Tears in Rain

Or, trying to use sci-fi to sound smart

First year undergraduates are often introduced to a thought experiment in philosophy. It goes something like this. Imagine there was a machine you could plug in to, which will keep you alive for the rest of your natural life. During that time, you will not be aware that you are in the machine, but will be treated to a never-ending stream of euphoric pleasure. Would you plug in?

The overwhelming response from students asked this question is ‘No!’ They are then asked to explain why. Often, people reach for answers along the lines that any pleasure experienced inside the machine would not be real; that to live in such a way would lack authenticity. But I've long suspected that this isn't the actual reason we are typically intuitively averse to plugging in to pleasure machines. Two other factors seem to me more likely to be doing the work.

First, there is the fact that whilst pleasure is important to human beings, it is by no means the only thing that matters to us. Far more than mere pleasure makes human life what it is, and worth living. We value struggle, overcoming hardship, mastering skills, developing our appreciation of art and culture, and so on and so forth. Life inside the pleasure machine would lack all these things. Accordingly, it would not really be a human life at all. I take it that most of us don't want to plug in to the pleasure machine for the same basic reason that we would prefer to be a dissatisfied adult human, rather than a happy pet dog.

Second, plugging in to the pleasure machine would surely constitute a kind of death. The typical undergraduate student, like most humans living in tolerable circumstances, has a life structured by ongoing projects and commitments. There is that wedding to go to, that qualification to earn, that book to finish, that birthday party for your niece, that girl you hope will fall in love with you – and so on, in many directions. Plugging in to the pleasure machine would mean abandoning all of that. It would mean, in essence, ceasing to be. Insofar as one does not want to die, because one has projects and commitments that give one reasons to live, then equally one has good reason not to hook up to the machine.¹

It always struck me that these seemed more plausible reasons than any nebulous appeal to “what’s real” or “authenticity”. My guess has been that people reach for these latter kinds of explanation because they are more immediately obvious, and also because they flatter us into thinking that we are being brave: the “heroism” of refusing to accept fantasy over reality. Yet it has also long seemed to me that the pleasure machine thought experiment is a pretty easy one to handle. A tougher customer is presented by the classic science-fiction film The Matrix, and specifically the character of Cypher.

As you may recall, Cypher lives aboard the hovercraft Nebuchadnezzar some time in the future. He is part of the small group of humans who are trying to wrest back control of Earth from the computers that have taken over – and who keep themselves powered up by having turned most of the human race into batteries. Of course, these humans don't know that they are batteries. That is because their minds are plugged in to ‘the Matrix’: a virtual reality simulation set in the late 20^th century, the height of human civilisation before it was torn apart by the rise of the machines.

Cypher himself used to be a battery, before he was liberated by the human resistance, which he then joined. The problem is, Cypher has had rather enough of life in reality. He is sick of the never-ending war against the machines, of living on a cramped hovercraft, under a permanently blackened sky, surviving on slop in a ruined world. Accordingly, he secretly makes a deal with the computers: he wants to go back into the Matrix, on condition that he remembers “Nothing. Nothing.” He is aware that he will be trading reality for an illusion, but he simply does not care anymore. The illusion, for him, is far preferable to reality. “Ignorance is bliss.”

The film invites us to judge Cypher, but it also overwhelmingly loads the deck against him. He does not simply want to go back into the Matrix, but is prepared to betray his own crew, and even kill some of them himself, whilst being revealed to lust creepily after Trinity, a woman he can’t have. Furthermore, he does not just want to go back into the Matrix, but once inside wants to be somebody important, somebody rich, “like an actor”.² Even worse, he is bald and has a goatee. His status as A Baddie could hardly be more clearly telegraphed. The result is that it is easy to side against him, agreeing with the film’s claim that he is deeply at fault, not least in choosing to be a slave rather than free.

But that just makes it all too easy. Consider instead a character we might call Nice Cypher. He is also fed up with living in the real world, fighting the machines and surviving on hovercraft slop. He’d rather be a battery once more. But he’s not prepared to betray his crew, or kill anybody. And he does not demand a life of luxury or opulence. Instead, he asks only for the most normal of lives once he is plugged back in: a boring but steady office job, a contented wife, 2.5 kids, and a labrador. If you want, you can even imagine him clean shaven and with a full head of hair.

The question is: does Nice Cypher do anything wrong by plugging back in?

Particularly important here is the issue of whether we should blame him. And here it seems rather unfair to do so. After nine years in the real world, he has made a well-informed decision to trade reality for illusion. It is his life, after all, so who are the rest of us to tell him he's making the wrong decision, assuming nobody else is going to get hurt?

But there is another question here: would you get into the matrix if you were in Nice Cypher’s position?

Well, because I'm a sort of professional philosopher, and given that I don't really have much else to do these days, it's a question I've been asking myself recently. More specifically: if I was offered the chance to plug in to a virtual reality simulation in which I traded my real existence as a severely paralysed tetraplegic for a Matrix-style illusion, would I do it? Indeed, let's up the ante. Let's imagine that the computer would have me believe that my old life had never ended; I would perceive myself to wake up that fateful morning, go out climbing, never have the accident, and continue the excellent life I was very happily leading, for another 40 or so years, until my biological death on the outside. Unlike Nasty Cypher, I wouldn't want riches and fame and glory and all that nonsense. But I too would remember nothing about the real world. And we're not talking about a pleasure machine here. I’m imagining being offered the closest thing imaginable to having my life back. Would I do it?

