Independent Perspective News

"Matrix"'s worldwide box office success has triggered a passionate debate over the film's philosophical content.

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Many are surprised: they can't understand how a movie can stir such a profound discussion, especially one that's so fantastic that it shows machines making their creators their hostages and slaves. But the debate has begun, and it's even more intense in the US than anywhere else, as opposed to what happened after "Blade Runner" or "Brazil".

Three philosophical problems

But isn't it "strange" that a movie like this appears in the current American intellectual environment?

"Because the official version, psychologically orthodox, assumes the truth of the computer metaphor: the idea that the human mind is to the brain what software is to hardware". "Many of psychology pieces of research are trying to create a program that runs on some computer/robot in such a way that the machine carries out activities and develops abilities similar to humans'."

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In the orthodox philosophy scene of the US, that is, in every learning theory, metaphysics, philosophy of the mind or ethics course, the three philosophical problems behind "Matrix" are being studied.

The first one may remind us of the myth of the brains in the bucket: the skeptical stage in its contemporary version, a descendent of Descartes' two skeptical arguments in his Metaphysical meditations: the dream argument and the evil spirit argument.

The first of them states that it's not possible to tell what's real from what's not. (...) As for the second one, let's imagine an evil spirit capable of deceiving us regarding each of our beliefs. This is implicitly in the film, since the matrix that deceives us is created by some evil machines who took over and enslaved humans.

The second philosophical contribution is that of functionalism - the orthodox theory that underlies cognitive psychology and gives its basis, according to which the mind is a number of functions (algorithms: describable in terms of a Turing machine, an abstract, non material entity, since it's a logical program).

The third recurrent philosophical issue in the movie, very fashionable nowadays, is free will. (...) The free will cultivated today in the US is about the possibility to choose for oneself and to define one's own fate (choosing between the red and the blue pill, the fortune teller who tells Neo he's going to have to choose between his own death and Morpheus', etc.).

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To top it all, there's what David Chalmers says. He claims that the possibility that we're actually in the matrix is not as bad as it seems. He opposes the intuitive idea that, if we're in it, we're constantly deceived about the external world. On the contrary, he suggests that if we're in it, this tells us something about the external world: the physical world is ultimately made of bits, and was created by beings who assure us that our minds interact with the physical world. Chalmers' surprising conclusion is that if we lived in a matrix-like simulation the majority of our beliefs regarding the world would still be real.