Red Pill and/or Blue Pill: Your Mind is Blown or You Live Your Life…or Both. Purple pill!
What would happen to Neo if he took both pills? Purple pill!
This article about free will and neuroscience appeared on bbc.com. In brief, it summarizes an experiment done in the ’80s. The article says what it want better than I can, so I’ll just summarize its summary: The scientists attempted to measure free will by comparing the difference between when people are aware they’ve decided something and when the brain “lights up” to make that thing happen. They conclude that your brain tells your body to move prior to your consciousness deciding to move. Which is either freaky or not really freaky, depending on things.
The results of the study are fascinating and potentially unsettling. Go and read it. Good stuff.
Hooray, potentially paradigm shifting science.
New “truth” like this provides an opportunity for a choice: going down the rabbit hole, or will you believe what you want to believe?
Taken in a particular way, the results of the study about free will could do things like call into question the existence of the soul, or support the idea that humans are automata just moving in a huge clockwork. I understand that kind of dialogue is precisely what the study inspired. It was immensely divisive. The study claimed to have discovered something incontrovertible, and it gave it to the world to do with as it would.
As a consumer of scientific studies, I have a choice: Believe what I want, or find out how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Or…do I? Are those my only choices? Do I live in that kind of dichotomy?
Science proposes to seek truth. I’ve no interest in arguing for or against that proposition right now. “Truth” and I have a complicated relationship.
For the sake of getting on with getting on, I’m taking as a given that scientific truth is a thing, and that it’s somewhat akin to objective truth — or close enough for getting on with.
Great. Perfect. Someone is determining true things. I am so in favor of that I can hardly sit still. Even if I can’t convince some people — you know who you are — that “truth” exists, I at least know that the scientific community has my back. It’s comforting to know that a well-funded and generally well-meaning community of reasonably well-educated nerds believe in “truth,” even if the wordy poets have trouble with it.
Occasionally, though, the scientific community seems a little reckless with “truth.”
The study about free will is an example. Here is this thing we discovered, says the scientific community. We have numbers. We have charts. We have records. We are not bullshitting here. Here is some truth.
And the rest of us, for a moment at least, go…okay…cool…
Then the poo-flinging begins.
Because, frankly, wild truth is divisive. Too much cheap-and-easy truth in the world causes wars. Cats and dogs living together. Chaos in the streets. The whole bit.
Truth is important. But it’s hazardous.
I would never propose that truth ought to be hidden or meted out or skewed. That would be more frightening. I am, to this point, merely pointing out that sometimes truth comes without an instruction manual.
Which is where philosophy tries to step in.
But philosophy isn’t good at people. Frankly, philosophers are almost as bad as scientists, as far as their careless flinging about of ideas. The only saving grace of philosophers is they’re not good at publicity. They know truth. They explain truth and in ways that ought to change the world. But they get so damned bogged in the analysis. Philosophers get too bogged down in examining truth, explaining truth, worrying over truth…when they’re done with it, it’s been turned into the literary equivalent of dry heaves: you know there’s something important happening, but all you can conjure is the echoes of it.
When philosophy gets done with truth, its lost any edge of revolution it might have had when the scientists flung it about.
Philosophy is odd, too, because what it’s trying to do with truth is explain what to do with it. Provide an instruction manual, essentially. Philosophy has all the right tools to do that too. Analysis — clear thought — explanation — emotional investment. Those are all supposed to be aspects of philosophy. It’s been a long time since philosophy could do those things well. So while its practitioners have historically analyzed science-revealed truths into yawnfests, it — philosophy — also has tools to tame truth.
And I think that’s kind of what truth needs.
Truth needs an instruction manual.
Humanity is sore beset by weird, crazy, improbable truth. Truth, the goal and product of science. But most people aren’t scientists. The search for truth isn’t our profession. So…what do we do? What does the non-scientific community do with truth? It’s an important question since, in terms of numbers, most of the human race belongs to the category “not scientists.” So what do we do? Use it for clever dinner conversation? What?
