In my freshman humanities class, I make students ponder the pros and cons of knowledge. We talk about Plato’s parable, in which people imprisoned in a cave mistake shadows projected on a wall for reality. I ask, Assuming we’re in the cave, how many of you want to escape? Most students dutifully raise their hands, because of course truth is good and ignorance is bad.
Then I ask, What if the cave is comfy and the outside world nasty? I bring up The Matrix, in which humans live in a computer simulation, called the Matrix, constructed by evil machines. A band of rebels who have escaped this digital cave is trying to liberate other humans.
Cypher: You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
Cypher: I don't want to remember nothing. Nothing. You understand? And I want to be rich. You know, someone important, like an actor.
Agent Smith: Whatever you want.
Cypher prefers happy delusion to painful truth. When I ask my students if they would choose as Cypher did (minus the betraying-your-buddies part), many raise their hands, smirking at their own cynicism. They probably don’t take the question seriously, and maybe readers of this blog don’t either. But many people face an agonizing, real-life version of Cypher’s choice.
But advanced directives pose problems too. What if someone who has chosen truth and death seems to enjoy life with dementia? “Should his directive be respected,” MacFarquhar asks,“ending his life?
What would I do if faced with Cypher’s choice? Pleasant delusion is tempting. After all, many non-demented people engage in denial, repression and self-deception. That is, they exclude certain things from their minds. Lately I’ve been trying to avoid political news, because it makes me feel crappy and there’s little I can do about it.
Moreover, those who insist they would always choose reality over illusion assume reality is knowable. But what if it isn’t? What if ultimate realty is unknowable, as certain philosophers and mystics suggest? What if life is but a dream, and everything is an illusion? What if, when break your shackles and escape the cave, you just end up in another cave? In that case, wouldn’t you be a fool for choosing a miserable illusion over a pleasant one?
I can’t bear the thought of loved ones suffering. If choosing for them, I’d probably go with pleasant delusion. But in spite of my recent aversion to political news, I care about truth, even if I’m not sure what it is. So I like to think I’d choose reality for myself even if it’s painful, and even if I’m not sure it’s real.
And remember, Cypher never gets his simulated paradise. Reality gets him—and probably all of us--in the end.
For more philosophical conundrums, see my free online book Mind-Body Problems: Science, Subjectivity & Who We Really Are.