the red pill or the blue pill?

The question of which pill to take illustrates the personal aspect of the decision to study philosophy. Do you live on in ignorance (and potentially bliss) or do you lead what Aristotle called 'the examined life'...

The Matrix is a film filled with religious and philosophical symbolism. The plot supposes that humans live in vats many years in the future, being fed false sensory information by a giant virtual reality computer (the Matrix). The perpetrators of this horror are machines of the future who use humans as a source of power. Humans are literally farmed.

The central character of the film, Neo, is presented to us in the opening part of the film as a loner who is searching for a mysterious character called Morpheus (named after the Greek god of dreams and sleep). He is also trying to discover the answer to the question "What is the Matrix?"

Morpheus contacts Neo just as the machines (posing as sinister 'agents') are trying to keep Neo from finding out any more. When Morpheus and Neo meet, Morpheus offers Neo two pills. The red pill will answer the question "what is the Matrix?" (by removing him from it) and the blue pill simply for life to carry on as before. As Neo reaches for the red pill Morpheus warns Neo "Remember, all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more."

The film as a whole and especially the choosing scene is deeply compelling. Why is the choice between what you believe you know and an unknown 'real' truth so fascinating? How could a choice possibly be made? On the one hand everyone you love and everything that you have built you life upon. One the other the promise only of truth.

The question then is not about pills, but what they stand for in these circumstances. The question is asking us whether reality, truth, is worth pursuing. The blue pill will leave us as we are, in a life consisting of habit, of things we believe we know. We are comfortable, we do not need truth to live. The blue pill symbolises commuting to work every day, or brushing your teeth.

The red pill is an unknown quantity. We are told that it can help us to find the truth. We don't know what that truth is, or even that the pill will help us to find it. The red pill symbolises risk, doubt and questioning. In order to answer the question, you can gamble your whole life and world on a reality you have never experienced.

However, in order to investigate which course of action to take we need to investigate why the choice is faced. Why should we even have to decide whether to pursue truth?

The answer in short, is inquisitiveness. Many people throughout human existence have questioned and enquired. Most of them have not been scientists or doctors or philosophers, but simply ordinary people asking 'what if?' or 'why?' Asking these questions ultimately leads us to a choice. Do you continue to ask and investigate, or do you stop and never ask again? This in essence, is the question posed to Neo in the film.

So what are the advantages of taking the blue pill? As one of the characters in the film says, "ignorance is bliss" Essentially, if the truth is unknown, or you believe that you know the truth, what is there to question or worry about?

By accepting what we are told and experience life can be easier. There is the social pressure to 'fit in', which is immensely strong in most cultures. Questioning the status quo carries the danger of ostracism, possibly persecution. This aspect has a strong link with politics. People doing well under the current system are not inclined to look favourably on those who question the system. Morpheus says to Neo "You have to understand that many people are not ready to be unplugged, and many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it."

The system also has a place for you, an expected path to follow. This removes much of the doubt and discomfort experienced by a trailblazer.

Another argument on the side of the blue pill is how does anyone know that the status quo is not in fact the truth? The act of simply questioning does not infer a lack of validity on the questioned. Why not assume that your experience is innocent until proven guilty? Just accept everything?

So if the arguments for the blue pill are so numerous, why take the red pill? Why pursue truth even though it may be unpalatable and the journey to it hard? In the film, Neo risks death to escape the virtual reality and discovers a brutal reality from which he cannot return. As he discovers the trouble with asking questions is that the answers are not necessarily what you want to hear.

To justify taking the red pill we might ask what is the purpose of an ignorant existence? Further still, what is there in merely existing? Simply existing brings humans down to the level of objects; they might have utility or even purpose, but where is the meaning? Existence without meaning is surely not living your life, but just experiencing it. As Trinity says to Neo, "The Matrix cannot tell you who you are."

Given the potential disadvantages of choosing the red pill, the motivation for discovering the truth must then be very strong. The film makes much of this point. Trinity says to Neo "It's the question that drives us, Neo." and Morpheus compares the motivation for Neo's search to "a splinter in your mind - driving you mad." The motivation for answering the question is obviously strong as the answer will help us to find the meaning in our lives.

