Tiktok and the Brain in the Vat

The year is 2199. Neo, a humble programmer cycling through days of drudgery on his 9-5 job, is called into the office of his boss to be berated for insubordination. What follows next is an epic chase scene, after which Neo learns about a world beyond his that will completely upheave his life.

Of course, these events are the prelude in the wildly popular movie "The Matrix." With its jaw-dropping visuals, strong acting chops, and dystopian premise, audiences were quite literally sucked in. A world where artificial intelligence carefully curates the world around us, feeding us precisely what it wants us to see, hear, and feel?

Wait a minute...

Floating Brains

The Matrix is probably the most popular example of the philosophical "brain in the vat" (BIV) question. This idea is just Cartesian skepticism on steriods, and basically asks the fundamental question: how do we, as humans, actually perceive reality? Are our senses representative of the world around us? And do facts and truth even exist, or are they just subjective conclusions reached by floating brains in amniotic fluid, an experiment for some galactic scale AI?

These questions have been beaten to death by centuries of philosophers, but an avenue with a little more space for thought is perhaps the idea of perception. Or rather, this is just the nature vs. nurture question that has similarly been prodded, smacked by a wooden club, and pulled apart like sticky dough.

I digress.

The BIV idea is that our perceptions of the world can be controlled, utterly and completely, and therefore our perceptions can be channeled to form the people we are today. But do our environments truly account for the kind of people we are today? Or do we all have some protagonist gene in ourselves, like Neo, that tells us when things are not as they should be?

Garden of Tech

This brings us to the question of culture. For the vast majority of human history, human on human interaction has been the nucleus of the social condition. Our ancestors had their most meaningful communions with other humans face to face, developing customs, language, and traditions that are the foundation of human culture. In short, the environment of humans was that of human culture.

However, is that still the case today? The increasing prevalence of artifically generated content is enroaching on the boundaries of society. Sure, the technology was developed by us, with all the cultural implications behind it, but the way chatbots and other forms of artificial intelligence function is fundamentally self-generated. Basically, we are reaching a turning point in which AI is truly coming up with ideas generated from pure data, removed from the inherent connotations of human ingenuity. We have hit a completely unexplored frontier. Namely:

We are reaching the point where our culture is inheriting artificiality over originality.

Hang on, you might be thinking. What's the big deal? AI is just a new technological development that can help us enrich our lives right? This all goes back to the idea of the brain in the vat. If we humans have sovereignty over our social interactions, then the environment that influences our behavior and actions (culture) is that of humanity. If, an entity independent of humanity and ethics takes control of our attention and environment, we enter a future of great uncertainty.

If we entrust our attention to a sysetm predicated on stealing our attention, are we not giving up our individuality and agency?

TikTok, our Overlord?

Which brings us to a thought that congealed into my brain on a recent rewatch of the movie: don't we already have a massive, AI-controlled company lurking around that is dedicated completely to commanding our attention? While obviously not taking control of our literal minds (and I'm not trying to be a doomsayer), but the ability of such a website to hold our attention and influence the way we behave and act is alarming to say the least.

According to ReNu Psychology and Counseling, the active and constant state of content bombardment that we receive from sites like TikTok have the effect of reducing our memory retention, shorten our attention spans, etc. etc. This phenomenon has even been termed "TikTok Brain," and the effect is obvious even to the eye test.

Especially in the case of teenagers and young adolescents, the most coveted target audience for our autocratic overlords, the effect on developing brains can be severe and the ramifications not well understood. By constantly exposing our youngest generation to the mind-bending powers of social media, are we not setting up the stage for more and more of our free will to be sapped away in the future?

As technology continues to develop, the fact is that TikTok might end up being small potatoes in comparison to more advanced and covert ways of controlling the way we think and perceive the world. Rather than submit and defeat, should we not encourage healthier and most responsible action? Much like we are what we eat, and the ways that our bodies develop is based on the foods we put in, mental health is very much the same. By building strong habits and goals towards things that we find meaningful in life, we too can take the red pill and face the true world around us with confidence.