CYBERNETICS & HUMAN KNOWING

A Journal of Second Order Cybernetics, Autopoiesis & Cyber-Semiotics

Volume 6, No.3 1999

Virtual Logic: The Matrix

By Louis H. Kauffman

This is column number nine in the series. We take as our theme the recent movie ‘The Matrix’. The Matrix is a cinematic exercise in virtual reality and virtual logic. It is not necessary to have seen the film to read this essay. The Matrix is all around you. It is in the air you breathe, in the ground you walk on, in the sights you see and in the feelings that you feel. You yourself are composed of it just as much as it is composed of you. You imagine yourself to be an observer independent of the Matrix, but the very possibility of your observation, your sense of Self and World is produced by the Matrix .

One might say that the Matrix observes itself, but that would be overstepping the bounds of language, for the very act of saying that ‘it’ observes ‘itself’ presupposes a split between the observed and the observer that does not exist in the presence of the act.

You are the Slave of the Matrix.

You are the Master of the Matrix.

The Matrix is your servant. Your will is its will.

Will and the freedom intertwine in presence.

This is the presence of an observing system.

The satisfaction of reality is not that it is objective, real and separate from ‘Us’. Rather, the satisfaction is in the inextricable linkage with the Real that comes whenever we try to make that separation.

The physicists have it right with their quarks and strings. Try to isolate a quark and you generate a string of gluons in the sticky reality of the microworld. No one can isolate the fundamental reality of the quark. It is what is and it will not be found alone.

An observing system is a system whose awareness is inextricably bound with its structure. Whilst objectivity in the classical sense is not possible, reality is emergent, nay necessary for the continuity of that structure. We are such systems, and our coherent realities are built from the stabilities of the processes that compose us, on the physical, biological, and spiritual levels. All discussions of the nature of such realities verge upon the primary discussion of virtual reality, for all observed realities are virtual. All observed realities are constructs held up as (almost) objective, an objectivity easily pierced through critical examination, optical and sensory illusion and experiments of all kinds.

The evolving platform of computer-generated virtual reality promises to be a great testing ground for these themes. Right now, in facilities such as the ‘Cave’ (at the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago) we produce vivid three dimensional optical virtual realities for human observers at the mild cost of donning a pair of synchronized stereo glasses. The computer tracks the position of the person’s head and continually recomputes the correct three-dimensional perspective view of the scene. This creates perspective, three-dimensionality and object constancy for the viewer. Artistic and mathematical realities become palpable in the eyes of the observer. As yet there is no generated illusion of touch (the right feedback mechanisms are hard to create) or smell or taste. Nevertheless, these matters are in the process of evolution.

The Cave has a surprising feature for persons schooled in the idea of virtual reality as separate from the external perceptual world of the observer. In the Cave virtual and standard realities are superimposed. The glasses are transparent, the other persons in the cave are visible. The walls of the Cave are visible, and yet they become transparent to the projected image. The world of the real and the world of the illusion are combined.

This combination of the real and the virtually real is not an accident. It is part of that terrain where the map and the territory are each part of the other, where the production of the map invokes the creation of the territory and the distinguishing and naming of the territory produces the map. We have encountered the same phenomenon on the internet. The internet is not a mirror of reality, or a library of information. It is all that indeed, but the most important fact about the internet is that it is the growing tip of our reality herself.

This intertwining is the very stuff of normal life. You wake and put on your glasses. Now you enter another dream. The glasses produce a sharp and useful virtual reality that is your actual reality for most of the day. A teacher kindly shows you that there is another reality in the world without glasses and your world expands. You have been the slave of the reality of the glasses and now you have the choice to use that reality or to move outside it. Any assumption, any conception whatsoever creates a virtual reality to which you are its slave so long as that assumption is unexamined. To awaken from the artificial reality is to use the mind as framer of question and slayer of the darkness of unexamined thought.

Who are the machines that would be your keepers? They are the offspring of your own thoughts, assumptions. These assumptions projected outward become the world created through technology, the Matrix itself, the creator of virtual worlds. ‘In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits.’ (John Lilly, 1972)

And listen to Joseph Campbell (1956, pp. 257-258):

Briefly formulated, the universal doctrine teaches that all the visible structures of the world — all thngs and beings — are the effects of a ubiquitous power out of which they rise, which supports and fills them during the period of their manifestation, and back into which they must ultimately dissolve . . . The apprehension of the source of this undifferentiated yet everywhere particularized substratum of being is rendered frustrate by the very organs through which the apprehension must be accomplished. The forms of sensibility and the categories of human thought, which are themselves manifestations of this power, so confine the mind that it is normally impossible not only to see, but even to conceive, beyond the colorful fluid, infinitely various and bewildering phenomenal spectacle . . . Myth is but the penultimate; the ultimate is openess — that void, or being, beyond the categories — into which the mind must plunge alone and be disolved.

The Matrix as a movie (recently produced starring Keanu Reeves (as Neo), Laurence Fishburne (as Morpheus) and Carrie-Anne Moss (as Trinity)) explores these themes of reality and the observing system in the form of a modern allegory on the dialectic of reality and virtual reality. Filmed and performed in high aesthetic, the story is supported by a depiction of the computer-generated reality as hyper-reality, a place that has the utter look and feel of sensory reality and in which deeds can be performed that transcend the limits of ordinary space and time. This hyper-reality is The Matrix, an entire world generated by machines to captivate the minds of humans. Humans are the captives of the machines. The machines use human physical bodies as energy sources. Each human is literally a ‘brain in a vat’ (Dennet 1981). Each person’s ‘real’ location is in a vat of nutrients in the depths of the machine, attached to sustenance and virtual reality by cables and connections. No person in a vat has the slightest conception of the truth. Each carries on a complex virtual existence in a simulation of the lost cities of the earth.