What we are looking at here is the drive to answer a question, but the key to this is what drove the question in the first place. The asking of questions about our environment our experience and ourselves is fundamental to the human condition. Children ask a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from an early age. It is only with education and socialisation that some people stop asking these questions. However, we remain, as it were, hard-wired to enquire.

This is an inevitable consequence of consciousness. A being with a mind, conscious of itself and its existence, experiencing a reality, needs to organise the data that it receives from its senses. Simply observing and recording does not allow for consciousness. It is what we do with that information that allows us to think. In order to process and store the vast amount of information received, the human brain attempts to identify patterns in the data; looking for the patterns behind what is experienced. This is asking questions of the sensory information, and requires reasoning. By definition a conscious mind seeks to know. Knowing something requires more than just data, but intelligence or reasoning applied to that data. To attempt to obtain knowledge we must therefore question the data our mind receives; thus, consciousness questions.

So the metaphor of the journey to truth that Neo takes is complete. The journey starts with a question, there is a search for the answer and the answer may be reached. This shows us that the journey does not start with Neo choosing between the pills, or with ourselves deciding whether to question. The act of asking the question is itself the starting point as the aim of asking the question is to seek truth and knowledge.

We have established that consciousness is aware and seeks knowledge and that thus the conscious mind must question. To question is to seek the truth and start on the journey to knowledge. Therefore the choice between the pills is surely made for us. The fact that we are conscious appears to require us to take the red pill.

However, this can be simply countered by someone who would prefer to take the blue pill. They may wish to seek the truth in a different way, or in a less mind jarring set of circumstances. They can choose the blue pill and not deny their consciousness, but to stop seeking the truth entirely would be to deny their consciousness.

Thus we are philosophically driven to seek the truth and the act of questioning whether to seek it is in itself seeking the truth. As conscious minds we will always seek the truth. However, the choice over the red or blue pills is not solely a choice between whether to question or not, it is a personal choice on the method of discovering the truth.

real time games

my dear zohaib asks for some real-life examples of game theory in ethics.

In many instances where game theory intersects real life, we just play the game according to the (local) Nash equilibrium. The phrase "All's fair in love and war" says that one is free to pursue the strategy that will bring the greatest immediate individual benefit. We construct specifically ethical systems when for one reason or another, we have to go "outside" the game to achieve what we intuitively feel is the best overall outcome.

For example, I can go into a restaurant, eat a meal, and then be presented with the bill. This is an example of a related game, the asymmetric closed bag exchange. Regardless of whether or not I'm actually served a good meal, I am always "better off" not paying (I get to eat the meal and keep my money). Paying before I eat (like at McDonalds) just changes the asymmetry; whether or not I pay, it's always "better" for the restaurant to not feed me (defect) once I've paid (cooperated).

The Pareto optimum (and usually the global maximum), though, is for the restaurant to serve me a good meal and for me to pay.

In a small community, we can play tit-for-tat. If I don't pay on Monday (he cooperates, I defect), the restaurant won't serve me again until I pay without eating (he "defects", I cooperate). However, a rational person with foresight will simply see the outcome of the repeated iterations. We call this foresight the ethical evaluation that you should pay for your meal.

In a larger community, where there are more non-communicating restaurants than I can eat meals, tit-for-tat doesn't work; I can play as many one-shot games as I like without fear of reprisal. So we make laws which follow from our idealized tit-for-tat strategy (i.e. good laws follow from good ethics).

But we can observe that the law is relatively easy to circumvent: There isn't a police officer standing at the door to every restaurant. Instead, we cultivate in ourselves ethical habits. In this case, the the thinking is one level more abstract: If too many people in general were to eat without paying, no one (myself included) could eat at restaurants, so we police ourselves.

