The Matrix, The Grand Inquisitor, and ChatGPT

The Ancient Logic Behind Our Surrender to Machines

Image: Neo awakens in the pod, pinterest.com

René Descartes considered the possibility that everything he thought was the result of his mind being controlled by an evil demon. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Jesus will be killed by the Church as a heretic in the Spanish Inquisition for the good of humanity. As we wrestle with what cultural role to grant to ChatGPT, large language models, and other forms of artificial intelligence, these arguments from our pre-digital past may hold some warnings that we ought to heed.

Brains-in-Vats

René Descartes wanted to know one thing: what can we truly know? What stands beyond any possibility of doubt?

One winter, he secluded himself in a small cabin, an almost too ideal setting for a philosopher sifting thought down to what is knowable. Descartes’ aim was to strip off every belief that could be slightly uncertain and keep only what was absolutely certain.

Isolated, bed-bound, buried under covers in a cabin blanketed with snow, Descartes imagined there exists an evil demon, an all-powerful deceiver, controlling his mind, making him believe all he believed, taking pleasure in leading him astray. Descartes was not delusional from the cold. He wasn’t claiming that this demon exists. His question was simpler: Is it possible? If such deception could happen, then perhaps everything he believed might be false. The point wasn’t to be realistic, but to explore what’s logically possible. And once Descartes opened that door, philosophy was never quite the same. Logical possibility became the raw material of thought.

Still, not everything could be doubted. He realized there was one truth even the evil demon couldn’t make up, his own existence. To be deceived, there must first be a me to deceive. I might be wrong about everything I think, but the act of being wrong presupposes that I’m thinking, and thinking presupposes a thinker. “I think, therefore I am.” The demon may distort everything else, but not that Descartes existed in order to experience that distortion.

In the twentieth century, philosophers reimagined the scenario. The demon gave way to technology. How do you know you’re not simply a brain floating in a vat, connected by wires to a supercomputer feeding you every thought, sensation, and emotion you have? The question remains the same: it’s about logical possibility, not practical or behavioral reality. And that difference, the difference between what’s logically conceivable and what’s humanly livable, will be central for Dostoevsky.

By the early 21st century, this philosophical puzzle took cinematic form in The Matrix. Humanity is literally reduced to brains in vats, living out illusions while machines harvest their energy. A few are offered a choice: take the blue pill and remain in the comforting dream, or take the red pill and confront the brutal truth of reality.

A strict utilitarian might say, “Stay in the illusion. It’s safer, less painful, and happiness is what matters most.” But most of us sense something deeper: that truth itself carries value, even when it wounds. To know what is real—to bear the weight of it—is part of what it means to be fully human.

And that brings us to the question: which would you choose?

This, in essence, is the question Fyodor Dostoevsky grappled with in the nineteenth century alongside thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur Schopenhauer. They shifted the conversation from what’s logically possible to what’s existentially possible. What it means to act, to feel, to live. That shift toward experience, choice, and subjectivity still shapes how we speak today. When we say, “In my experience,” or “I saw it differently,” we’re echoing that existential turn, the recognition that existential truth is something we live, not just something we think.

The Pain of Freedom

Image: Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, EvangelicalFocus.com

The Brothers Karamazov is the story of a family wrestling with the most profound questions of human existence, including morality and the existence of God. Alexei is a devout monk, dedicating his life to his religion. Alyosha is kind, good-hearted, too earnest to be corrupted. Ivan is an atheist who has an edge and a brain to match. To explain his rejection of religion, Ivan tells his brothers the story of the Grand Inquisitor.

Set in sixteenth-century Spain during the height of the Inquisition, the story unfolds in a city where a heretic is about to be burned at the stake. As the crowd gathers, the Grand Inquisitor sees a commotion up the road. He recognizes the figure immediately, it is Him. Christ has returned. Without hesitation, the Inquisitor orders Jesus’s arrest. That night, he descends into the dungeon to tell Him that He will burn at the stake tomorrow. Why? Because Christ, he says, “got it all wrong.”

What you bring, the Inquisitor explains to Jesus, is Truth, and that Truth shall set you free. But freedom is hard. Freedom is painful. Freedom is anxious. It will surely be misused, unbinding the binds of the community. Triggering alienation, suffering, starvation, and destruction.

The responsibility of freedom is not what the people want. They don’t want to work for their bread. People hand us their freedom for the protection and security we provide. The freedom you offer is a burden, a never-ending choice and consequence without predictable outcomes. “We don’t need you,” the Grand Inquisitor says, “We just need your name.”

Dostoyevsky is arguing that we should not even offer the pills. Those in control have the duty to take the red pill and force-feed the blue to the masses. Being the Grand Inquisitor is to be the one who bears the responsibility of the freedom of humanity with all of its suffering. Something he is taking on to save the happiness of humanity. Jesus may have died for humanity’s sins, but the Inquisitor is living with those sins, carrying their weight himself as his own cross to bear.

ChatGPThee

And that brings us to the most modern version of the question. With artificial intelligence, we now have real-life brains-in-vats, but in a fascinating inversion, these are now threatening to become our Grand Inquisitors. They contain the potential to shape our world artificially, bringing a digital blue pill that allows them to control our reality with the promise of an easier life.

AI is amazing. It is capable of finding patterns in huge mountains of data, allowing it to expose truths we never would have been able to find ourselves. It can write computer code to develop applications more complex than we could have made. It can spot trends and make predictions. It can tell if you’ve bought a new house. It knows what films you are likely to enjoy. It knows if you are probably going to have an affair and with whom. This knowledge makes it seem super-intelligent, if not omniscient.

It can now write essays and stories, often better than we can. It can make images, new pictures that we would never be able to draw ourselves. It appears not only brilliant but creative. It seems to have the capacities of a human, only better. And so, many of us are coming to trust it more than we trust ourselves.

Businesses could harness this in a way that requires paying fewer employees and gets superior work. We can have increased production of superior products. Such as precise robotic surgeons. AI will make life better for humans. We want to be comfortable, and AI can complete tasks that can lead to useful products designed the way we want them to be…even if we didn’t realize that that was how we wanted them. It hopes to know what we want better than we do, and so it can fulfill our desires.

But at a cost, a profound cost that we pay with our autonomy. The Grand Inquisitor holds that our personhood and the freedom it brings are burdens to us that cause us to suffer. We are happier living in a lie. And we know that AI has hallucinations, that is, the world it creates is different from the actual reality. Accepting the AI-generated realm as our own would be to opt into the Matrix, to remand oneself to the status of a brain-in-a-vat controlled by a brain-in-a-vat. But it is a really exciting vat.

The question that Descartes and Dostoevsky asked is now one we must answer. Reality is expensive. Virtual reality even more so. Which will we choose? Or has the choice already been made for us?

See Sir John Gielgud portraying the Grand Inquisitor here.