Great philosophers taking the red pill

Part 1: George Berkeley

George Berkeley’s theory of reality as a construct of our collective minds immediately reminded me of The Matrix, the excellent 1999 film by the Wachowski brothers.  I’m not going to waste time explaining it, as I’m quite sure that everyone in the developed world has already seen it at least 3 times.  I got to thinking about about how the whole conceptual basis of the movie could have been drawn from a number of philosophers (and, in turns out, it actually was) and decided to write my “Philosophy Special” about it (thanks to Morgan Hunlen for this new term.  I use it here in the hopes that it catches on ;)
 Okay, so in case anyone out there has not seen this film, in a nutshell it proposes that the world we live in is not the “real” world.  We are real people, actual human beings with human bodies, but we our perceptions have been usurped by a self-aware computer that has taken control of the Earth.  We are all hooked into a massive simulation of reality, by direct brain connection to a network running some incredibly awesome version of SecondLife.  In the film series, there’s a whole plot about people “waking up” and fighting to escape this simulation and return humanity to “reality”, with lots of kicking, punching, gunfire, and a surprising amount of medieval weaponry.  But that’s beside our purpose here.
 Let’s start with Mr. Berkeley.  He proposed that reality is “real”, but that what we experience are not actually physical objects.  Our perceptions of the physical world around us are merely projections, you might say, of our own ideas.  Any object perceived by multiple people represents an idea that is shared between those people.  In this respect, what Berkeley is envisioning is indiscernable from the world of The Matrix, where objects perceived are also simply representations of ideas.  
 It turns out that I’m not the first philosophy student to notice the parallels of Berkeley and the Machine City (shocked?). There is a similar post here, and while it makes use of some questionable sentence structure, it does point out the excellent comparison of Berkeley’s premise to the scene in which Neo finds a young boy seemingly bending a spoon with his mind.




“Do not try to bend the spoon, that is impossible.  Instead, only try to realize the truth: there is no spoon.  Then you’ll see that it’s not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself.”

This kid in a toga is basically channeling Berkeley, by pointing out that the spoon is not an actual physical object, merely a representation.  If it isn’t a “real” physical object, how can it be governed by physical laws?  This brings up an interesting twist of Berkeley’s theory:  if in fact nothing is physically real, what then causes our projections of these ideas to unfailingly obey the laws of physics?
Perhaps another similarity is at work here.  If Berkeley says God perceiving everything all the time is what keeps objects from winking in and out of existence, might not His perception also be what is keeping our own projections in line with a set of rules we have come to call The Laws of Nature?  The parallel here would be the AI running the Matrix itself.  By maintaining as accurate a simulation as possible, it would have to keep track of all virtual objects in the simulation, and how our virtual selves are perceiving and interacting with them.  So unless one has knowledge of the true nature of the reality, one would always perceive things to be in keeping with “the rules”.  Although perhaps Berkeley would view the spoon as simply contradicting ideas?
 Tomorrow will be part 2, revealing that Rene Descarte’s “fiendishly clever demon” concept is really just a chronologically challenged rip-off of the entire premise of The Matrix.