7/10/99 - The Matrix has you

At last I have seen The Matrix. I say "at last" partly because it's taken so long for the film to reach Turkey, Dodge this!

and partly because for the last three weeks, every time I managed to get my significant other to fix a date to go and see it, her mother would drag her off somewhere else. This last time I got wise and instead of saying "Shall we go and see The Matrix tomorrow?", I said "I'm off to see The Matrix tomorrow, come along if you want," so when the inevitable phone call from my mother-in-law came, I was well-prepared and took off on my own.

This was perhaps just as well, since The Matrix is the kind of film you love or hate, and wondering whether the person next to you is going to love it or hate it can severely damage your enjoyment of a film. I have friends who have walked out after the first half hour, or even fallen asleep. Left thus to my own devices, I could sit in my favourite position, so close that the screen fills my field of vision (which apparently Wittgenstein also enjoyed) and just surrender myself to sight and sound, without having to worry about trivial details like plot and character. There were a few things I wasn't too keen on, like the unnecessary religious overtones ("the One", "Zion" and Trinity's resurrection of Neo) but overall I was stunned. It wasn't just the eye-candy, it was the fact that at last somebody had had the courage to do a film for cyberpunk philosophers.

In case there is anyone reading this who still hasn't seen The Matrix, I don't think I'm giving too much away by saying that in the film, the "real life" of 1999 is actually a massive computer simulation, and "the desert of reality" is actually two hundred years later and, well, not very nice. In cinematic terms, this is a very nice twist - the far-out science-fiction bits are reality and the grimy world we know is fantasy. The idea that we may all be living some vast illusion is by no means new - it goes back about two-and-a-half thousand years, in fact - but it is done very well, and manages to raise some serious questions into the bargain. Our brave band of rebels (echoes of Star Wars) choose horrific reality over comfortable fantasy, but one renegade sells his friends out so as to re-enter the illusion of the Matrix. It can't be a coincidence that his name is Reagan. Another nice point is that the Matrix was originally set up as a kind of paradise, but the participants couldn't handle it. There wasn't enough misery to make it convincing.

To intensify things, I'd just been teaching a lesson on the philosophy of mind (not actually in a philosophy course, I just like to throw these things at my students) and a friend who is a proper philosopher (i.e. has a PhD and actually publishes stuff on paper) gave me his forthcoming article on idealism to look over. By the way, that's idealism as opposed to materialism, not as opposed to pragmatism, and materialism as opposed to ... well, you get the idea. Metaphysical stuff. So this morning my long-suffering students got the functionalist theory of mind, the Turing test, the Chinese room, then finally the Matrix.

Functionalism is a philosophy of mind which is fairly popular these days (well, popular amongst the tiny group of people who are interested in these things). It's pretty complicated and I can't claim to understand it all that well, but the basic idea is that it analyses mental events in terms of their, er, functions (and here's me telling my students off when they use circular definitions). Basically, if the brain is hardware, the mind is software, a metaphor which we're all familiar with, largely because we tend to conceive of ourselves and the universe in terms of the latest technology. In the eighteenth century everything was one big piece of clockwork, with God as the blind watchmaker. With the coming of the steam engine, people developed drives, were under pressure, and needed to discharge things, or in everyday language, let off steam. Then computers came along, and suddenly we're all programs. We've found the ghost in the machine, and it's very like Windows - it uses a fraction of the capacity of the hardware, is hard to customise, and crashes if you multi-task too much.

Joking aside, the computer metaphor is an improvement on previous metaphors, but it still raises a lot of questions, notably the issue of awareness. What, if any, is the difference between a human being and a computer that has passed the Turing test, i.e. its responses are indistinguishable from those of a human being. Remember that the Turing test only establishes that a computer is intelligent, not that it is aware. To clarify this, we can use the thought-experiment of the Chinese room, which is a kind of anti-Turing test. We have two people in separate rooms who can only communicate by passing each other cards. One person is Chinese, and passes cards with questions in Chinese characters. The person does not know Chinese, but has a massive database of Chinese characters, with appropriate responses to just about anything that can come up - the ultimate tourist phrase book. Our questioner thinks this person understands Chinese, but in fact she/he doesn't, but only knows which characters go with which. The meaning of any individual character is a mystery.

This means that our computer which passes the Turing test may only be intelligent in the sense of being able to string symbols together in a way that conforms to the expectations of humans. It does not need to "know" what those symbols refer to in the "real world", but even if it did, this would not prove that it was aware, just that it had a massive database.

