by Oliver Waters
The Matrix films depict a future dystopia in which oppressive super-intelligent machines have imprisoned human beings inside an entirely simulated world in order to exploit them as a power source. The human protagonists of the films – Neo and Trinity – lead a thrilling rebellion to free as many people as possible. It’s rather obvious why they are the ‘good guys’ and the machines are evil: imprisoning people in a virtual cage is wrong.
This is despite the fact that life in the Matrix actually seems more enjoyable than the alternative. Inside, you partake in the heady optimistic era of 1990s America. Outside it, you must endure the dusty remnants of the great civilisational war between humans and machines. There isn’t even any sunshine, on account of the humans having ‘scorched the sky’ to prevent the machines from accessing solar power. The only ‘free’ human city exists deep underground, where there’s very little entertainment unless scantily clad festival raves are your thing.
This is why the notorious character Cypher decides to betray humanity to the machines in exchange for a charmed life in the simulation. As he rationalises while eating a juicy virtual steak: ‘ignorance is bliss’. The film pushes us to think of Cypher as a deeply mistaken jerk. But why exactly? Why is being trapped in the Matrix wrong even if it is seemingly more pleasurable than living in reality? Because it is assumed that the people stuck inside it possess the inherently human trait of curiosity. Deep down, they want to know how the world really works. By being trapped in a fantasy world, this basic need is being frustrated, even if they don’t know it. Their individual potentials as self-aware beings are being cruelly inhibited, and justice demands that they be freed.
If you haven’t seen the Matrix films by now – where on Earth have you been?
One plausible place is on North Sentinel Island, a tiny member of the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. It is remarkable for the fact that the people who live on it (the ‘Sentinelese’) are in almost zero contact with the rest of our global civilisation. There have been several attempts to connect with them over the centuries with varying degrees of failure, brought vividly to life in Adam Goodheart’s recent book The Last Island (2023). The Sentinelese exist today in total isolation – an arrangement enforced by the Indian government within whose sovereignty the island lies.
The general and sensible consensus is that we should leave the Sentinelese alone. They are severely vulnerable to infection from external pathogens, and perhaps most importantly, are violently opposed to any form of contact. They made this clear most recently in 2018 when they killed an American Christian missionary who turned up alone on their shores to convert them.
We should acknowledge and respect these barriers to mutual engagement, yet at the same time deeply regret the state of our ignorance of Sentinelese culture, and theirs of ours. In theory, it would be mutually enlightening to exchange wisdom and technology, if this could be achieved with no risk to well-being or cultural integrity.
Some of these practical barriers could potentially be overcome via technological progress. For instance, we will probably one day have broad-acting and safe enough vaccinations that eliminate any danger from external pathogens. A more sci-fi (and morally hazardous) possibility is using microscopic and undetectable drones to peer beneath the canopy and learn about the Sentinelese language and culture. This knowledge could then be used to design an approach to contacting them that is harmonious with their existing worldview, perhaps enabling a culturally sensitive meeting of minds to take place.
Invading their privacy in this way of course sounds very creepy and undermining of their autonomy. Though it’s worth noting that the ultimate objective would ideally be to help them understand their broader place in the universe and the hidden opportunities it affords, not to misguide or exploit them.
Whether you are comfortable with ‘achieving contact’ using such measures depends on your moral judgment of just how well the Sentinelese are living now. If it turned out that (and we have no reason to think this) a small elite of Sentinelese were systematically torturing the majority, most people would find the case for ‘liberating them’ quite strong. But from the little we do know, a Sentinelese person probably has quite a healthy diet and has plenty of exercise, judging from their athletic physiques. Indeed they are probably more content and less stressed than the average human living in an industrialised society.
It also depends on your judgment of whether the Sentinelese have enough information to make a genuine choice to not have contact with the outside world. If you think they do, then we should respect their autonomy.
The human rights organisation Survival International takes a strong stance on the issue:
‘The Sentinelese have made it clear that they do not want contact. It is a wise choice.’
It certainly does seem to be an understandable choice by the Sentinelese given their terrible experiences of external contact so far. But is it a wise choice indefinitely into the future?
To invoke a seemingly unhinged analogy, would Survival International say the same about the humans stuck inside the Matrix? After all, when so-called liberators approach people plugged into Matrix to explain their predicament, the most common reaction is denial and resistance. People are very attached to their meaningful lives, despite their ultimately virtual underpinnings. Are those people making a wise choice also?