There are other examples. I can work hard (cooperate) or slack off and just look busy (defect); my company can give me a raise next year (cooperate) or stiff me (defect). As an exercise, use game theory to relate the Communist slogan, "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," with the cynical Soviet observation, "we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

A lot of human behavior can be modeled just by reducing it to pure game theory and locally rational choice. But as the Prisoner's Dilemma shows, some situations are not so easy to reduce, even in theory. It is precisely those Prisoner's Dilemma and similar games which cause us to go outside the game and create ethics and laws.

multiculturalism

The comments on Stephen Law's response to Ibrahim Lawson [link fixed] have become a conversation about multiculturalism.

Steve Chester appears to argue that condemning any behavior under the umbrella of a religion is tantamount to totalitarian oppression.

The problem with that stance, though, is that nobody supports absolute tolerance. We don't tolerate murderers, thieves, rapists, people who don't pay their taxes, or even people who jaywalk. The Nazis presumably had some sort of prosaic law enforcement, but we are not Nazi-like just because we enforce prosaic civil law.

The question is not whether to be intolerant of anything, it's about what specifically to be intolerant of; not whether but where to draw the line.

It's one thing to argue that we should tolerate some particular behavior. It's a horse of a different color to try to protect some behavior by arguing that we should draw no lines at all. It's so patently false — precisely because we do draw entirely uncontroversial lines — that one wonders why the speaker wishes to distract attention from the specifics of the behavior.

"Multiculturalism" has been assigned so many incompatible meanings that it's been rhetorically bludgeoned into meaninglessness. It can range anywhere from tolerating varying styles of dress to racial tolerance all the way to permitting and condoning the murder and mutilation of one's own children for trivial or even imagined sexual misbehavior.

Part of the problem is that multiculturalism and anti-multiculturalism have been adopted as smokescreens by people with objectionable hidden agendas. Right-wing extremists have adopted anti-multiculturalism to justify naked racism, racial oppression, and to justify wars of aggression to get those damn wogs off of our oil. Religious extremists have adopted multiculturalism to shield abhorrent misogyny and a genuinely totalitarian political ideology from democratic criticism. (Islam is not necessarily totalitarian, but Islamic totalitarianism is hardly a fringe movement, as evidenced by Saudi Arabia, the Afghani Taliban, the Northwest Frontier province of Pakistan, and any number of fundamentalist movements in other Islamic countries, even secular Turkey.

If people are going to live and work together, they need to establish some core values that are affirmed by everyone in that society. However, determining specifically what those core values are or should be is a nontrivial task, because it is also the case that beyond those core values, there is a considerable range of value that can be tolerated, and in many cases a range of values has value in itself.

It's a fundamental value of Western civilization from the dawn of the enlightenment that verbal criticism should never be suppressed. Although J. S. Mill makes the case most forcefully and coherently in On Liberty, it's arguable that freedom of speech is the sine qua non of Western Civilization. I view any attempt to suppress or condemn speech as speech on any basis — multiculturalism included — to attack the very foundation of my own values. Criticize the content of any speech to your heart's content, but to demand that anyone just absolutely shut up on any basis is beyond the pale.

Within my own (or other Western societies) if Muslims want to defend the practice of murdering their daughters, throwing acid in their faces, crippling their education, or restricting them from full civic participation and equal rights, let them argue the merits of these demands and submit them to full, vigorous democratic debate. To hide behind "multiculturalism" is nothing more than pure cowardice.

And if the racists and colonialists want to defend the practice of subjugating and denying full civil rights to brown people, if they want to defend wars of aggression and robbery on a national scale, if they want to enforce Christianity, let them defend those demands on their own merits. To hide behind "anti-multiculturalism" is equally cowardly.

Update: Here's an example of bullshit anti-multiculturalism (h/t to Political Crank):

Juashaunna Kelly, a Theodore Roosevelt High School senior who has the fastest mile and two-mile times of any girls' runner in the District this winter, was disqualified from Saturday's Montgomery Invitational indoor track and field meet after officials said her Muslim clothing violated national competition rules.

Kelly was wearing the same uniform she has worn for the past three seasons while running for Theodore Roosevelt's cross-country and track teams: a custom-made, one-piece blue and orange unitard that covers her head, arms, torso and legs. On top of the unitard, Kelly wore the same orange and blue T-shirt and shorts as her teammates.

