by Joe Miller
I love a good Easter egg. I’m not talking about the sort you get in a basket in the spring (though those are good, too). I mean the kind you find in media – hidden references or inside jokes that get tucked away in a corner somewhere. A good Easter egg is not essential to the plot but adds a bit of extra context for anyone who catches it.
The series finale of “The Good Place,” for example, finds Chidi – the former professor of moral philosophy – lecturing a group of students among whom were Todd May and Pamela Hieronymi. May and Hieronymi are real-life philosophy professors and served as consultants on the show.
My favorite Easter egg of all time comes early on in the 1999 film “The Matrix.” A group of club kids paid Thomas Anderson (who goes by the hacker name of Neo) for some illegal hacking software. Neo retrieves the disk containing the software from a hollowed-out book. For a brief moment, we see that the title of the book is “Simulacra and Simulation.”
“Simulacra and Simulation” is a real book by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. The book’s thesis is that modern technology has blurred the distinction between reality and simulation to such an extent that we often view simulations as more real than reality itself.
A simulation that is more real than reality is, of course, also a pretty good description of life inside the Matrix.
So, we’ve got a simulation of a book about the world-as-simulation that exists in a simulated world inside a movie whose writers were inspired by the real-life version of the book.
“The Matrix” is a great philosophy film. You can use it to explain Baudrillard on simulation or Plato’s allegory of the cave or Robert Nozick’s experience machine. I always liked to use the film to illustrate a different French philosopher: Rene Descartes.
Descartes is probably best remembered as the guy who wrote “cogito, ergo sum” which roughly translates to “I think, therefore I am.”
Descartes’ famous claim follows a series of thought experiments which are designed to help him figure out what things he can know with certainty. He starts that project by eliminating all of the things he’s not sure about. That’s where the thought experiments come in.
You think that you live in a world with other people and animals and trees and a job and a house. But you could just be dreaming all of those things.
Maybe you don’t even have a body at all. You could just be a brain in a vat, with a bunch of electrodes that stimulate various parts of your brain, causing you to have the experience of seeing and hearing and smelling things.
Or perhaps there’s some sort of evil deceiver who is somehow causing you to see and hear and feel things that aren’t really there.
In short, maybe you’re plugged into the Matrix, where you’re essentially dreaming the world because your brain is being directly stimulated by some evil robots.
Descartes works himself into quite a state. He turns his methods of doubting on everything he can find, ultimately concluding that he cannot trust his senses, his reasoning – even mathematics falls victim to doubt.
Just one thing survives. When Descartes tries to doubt his own existence, he finds that that doesn’t work. He may be dreaming the world, but he cannot be dreaming himself, for there must be some self there to dream. He may be the victim of an evil deceiver but there has to be someone there to be deceived.
The very act of doubting whether you exist guarantees that you must in fact exist, for otherwise there wouldn’t be any you to be doubting.
Descartes takes this one thing that he cannot doubt – an idea that he knows clearly and distinctly – and uses it to reestablish reasons for believing in logic and your senses and pretty much everything that we all take for granted.
Philosophers today think that Descartes’ most important contribution is his methodology. Starting from a position of doubt and skepticism and accepting as true only those things that you can prove is the foundation of the modern scientific approach to knowledge.
It was also a pretty reliable method for analyzing political ads and viral social media posts back when I worked at FactCheck.org
Start by doubting that they are true. Go do some research. Believe the ones that we can verify to be true. Write an article debunking the ones that turn out not to pass the test.
Part of what makes Cartesian doubt such an effective tool is that it combats something that psychologists call confirmation bias. That’s the name for our tendency to automatically accept things that support beliefs we already have (and also reject things that contradict our existing beliefs).
Confirmation bias is what leads us to say that referees are biased when they make a lot of calls against our team or emergency room workers to swear that things are crazier when the moon is full.
The thing is, we’re all prone to confirmation bias to at least some degree. That’s why the most important things to doubt are the things you most wish were true.
