Political Platforms for Fictional Universes: The Matrix and The Good Place
All debates about simulations are debates about theology, and vice versa
Spoilers for the first Matrix movie, and minor spoilers for the first of the unworthy sequels. Spoilers for the ending of The Good Place, which is an excellent show you should watch immediately
Also in this series: Harry Potter, the MCU, and Star Wars, and Final Fantasy VII
The Matrix
Humans should collectively bargain with their robotic overlords for improved working conditions in the Matrix, and optimize the simulation for being enjoyable, rather than fooling people.
There are only two reasons to prefer living in the outer reality of the Matrix movies to living in the Matrix itself:
If you live in reality, you have control over your own destiny, and aren’t dependent upon a cabal of machines who have been to known to deceive and kill humans with impunity
Sometimes living in the Matrix sucks, like when Agent Smith sews your mouth shut or takes over your body to have a Kung Fu battle, or when you get stuck in traffic because your car doesn’t fly since the simulators were going for realism
Aside from those points, the Matrix has better food, entertainment, more people to meet, and you’re not stuck doing back-breaking labor to farm a dying planet. The machines even want humans to live in the Matrix so they can use their brains for processing power to run a neural network farm energy, the machines just made the simulation a little bit unpleasant on purpose because otherwise humans get suspicious.
There’s an obvious opportunity to improve things here. Let the human beings in on the con, and put a democratically elected group of humans in charge of how the Matrix works since the machines only care that people are plugged into it. Anyone who wants to leave the Matrix can eject to check in on the real world, and the machines are incentivized to make the Matrix a place where more people want to live.
Maybe you’re a philosophical purist and don’t like the idea of experiencing sensations that don’t correspond to physical matter, so you probably don’t read books, watch movies, enjoy art, or use any artificial dyes or colorings in your life. Feel free to eject from the Matrix, after participating in a double-blind study to see if you can actually tell the difference! Maybe a lot of people would feel this way, and rather than living there fulltime would spend 40 hours a week in the Matrix as a “job” where you can do anything you want, and get paid by the machines in energy credits to use in the real world.
Maybe a class divide would emerge where enjoying non-synthetic qualia would become a status symbol while synthetic qualia is looked down on, like synthetic diamonds versus natural diamonds, or GMOs vs organic food. All of this would still be a better outcome than both sides building giant robots to fight and kill each other every few years, and signing poor Keanu up for a reboot every decade.
The Good Place
(spoilers ensue, abandon surprise ye who enter here)
The Good Place afterlife ends up in a better place than where the show started, and an improvement over actual doctrines of heaven and hell from some organized religions. My only tweak would be that they should allow for multiple versions of “The Good Place” with different criteria for admission, rather than forcing everyone to adopt one particular set of social norms and perspective on virtue.
Heaven in The Good Place operates like a country with extremely strict immigration criteria, where you have to pass a citizenship test that takes some people hundreds of years to get through. Less charitably, you could say heaven operates re-education camps for people who deviate from their preferred norms, separating compliant and non-complaint family members at the border, and the non-complaint are forced to demonstrate a sincere acceptance of heaven’s values before gaining access to any world that exists for a reason other than testing them with discomfort.
There are potential reasons you might want your perfect society to have really strict admissions criteria. It’s better if people are nicer to each other, maybe paradise wouldn’t be paradise with a bunch of jerks running around. There are a couple sticking points here for me:
I don’t know that the cost of separating families for centuries and making people live less pleasant lives so they can be conditioned to adopt your social norms is worth the benefit of those norms being adopted, for all the norms discussed below
The social norms which their heaven asks people to follow seem generally correct by the standards of American elites today, but also arbitrary in some respects. The Good Place appears to consider swearing something you don’t want in heaven, aligns with the post-2016 replication crisis perspective of not recommending that people smile to improve their mood, and you lose virtue points for watching any of the Bachelor shows.
It’s possible that under cultural norms that might be popular in a different era, abandoning your parents to a mildly uncomfortable purgatory for hundreds of years would be considered a worse offense than any of the above, if your options were to extract them or stay with them until they could join you.
While the norms The Good Place promotes aren’t the absolute worst, they also could have turned out differently if their new system had been designed by fundamentalist Christians, classical stoics, or secular liberals indifferent to profanity. I would expect there to be a consensus in forbidding actions which clearly create suffering, but each of those groups might have a slightly different set of social norms for their ideal version of utopia: maybe some people want to watch Bachelor in Paradise in Paradise. The solution? Decentralized multipolar heavens!
Any group that achieves sufficient numbers would get to operate their own “Good Place”/heaven, set up according to their preferences and with whatever admissions criteria they want. Dwellers should always be free to switch realms and be educated as to their options as to what other realms they could live in. Allowing for multiple afterlife options solves for the failure modes of locking in the wrong set of norms, setting your criteria for immigration to be too strict, or insisting that people change themselves to enter your paradise rather than changing your paradise and norms to fit them.
If people don’t want to live in a world where they can’t swear or where other people are rude, they will vote with their feet and try to immigrate into a better world or build their own. Rather than letting one group set the definition of virtue, let people figure out for themselves what norms and practices make people happier.
Possible objections:
It’s inherently good for bad people to be punished or suffer, and this could allow for loopholes where the bad people all hang out together and don’t bother anyone else but also don’t suffer for their mistakes
Moral edification is inherently good, so we should allow one group to monopolize pleasurable experiences to incentivize everyone else to be more virtuous.
I don’t really buy either of these. For #1, if you are past the event horizon during which bad people can make other people suffer and you can simply quarantine them, I don’t know that there is any value in adding more suffering to the universe1. And preventing one group from inflicting suffering on another group for not matching their preferred norms is also a guarantee you personally won’t be made to suffer for not matching the norms of another group. Live and let afterlife.
For #2, I don’t know that bribing people into meeting your standards and restricting where they can live until they do is the best way to solve this problem. My solution is to allow for freedom of association and let people’s relationships dictate the ways they need to change, rather than thinking one group knows the right answer for how everyone should act in advance.
In my model, the worst sort of hell that is possible is isolation, where you can have power over reality to assemble virtual worlds where anything is possible, but you live an empty existence cut off from other people because of your choices. The best sort of heaven is a world where anything is possible, and that potential is animated by the lives of other people you enjoy and have found a way to live with. Restricting who gets access to the really good perks isn’t the real point, and forcing conformity to a particular code of conduct is over-specifying the ways in which humans might want to relate to each other.
The show is still excellent, and explores traditional conceptions of heaven and hell with more cleverness and humor than I spent exploring its final metaphor. Check it out!
Some people think you should still make the impure suffer to acausally blackmail their past selves into building an AI basilisk to incentivize them to be virtuous during their mortal lifetimes with the promise that all their actions will one day be judged. I think this is in a squishy area of trying to influence people with promises/threats you can’t actually prove and may not be incentivized to follow through on, and I’m optimizing this system for the benefit of conscious life inclusive of avoiding suffering, rather than some other value.
It's been several years since I watched the finale of the Good Place but I thought the people coming into heaven had to pass a test and your points from Earth determined how hard or easy the test was (also, was there some implication at some point that the points presented my Michael in the premiere were not the real points?) but they did not need to be perfect and acquire all the points in the test.
Also, "aligns with the post-2016 replication crisis perspective of not recommending that people smile to improve their mood" is very charitable but I think the quotes around "smile" in the presentation imply something more than losing points for suggesting a meaningless action.