Morpheus and the inverted world

On Tues, Nov 30, 2010 at 00:22:33
Courtney asked:

A man named Morpheus approaches you on the street and tells you that the world is not real. Specifically, he makes the claim that you are plugged into a machine, and the world that you believe to be real is nothing but a computer simulation. He then challenges you to prove him wrong. With reference to Descartes, make an argument that either agrees or disagrees with his position. After establishing your Descartes based position on the external world, argue against the opposite one. Make sure not to take any red or blue pills until you do!

This is a typical philosophy instructor's question, and I reckon from the language an American philosophy instructor. The last sentence suggests female rather than male. I can't say exactly why it does, it just does. But that's mere guessing. I'm not being responsible in making this assertion. Descartes would say, I am willfully abusing my God-given powers of judgement. The truth is, I don't know and wouldn't know even if by pure luck my guess turned out to be correct.

But I'm jumping ahead. In Meditation 1, where Descartes considers the possibility that he is being deceived by an all-powerful evil demon, the fear is that exercising one's judgement responsibly is no more likely to arrive at the truth than wild guessing. The corrosive world-destroying doubt only ends when Descartes succeeds in convincing himself that God exists and is not a deceiver. God wouldn't give me ample evidence for the existence of an external world when no such world exists.

But that doesn't mean we can't make false judgements. The best we can do, in the face of the ever-present possibility of empirical error is to remind ourselves that we have made errors in the past and keep our eyes open for new evidence that overturns what we previously believed. That's part of what it means to exercise one's judgement responsibly.

In Meditation 6, Descartes goes further and explains in considerable detail how it is that illusions and misperceptions arise. Our perceptual powers such as sight and hearing, our ability to sense when we have suffered an injury, depend on physical processes which God has designed to lead us to truth. But even the best, most optimal design doesn't guarantee that we will always attain the truth. The very same laws of nature which lead us to knowledge can also lead us into error.

So what would Descartes say about the Matrix scenario? It's possible. It could happen in reality — if we grant the hypothesis that human beings will one day create artificial intelligence. Of course, Descartes would disagree on this particular point: he believed that intelligence requires a non-physical soul. Non-human animals are just machines, he thought, like the clockwork birds twittering in cages that amused the idle rich. But that detail is easy enough to fix. We can change the Matrix story to one where an evil angel, with finite not infinite powers, puts us asleep and makes us dream of a world of 2010.

Would God allow this? Why not? There are evil angels (Satan and his host) whom God could destroy if He wanted to, but out of his infinite wisdom and benevolence chooses not to. The point is that, even while dreaming, we are not deceived into thinking that an external world exists. We are physical objects existing in space, even while asleep. Even though we are deceived, there remains the possibility of discovering the deception, provided we exercise our judgement responsibly. That's what Neo does in the Matrix when he concludes (rightly, as we the audience know) that after he is 'woken up' in a pod with tubes attached to his back, this was his first taste of reality, and not just the beginning of a science fiction nightmare.

So in answer to the instructor's question, nothing Descartes says in the Meditations proves that Morpheus is wrong.

I'm going to take a bit of a jump now. Actually, it's a huge leap, but you'll see the point in a minute. In my post a couple of weeks back on what a philosopher might think about I confessed that 'Like Neo in The Matrix, I know there is 'something wrong with the world'.' Something tells me that this isn't real. I don't mean that I am not awake, at home (because the heavy snow made it impossible to get into my office today), writing a post for my Tentative Answers blog. I've no doubts about that. I mean something deeper, not just 'more of the same' which is all you discover if you take the red pill.

Hegel thought about this. In one of the most difficult passages in his Phenomenology of Spirit (a text which I've struggled with and never mastered), he turns the tables on every attempt at drawing a distinction between 'the apparent world' and 'the real world' — a project which traces back to the earliest Greek Philosophers Thales, Anaximander and Anaximenes. The final, most sophisticated version of this story is Kant's distinction between the phenomena and noumena, or the 'world of appearances' and 'things in themselves'.

The passage in question is entitled, cryptically, 'The Inverted World'. (I apologize to Hegel scholars in advance, because I don't have the text in front of me.)

Why an 'inverted world'? Hegel considers the idea of a reality 'behind' the world of appearances. This world is 'different', indeed radically different. The extravagant idea that everything in this other world is the 'inversion' of what it is in this world is meant to be a metaphor. Scientific inquiry is all about this world, the world of appearances, just as Kant believed. Yet there must be something more, Kant thought, than just the world of science: the ultimate reality, which we can never know or comprehend because our knowledge is limited to the world of our possible experience.

Now you can say (with Wittgenstein) that 'a nothing will serve as well as a something about which nothing can be said'. But Hegel goes further, and that's what makes this passage so brilliant. He gets right into the brain of someone who believes, wants there to be something more. Yet all we know about this 'something' is its sheer 'difference'. The inverted world is opposite to all we know. What does that mean? Nothing, says Hegel! We are deceiving ourselves with a picture (as Wittgenstein would have remarked).

In Hegel's metaphysics, no 'ultimate reality' is revealed, or posited, because the Absolute is none other than this world, seen aright. Seen aright, the world has an irreducibly teleological structure by virtue of which we can construct a suitable object for religious awe, even though God or Christ in a Hegelian universe is a different entity from anything the non-philosophical believer would recognize. From the perspective of the Absolute, the meaning of human history is finally revealed. This is it, there is nothing else.

Are you still with me?

In the 20th century, arguably the two seminal philosophical texts in Metaphysics are Heidegger's Being and Time and Whitehead's Process and Reality. Right at the beginning of their respective works, these philosophers nail their colours to the mast. According to Heidegger, what phenomenological ontology seeks to reveal is (as I would put it) the 'wood we fail to see for the trees', the ontological structure of appearances. According to Whitehead, the task of the philosopher is to 'frame the best set of categories that we can', categories which apply to the world of our experience, more general than the categories of physics because they depend on only the most general features of experience. In Whitehead's memorable metaphor, we don't notice the elephant which is always present.

(It goes without saying that both philosophers owe a massive debt to Hegel.)

Now I remember that that was the topic of my very first post, August 1009 The elephant in the room...

Funny that I seem to have gone full circle. Have I made any progress? I see through myself. I have nothing to offer, nothing to contribute to the academic debate. Nothing hidden away in some dark corner of my mind. I won't wake up tomorrow and 'remember' the truth. And, supposing I did, it would just be more of the same. Whatever it is I want, whatever it is I'm looking for, I can't even give a name to. (It sure ain't religion, so don't even think of going there. Read my other posts.) All I know for sure is that Heidegger and Whitehead are old hat. — Nor even Emmanuel Levinas author of Totality and Infinity which some philosophers would rate even higher, whom I once thought was the veritable bees knees.

The elephant is sitting right next to me. Staring at me. Chuckling silently as I scramble through every possible permutation. Logic isn't enough!

But you know what? I don't give up that easily. So what if I took the red pill and nothing happened. That just goes to show that you shouldn't rely on pills.