 Okay, what do you need? Puns. Lots of puns. So if you haven't seen the first Matrix movie yet, please get out from whatever rock fell on you in the mid-90s, see a doctor, and then go watch it. Okay, so spoilers. We might be living in a computer program. Our bodies might be somewhere else, and everything that we see, hear, and feel might just be an artificially generated simulation. Whoa. But this isn't a novel thing that the Wachowski brothers just stumbled upon. The idea that the so-called real world isn't goes back at least as far as Plato's allegory of the cave, where supposedly we're only looking at shadows of real things. But Plato, he can see them as they really are. And Descartes, who you'll remember from the episode about artificial intelligence in the mind, he realized that our senses are easily fooled by things like optical illusions, dreams, or hallucinations. And so, even if we did exit the cave with Plato, we still really couldn't be sure of anything that we were seeing. So what if nothing I know is real? What if everything that I've been living is a lie? What if I'm really just a brain in a jar somewhere with a couple of electrodes feeding me fake information? Well, here's the question. Let's say that you are just a brain in a jar somewhere, and that you live and eventually die totally convinced of the illusion. Does it really matter? In the movie, a guy named Cipher sells out his fellow freedom fighters for the opportunity to be reinserted into the Matrix, with no memory of the real dystopian future or of his betrayal. We're supposed to hate this guy, and for good reason. As soon as nobody's watching and knowing that he won't have to live with the guilt or consequences of doing so, he begins to murder his totally helpless teammates even though they're not a threat to him anymore. What a jerk. But despite the way that it's framed in the movie as good versus evil, truth versus deception, and revolutionaries versus the man, Cipher and to some extent Morpheus seem to be the only ones asking a very interesting question. Most of us really value truth and authenticity. We don't like to be lied to even if those lies are told in our best interest. But why? Why is truth important? Well knowing the truth and what's actually going on can help you to predict and change events in your favor. You might not be able to dodge bullets, but if the used car dealer is trying to sell you an anti-rust treatment that you know is worthless, then you can save some money. But beyond that, the truth is kind of irrelevant. I mean, there are people who believe that the sun goes around the earth, and I certainly feel enriched knowing that it's the other way around. But how much does that really affect my life? Let's say you are just a brain in the jar, and that's the only thing that exists in the real world. You can't move, there's nothing for you to do there, why would you want to know? What's more, the events and people of this world seem real enough, and they matter to you. So what if they don't exist in some other reality? They exist here, and even if they're just ones and zeros, that doesn't make them not worth caring about. All of this might seem like an academic exercise in naval gazing, but as video game graphics, physics, and immersion become closer and closer to totally convincing, Cypher's Choice is looking like something that we're actually going to have to confront. Do you want to live in the real world, or do you want to live in some sort of perfectly realistic fantasy world? Not like Skyrim realistic, like Matrix realistic, only your life is perfect and amazing and also you're a wizard. You wouldn't even have to leave your friends behind. We could all voluntarily join an artificial reality together where we're all attractive and talented and important, and we can eat all the ice cream we want and never get fat. We could build machines to take care of our sedate real world bodies and then never have to work or feel pain again, just play the game. In the movie, Agent Smith says that human brains would reject that sort of perfect reality, and there are problems with it that I covered in my episode on the hedonic treadmill, but honestly, we've never had the chance to try a perfect virtual world, and considering how people can get addicted to video games, we might adapt to it just fine. Current research on memory might even make Cypher's exact choice possible, where we won't even remember the real world, we'll just think that we've lived our entire lives in this awesome virtual one. Which raises another question, what if we get convincing NPCs? What if in our perfect virtual world there are artificial versions of our friends that are more awesome than the real ones? What if you had the option to go to sleep and when you woke up everything and everyone you knew was just exponentially better? It's easy to sort of wave our hands and say that nothing could ever beat the real world, but we've never had a decent contender before, and these sorts of questions deserve real answers, or at least artificial answers that are indistinguishable from the real ones. Would you take Cypher's choice? Please, leave a comment and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe, blah share, and I'll see you next week.