For a long time, I assumed the answer was simply yes. But recently I find myself thinking that I probably wouldn’t. What gives? Well, I haven’t changed my view that, all things considered, it would have been better for me to die on the mountain that day. But the fact is, I didn't. The last ten months are ones that I have lived through, and as a result have become part of who I am. I've met many new people that I never expected to, experienced many things I never could have imagined, and been forced to rethink pretty much everything I previously thought I understood. None of this has been pleasant. I certainly wouldn’t have chosen it. But it happened, and so were I to plug in to the Matrix tomorrow, that would be the death of me. I am attached to the projects and commitments, such as they are, of this new version of myself. Perhaps this is what coming to terms with my reality looks like, at least at the beginning?

Or so, that is how I was going to end this post when I was planning it in my head during the past week. Then I came down with a vicious urinary tract infection. This is just par for the course when you piss into a bag, through a plastic tube, drilled into your guts. I’ve had them before. But this one was bad. Several times when I was forced back to bed, teeth chattering in the grip of fever, I thought to myself: what if this is something more serious? What if it turns into sepsis, or is a bacterium resistant to antibiotics? What if this kills me? (And in case you think I’m being melodramatic, the staff here pretty clearly worried along the same lines, and various doctors became involved.) Much to my surprise, my reaction to this possibility was…calm.

Okay, I thought to myself, maybe this is the beginning of the end. Would that be so bad? I had a really good life, even if the addendum of the last 10 months was rather pointless. I don’t think I’m being especially arrogant to claim that I achieved more in 36 yeas than most people manage in 72. To burn twice as bright, for only half as long? There are worse ways to have lived. (And at least this way I’ll be spared the monotony, tedium, and indignity that seem to stretch endlessly before me.) My main concern was that, if things did go that way, I hoped to lose consciousness quickly, any pain kept to a minimum.

How can I claim, on the one hand, that I wouldn’t want to plug in to the illusion of the Matrix because it would represent my death, and yet claim to be intensely relaxed about popping my clogs? One possibility could be that it turns out that authenticity is more important than I gave it credit for. If both getting into the Matrix, and dying of bacterial infection, are equally the end of me, then why not consider them on a par? Well, one obvious distinction is that dying of sepsis would be real, at least in terms of what I experience (or rather, stop experiencing), whereas persisting in a virtual reality simulation would not be. If I value what is real over what is inauthentic, then I will view my real death differently to the prospect of plugging in to the Matrix.

Maybe. But I’m still not convinced that a commitment to authenticity is what’s doing the work here. Here’s an alternative explanation. Plugging in to the Matrix would in a way be an attempt to cheat death. Rather than fully facing up to the prospect that this is it, the end, one would, as it were, sidestep that fact by swapping the loss of oneself for a substitute: the virtual reality simulation. One can thereby try to trick oneself into believing that one isn’t dying when one plugs in, just living a different way.

Calmly accepting death in the face of bacterial infection is not like that. It is to look at the facts and say: what shall be, shall be. We all die eventually, anyhow, and having more time is not good simply because it is more time. Lying in bed, shivering with the lights off, my mind kept going back to a different film, one of the greatest ever made. Ridley Scott’s classic 1984 Blade Runner, which culminates with the replicant Roy Batty saving the life of the cop Rick Deckard, whom he had moments ago almost hunted to death. Batty is dying, because androids like him have a maximum lifespan of five years, and his time is up. Having raged against this inevitability throughout the film, he comes in his final moments to transcend it. Indeed, he saves the life of his prey in part to try and communicate what he has discovered:

“I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.”

What is crucial here is that Batty accepts. This is not to deny a certain melancholy. Those moments really will be lost. But he ceases to rage, ceases to hold the false belief that more life would be good just because it would be more. That might be true for an animal, but not for a person – and one thing the film is saying is that Batty is a person, regardless of the fact that he is not made of biological matter.

Well, I like to think that I too have seen things that many people wouldn’t believe. The sun rising on a midsummer day over the Black Cuilin Ridge. A philosophical argument that can cut like a knife, upending your world when you come to understand it. One day all these moments, too, will be lost. Like tears in rain. Whether it’s next week, or in three decades, remains to be seen. But when it’s time to die, it’s time to die – an acceptance which getting into the Matrix would be an attempt to flee from. Authenticity isn't what matters here. Being most fully a person is. And we all of us, one day, must die. Before my accident, I could never really accept this way of seeing things. If nothing else, perhaps breaking my neck has at least made me a little wiser.

1. Which leads to an interesting question: what about people who don't have tolerable lives, who lack meaningful projects and commitments? Are we so sure that they wouldn't get in, just because we wouldn't? Indeed, isn't there plenty of evidence that people with such lives do often get in - it is just that we don't use the term "pleasure machine" but instead names like “heroin” and “crack cocaine”? Here is an area where it is wise to be cautious about generalising from the intuitions of a subset of (mostly) well-off, secure, stable individuals.

2. Quite possibly one of the most underrated jokes in cinematic history.