Are We Living Inside the Matrix?

Or, the origin of false belief

Mar 13, 2022

👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.

It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.

I got a couple of emails from readers saying that last week’s essay was in bad taste. It felt as if I was trying to justify rape and murder by explaining their nature. While I can assure you that wasn’t at all my intention, I do apologise if it felt that way. The sole goal of the essay was to understand the cause of such heinous acts from an evolutionary point of view. Regardless, I’ll try to do better next time.

On another note, I do want to thank you for writing to me and raising your concerns. This keeps this newsletter accountable. Please continue doing that. ♥️

On to this week’s essay! It’s about 1,500 words.

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Q: Why are some people delusional?

The movie The Matrix is about a guy called Neo (played by Keanu Reeves), who discovers that he’s been inhabiting a dream world.

The life he thought he was living is actually an elaborate hallucination. He’s having that hallucination while, unbeknownst to him, his actual physical body is inside a gooey, coffin-size pod — one among many pods, rows and rows of pods, each pod containing a human being absorbed in a dream. These people have been put in their pods by the machine overlords and given dream lives as pacifiers.

Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne), the leader of a rebel group fighting against th machines, explains the situation to Neo: “The Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: “That you are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else you were born into bondage. Into a prison that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your mind.”

Is it possible that the world we think we live in is not the real world, but instead a fake world simulated by machines? As a teenager, I was fascinated by this hypothesis.

Today, let’s talk about the brain. More precisely, how it receives information from various sensors, creates models of the world to navigate it smoothly, and how, once in a while, these very models fool us and makes us delusional.

As we learn more about how the brain works, the truth becomes surprisingly closer to my childhood fascination. We may not necessarily live inside a simulation but how our brain perceives the world around us is eerily closer to a simulation.

You see, the brain lives inside a closed box, the skull. There are no sensors in the brain itself. So the only way it knows anything about reality is through the sensory nerve fibres that enter the skull from the eyes, ears, and skin. There is no light or sound entering the skull, only electrical spikes.

The brain also sends nerve fibres to the muscles, which move the body and its sensors and thereby change what part of the world the brain is sensing. By repeatedly sensing and moving, sensing and moving, the brain learns a model of the world outside the skull.

Let me reiterate because this is counterintuitive. No light, touch, or sound enters the brain ever, even though we feel them all the time. None of the perceptions that make up our mental experiences — from the fuzziness of a pet, to the sigh of a friend, to the colours of fall leaves, to the taste of a candy — come through the sensory nerves. The nerves only send electrical spikes. And since we do not perceive spikes, everything we do perceive is fabricated inside the brain. Even the most basic feelings of light, sound, touch, and taste are creations of the brain. They aren’t real. They only exist in the brain’s model of the world.

So basically, what we call reality is the brain’s model of the world, not the physical world outside the skull. The world we perceive is a simulation of the real world and not the real world itself.

Our reality is similar to the Matrix. We do live in a simulated world, it’s just that this simulation is not designed by machine overlords, it’s designed by the very brain living inside our own head.

Let that sink in for a moment.

But what has it got to do with delusion? Before I answer that, we’ll have to understand how the brain actually builds a simulation (or more appropriately, a model) of reality.

Let’s start by understanding how the brain interprets the “perception” of location. For example, how it knows where in the world your fingertip is located.

We have nerve fibres in all parts of our body. Now, a nerve fibre representing pressure on a fingertip does not convey any information about where the finger is located.

The fingertip nerve fibre responds the same way whether your finger is touching something in front of you or off to your side. Yet you perceive the sense of touch as being at some location relative to your body.

This is because there are cortical columns (groups of neurons inside the cerebral cortex of the brain) that represent each part of your body. And in those columns are neurons that represent the location of that body part. You perceive your finger to be some place precisely because the cells that represent the location of your finger say so.

This, albeit slightly technical, is an important concept to understand because this also explains why models can sometimes behave wrongly.

For example, people who lose a limb often perceive that the missing limb is still there, because the brain’s model still includes the missing limb and where it is located. So even though the limb no longer exists in the physical world, the sufferer perceives it and feels that it is still attached. This is the curious case of a phantom limb. We’ll revisit it after a few paragraphs.