Now obviously the Matrix is radically different to North Sentinel Island in many ways. Firstly, unlike in The Matrix, there is no super-human agent controlling the Sentinelese and knowingly keeping them captive. And secondly, the Sentinelese actually live in reality, not a virtual simulation.
But their situations are analogous in a crucial respect:
There is an arbitrary upper limit upon their understanding of reality
Having not developed writing or science, the Sentinelese must have a profoundly limited understanding of their underlying reality, compared to the current state of global human knowledge. Yes, this limit is not being imposed by a malevolent mind like in the Matrix, but it is similarly arbitrary. It is not a natural limitation mandated by the laws of physics, but rather a contingent one due to their particular course of development. And it ultimately makes them extremely vulnerable to catastrophic events far beyond their every-day experience, such as an asteroid strike or, more pressingly, the arrival of other humans.
Of course, this is inevitably also true of all of us ‘modern’ folks today. We have not arrived, nor will we ever arrive, at any final, unerring theories of morality or science. This means we are all living inevitably in a kind of ‘simulated dreamworld’. The difference between the Sentinelese’ grasp of reality and our own is not categorical, but rather we occupy different places along the continuum of ignorance.
Similarly, people inside the Matrix mostly experience life just as it is experienced on the outside. The laws of physics are equivalent for all intents and purposes, as is the smell of a rose or the taste of chocolate. It is the rather the fundamental reality behind their perceptions that is false. They believe they exist in America in the 1990s, when instead they each exist in some pod in the far future filled with green goo hooked up to probes and wires.
But it is not so straightforward to call the experiences of those in the Matrix therefore ‘false’ or ‘fictional’. They are having real experiences of love, boredom and adventure, while completing real tasks and building a shared experiential world with other real people. The ‘platform’ for consciousness that the machines have created for them can support almost any experience or activity that we strive for ourselves today. So it’s wrong to say that those in the Matrix are living a complete lie, or that their lives are meaningless. That would be as mistaken as saying that our ancestors’ lives were fake and meaningless just because they didn’t understand quantum theory.
The point is that you don’t need to understand the ultimate truths of reality to live a good and meaningful life. The problem with those stuck in the Matrix and with the Sentinelese is not that they both live in simulations disconnected from ultimate reality. We all do. The problem with these two groups is that their access to reality is being constrained unnecessarily.
When we watch the Matrix, the moral urgency we feel to liberate those inside is driven by the fact that they are being oppressed by an active, intentional agent (the machines). Freeing them is an act of ending this injustice. The Sentinelese, on the other hand, are not oppressed by any intelligent force, so why do they need saving?
Consider a tweak to the Matrix scenario. What if the machines had long since died off but the Matrix simulation was left running on an effectively inexhaustible power supply? Would it still be morally righteous to ‘unplug’ those trapped inside? It seems like it would be, as the basic character of their situation has not changed. They are still stuck in the same prison – just now without guards.
If the people stuck in this Matrix still resist being freed by Neo and Trinity, there is no longer a super-intelligent race of machines to blame. They are now trapped by nothing other than their own ideas.
They would be persisting in what the philosopher Karl Popper referred to as a ‘closed society’, which he distinguished from the ideal of an ‘open society’. Popper defined the latter as that which manages to invent and maintain what he called ‘a tradition of criticism’. Open societies somehow figure out how to subject their practices and beliefs to open-ended rational criticism and improvement, without destroying themselves entirely in the process.
More recently, the physicist David Deutsch (strongly influenced by Popper) has developed the distinction between ‘static’ and ‘dynamic’ cultures. The former are dominated by what he calls ‘anti-rational’ ideas – those that effectively inhibit the growth of knowledge. An obvious example of an ‘anti-rational’ idea is ‘you should never question the truths contained in our sacred text’.
Note that a culture is never purely closed or open, static or dynamic. Rather, it comes down to the balance between replicating and competing rational and anti-rational ideas or ‘memes’ (to use the term coined by Richard Dawkins).
In a closed society, it makes sense for an individual to enact anti-rational memes because any deviation from past, reliable practice is very likely to lead to disaster, either for them or for the society. If a single Sentinelese, for instance, decided to try to build a boat and sail to Antarctica, he would probably drown, because of the lack of knowledge of how to do so safely. Static societies are quite fragile in this way, since they are precisely adapted to their local conditions.