The clearest answer is nothing. The clearest answer is that most people are pop-culture consumers whose day-to-day won’t be effected by knowing too much truth. If we’re all Sherlock Holmes, trying to most effectively serve the purpose to which we are born, then most of us would do well to forget as much “truth” as we can. It clutters up our reality, interferes with the way we give life to our purpose.
I suggest that’s too utilitarian. I know. It’s a suggestion I’ve just made out of a sky all clear and crystal, and no one else was saying that. Bear with me, though. Think of “average human X,” that theoretical person who, while he doesn’t technically exist, does seem to drive a lot of market statistics. For him, in a practical sense, truth is irrelevant. His knowledge of truth won’t effect how his iPhone works. He’s just glad that it works.
See? Too utilitarian. Most practical views are too utilitarian. To say that truth is only relevant to those who take their purpose directly and entirely from truth is to reduce the question to mathematics. It suggests that humans can be defined by objective qualities, and that what is relevant to them can be similarly objective and definite. Life is too long and people are too nuts for that to be the way of things. I would argue we live in an objective reality. (For a complete expression of that argument, stay tuned for a later story.) I will also argue till the end of time that it is the wont of humanity to impose a subjective interaction with reality. (I’ll explain that sometime too.)
In essence, that means “truth,” meaning scientific truth, is relevant to anyone who wants to find it relevant.
But that still seems to imply the question: what am I supposed to do with “truth”? It still has no instructions.
I believe that’s where the artists step in.
The Matrix trilogy is essentially an instruction manual for how to deal with a kind of truth.
You can make any argument you like about the philosophy and “truth” represented in The Matrix. That subject’s an old one for the internet. I’m not going to make an argument in favor of any “truth” in The Matrix.
It makes for a good example for my point, though, because quotes.
The literal presence of a) questions about truth and b) answers to those questions turns it into a perfect example of an artistic interpretation of some of this free range “truth.” In a nutshell, The Matrix is about learning something “true” and discovering purpose. And, case in point, it’s engaging and memorable and I can have a conversation with my buddies about it.
I can tell you from experience that it’s much more difficult to have a conversation with my buddies about quantum theory and its relationship to psychology and neuroscience than it is to have a conversation about The Matrix. It is also extremely difficult to have a conversation with my buddies about Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave than about The Matrix.
In a real sense, a conversation about quantum physics, about Plato, or about The Matrix are the same conversation.
You can bet your ass that one of them is more memorable than the other two.
That’s right: Plato for the win.
Okay, right, that’s cool, but it only introduces the point. I’m saying that truth needs instructions, and that art helps provide those instructions. Not every bit of truth that science so graciously passes out, though, has an artistic interpretation. So, what, we wait till art interprets everything? That sound inefficient, and it’s what we — what your average not-scientist, consumers of culture — do anyway. And it suggests that what I’m suggesting is another layer of elitism. Scientists are the elite you discover the truth; philosophers are the elite who analyze the fun out of the truth; artists are the elite that provide a palatable interpretation of the truth. That’s the trifecta I think I’ve suggested. But I meant to do something else.
I meant to suggest that artists are those who, when they hear the truth, they do something.
Neo took the red pill. He accepted the truth, and he let it change his life. By negation, he’s suggesting that the rest of us take the blue pill: We wake up and believe whatever we want to believe. Neo is, in that way, daring us to take the red pill. Wake up. Do something.
That sounds really exhausting. Especially if everyone becomes Neo. Imagine that in a real way. If everyone were the enlightened savior of the new way of life, lord, that would be a tiring world.
Which isn’t to say that we should all take the blue pill either. We already live in that reality, and that is exhausting in a different way.
I’m suggesting the advantages of a middle path: take a purple pill. A softened approach. Let things change you — multiply you — turn you into something. Take truth and decide that you will do something with it.
But keep your itinerary too. We don’t all need to become the leader of revolutions. But we can all do artistic interpretation.
