21 Lessons for the 21st Century(80)
Perhaps we are all living inside a giant computer simulation, Matrix-style. That would contradict all our national, religious and ideological stories. But our mental experiences would still be real. If it turns out that human history is an elaborate simulation run on a super-computer by rat scientists from the planet Zircon, that would be rather embarrassing for Karl Marx and the Islamic State. But these rat scientists would still have to answer for the Armenian genocide and for Auschwitz. How did they get that one past the Zircon University’s ethics committee? Even if the gas chambers were just electric signals in silicon chips, the experiences of pain, fear and despair were not one iota less excruciating for that.
Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love – even in the matrix. It doesn’t matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real. So if you want to explore the reality of your mind, you can do that inside the matrix as well as outside it.
Most science-fiction movies really tell a very old story: the victory of mind over matter. Thirty thousand years ago, the story went: ‘Mind imagines a stone knife – hand creates a knife – human kills mammoth.’ But the truth is that humans gained control of the world not so much by inventing knives and killing mammoths as much as by manipulating human minds. The mind is not the subject that freely shapes historical actions and biological realities – the mind is an object that is being shaped by history and biology. Even our most cherished ideals – freedom, love, creativity – are like a stone knife that somebody else shaped in order to kill some mammoth. According to the best scientific theories and the most up-to-date technological tools, the mind is never free of manipulation. There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell.
Have you any idea how many movies, novels and poems you have consumed over the years, and how these artefacts have carved and sharpened your idea of love? Romantic comedies are to love as porn is to sex and Rambo is to war. And if you think you can press some delete button and wipe out all trace of Hollywood from your subconscious and your limbic system, you are deluding yourself.
We like the idea of shaping stone knives, but we don’t like the idea of being stone knives ourselves. So the matrix variation of the old mammoth story goes something like this: ‘Mind imagines a robot – hand creates a robot – robot kills terrorists but also tries to control the mind – mind kills robot.’ Yet this story is false. The problem is not that the mind will not be able to kill the robot. The problem is that the mind that imagined the robot in the first place was already the product of much earlier manipulations. Hence killing the robot will not free us.
Disney loses faith in free will
In 2015 Pixar Studios and Walt Disney Pictures released a far more realistic and troubling animation saga about the human condition, which quickly became a blockbuster among children and adults alike. Inside Out tells the story of an eleven-year-old girl, Riley Andersen, who moves with her parents from Minnesota to San Francisco. Missing her friends and hometown, she has difficulties adjusting to her new life, and she tries to run away back to Minnesota. Yet unbeknownst to Riley, there is a far greater drama going on. Riley is not the unwitting star of a TV reality show, and she isn’t trapped in the matrix. Rather, Riley herself is the matrix, and there is something trapped inside her.
Disney has built its empire by retelling one myth over and over. In countless Disney movies, the heroes face difficulties and dangers, but eventually triumph by finding their authentic self and following their free choices. Inside Out brutally dismantles this myth. It adopts the latest neurobiological view of humans, and takes viewers on a journey into Riley’s brain only to discover that she has no authentic self and that she never makes any free choices. Riley is in fact a huge robot managed by a collection of conflicting biochemical mechanisms, which the movie personifies as cute cartoon characters: the yellow and cheerful Joy, the blue and morose Sadness, the red short-tempered Anger, and so on. By manipulating a set of buttons and levers in Headquarters, while watching Riley’s every move on a huge TV screen, these characters control all Riley’s moods, decisions and actions.
Riley’s failure to adjust to her new life in San Francisco results from a fuck-up in Headquarters that threatens to push Riley’s brain completely out of balance. To make things right, Joy and Sadness go on an epic journey through Riley’s brain, riding on the train of thought, exploring the subconscious prison, and visiting the inner studio where a team of artistic neurons are busy producing dreams. As we follow these personified biochemical mechanisms into the depths of Riley’s brain, we never encounter a soul, an authentic self, or a free will. Indeed, the moment of revelation on which the entire plot hinges happens not when Riley discovers her single authentic self, but rather when it becomes evident that Riley cannot be identified with any single core, and that her well-being depends on the interaction of many different mechanisms.
At first, viewers are led to identify Riley with the lead character – the yellow cheerful Joy. Yet eventually it turns out that this was the critical mistake that threatened to ruin Riley’s life. By thinking that she alone is the authentic essence of Riley, Joy browbeats all the other inner characters, thereby disrupting the delicate equilibrium of Riley’s brain. Catharsis comes when Joy understands her mistake, and she – along with the viewers – realises that Riley isn’t Joy, or Sadness, or any of the other characters. Riley is a complex story produced by the conflicts and collaborations of all the biochemical characters together.