There’s no name for the general idea. But for people who habitually think that everything reduces to computation and/or that physics is largely figured out, the Matrix is the quickest way to reintroduce fundamental uncertainty about what’s behind the appearances of the world.
Another formulation which might have some potency for an audience of materialist futurists, would be to suggest that the stars and planets are all already superintelligences, engaged in purposeful aeon-old interactions about which we know nothing, and that the minutiae of our life and history on Earth are shaped by a local superintelligence, or its agents, by means that we do not know, towards goals that we do not know. Earth is not a rare oasis of life in a cosmic desert; the sum total of our lives here is more like a day’s worth of microbes living and dying, in the dark under a small rock, in a jungle bursting with larger lives and dramas.
If you start just with the data of experience, rather than presupposing physical or computational reductionism, the possibilities are even broader. A dream presents an example of a hallucinated world and narrative which is not only unreal, but often logically incoherent and only imagined rather than experienced, to a degree that isn’t recognized while it’s taking place. Also, the events of dreams can be the product of knowledge and concerns which the dreamer does not consciously recall during the dream (but which will be remembered and understood once awake), and also just the result of external sensory stimuli, transduced into something that fits the dream context.
One might suppose that waking life is a similar phenomenon, but on a higher scale. Perhaps if one looked at all the facts of one’s circumstances with an IQ of 5000 (whatever that might mean), it would be obvious that it’s all a sham and a delirium. That line of thought could lead back to the Matrix, but there ought to be other, more mentalistic, models of real causality (causality outside the illusion), which provide an alternative conception of higher reality. For example, you could combine solipsism, metaphysical idealism, and the idea of a temporary self-induced occlusion concerning your own nature and powers, to arrive at the guess that you are Something, somehow floating in existential isolation, which has produced the illusion of a body and senses and a world, and the illusion of being a limited denizen of that world with no existence before it. Why did you do this? Maybe you went mad in eternal isolated boredom, maybe it was a mistake, who knows.
There are many variations on this sort of hypothesis. It doesn’t have to be solipsistic, for example. But what distinguishes it from the materialist paranoia of the Matrix is that it doesn’t even hold onto the idea that states of mind are “really” material processes, occurring in a physics known or unknown. There is a more direct coupling between appearances and intentions, as in a dream when analysed from the cognitive point of view.
Obviously, if reality were like that, then events might be connected in ways far removed from conventional probabilistic causal thinking. If the world of the senses were just a symbolic realization of the agenda of some governing intention, then events might be orchestrated in all sorts of unusual ways.
Another class of rogue hypothesis might be called the “big dumb spirit-force” hypothesis. Earlier I spoke of superintelligent celestial bodies, the implication being that they are actually giant nano- or pico-computers of a sort that the human race has begun to imagine, and their vast ancient computations are what governs us. A peculiar alternative would be to suppose something like astrology, in which celestial objects are big dumb objects after all, but they exert influences which act “directly” on sensibility, culture, and evolution (I mean in a way which has the directness of physics, rather than the indirectness of cosmic darwinism, whereby the cosmic environment imposes changing conditions on the biosphere).
There is also a type of transcendental hypothesis which is mostly defined negatively. It amounts just to saying that reality consists of “entities” in “relationships”, and not only are you oblivious to most of them, you can’t even conceive of most of them. And not only that, but you aren’t even properly conceiving of what’s happening right in front of you, and of who and what you yourself are. You have to imagine everything you have experienced and thought, and everything that you have ever heard of and thought you understood, as completely superficial, when it’s not outright wrong. To even conceive of the situation as “you getting reality wrong” would still be getting it wrong, in the sense of missing the essence of everything. In other words, you and your life have a meaning other than “semi-intelligent entity blundering through local corner of reality using its inadequate concepts”; your existence (in the broad sense of everything you know about, not just the actions for which you personally take responsibility) has significance, but you are completely blind to it.