What is worrying about the Chinese room is that the same principle can apply to humans. The only reason you have to believe that these words are written by a human and not an "intelligent" computer is that, as far as you know, artificial intelligence hasn't got that far. Simlarly, the only reason that you can be sure that you are living in the real world and not in cyberspace is that as far as you know simulations haven't got that good yet. As far as you know.

The Matrix has you.

14/10/99 - Poem

For once, I'm going to break my self-imposed rule banning poetry on my site. There is so much bad poetry on the web that I would not wish to add to it, but after looking through some of my old poetry, I found this one from 1992 that seems vaguely appropriate to what I wrote in the last entry, and also ties in with my current state of mind after the deaths of my grandmother and my sister-in-law's father.

Now we live in information worlds
Our thoughts can dance like pixels on a screen,
But still the body works its peasant ways
Like oxen on a treadmill grinding grain.
And suffering goes on despite our thought,
Like some Victorian mindless dark machine.
Top-down planning rarely works in life
When programs are the slaves to their machines.
Computers cannot force the crops to grow
Or thinking stop the pistons of our pain.
The systems of our lives are out of sync,
Despite the cybernetics of our dreams.

OK, the metaphors are pretty strained, but this is one of the few poems of mine which I still like after several years. The other is a pastiche called "The Reverend Donne Discovers Chaos Mathematics", but I'll leave that for later. Or maybe never.

20/10/99 - You too can be a saint

Pope John Paul II currently holds the record for canonisation, having created about 300 saints, and is apparently about to process another dozen this month. Cynic though I may be, I still found the sheer scale of saint-making staggering. I didn't even know that there were that many saints in existence, let alone that they were the work of one pontiff.

Of course, with this saintly inflation there must inevitably be some devaluation of the divine currency. Saints are not what they used to be. In the good old days, they sat on the right hand of God and had odd parts of their bodies distributed among churches throughout Christendom (miraculously preserved, of course). Kissing some martyr's detatched toe could cure anything from paralysis to infertility (though not, ironically, leprosy). Nowadays, a saint is merely, according to the Vatican, someone whose life and/or death may be taken as an example by the rest of us, and only two attested miracles are required, healing the sick being the most popular choice.

Leading the candidates for canonisation is Mother Theresa, who does not even have to wait the customary five years after death before her case is considered by the spiritual Olympics Committee. In the miracle stakes she is at a distinct advantage because of the nature of her work running hospices. Hang around dying people long enough and you're bound to encounter a few who suddenly fail to die for no obvious reason. Of course if you're a real doctor in a proper hospital, you just shrug your shoulders and say "Spontaneous remission," but if your main function is to pray, it must be tempting for onlookers to see the hand of the Almighty at work.

People may start to boo and hiss at this point, but I have to say that I am not impressed by Mother Theresa. In fact, I don't even like her very much. Since not liking Mother Theresa is at least a venal sin, and maybe even a mortal one, I should explain myself.

It is true that Mother Theresa went and lived in fairly uncomfortable surroundings to comfort the poor, sick and dying, but she was a nun, for God's sake. That's what nuns are supposed to do, and thousands of them get on with their nunly business without all the fanfares. It is not as though they are giving up a life of luxury and sensual pleasures to do so, and I imagine any girl wanting to join Holy Orders on the condition that she didn't have to deal with the poor and sick wouldn't get very far. More to the point, it is not necessary to have a divine mission to help people. Doctors Without Frontiers recently won a well-deserved Nobel prize, but I imagine there are plenty of atheists in their ranks. Moreover, they do not wrap up their good deeds in an aura of self-sacrificing piety; a friend of mine who worked alongside some of them summed up their attitude as "Get in, get out, get drunk."

Perhaps part of the appeal was the fact that Theresa ministered to non-Christians, but in this age a little religious tolerance should not be so surprising. After all, doctors treat bodies without considering their race or religion, so why shouldn't the same apply to doctoring souls? The Dalai Lama once blessed some talismans for a friend of mine who was not only not a Buddhist, but a follower of the notorious Aleister Crowley, who in his lifetime was called "the wickedest man in the world." You can't get more interdenominational than that.

Apart from prayers, hand-holding and a few dubious miracles, did Mother Theresa do any good? Well, she might have made quite a few people happy, which is to be applauded, but again this is hardly a criterion for sainthood, otherwise we would also have St. Elvis of the Pelvis. In fact, I'd go as far as to say that Mother Theresa did more harm than good (pause to duck flying cyber-tomatoes and rotten eggs). India's most pressing problem is poverty, and one of the most important factors in this poverty is over-population. To go into a country like this and preach the sanctity of poverty and the evil of birth control is counter-productive, to say the least. To be sure, our saint-elect was acting with the best of intentions, but good intentions are said to pave a certain road ...