I'm no fan at all of Islamic dress codes for women. I think these codes are inherently misogynist and oppressive, and they deserve criticism. On the other hand, singling out Ms. Kelly in this manner is just egregiously stupid, and the supposed justification is just slavish, authoritarian adherence to a different arbitrary dress code. When multiculturalism vs. anti-multiculturalism becomes a heated argument over which kind of petty authoritarianism to enforce in society, we have entirely missed the point of liberal democracy.

meta-philosophologer

In his latest essay, The Limits of Science?, Mark Rowlands holds up Kant's Critique of Pure Reason as (possible) paradigmatic (or at least exemplary) of an epistemic methodological alternative to science.

I'm not a philosophologer (I'm not concerned with having a detailed knowledge of the philosophical canon), and I read Critique of Pure Reason more than twenty years ago, before I was seriously interested in philosophy. I wasn't impressed then, and none of the commentary I've read about it since has given me much motivation to revisit the work.

Going by my general impressions from commentary and decades-old memory, I recall that Kant's overall argument rests on what we can (and, to his credit, much that we cannot) say about synthetic a priori propositions. A synthetic proposition is some proposition that states a truth about the world (e.g. "all crows are black"), as opposed to an analytic proposition, which is about the meanings of words (e.g. "all bachelors are unmarried"). An a priori proposition is some proposition that is known (or can be known) prior to experience, as opposed to an a posteriori proposition, which can be known only on the basis of (i.e. after) experience.

Kant's argument rests on our a priori knowledge of mathematics and geometry and our deep a priori intuitions about space and time. (One might also add our a priori intuitions about morality.) I think this sort of argument fails both on the specifics and in general. Kant cannot be faulted too much: He works at the birth of modern science, immediately after Newton (Kant: 1724–1804; Newton: 1643-1727). He precedes Lobachevsky (1792–1856), Riemann (1826–1866), Darwin, Gödel and Einstein.

Non-Euclidian geometry, chaos theory, Gödel's incompleteness theorems, and all the weirdness of 20^th and 20^st century mathematics casts considerable doubt on the a priori truths of mathematics. Furthermore, Tobias Dantzig's history of mathematics, Number, the Language of Science, shows us just how hard-earned were the mathematical concepts of even Kant's day. Dantzig argues persuasively that our "primary" mathematical intuition is very limited, and the sophistication of modern mathematics can be seen as groping for concepts that would allow us to understand practical problems; our mathematical discovery has been driven as much or more by the requirements of experience as by the exercise of pure reason.

Einstein puts paid to our ordinary, intuitive "Newtonian" intuitions about space and time. Worse yet, quantum mechanics subverts our core assumptions about reality itself. If paradigmatic synthetic concepts are actually wrong — or obviously limited to the conditions of our ordinary experience — it's suspect to maintain they are actually known a priori.

It's provably true that individual human beings have true synthetic propositional beliefs that precede their own individual experience. Someone of Kant's time would be justified in concluding that such beliefs are fundamentally a priori, the result of the exercise of pure reason uninformed by experience.

But someone of Kant's time precedes Darwin, and Darwin makes all the difference. Because, of course, it becomes a plausible counter-argument to say that our true synthetic "a priori" beliefs are actually a posteriori with respect to the experience of evolution. Our brains, far from being engines of "pure" reason, have been shaped by at least 500,000,000 years of multicellular evolution (and perhaps even by the full 4,000,000,000 years of the evolution of terrestrial life). Evolution is not only undeniably an experiential process, it is also scientific. The parallels are exact: theoretical structure = genome; creation of hypotheses = random mutation; acceptance or rejection of the hypotheses by experiment = natural selection.

I am almost certainly missing some subtlety of Kant's argument, and it's possible I'm missing it completely; like I said, it's been a long time and I'm not much of a philosophologer. But Darwin seems to rebut any argument that rests in any way on synthetic a priori propositions.