14 DAY TRIAL // Let's start with a popular subject: love. What is love? Does love exist? We are accustomed to use the word "chemistry" as a synonymous to "love"; when two people feel attracted to each other or fall in love, we'd say - "well, there's chemistry between them". However, it appears that this simple form of saying something about love has become a definition for it with latest scientific developments.
This is viewed as fairly dramatic by some: if love is only about some hormones and cells matching each other, if we unconsciously search a partner that is physically compatible with us and capable of delivering good off-springs, if we unconsciously abide by the unwritten law of nature (that is all about the perpetuation and progress of our species), then we are just physical mechanisms, we are no different from mere animals.
In the future science might develop so much that there might be some pills that would make us happy and functional all the time without having the drawbacks of today's drugs. Similarly, there might be a method of screening people in order to find the ideal partner (like doing some blood tests), and then all the charm and romance of searching, flirting, falling in love with a person will become obsolete. There might be no room for love poetry, philosophy or any other kind of speculation.
This is the future world that inspired many book and movie scenarios. A scenery of a controlled world, where people function well and never feel the need to be free, we find in Brave New World, Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, set in London in the 26th century. The world it describes could in fact also be a utopia: humanity is carefree, healthy, and technologically advanced. Warfare and poverty have been eliminated, all races are equal, and everyone is permanently happy. The current moral involves sexual promiscuity and people are given a drug called soma that makes them happy. The irony is, however, that many things have disappeared- family, cultural diversity, art, literature, religion and philosophy.
Gattaca is a 1997 movie that bears a lot of resemblance to the book. Gattaca Corp. is an aerospace firm in the future. During this time, society analyzes your DNA and determines where you belong in life. It is a genetically controlled environment where everybody is satisfied with his/her life.
Last but not least is the famous Matrix (1999) that is strikingly similar to the other two and puts forward the same idea. In the near future, a computer hacker named Neo (Keanu Reeves) discovers that all life on Earth may be nothing more than an elaborate facade created by a malevolent cyber-intelligence, for the purpose of placating us while our life essence is "farmed" to fuel the Matrix's campaign of domination in the "real" world. People are just brains in a vat, and their lives are simulated artificially.
The plot that makes all these stories so attractive is the following: there is a hero that discovers everything is a great illusion and tries to break through the system and save the world, the real world. I say this is an even greater illusion in itself. If there is no flaw in the system, if it's a perfect illusion, nobody can break through, and if one can, how can he be sure that what he discovered is the real world? All these guys rebel against the worlds they are born into because they are unhappy and don't fit in. I am more of a relativist myself and think you can never be sure what the real world is, but it doesn't really matter. There are just worlds we create for us and the thing is to try to find the one where we are the happiest, the real world for a person is his/her best world, the world he mostly adapts to.
All these stories are based on an old and sustainable philosophical hypothesis: what if we are just brains in a vat? What if our lives, they way they are right now, are just artificial simulations, what if we are fooled into being happy, sad, in love, and so on, by science, by nature or by society? This is called a skeptical hypothesis.
The skeptical hypothesis is as old as Descartes. There are various logically possible skeptical hypotheses, such as that you are merely dreaming that you are reading an article right now. A more radical story is the Evil Genius hypothesis: you inhabit a world consisting of just you and a God-like Evil Genius bent on deceiving you. In the Evil Genius world, nothing physical exists, and all of our experiences are directly caused by the Evil Genius that manipulates our minds.
Nevertheless, with the recent developments of science one could not possibly sustain with success such a hypothesis. A modern version of it, compatible with materialism - the doctrine that claims our mind is nothing else but what happens in our brain - is the brain in a vat hypothesis. Imagine that you are a disembodied brain floating in a vat of nutrient fluids. This brain is connected to a supercomputer whose program produces electrical impulses that stimulate the brain in just the way that normal brains are stimulated as a result of perceiving external objects in the normal way. (and here you have The Matrix). If you are a brain in a vat, then you have experiences that are qualitatively indistinguishable from those of a normal perceiver. If you come to believe, based on your computer-induced experiences, that you are having sex, then you are unfortunately wrong.
Is there a way to prove that our reality is the real reality? I think not. As a famous philosopher called Kant used to say, we can't unfortunately have access to reality in itself, just to our perception of it. When you die, this world ends, that you can know for sure, because it's your world, the world that you perceive.
So then, is it important if love really exists or it's just a matter of chemistry? I think not, I mean we wouldn't really want to live in a world where everything is scientifically known and controlled, and all the beauty and poetry of falling in love are gone. Of course we could walk around the streets with devices that would beep when passing by a person that we would match, that would make things more efficient, but definitely spoil all the charm. Love in itself might just be an illusion, the world might just be an illusion, but as long as it makes us happy, I say stick to it.
