Inside the Matrix: philosophers discuss the possibility of living a simulation

More than twenty years after the release of the franchise’s first title, Matrix returns with the sequence Resurrections, directed by Lana Wachowski, one of the two sisters responsible for the franchise.

As early as the turn of the 2000s, the franchise’s first title sparked different debates about its meaning. In the first few minutes, for example, we see Neo holding a copy of the book “Simulacrums and Simulations” by Jean Baudrillard, who became known precisely for bringing the premise of the illusion of another reality provided by new technologies and their images.

In Matrix, what we are following is, precisely, the journey of a hacker who is invited to discover the truth behind the veil of a computer simulation.

The discussion resonated so strongly in the popular imagination that, in 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom even developed an article called “The Argument from Simulation”, in which he suggested that we could be living in a simulated universe – as if we were inside a video game …or the Matrix.

But for this to be true, only one of the three statements must be true:

1. There is a high chance that the human will go extinct before reaching its “post-human” status (ie, the next evolutionary step of the species, propelled by technology);
2. It is very unlikely that any post-human civilization will be able to create a significant number of simulations of its history;
3. We are almost certainly living in a simulation.

Although the first two statements suggest, precisely, the impossibility of creating a simulation in which we or other individuals could be inserted, it was the third option that most caught the attention of people like billionaire Elon Musk.

Back then, the founder of Tesla said he believed that the world we live in is, in reality, a simulation.

More recently, in a response to a tweet about the game Pong, released in 1972, Musk argues that, 49 years later, video game graphics are increasingly sophisticated to the point of being able to create new worlds indistinguishable from reality. “What does this trend continue to imply about our reality?” he asks.

Interestingly, even in December 2021, Matrix was used as a pretext to show the capacity of the graphics engine Unreal Engine 5 and make games that, more and more, are confused with reality. See the demo in the video below:

From Matrix to Metaverse

For Bruno Pato, presenter of a game program and virtual reality (VR) evangelist, it is precisely this reasoning raised by Musk that makes him believe that we are, in fact, living in a simulation.

in your podcast VR chat, for example, every guest is asked about their opinion about it: are we or are we not living in the Matrix? The answers, according to Pato, vary a lot.

As for Alfredo Suppia, cinema and audiovisual professor at Unicamp, believing that we are living in the Matrix has another political and economic layer when Bostrom says that, for the third statement to be true, it is necessary that “relatively prosperous individuals wish to create simulations, and be free to do so.”

This is the case of Elon Musk himself and also of Mark Zuckerberg, who recently announced the change of the Facebook brand to Meta, arising from a new path taken by the company towards the metaverse – that is, virtual simulated universes accessed through technology devices immersive as virtual, augmented or mixed reality.

Although the term “metaverse” is on the tip of the tongue of enthusiasts and investors (even more so in the days of NFTs and the sale of “virtual land”), this is a concept that dates back to the early 1990s, when writer Neal Stephenson released the science fiction book Snowcrash.

While some interpretations understand the novel to be a parody of the main topics of cyberpunk science fiction, others (including Stephenson himself, who became a futurist consultant at the Magic Leap company) saw the concept as a business opportunity.

A pioneer in the field of immersive technologies, Boo Aguilar was responsible for the creation of the Snowcrash immersive technologies nucleus, by the Brazilian company Flag.

Since the beginning of the 2010s, Aguilar has been working on different projects that aim, for example, at the interaction between VR, artificial intelligence and medicine.

For him, what was a “garage” movement turned into something much bigger and dangerous as it was incorporated into the agenda of large technology companies. “There are already much more sophisticated mapping and immersion devices that were developed years ago, but have not yet been implemented because they want to incorporate algorithms for analyzing human behavior first”, he explains.

What is already a reality on platforms like Instagram and Facebook, then, is about to extend to the level of the metaverse as well. As a defense, Aguilar mentions a project that used VR helmets with eye movement analysis, which was able to pinpoint the wearer’s personality with high accuracy.

Game of life

In his article “The argument from simulation and its soup of culture”, Suppia indicates that the fact that Musk is bringing back the argument from simulation just now has to do with a new development of neoliberalism.

According to him, “every defender of simulation, academic or not, is responsible, consciously or not” for this perpetuation of capital.

After all, if the world really is a simulation, Suppia believes that we can only play games: “It’s as if capital could say: if almost everything is a simulation, no reality is very likely; you have to play the simulation, assume your role as best you can, get your best performance.”

In this regard, Suppia cites Player Number One (2018), a film by Spielberg adapted from a book of the same name, in which players compete not only for a game win, but also for cash prizes – while the “real” world lives in misery. – perpetuating the idea of ​​meritocracy.

In the opinion of Alexey Dodsworth, Ph.D. and science fiction writer, however, when Bostrom suggests that we are living in a simulation, it is not in a way similar to Plato’s classic cave allegory, in which a world is assumed. true (outside the cave) and the simulation (the projected shadows).

In The Matrix, the distinction between the true and the simulacrum is pointed out, while, in Bostrom’s theory, all universes are simulations. “He talks about simulation not synonymous with illusion, it has more to do with something generated by a program that creates countless realities”, argues Dodsworth, who thinks The Matrix is ​​much closer to the cave’s allegory than to Bostrom’s theory.

As the researcher explains, Matrix does it incur the same “naivety” as Plato’s allegory, after all, as different philosophers have argued, which guarantees that, when you leave the cave, you will in fact be seeing reality? What if it’s an even more sophisticated simulation? At this point, which is more in line with Bostrom’s proposal and perhaps with the premise of Matrix Resurrections, there is no guarantee that “leaving the Matrix” will bring Neo to reality.

Virtually real

An important point to be considered, therefore, is the one raised by historian and researcher Vanessa Bortulucce: each era deals with its potentialities differently.

She recalls an ancient Greek story about Zeuxis (ca. 5th century BC) who had painted a bunch of grapes on a wall so realistically that even birds pecked at the image. “This is a tradition that has continued throughout history, especially from the Western point of view, when we see paintings that imitate nature in the domes to give the feeling of being outdoors, when, in fact, it’s a wall”, she complements.

Bortulucce comments that, from this point of view, it is now possible to say that some people abdicate the “real world” to live in these increasingly realistic virtualities provided by computer graphics and games.

This is also data brought up by Pato, who claims that there are already people who spend much more time in simulations like VRChat than “offline”.

However, for the historian, there is really no opposition between the “real” and the “virtual”, since “everything always starts from the real” and that, many times, this reality is still an idealized version.

At this point, the fact that The Matrix has so many different interpretations already presupposes the ambiguity of what would be real or true, what would be idealized or what goes unnoticed by our perception.

One of the reasons Lilly Wachowski will not direct the sequel Resurrections with her sister has to do with the fact that, for her, The Matrix has always been a metaphor for gender transition, but at the time, executives weren’t willing to bring it up so explicitly. Now that both sisters have gone through this transition publicly, Lilly sees no reason to return to the franchise.

In other words, Matrix not only does it bring in its plot a question about what is real and what is simulation from a technological point of view. The work itself, in a metalinguistic way, manages to multiply in several other ways.

Although the first titles have assumed a clear differentiation between what would be real and virtual, the fans are left for Resurrections reinforce this debate also bringing on the agenda the proposal of a reality in the “Russian doll” style of Bostrom. If, in fact, we live in a simulation – is it possible one day to get out of it and not fall into another simulation?