Remember the "Truman Show Delusion" in which someone is convinced they are starring in their own reality TV show? In a similar delusional vein is the "Matrix Defense" used in the last few years in courts by accused murderers who either truly believe (or pretend to believe) that they are living in the same simulated reality that's the setting of the 1999 film The Matrix and so their heinous crimes were not "real." (Of course, many people do think we may be living in a simulation, but they don't kill others with the "simulation argument" as their excuse.) Over at Mysterious Universe, Brent Swancer tells of these tragic acts:
In July of 2002, 37-year-old Tonda Lynn Ansley, of Butler County, Ohio, got a gun and proceeded to shoot a Miami University professor who she was renting a house from, Sherry Lee Corbett, 55, multiple times in the head. The coldblooded murder was carried out in full view of startled witnesses in broad daylight, and Ansley was quickly detained. Upon questioning, Ansley told detectives that she believed that the world they were in was not real, and that she was living in a computer simulation like in The Matrix. In this alternate reality, she said that her landlady had been involved in a conspiracy to keep her brainwashed and under the control of the simulation, as well as "invading her dreams," with the ultimate goal of killing her. In Ansley's mind, this was all simple self-defense against the sinister agents conspiring to keep her in the virtual dream world. She would say of her perceived predicament:
"They commit a lot of crimes in 'The Matrix. That's where you go to sleep at night and they drug you and take you somewhere else and then they bring you back and put you in bed and, when you wake up, you think that it's a bad dream."
"Mysterious Murders and The Matrix" (Mysterious Universe)
