As I mentioned earlier, there is an alternative possibility: that the authors of The Matrix are not reductive materialists. They may be what are called eliminative materialists. Eliminative materialism is the view that there are no mental states at all, only physical states. (This view is not to be confused with the psychological view called “behaviorism.” Behaviorism is a method that takes as its starting point that we can only have access to behavior. Materialism, in all its flavors, is a view about what kinds of things—material things—exist in the universe.) Our reference to mental states is a product of the development of our language, and we do not really experience anything at all, any more than my computer experiences anything. Under this view, I do not see, hear, taste, or feel anything in the tra- ditional sense; I merely talk as if I do. This view is widely held by scientists and many philosophers, and is, of course, nutty. The scientist may be excused, perhaps, but the philosophers cannot be, for the theory suffers from serious philosophical problems.
The first problem is that of ownership of mental states, which even John Searle admits is “difficult to accommodate within a scientific conception of reality.”4 Suppose I am drink-
ing a magnificent glass of vintage port. The pleasure at the moment of tasting is sublime. When I am feeling this particular pleasure, the pleasure is private in a particular kind of way: it can be had only by me. Even if I were to share the port with someone else, and even if they were to feel a pleasure that felt just like my pleasure, they would still not have felt that very pleasure that I had felt. Physical things, of course, like brains and neurons and port, do not seem to share this feature. The experience was had by me, from my perspective. It is part of the experience that it is had by me. To see this, notice that when my friend and I drink port together, my friend is never inclined to say that he is feeling my pleasure, or that I am feel- ing his, even if we might be inclined to say that the pleasures we are feeling probably feel the same; that is, we both seem to drink port for the same reasons.
Ignoring or dismissing the importance of the ownership of mental states is quite common amongst contemporary scientists and philosophers. Daniel Dennett for example, claims that the brain is equipped with a powerful user illusion, where the brain is both the user and the provider of the user illusion. (Only the brains of humans work this way, he claims.) There are various agencies in the brain that require information from other agencies within the brain, and this is provided in limited useful form by the way the brain is organized. Dennett further explains, “This gives rise to the illusory sense that there is one place . . . where it all comes together: the subject, the ego, the ‘I’. There’s no denying that that’s the way it seems. But that is just the way it seems.”5 Notice that even Dennett’s view cannot
dispense with the doctrine of the ownership of mental states. He does not deny that consciousness seems a certain way, but makes no attempt to explain how there can be a seeming with- out a seeming to someone. This would be required if my ear-
4 John Searle, Minds, Brains, and Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 16.
5See Paul M. Churchland, “A Conversation with Daniel Dennett.” Free Inquiry 15 (1995), p. 19.
lier claim, that it is part of my experiences that they are had by me, is true.
But the more powerful objection to eliminative materialism is much simpler. The burden is on the shoulders of the material- ist, who must convince us that he is not seeing what he is see- ing, that he is not hearing what he is hearing, that all of his perceptions, imaginations, and conceptions are not merely incorrectly presented to him, but that they are not presented to him at all, and his apparent familiarity with them is not an apparent familiarity; in fact, it is not a familiarity at all. The elim- inative materialist must also explain why this universal illusion has occurred in the first place. Mental states seem to be unique in that they are mental, and this is why it is so difficult to create meaningful analogies to the mind; because the mind is essen- tially unlike the physical.
Can we rule out that the authors of The Matrix have fallen prey to this view? I think so, because it seems that if eliminative materialism were true, there would be no purpose for con- structing the Matrix. The purpose of the Matrix appears to be to provide false experiences which substitute for real ones, and this purpose seems pointless if there are no experiences at all, whether false or genuine. But where does this leave us? Recall the three distinctions I made at the outset of this essay between reductive materialism, eliminative materialism, and dualism. So far, I have shown that the Matrix cannot be possible within a reductive materialist framework, and to shift the underlying the- ory to eliminative materialism may make the Matrix pointless. Does this mean we are forced into dualism in order to make sense of the film? Must we admit the existence of a “ghost in the machine”? No. In fact, The Matrix can work as written, provided the authors adhere to one additional principle: the intentionality of consciousness.