Philosophy Now ‘Matrix’ Undergraduate Competition

Greg Detre

Corpus Christi, Oxford

Sunday, 30 July, 2000

"The blue pill will eliminate any knowledge of the choice he has made, and will leave him in the world of illusion. The red pill opens the gates to a world which offers nothing but the terrible truth."

Red or blue? Which pill would you take, and why?

Cypher	He lied to us, Trinity. He tricked us. If he’d told us the truth, I woulda told him to shove that red pill right up his ass.
Trinity	That's not true, Cypher, he set us free.
Cypher	You really think so? I remember how Morpheus put it: “Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is … 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.... Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more...” How could a man say no? How could you get to sleep at night ever again, knowing that someone had held out a promise like that, and that you had turned it down?
Trinity	And if he’d said that the blue pill would wipe your mind of the choice you had made? That you’d wake up in your bed, and not remember ever having met him?
Cypher	Perhaps, yes, if I could return to the status quo and carry on as though no-one had exposed me to the darkness around my cocoon … But it wasn’t just the fear of remembering. It’s being privy to a great secret, and then having to give it up. A man still has his curiosity, and that’s a powerful, powerful force. It was all so mysterious, alluring - the way Morpheus told it, the red pill held the promise of new horizons, of some kind of enlightenment.
Trinity	That’s right. This is the real world. The Matrix is an illusion, and so are the lives we led in it. Here, we can see the truth about reality.
Cypher	Truth. What truth? The Matrix and the physical world are fundamentally similar. The Matrix is more like a time machine than another universe – all the laws and limitations inside it are the same.
Trinity	But the Matrix isn’t a time machine, and you weren’t living in the twentieth century. It was a computer-generated approximation. It isn’t real.
Cypher	Our day-to-day actions in one world have no direct effect on the other, but they each seem real. As I see it, the Matrix and the physical world are disconnected locations in the same universe. And I just happen to prefer life in the Matrix world.
Trinity	The Matrix is a veil, interposed between your sensory input, and the world as it is.
Cypher	Trinity, ‘reality’ is a figment of your imagination. Why concern ourselves with whether the Matrix is virtual or physical – the ‘real’ world is an equally illusory world of secondary qualities constructed by our own perceptual mechanisms. But my experiences in the Matrix felt the same, they taste and smell just as real. I sense with the same primitive modalities. Chemically, the nerve impulses themselves are indistinguishable. The Matrix supplies virtual muscle tone, full sensory input, digestion and the like. I have effectively the same body. What if taking the red pill took us to a world indistinguishable from the virtual one we had just been living in? What difference to us to be living in the ‘real’ one, rather than a simulacrum which produced the exact same experiences and course of life? I see colours. What are colours? They are the way my brain interprets particular wavelengths. There are veils hardwired into my visual nervous system, unremovable spectacles behind my eyes that are my eyes. Our senses are adaptive, rather than faithful to physical reality. Colours represent reality, but they are not themselves real. Get used to it – the ‘real’ world is an inescapable artificial construct.
Trinity	I'm not saying that in the physical world we have access to any more than secondary qualities. But I am saying that the Matrix is a microcosm, a valley surrounded by mountains, and that here, we can see further. We can see it more objectively from the outside. The Matrix is contained by, and ultimately obeys the laws of, the real world. On the level we experience it at, it is a verisimilar world of mental phenomena. But you’ve seen what it really is – a never-ending string of ‘0’s and ‘1’s, instantiated somehow in the phsyical world.
Cypher	Now who’s weaving a web of carbon chauvinist sophistry, Trinity? All the machines have done is interpose a layer between my neuronal action potentials and their cellular targets. I will my arm to move, my spinal coaxial cable picks up the nervous signals, processes them according to the rules of the Matrix (modelled on the real world) and feeds back a signal to my retinal ganglion cells indistinguishable from the pattern of light my moving arm would generate. No crude restraint on the richness or range of my experience, and no impairment to our volition. At that low a level, how is a binary code any different to the sub-atomic code of physical reality?
Trinity	Cypher, I'm not going to debate whether or not the real world has greater validity. I might concede that the Matrix is no more or less real epistemologically. But at the very least, the Matrix constitutes a screen from the world, consciously created by machines as an intoxicating subjugation. Ontologically speaking then, the physical world is more ‘real’.
Cypher	But to me, they’re both real. Morpheus promised an escape from a prison of the mind that ‘blinds us from the truth’. It is our bodies, with their limited nervous systems, that are the prison. The Matrix provides some engaging scenery and welcome padding to the dungeon.
Trinity	Do you really think that, if people knew what they looked like, squirming in gelatine in coffin-sized pods, that they wouldn’t dream of escape, of lungs breathing real air, seeing the sky for the very first time …
Cypher	That’s a nice thought. Have you looked outside recently? Every time I look around me, I wish I could just melt right back into society now. With what I can do, I could be the greatest athlete the world would ever know, a futurist, a phenomenally rich professional thief … We could collaborate with the agents. Learn to compromise. It can be arranged, Trinity. You and me. We’d be royalty, wizards, blissfully powerful…
Trinity	Cypher, that’s foolish talk. The agents would never just let you back in on your terms.
Cypher	Yeah, I guess you’re right. That’s why, if Morpheus’ deal was to be a fair one, he’d have had to be able to guarantee my life back, and that the agents wouldn’t be waiting for me when I woke up. He didn’t mention that either.
Trinity	That may be so, but at least you would have had the choice. The people inside can’t even see the machine-made cage. Don’t they deserve the right to a choice too?
