these problems (and more like them) have been discussed at great length by modern philosophers. But, as I said at the outset, I have never been able to sustain much interest in them. They are all theoretical problems, not practical problems. No sane person doubts that we do know the sorts of things that these skeptical arguments are supposed to call into question. Even the philosophers who claim that these problems cannot be solved aren't skeptics in any practical sense. (They live and love and trust and hope much the way non-philosophers do.) For the most part I share the sentiment expressed by the great Scottish philosopher David Hume in the following passage (from his Treatise of Human Nature, 1739): "Most fortunately it happens, that since reason is incapable of dispelling these clouds, nature herself suffices to that purpose, and cures me of this philosophical melancholy and delirium, either by relaxing this bent of mind, or by some avocation, and lively impression of my senses, which obliterate all these chimeras. I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours' amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther. " (Hume, by the way, invented the problem of induction described above.) The question, "How do you know you are not living in the Matrix?" strikes me in just this way. It is interesting as a sort of puzzle, but I don't for a minute think that I might actually be in such a predicament.
But there are practical problems about knowledge, too. For some years I have been thinking about a set of problems I like to call "citizen's epistemology." The central question is this: How can citizens in a society like ours come to know what they need to know in order to play the role they are supposed to play in a democratic society? As citizens we are supposed to choose representatives who will pursue policies that promote our interests and our values. (More ambitious theories of democracy might give us more demanding roles to play, but at least we ought to try to be reasonably well informed voters.) How can we hope to do this in a world saturated (as it seems to me) with lies and 'spin' and propaganda?
Part
of the problem is that we get almost all of our information about
public affairs (and, more generally, about what is happening in the
world outside our direct experience) from the mass media (television,
radio, newspapers, etc.) or from social media, like Facebook, Twitter
and Instagram. But we may reasonably wonder how reliable these media
are. Even if we are not, strictly speaking, trapped inside a virtual
reality like the folks in the Matrix, maybe we are largely trapped
inside a view of the world provided for us by the mass media (or by the
algorithms that structure our social media
feeds). Maybe our ideas about what is real and who is telling the truth
are systematically distorted, because so much of our information comes
from sources who have a vested interest in shaping our perceptions to
serve their interests (or the interests of their owners). And when we
rely on social media, we are usually letting our own preferences
reinforce our existing beliefs, as the algorithms respond to our clicks
and likes to feed us more of what we 'want'.
Click on the link below to read a 2003 article by Frank Rich of the New York Times
that explores the idea that the mass media form a kind of Matrix. See
what you think. Are things much different nearly 20 years later?
"There's No Exit From the Matrix"
Another part of the problem comes from the sort of psychological tendencies described in the chapter on personal experience in How To Think About Weird Things (Chapter 5 -- part of assignment #2). Even if the media presented a reasonably 'fair and balanced' picture of the world, all of us would be interpreting that picture through our own set of filters. Confirmation bias, availability heuristic, seeing what we expect to see, etc. etc.would all be operating as we construct our understanding of the world -- leaving us trapped, to some extent, inside the 'matrix' of our own assumptions, prejudices and expectations. I was recently reminded of an old song by Paul Simon, "The Boxer", that makes the point quite simply: "A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." So even if it's hard to take the problem of global (or completely general) skepticism seriously, there are plenty of more specific sorts of skepticism that seem to me to be quite real and serious. We'll be looking mostly at these more practical problems going forward.
Some optional extra readings: Want more? Here are some other things you can read if you are interested in exploring the various ways people use The Matrix as a metahor for our practical problems about knowledge:
1. an article from the left wing magazine "Counterpunch" making an argument similar to Frank Rich's (also from back in 2003):
2. Here's a conservative blog from 2008 based on the idea that it's liberals who need to "take the red pill" and wake up from their delusional Matrix:
3. And here's social psychologist Jonathan Haidt using the matrix metaphor in 2011 to describe how liberals and conservatives get stuck in their particular moral outlooks:
Jonathan Haidt and the Moral Matrix: Breaking Out of Our Righteous Minds