Spoiler Warning: Do not read this if you have not seen “The Matrix,” “Existenz”, and “The 13th Floor,” unless you want the endings of these movies spoiled.
Last night I was channel surfing and ended up watching the last half of “The 13th Floor” for about the 10th time. This is an excellent sci-fi film in the whole “is this real?” genre of films started by “The Matrix” (“Existenz” is a Cronenberg film in the same vein that is, like all of his films, bizarre beyond belief.)
I like these films, but it always bugs me how they chicken out at the end to please the moviegoers. Only “Existenz” comes close to really driving home the true problem — how do we know the characters at the end of these films are not themselves in yet another computer simulation.
In the “13th Floor,” for example, the main character has created this simulated world which people can jack into, only to discover that his world is also just a simulation. He meets people who have jacked-in from the outside, and at the end of the movie escapes his simulation back to the real world. But the film chickens out by never considering the obvious possibility — that this third and supposedly “real” world is also a simulation. The same thing goes for “The Matrix”. It is interesting that after being in the matrix for so long and finally getting out to the “real world” that nobody in the film seems to consider the possibility that the “real world” might also be a simulation. “Existenz” comes closest to this point with many layers of simulations so it is a lot more difficult to know if the final scene is really the final world (and the film is very difficult to follow as a result).
Of course we can just leave the whole computer simulation issue out of it since right now everyone who is reading this is running an extremely advanced simulation of the universe within their brain. Moreover this simulation is often wrong and needs to be constantly corrected. In the “13th Floor,” the main character learns he is in a simulation when he ends up driving to a part of the world that the programmers had not yet programmed and he literally sees where the world ends — a clear logical inconsistency. The simulation your brain runs of the world has similar problems. A good example that I learned from a philosophy professor is to take a book, a small one is preferable, and hold it to your nose. What shape is it? Most people reply that the book is rectangular in shape, but in fact the image you see is actually a trapezoid. There are also the many other more formal optical illusions where our brain can be fooled into thinking that lines of the same length are actually of different lengths, etc. (not to mention the complete weirdness of things like Godel’s proof that there are some things in formal systems that are true but unprovable, or the weird results of quantum mechanics which really stretches the ability of our brain’s simulation of the universe to comprehend).
It is this sort of speculation, by the way, which explains why my wife does not like to watch science fiction with me. Actually that has more to do with my theory that Star Trek is a revisionist historical look at the history of the Federation, but I do not even want to get started on that.