The Philosophy of David Cronenberg

eXistenZial Angst

69 One of the key motifs of David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ (1999) is the idea that one might not be able to tell the difference between appearance and reality. This is conveyed in the film in terms of the protagonists—Ted Pikul (Jude Law) and Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh)—being progressively unable to be sure they aren’t inside the game they are playing, rather than in the real world. Although the circumstances in play in the film are of course highly unusual, and very distinct from normal circumstances, there is a general philosophical difficulty at issue here—indeed, it is one of the most fundamental and enduring challenges that philosophers face. This is the problem of radical skepticism, a problem that can be traced back to antiquity and that finds expression, in some form, in the work of such diverse figures as Plato, Descartes, Hume, and Kant. In a nutshell, radical skepticism is the worry that we don’t have any adequate basis for distinguishing appearance from reality, and hence that we do not have nearly as much knowledge of reality as we tend to suppose we have. Indeed, in its strongest form it is the claim that all knowledge is impossible. As we will see, this problem is typically thought of in broadly methodological terms, where by this I mean as a difficulty that we can use to “test” our theories of knowledge to see whether they can withstand this challenge (this was roughly how Descartes understood the problem, for example). But it can also be thought of as an existential problem, a problem that can actually have a bearing on how, at a fundamental level, we think about and live our own lives. As we will see, one of the interesting aspects of eXistenZ is that it makes explicit how the radical skeptical problem might have existential import, by offering a thought-provoking example of how one’s own subjective confidence in reality can be threatened by skeptical doubt. We will also note how eXistenZial Angst Duncan Pritchard 70 Duncan Pritchard this film raises some other interesting questions relevant to contemporary epistemology, particularly concerning the possibility of extended cognition, where this means a cognitive process that extends beyond the skin of the agent concerned. The Problem of Radical Skepticism A standard way of expressing the problem of radical skepticism is via appeal to radical skeptical hypotheses. These are hypotheses that, if true, would undermine much of what we currently think we know, but that it seems we are unable to know to be false. A famous example of a radical skeptical hypothesis is the so-called brain-in-a-vat hypothesis. In this scenario, one is to imagine—somewhat along the lines of The Matrix (1999), which, interestingly , came out the same year as eXistenZ—that one has been abducted and had one’s brain removed. It is now placed in a vat of nutrients connected to supercomputers that are “feeding” it experiences so as to give one the impression that one’s life is in fact proceeding as normal (i.e., the supercomputers make one think that one is walking around, talking to people, going to work, and so forth, even though all the time one is in fact merely a brain in a vat being given these deceptive experiences). In The Matrix, of course, the victim’s entire body was suspended in the vat rather than just the brain, but the essential point is the same: those suspended in the vat will think that life is progressing just as normal, when in fact the experiences they are having are entirely fake ones generated by the supercomputers. The trouble is, if one were a brain in a vat, then one wouldn’t know very much about the world around one (one’s beliefs about the world around one would be mostly false, for one thing). This is a problem once we realize that we do not have any effective way of knowing that we are not presently deceived in this way. How would we tell? (By seeing whether we had a body? But it would seem as if we had a body even if we were a brain in a vat). From this point the radical skeptic concludes that we can’t possibly have much of the knowledge that we typically credit to ourselves. More generally, the radical skeptic argues that since we can’t know the denials of skeptical hypotheses like the brain...