Living the dream

By Menno Schellekens
A quick note for the sake of clarity: when preparing this essay I interpreted the word 'programming' in the usual sense: building digital worlds out of code. As an avid player of videogames, the image of a dream machine being limited only by imagination appeals to me. Only later did I realize that programming has multiple meanings. This interpretation has not adversely affected the philosophical content of this essay, but it is convenient to keep this in mind while reading.

"You know, I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that is juicy and delicious. After nine years [of reality], you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss." These lines are spoken by an antagonist in the 1999 classic 'The Matrix'. He confronts the audience with an idea which is intuitively true, yet repulsive: reality is depressing, while our imagination can picture dream worlds which we would love to escape into. In my teens, The Matrix was my favorite movie. In my opinion, Inception, an ode to the power of dreams, is the best movie of the last few years. Watching and rewatching these movies has helped me grapple with the question if I would forgo reality and hook up to a dream machine if I had the chance. My answer: yes. In this essay, I will argue with the help of John Locke and David Hume that there is no discernible difference between the 'real' world and the world generated by the hypothetical dream machine and that dream worlds can offer as rich experiences as the real world, albeit with different boundaries. This essay will address this topic in a philosophical vacuum and will thus not concern itself with practicalities. I assume the dream machine is accessible to everyone, one is completely free to choose his or her dreams and the machine will work indenitely. The rst question is how a dream machine can make another world feel as real as the 'real' one. Locke and Hume, both empiricists, see sensory data as the only source for knowledge. Indeed, we are but dry sponges, soaking up experience as time goes by. Our minds extract ideas from our experiences and draw reasonable conclusions to their signicance, but the senses tell us all we know. One can doubt the necessity for coherence of those stimuli, because dreams are completely incoherent yet feel real. We can only take the dreamworld as it comes. Even if the dream world is logically inconsistent, one can never reject it, because it is the only reality one has. Our emotions are triggered by certain experiences, like the satised feeling one has as a response to a eating a big meal, and non tangible events, which also trigger emotions, such as the relief felt when a difcult theoretical problem has nally been solved. When the dream machine simulates these triggers, the same 'real' emotion will occur.

 The sense of physical self can be simulated as well. As Hume theorized, what we experience as our own being is a bundle of stimuli that our brains perceive, which across time forms a constant stream of stimuli. As long as the dream machine can fake the stimuli of having a body, like the sound of your own heartbeat and the pain you feel when you pinch yourself, you will be oblivious to the fact that you have none. The second question is whether dream worlds, preprogrammed by humans and thus dependent on their ideas, can offer the same rich experience that the real world can. One aspect of the dream machine is that we cannot program the world as we know it. As Hume theorized, we can only see sequences of events and try to distill knowledge from them. Therefore, the true formulas or rules underlying our universe remain unknown to us. This is the problem of induction. We thus have to rely on our own ideas to build a dreamworld for the dream machine. When thinking about building worlds from ideas already present in our minds, we nd a helping hand in Locke. He thought that we extract ideas from our experience. We can combine ideas to form more complex ones, like extracting the idea 'red' from a walk in a rose garden and combining that with the more complex idea 'sweater' to arrive at the complex idea of a 'red sweater'. A limitation of pre-programming experiences is that we are conned by the ideas present in the mind and the simplicity of those ideas. Life can stun you with radically new experiences which lead to new ideas, while your imagination only has ideas extracted from past experiences to work with. The number of building blocks is nite. Another limitation is that manmade complexity cannot match nature's complexity. When I look into my girlfriends eyes, I see the product of millions of different pigments that were placed by a host of biological mechanisms, resulting in a beautiful image with many shades of green and small brown dots. When I look at the eyes of a regular cartoon character, I see a green circle. This is not to prove humans can not create complexity at all, but that the universe - from the molecular level to the galactic - is more complex than humans can comprehend. Although the imagination is limited in ways real world experiences are not, the real world is bound by limits that fantasy is not. Physical space, the ow of time, the degradation of body and mind, the absence of things that do not exist: these are facts one has to grapple with in real life. Curiously, our ability to manipulate ideas allows us to imagine certain aspects of the world outside the ruleset they were experienced in. For instance, all experience of life is combined with certain death, yet we can imagine immortality. We can even imagine the experience it would give, all that lacks is the satisfying sensory experience. The dream machine would be able to turn a reality-defying idea into sensory data. The dream machine turns Locke's empiricism, in which ideas are extracted from experience, on its head, for it allows one to generate experience from novel constellations of ideas. If you would offer me the chance to let my imagination drive my experience and allow me to craft realities in which I can y like a bird, slay dragons like a hero and ride pink unicorns without ever having to feel tired or experience the pain of fresh wounds, I would take it.