The machines that have so encaptured humanity are the spawn of twentieth century research in cybernetics and artificial intelligence. At some point the artificial intelligence became a powerful and malevolent awareness intent upon its own propagation and the subjugation of its human progenitors. The ‘mind children’ became the masters. Some humans survived in a mythical city named Zion and some roam the ruined earth in hovercrafts, acting as cybernetic pirates who hack into the Matrix, attempting to sabotage its workings and release humanity from their bondage to illusion.

Such a ship is the ‘Nebuchadnezzar’ operated by Morpheus and his crew: Trinity, Epoch, Tenk, Switch, Cypher, Dozer and Mouse. Morpheus roams the ruined external reality in his craft, avoiding detection and destruction by the machines, while he and his crew use their sophisticated computer equipment to project themselves into the world of the Matrix. In the Matrix the most terrible dangers come from the Agents, apparent persons representing programs directed by the machine world to act as high level police and enforcers of the order of that virtual reality. A fight with a human in the virtual world is bound by the rules of human strength and reaction. The agents, while still limited by the underlying formalism of their programming have powers that far exceed the human. Furthermore, any person can suddenly be transformed into an agent. Any person is an avatar, a representative of a program in the machine and linked to a mind held captive. An agent can be switched to any human’s line.

The great hope of Morpheus and his pirates lies in the uncovering of a human who is ‘The One’, a person who can transcend the world of the machines by tapping into a creative power that can subvert the workings of even the most powerful agents. Neo (Keanu Reeves) is singled out by Morpheus as the candidate for this role, and he is convinced within his virtual reality (the only reality that he knows) to take a step into the unknown. His act is to take a virtual pill (the metaphor goes back to Alice, the caterpillar and the Mushroom in ‘Through the Looking Glass’ by Lewis Carroll) that allows the pirates to trace his signal back to the capsule that contains Neo’s ‘real’ body. (By this time it is clear that we can only use the words real and virtual relative to the constructions of the story. This is, of course, the basic semiotic truth of all virtuality.)

Neo is offered two pills by Morpheus. If he takes the blue pill, he will be returned to his familiar (virtual) reality. If he takes the red pill, he will be propelled into the unknown wonderland. He takes the red pill. At this point the wave-function of the movie collapses and the choice of what is virtual and what is real is made. Neo begins to feel the effects of the red pill as he is led into a ‘room’ filled with computer equipment and he experiences a breakdown of the difference between his reality and a dream reality. His body becomes a liquid metallic dream-body just as we are shown Neo’s real body rise to consciousness in its capsule in the world of the machines. The machines detect this movement and act quickly to dump the no longer docile specimen down the garbage/birth tube. Neo the Real lands in underground water to be picked up moments later by the grappling mechanisms of the pirate ship. His body is retrieved in reality. His virtual persona is gone from the Matrix.

Now the movie shows the real pirate ship’s interior, an interior virtually (sic) indistinguishable from the cyberspace version of the ship’s computers that virtual Neo had just seen. But in the reality of the pirate ship, Neo’s newly born body must undergo training and treatment to enable it to navigate in the physical world. It is a body that has spent its first decades entirely enclosed in a capsule of liquid, while its brain roamed the reaches of cyberspace. It is a body that is prepared to be jacked into the machine — with receptacles and plugs for the task. The pirates invoke this new Neo to help them in their fight with the Matrix. Neo can now enter virtual reality anew, in full consciousness of the metalevel from which this entry is possible.

The Metalevel has become conscious in its own rebirth. The new Neo is fully human and capable of living in a multiplicity of worlds. He was once an expert criminal hacker within the Matrix. He now is a member of a band of hacker pirates who can make the distinction between the virtual and the real.

This is only a first step towards mastery. To attain the metalevel is the semiotic equivalent of proving Godel’s Theorem on the incompleteness of formal systems. To absorb this proof is to know that human reason transcends the workings of any sufficiently rich and consistent formalism. To absorb this proof is to know that human comprehension extends beyond the limitations of a machine.

Neo’s metamorphosis from virtual entity within the Matrix to pirate entity both in and out of the Matrix is the precise analog of Godel’s Theorem and of the situation we have in our world. We understand that the machine cannot encompass our comprehension. We can prove the Theorem and in so doing, we are out of the system. Yet we are caught by the system and we are surrounded by the Matrix of our own making.

For Neo the path to mastery is part of the remaining story of the film. It is the story of the formation of the warrior and eventually, through Trinity’s love (she could not be named other than Trinity), the birth of a soul whose compassion is so great that it goes beyond mechanism to the heart of creation.

We have, collectively, lost access to this place of the heart, and it is in its ending that the film acts powerfully to call in question the basis of our myths of power, control, mechanism and the distinction between the virtual and the real.

In the end, Reality is Quality, the quality of a perfection that breathes itself into existence in the calm center of action that is the nexus of all worlds.

References

John Lilly (1972), Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer — Theory and Experiments, Julien Press.

Joseph Campell (1956), The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Meridian Press.

Daniel Dennett (1981), ‘Where am I?’ pp. 217-230 in The Mind’s Eye edited by Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett, Bantam Books.

CYBERNETICS & HUMAN KNOWING

Contents:

Virtual Logic: The Matrix