If I believed in the idea that the pope could sanctify people in the same way that the Roman senate used to deify them, my candidate would be the Dalai Lama. I don't go all goopy over the Dalai Lama like a lot of Westerners do, but he seems like a decent chap, not only personally, but also politically and religiously. If it weren't for the inconvenience of troops of pilgrims passing through the living room, he's the kind of person you'd quite like to share a flat with. I'm not sure how he does in the miracle business, but someone who's spent that long meditating ought to be able to pull off a few good ones. Making him a Catholic saint would be a major advance in inter-faith co-operation, and it would also be a wonderful way to annoy Jiang Zemin on his European tour. One thing the Dalai Lama said that I particularly liked went something like "People often think that behaving ethically is something to do with spirituality. In fact, behaving ethically is just part of being human." Amen to that.

23/10/99 - Fakes

Following on from my recent meanderings about reality, I have just learnt that a book, Fragments, which claimed to be the recollections of a Latvian Jew who spent his childhood in Auschwitz, has turned out to be the work of a Swiss gentile. This has had quite an impact on the publishing community, as well as, I suppose, angering a lot of readers. There is also some speculation that this hoax may provide ammunition for the assorted lunatics who claim that the whole Holocaust was one big hoax, and that there is some other reason for the Jewish population of Europe to have suddenly dropped by six million.

Artistic fakes are famous, but literary fakes are not without their pedigree, the most venerable faker being the poet Chatterton, who sold a bunch of "Medieval" poems he'd actually written himself before dying of an opium overdose. Well, I assume this is what happened, and that Chatterton was not the pen-name of some other writer. Nearer our times, there are such notorious literary hoaxes as the "Hitler Diaries". Perhaps, though, there is a difference between artistic and other fakes, in that it is hard to sympathise with a collector who has paid milions for, say, a fake Van Gogh. If it looks like a Van Gogh and you respond to it as you would to a Van Gogh, then for all practical purposes, it's a Van Gogh. It only makes a difference if you view the painting not simply as a painting, but as an event in the life of the historical Vincent Van Gogh. A more extreme example is the forthcoming sale at Christie's of Marilyn Monroe memorabilia, where you can spend thousands on a cheese grater which was used by the deceased. Presumably an identical copy of the cheese grater would not have the same status as a historical artifact.

To return to more serious topics, it is this historical element which makes fake Holocaust memoirs are more disturbing than your average fake. People read Fragments not just as a story, but as a historical account. But if the historical facts are accurate - in other words, if the events in the story could have happened - there should only be a problem for lawyers, not for the literary public. We expect authors to be honest, but isn't this a little naive?

This all goes to demonstrate the main problem with the Turing Test. According to Turing, if a computer produces responses which a human observer can't distinguish from the responses of a human (or other thinking being), then that computer can be said to think. But by this reasoning, if everyone thought that Fragments was written by a Jew, then it was written by a Jew.

Unfortunately we now come back to our other problem, which is that if the Turing test is wrong, then there is no reason to assume that any apparently human entity is really a human and not a Terminator. A South African exile I used to know said that it was impossible to convince hard-core supporters of Apartheid that Blacks were just as human as they were, because whatever intelligent, humane and civilised behaviour Blacks demonstrated, Van Der Voortrek could just say "Oh look, someone's taught him to act just like a white man, how clever!"

So why is it that nice liberals like you and I assume that people from different races are basically like us, and only schizophrenics think that their neighbours are androids? Why, for that matter, do we believe that we are living in some kind of "real" world and not in the Matrix? Perhaps in the end, belief is largely a matter of utility - we believe in some things because the results are better than if we don't believe. If you treat your neighbours as androids you're not likely to get invited round for tea, and if you act like you're living in the Matrix, you might start trying to dodge bullets. Unfortunately, the idea that beliefs should be judged by desirablity of their consequences can also have undesirable consequences. If truth becomes just another selling point in the free market of ideas and is not pursued for it's own sake, there is a big risk that we will subsist on a diet of half-truths, the epistomological equivalent of junk food - it goes down well at the time, but an hour later you want another one.

It is at this point that we start to experience, as Wittgenstein says, a mental cramp. If only life was as simple as some Star Trek episodes. Captain Kirk had a foolproof Turing test. Tell the entity in question two things:

The next sentences is a lie.
The previous sentence was true.

If it blows up in a cloud of blue smoke, it's a computer.