There is no Spoon

My son wanted to watch a movie with lots of guns. Oh, where to start? A friend of mine suggested “Saving Private Ryan,” especially the beginning, which to my mind is one of the best battle scenes ever made. But I couldn’t find the DVD. I did, however, find “The Matrix,” with the wonderful line: “Guns. Lots of guns.” My son never saw the movie, so we put it on.

I have seen the movie a number of times. It is one of those movies where if it happens to come up in cable or I see it flit by on Netflix, I just get sucked back into it. I love it. The opening scene with Trinity taking everyone out – priceless. And of course its contributions to the popular culture: the blue and red pill, the kid saying “there is no spoon.” These are certainly is part of my vocabulary now.

1999. Wow – it is hard to believe it came out that long ago. I consider it a timeless movie – to me it really holds up. I didn’t see anything in the movie that screamed “oh, come on – we’re so much better now.” Star Wars is a great movie, but I don’t feel like it is any newer than 1977. It was a groundbreaking movie, and it had amazing and totally new effects, but I still see it firmly planted in the mid-seventies. The Matrix, though – it just seems newer than the nineties.

The premise, of course, is that the world the people live in is not real – it is the “matrix” – an illusion created in the minds of all humans, generated by artificially intelligent machines. In reality, humans are kept in vast tiers of pods. They are used as batteries for the machines – which of course makes no sense at all, but hey, you gotta have a story. Humans live, therefore, in a dreamlike state that is reality to them. Keanu Reeves plays “Neo,” the kid with mystic powers allowing him to see through the Matrix, and eventually, to bend it to his will.

I don’t know about you, but I do feel we are living in an illusory universe. A couple of years ago I ran into the theory that it not just possible, but probable, even inescapable, that reality is not real, and that we really are living in a computer simulation. This idea hasn’t just been hiding out on the fringe, either – even the New Yorker wrote about it last June. Regardless of whether we are in a computer simulation, or not, I have always been a fan of the multiverse – the idea that there are an infinite number of universes that exist besides our own. Why not? If you imagine our universe, all the stars, planets, galaxies, and the space in and around them, as fitting in a basketball, it is easy to imagine a whole roomful of basketballs, each one containing its own universe. If you go to the outer limits of our universe, what’s on the other side?

Even disregarding the idea of multiple universes, let’s look at this universe. If you look at the screen you are reading this on, it looks solid. It is solid glass or plastic. If you drop it it breaks, and you can cut yourself with a shard from it. Except, it’s not solid. It is mostly space. All things are mostly space. Everything breaks down to little spinning balls called atoms, which have a cloud of elections around their cores, and even these atoms are mostly space. There is space between atoms, too. It is a miracle anything seems solid, really.

And then look at light. We see an astonishingly small band of the electromagnetic spectrum. All those frequencies are there, we just don’t see them or perceive them – except perhaps as sunburn from UV. But even within the small band we do see, we don’t see all the colors available. The mantis shrimp can see far more colors than we do, in roughly the same range.

The Matrix speaks to this. It touches on the nagging thought that our world, perhaps, is not what it seems to be. That there is more to all this. That indeed we could be just part of an experiment from some extra-universal teenagers. It speaks to the thought that if we just take the red pill, all will be revealed.

I don’t consider this attitude crazy at all. I think it is healthy to be curious about this, to be curious about anything. I find it fascinating to read what people think about reality, and fascinating to think about what could really be going on.

One thing I am pretty sure of though is that we are not going to find a definitive answer. How could you verify the computer simulation theory? Find some half-buried Statue of Liberty on the beach with the logo “Intel Inside?” on its backside? Dig into some cave somewhere and find a wall with the comment “//to be implemented” on it? No, it’s all speculation. Fun to think about, though.

And by the way, my son loved the movie.