There’s no name for the general idea. But for people who habitually think that everything reduces to computation and/or that physics is largely figured out, the Matrix is the quickest way to reintroduce fundamental uncertainty about what’s behind the appearances of the world.
Another formulation which might have some potency for an audience of materialist futurists, would be to suggest that the stars and planets are all already superintelligences, engaged in purposeful aeon-old interactions about which we know nothing, and that the minutiae of our life and history on Earth are shaped by a local superintelligence, or its agents, by means that we do not know, towards goals that we do not know. Earth is not a rare oasis of life in a cosmic desert; the sum total of our lives here is more like a day’s worth of microbes living and dying, in the dark under a small rock, in a jungle bursting with larger lives and dramas.
If you start just with the data of experience, rather than presupposing physical or computational reductionism, the possibilities are even broader. A dream presents an example of a hallucinated world and narrative which is not only unreal, but often logically incoherent and only imagined rather than experienced, to a degree that isn’t recognized while it’s taking place. Also, the events of dreams can be the product of knowledge and concerns which the dreamer does not consciously recall during the dream (but which will be remembered and understood once awake), and also just the result of external sensory stimuli, transduced into something that fits the dream context.
One might suppose that waking life is a similar phenomenon, but on a higher scale. Perhaps if one looked at all the facts of one’s circumstances with an IQ of 5000 (whatever that might mean), it would be obvious that it’s all a sham and a delirium. That line of thought could lead back to the Matrix, but there ought to be other, more mentalistic, models of real causality (causality outside the illusion), which provide an alternative conception of higher reality. For example, you could combine solipsism, metaphysical idealism, and the idea of a temporary self-induced occlusion concerning your own nature and powers, to arrive at the guess that you are Something, somehow floating in existential isolation, which has produced the illusion of a body and senses and a world, and the illusion of being a limited denizen of that world with no existence before it. Why did you do this? Maybe you went mad in eternal isolated boredom, maybe it was a mistake, who knows.
There are many variations on this sort of hypothesis. It doesn’t have to be solipsistic, for example. But what distinguishes it from the materialist paranoia of the Matrix is that it doesn’t even hold onto the idea that states of mind are “really” material processes, occurring in a physics known or unknown. There is a more direct coupling between appearances and intentions, as in a dream when analysed from the cognitive point of view.
Obviously, if reality were like that, then events might be connected in ways far removed from conventional probabilistic causal thinking. If the world of the senses were just a symbolic realization of the agenda of some governing intention, then events might be orchestrated in all sorts of unusual ways.
Another class of rogue hypothesis might be called the “big dumb spirit-force” hypothesis. Earlier I spoke of superintelligent celestial bodies, the implication being that they are actually giant nano- or pico-computers of a sort that the human race has begun to imagine, and their vast ancient computations are what governs us. A peculiar alternative would be to suppose something like astrology, in which celestial objects are big dumb objects after all, but they exert influences which act “directly” on sensibility, culture, and evolution (I mean in a way which has the directness of physics, rather than the indirectness of cosmic darwinism, whereby the cosmic environment imposes changing conditions on the biosphere).
There is also a type of transcendental hypothesis which is mostly defined negatively. It amounts just to saying that reality consists of “entities” in “relationships”, and not only are you oblivious to most of them, you can’t even conceive of most of them. And not only that, but you aren’t even properly conceiving of what’s happening right in front of you, and of who and what you yourself are. You have to imagine everything you have experienced and thought, and everything that you have ever heard of and thought you understood, as completely superficial, when it’s not outright wrong. To even conceive of the situation as “you getting reality wrong” would still be getting it wrong, in the sense of missing the essence of everything. In other words, you and your life have a meaning other than “semi-intelligent entity blundering through local corner of reality using its inadequate concepts”; your existence (in the broad sense of everything you know about, not just the actions for which you personally take responsibility) has significance, but you are completely blind to it.