Lacking deeper explanations of why substantially changing their practices would improve their lives, any random change would likely make their lives demonstrably worse. This creates a strong pressure against deviating from traditional ways of living.
We should take a step back at this point and ask why we would assume that the Sentinelese are not creative and critical when it comes to their beliefs and practices. It certainly seems like an insulting and ignorant claim, given how little we know about them. But Deutsch provides a compelling argument that any static society – i.e. one whose cultural artifacts to not noticeably change over several lifetimes – must systematically inhibit its individuals’ creative faculties.
Deutsch’s argument begins from the premise that all humans, as a matter of innate capacity, have the potential for creative thought and invention. But if you grant this premise, a problem immediately emerges – how are static societies possible? You might assume that static societies simply have explicit norms forbidding the acting out of variations of existing ideas. They might explicitly ban anyone from making a slightly more powerful bow-and-arrow, for instance. However, it is impossible to enforce against tiny deviations from existing practices, since they are mostly imperceptible, and it is impossible to know in advance which tiny deviation might make an outsized improvement in well-being.
Once people begin preferring a small change in behaviour, because they recognise it as undeniably better, it would then be impossible to prevent from spreading. But we have now arrived at a dynamic society – one like ours that changes rapidly in the course of a single lifetime. As Deutsch points out, we have failed to imagine a static society. He proposes that what is necessary to maintain stasis is a widespread desire of people to replicate existing ideas as faithfully as possible, dedicating their innate creativity to this end.
Deutsch’s argument makes sense of why a group of creative individuals can nonetheless perpetuate a static society indefinitely. The establishment of a tradition of criticism is comparatively rare and mostly short-lived throughout history. He follows Popper in tracing the roots of our current scientific and philosophical traditions to ancient Greek thinkers whose experiences of ‘culture clash’ led to them applying critical discussion to their own myths.
This all of course is not to say that closed cultures do not contain anything meaningful or valuable. A valid concern of those who wish to avoid ever interacting with the Sentinelese is that many of their distinctive practices and beliefs would likely be destroyed in the process.
We should note firstly that this should also be a concern for ‘freeing’ someone from the Matrix. Their particular lives and practices are just as real to them as they are to the Sentinelese, and to extract someone from the simulation is to similarly strip them of their rich, interwoven reality. Yet it somehow seems justified to most of us to free them, despite this potential loss.
An important distinction to keep in mind here is that between preserving cultural memory or history versus preserving cultural practices. When we look at historically English culture, for instance, almost no one regrets that loss of the once dominant cultural norm of only men being allowed to occupy positions of political power. We don’t see any value in preserving that practice, even though it would indeed be a great loss if all historical records of patriarchy were lost.
In short, it is not an injustice per se that cultural practices cease operating – it all depends on whether they stand up to our best collective and inclusive attempts at rational scrutiny. To be consistent, we ought to apply the same standards to the Sentinelese. It would be an absolute tragedy if all memory and records of their ways of living were lost. But it also seems true that any actual individual Sentinelese person could be better off with a more modern worldview and with the wider scope of opportunities that would afford them.
Those who disagree with this may tend think of ‘culture’ as having a value over and above the well-being of the flesh-and-blood human beings who believe in and enact it. But this itself is a pre-modern, almost theological view – hard to square with the idea that only existing humans feel suffering or pleasure – not those in the afterlife or abstract beings such as gods.
Others may genuinely harbor racist views about the basic needs of the Sentinelese, as opposed to the mostly white Americans stuck in the Matrix. They might assume that the latter hold the deep implicit value not to be fooled about the nature of their own existence, while the former do not. It’s not wrong, on this odious view, for the Sentinelese to continue living in isolation because they are content, as all other animals are, to merely act on their fixed desires in a static environment. Such a failure to attribute a common human nature to our fellow human beings is worth interrogating if your initial instinct is to leave the Sentinelese alone forever.
If we think however that the Sentinelese are truly people just like us, with an innate drive for curiosity about their world, we should try to save them. If we think that culture exists to serve humans, and not the other way around, we should try to save them. But we should also remain ever wary of the limitations on our own knowledge, for right now we haven’t the foggiest idea of how to do so without total calamity.