Sometimes, your perception of your body can be fooled even without losing a limb. The rubber hand illusion is a party game where you can see a rubber hand but not your real hand. When a friend simultaneously caresses the rubber hand and your real (obscured) hand, you start to perceive that the rubber hand is actually a part of your body. Strange feeling!

This tells us that our model of the world has the possibility to be wrong. We can perceive things that don’t exist (such as the phantom limb) and we can incorrectly perceive things that do exist (such as the rubber hand). This finally brings me to false beliefs.

Think about phantom limbs again. A phantom limb occurs because there are columns in the brain that model the limb. These columns have neurons that represent the location of the limb relative to the body. Immediately after the limb is removed, these columns are still there, and they still have a model of the limb. Therefore, the sufferer believes the limb is still there, even though it does not exist in the physical world. The phantom limb is an example of a false belief.

A false belief is when the brain’s model believes that something exists that does not really exist (and vice versa).

Now consider another false belief: climate change. There is overwhelming evidence that human activity is leading to large-scale changes in earth’s climate. These changes, if not checked, will lead to the death and/or displacement of billions of people.

There are legitimate debates about what we should do about climate change, but there are people who deny it is happening. I’m not talking about politicians with an agenda. I’m talking about common people like you and I who genuinely believe that climate change isn’t real. Their model of the world says that the climate is not changing or, even if it is changing, there is nothing to be concerned about.

How do climate-change deniers maintain their false belief in the face of substantial physical evidence? It’s pretty simple actually. They simply don’t trust other people, and they rely only on what they personally observe or what other similarly minded people tell them.

Interestingly, if you rely only on your personal experiences, it is possible to live a fairly normal life and keep on believing that climate change isn’t real, that the earth is flat, that the moon landings were staged, that species don’t evolve, that vaccines cause autism, and that the holocaust didn’t happen.

The brain is constantly making predictions. Predictions are how the brain tests whether its model of the world is correct. An incorrect prediction (when the model doesn’t match reality) indicates that something is wrong and it needs to be fixed.

This process leads to a modification of the brain’s model to reflect the world more accurately. Model repair is built into the brain and it works reliably, that is until you deliberately start screwing with it.

To hold on to a false model, all it requires is dismissing any evidence that conflicts with your model. It’s a good recipe to remain dumb.

There is only one way to discern falsehoods from truths. There’s only one way to see if our model of the world has errors. It’s pretty obvious by now that the method is to actively seek evidence that contradicts our beliefs.

Finding evidence that supports our beliefs is helpful, but not definitive. Finding contrary evidence is proof that the model in our head is not right and needs to be fixed.

Actively looking for evidence to disprove our beliefs is the scientific method. It is the only approach we know of that can get us closer to the truth and away from false beliefs.

Timeless Insight

Predicting the past is a pseudo-intellectual’s job. It doesn’t matter if you are right or wrong in your prediction, because there’s no way to empirically verify your claim.

For example, if you reckon that a certain startup has failed miserably (or has succeeded impressively) for such and such (obvious) reasons, one has got very little to counter your reasoning. And that’s exactly what a lot of business journalists do.

They write post-hoc analyses with titles like, “How Square Became a $30 Billion Company by Reimagining Payments,” or “How Pinterest Became an $11 Billion Company by Organising the World’s Hobbies.”

On top of that, the same trait is often used both to credit the success of one company, and the failure of a different company. It’s hilarious!

What I’m Reading

No matter how much we may wish to cure a patient, the wish has nothing to do with the objective analysis of his symptoms, or a correct prediction of the probable course of the disease, or an estimate of the probable effects of a medicine. If our aim is peace, this does not entitle us, from the point of view of science, to falsify human nature and the facts of social life in order to pretend to prove that “all men naturally desire peace,” which, history so clearly tells us, they plainly do not. If we are interested in an equalitarian democracy, this cannot be a scientific excuse for ignoring the uninterrupted record of natural social inequality and oppression.

— James Burnham, The Machiavellians

Tiny Thought

People will envy you for your success, for your wealth, for your intelligence, for your looks, for your status — but never for your wisdom.

Before You Go…

Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, jokes. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.

Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