Cypher	A man can lead a meaningful life in the Matrix – his sensory input is rich and diverse, the perceived effects of his actions are accurate and his motivations are certainly real – for some, the Matrix will allow them to live fuller, happier lives. For example, an artist will have more opportunity to explore his talent there, than in this dismal warzone.
Trinity	The artist might, but what about the scientist? Inside the Matrix, our journey of discovery is limited to the path set out by the machines. The experiences inside can only be as rich as their experience of the physical world; if there are further depths to be plumbed, their significance will be lost on the prisoners of the Matrix.
Cypher	I don’t know what to say. I'm a simple man, and I only believe in what I can see and hear and touch. I'll take that chance. I don’t question where my steak comes from, just so long as it tastes good.
Trinity	But nothing you do in the Matrix has any physical consequences, for good or bad. While you react and interact within the Matrix, your body lies inert. It’s just like a computer game – your status as a moral agent is nulled. In this impotent state, you are robbed, or freed, of any responsibility for your actions. That’s no life.
Cypher	Now wait just a second. It might be true that our actions in a pure virtual reality have no effect on anything or anyone. It’s all data being processed. Calculations, not repercussions. A world without values. But the Matrix is different - there are other consciousnesses, other moral agents in the Matrix – both human and machine. So my interactions with the Matrix are necessarily interactions with them too. And if the Matrix is a world with relationships, conflicts of interest, rights and responsibilities, i.e. with morality – then how is my life inside it divested of meaning and morality? If the nature of the experience is rich enough, then the adversity is real. After all, mortality in the Matrix is just as fatal. Or to put it another way, if you’re going to measure good and bad in terms of consequences, then the ultimate measure of states of affairs must be by reference to the effect on other moral agents and their happiness. Being a good person is a measure of you, not your effect on the physical world.
Trinity	Yes, but they’ve added that extra layer – the input your neurons receive, the content of the signals, is constructed. And can be altered at the will of the machines.
Cypher	Ah, so you’re saying that you prefer the physical world, not because the Matrix is a virtual reality, but because it’s a constructed reality.
Trinity	The machines, unlike nature, are sentient creators. And they have built a sentient, and malign, environment.
Cypher	And if there’s a God, he provides them (and us) with a sentient environment. Do you seek to escape him too? If I were to take the blue pill, I would be just as powerless and ignorant about the machines and the Matrix as I am now about God and the physical world.
Trinity	The machines’ sole intent is to imprison us. The laws of nature may be cruel, but at least they can be more or less relied upon to stay cruel to everything. What happens when the machines find a more efficient battery? Or they’ll find a way to break through the clouds so that they can harness the sun again. Then every single person in the Matrix is going to die. Without us, all of humanity is going to die. But we can free them. Isn’t that a noble goal, worth living and dying for?
Cypher	Just one little question: why should humanity’s survival be paramount? Why is that a noble goal? What if the machines could do a better job of running this planet? They’re sentient too, remember, and frighteningly intelligent – who’s to say that with their incredibly sensitive sensory arrays, more efficient bodies, wisdom amassed in enormous memory banks and more complex neural wiring that they aren’t more conscious than us, and would live happier, more meaningful and less destructive lives than billions of seething humans? It is better that we stay in the Matrix. It’s been built for us. This drive to destroy it and free the people inside would trap humanity in an apocalyptic desolation of its own making. Remember that when the machines tried to recapture Eden for us, we kicked ourselves out of it all over again.
Trinity	Cypher, would you sacrifice your life now for a dying machine? - I thought not. Neither would I.
Cypher	Don’t be naïve. I wouldn’t sacrifice myself for a dying human either, so don’t pretend that proves anything.
Trinity	Alright, forget whether the machines have more or less right to live than humans. All I'm saying is that I would prefer to live in the physical world, and I'm prepared to fight to offer others that freedom of choice.
Cypher	I can see that your high-minded, narrow-minded ideals won’t give up this empty crusade so easily. So let me give you a moral argument. Are you able to consider, even for a moment, that it is better that we’re trapped in the Matrix – that humanity is too dangerous to be let out? In there, we’re safe from ourselves, from the repercussions we can create but not understand or judge. We’re safe, and so is everything else around us.
Trinity	Would you really take the blue pill now, if the choice was offered to you again? It would be a surrender.
Cypher	Taking the red pill is also a kind of suicide, because there’s no return to the life you led before. It’s like eating from the Tree of Knowledge – it gives you wisdom, but you don’t realise until afterwards that the innocence is preferable. So if I was faced with the choice now, then yes, I would take the blue pill. If I'd known that the real world is just a bigger Matrix, and that life inside the Matrix is so much more pleasant, what reason would I have had to leave? And if I'm prepared and happy to stay there myself, where’s the moral imperative to free anybody else? Frankly, I wish I'd never been given the choice at all. Trinity, can’t you at least see that the answer is not so easy and clear cut, not for everyone?
Trinity	Very few people would accept your conclusions, even if they accept your reasoning. Do you want to know what the difference between us is? I'm seeking to grow my awareness and humanity, and you wish you could shed yours.
Cypher	That’s a deliberately emotive way of putting it. I don’t see taking the blue pill as ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’ - it’s just that I prioritise more immediate ideas of ‘Good’ than you. Morpheus is not John the Baptist as he pretends – I can hear his hissing, as he tempts our curiosity and sense of self-worth with his Manichean vision, offering us truth, reality and valour.