UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Skepticism films: Knowing and doubting the world in contemporary cinema Schmerheim, P.A. Publication date 2013 Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Schmerheim, P. A. (2013). Skepticism films: Knowing and doubting the world in contemporary cinema. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:26 Sep 2021 The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as Dead: his eyes are closed. Albert Einstein, “The World As I See It” (Einstein 1954 [1931]: 11) Die einzige Meinung, die garantiert jeder Revision standhält, ist vermutlich der Zweifel. Harald Martenstein, “Der Sog der Masse” (Martenstein 2011: 18) 4 Varieties of Philosophical Skepticism: Knowledge, Acknowledgement and Trust Remember the deception situation described in the introduction: In THE TRUMAN Truman remembered SHOW (Weir, 1998), the All-American town of Seaside, Florida, home to the insurance salesman Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey), turns out being a giant TV studio for a daily reality show whose star is, unbeknownst to him, Truman Burbank himself. It is only an unusual happenstance in a day in the life of Truman, a headlight crashing onto the road out of the blue sky, which triggers a chain of events that makes him realise that he does not know what he thought he knew about the world he is living in.94 His wife, his best friend, his parents as well as everyone he shares this fake world with are paid actors, and even the sun in the blue sky above him is nothing but a giant headlight. All this is the result of the schemes of a megalomanic failed-artist-turned-TV-director Cristof (Ed Harris), who directs every aspect of Truman’s life and environment from his office high above the city, which, ironically, is hidden inside the fake moon of Truman’s TV world. Truman has been fooled all his life by the ‘man in the moon,’ and he cannot take anything he believed to be certain for granted anymore. This is a variation of the primal scene of philosophical skepticism: The world is, The primal scene of contrary to what we believe, not what it seems to be. The world is not real. Reality is philosophical skepticism illusion, Sein is Schein.95 In worst-case scenarios, this is not simply due to some regrettable miscalculation of man’s place in the world but the result of the schemes of some evil deceiver. This is the standing threat of “[s]keptical possibilities […] according 94 This is a variation of Barry Stroud’s description in “Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability” of skepticism as the suspicion that we do not “know what we think we know” about the world (Stroud 2000 [1994]: 174) 95 Markus Gabriel builds his introduction to philosophical skepticism on the contrast between “Sein” and “Schein” and locates the roots of this dualism in Pre-Socratic and classical ancient philosophy. See Gabriel 2008. 72 VARIETIES OF PHILOSOPHICAL SKEPTICISM to which the world is completely different from how it appears to us, and there is no way to detect this.” (Nagel 1986: 71) Even more extreme than the scenario of THE TRUMAN SHOW seems to be the one envisioned in the science-fiction film MATRIX: The computer nerd Thomas Anderson discovers that the entire world he and his co-habitants experienced in his life so far is only a gigantic computer simulation, while his own body is floating in a tank filled with nutritious fluids, and his neural endings are connected to a supercomputer that generates the perfect simulation. The setting of MATRIX appears like a cinematic adaptation of two not less radical contemporary philosophical thought experiments: Robert Nozick’s experience machine and Hilary Putnam’s brains in a vat. In Anarchy, State, Utopia Nozick asks his readers to “[s]uppose there were an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired. Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book. All the time you would be floating in a tank, with electrodes attached to your brain.” (Nozick 1977: 42ff.) This is the state Thomas Anderson finds himself in after ‘unplugging,’ with the difference that the electrodes are not attached to his brain but rather plugged into the nerve endings of his spinal cord. While the individual situation of the film character Thomas Anderson appears structurally similar to the situation in the experience machine scenario, overall MATRIX appears like a less radical version of the perhaps most radical thought experiment in the history of philosophy: Hilary Putnam upgraded the historical evil genius scenario invented by René Descartes and in Reason, Truth, and History proposed the following scenario, which is worth to be quoted at full length: “[I]magine that a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings. The computer is so clever that if the person tries to raise his hand, the feedback from the computer will cause him to ‘see’ and ‘feel’ the hand being raised. Moreover, by varying the program, the evil scientist can cause the victim to ‘experience’ (or hallucinate) any situation or environment the evil scientist wishes. He can also obliterate the memory of the brain operation, so that the victim will seem to himself to have always been in this environment. It can even seem to the victim that he is sitting and reading these very words about the amusing but quite absurd supposition that there is an evil scientist who removes people’s brains from their bodies and places them in a vat of nutrients which keep the brains alive. The nerve endings are supposed to be connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that... [...] Instead of having just one brain in a vat, we could imagine that all human beings (perhaps all sentient beings) are brains in a vat (or nervous systems in a vat in case some beings with just a minimal nervous system already count as ‘sentient’). Of course, the evil scientist would have to be outside — or would he? Perhaps there is no evil scientist; perhaps VARIETIES OF PHILOSOPHICAL SKEPTICISM 73 (though this is absurd) the universe just happens to consist of automatic machinery tending a vat full of brains and nervous systems. This time let us suppose that the automatic machinery is programmed to give us all a collective hallucination, rather than a number of separate unrelated hallucinations. Thus, when I seem to myself to be talking to you, you seem to yourself to be hearing my words. Of course, it is not the case that my words actually reach your ears — for you don't have (real) ears, nor do I have a real mouth and tongue. Rather, when I produce my words, what happens is that the efferent impulses travel from my brain to the computer, which both causes me to ‘hear’ my own voice uttering those words and ‘feel’ my tongue moving, etc., and causes you to ‘hear’ my words, ‘see’ me speaking, etc. In this case, we are, in a sense, actually in communication. I am not mistaken about your real existence (only about the existence of your body and the ‘external world’, apart from brains). From a certain point of view, it doesn’t even matter that ‘the whole world’ is a collective hallucination; for you do, after all, really hear my words when I speak to you, even if the mechanism isn’t what we suppose it to be. [...] Suppose this whole story were actually true. Could we, if we were brains in a vat in this way, say or think that we were?” (Putnam 1981: 5ff.) Putnam plays with different versions of the brain-in-a-vat scenario, ranging from a single kidnapped brain with simulated world experiences to a world that never contained anything else but envatted brains tied to one super-computer, subjected to a collective, ergo synchronised experience of the simulated world.96 It is easy to see the difference to MATRIX: while in the film embodied brains are floating in the tank (i.e., a human being ‘as a whole’ is inserted into a vat), Putnam explicitly relies on disembodied brains – cerveaux sans mains (see chapter 3).97 Although the inhabitants of the Matrix actually interact with other human beings (in this respect, the Matrix is similar to an online role game), the physical structure and constitution of the world they experience is completely different from what they think.