Was written hundreds of years ago

Which pill will you take; will it be the red one or the blue? Will you choose the blissfulness of ignorance, or will you see how far down the rabbit hole goes? This is a question you need to answer, when you decide to dive into the philosophy of the Matrix, one of the biggest blockbuster film trilogies, joining notable other such film trilogies as Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Terminator, and Star Trek. The Matrix although it has the ability to make lots of money on ticket sales and merchandise, it also has the ability to make you think about the world around you in ways that you had never thought to, and to question what you know and don’t know.

So you have chosen the red pill! Well let’s take a leap down the rabbit hole. To help me in this journey, I will be relying on a few sources, first being- The Matrix and Philosophy: Welcome to the desert of the Real edited by William Irwin, Philosophy of Technology edited by Robert C. Scharff and Val Dusek, and last source I will be citing are my own ideas that have been created in me through viewing the films, reading books on th

Freedom. Everybody wants it. But can anybody have it? Morpheus wants to free humans from the Matrix, Cypher wants to free himself from Morpheus, and Agent Smith wants to free the computers from the humans. But even if these characters were able to free themselves from their alleged oppressors, would they be in control of their lives? Would they be masters of their fate or would they still be slaves to an inescapable destiny?

Naturally, the distinction between real and unreal must be justified in terms of some properties that separate them. It would not do just to say that they are different without being able to point out what the differences between them consists of. Moreover, whatever property (or properties) is used to distinguish between the real and unreal must also belong to the things that are classified as such. So our question is: What is it that is common to all real things and common to all unreal things, that makes them what they are and different from each other? Or put in anther way, why is it that minds, machines, human bodies, computer programs, and electrical signals are real and simulation, images, digital entities, dreams, appearances, mental projection, the Matrix, and computer programs are not real?

It is up to you now the reader/listener to take all this and ask your self the question of do you believe in this reality or is there other one, where you exists in a bubble of ooze and where you are nothing more then a coppertop for machines and your mind locked in a prison in a computer controlled world your mind was placed in. Or are you in a reality of someone else’s mind, so what is real?

So, what are the categories of the real and the unreal that we need to into account? There are at least three main categories of the real, although only one of these is mentioned explicitly in the film. Subcategories of the other two are given, but the categories themselves are not mentioned is “mind” and the categories not mentioned but used are “non-mind” and “composites of mind and non-mind.” The category of mind includes human minds, such as Neo, Morpheus, you and me.

He recalls that his colleague’s question is not so new one. His compatriot Descartes had raised it against himself when asking how an isolated mind could be absolutely as opposed to relatively sure of anything about the outside world. Of course he framed his question in a way that made it impossible to give the only reasonable answer, which we in the science studies have slowly rediscovered three centuries later: that we are relatively sure of many of the things with which we are daily engaged through the practice of our laboratories. By Descartes’s time this sturdy relativism, based on the number of relations established with the world, was already in the past, a once-passable path now lost in the thicket of brambles. Descartes was asking for absolute certainty from a brain-in-a-vat, a certainty that was not needed when the brain (or the mind) was firmly attached to its body and the body thoroughly involved in its normal ecology. As in Curt Siodmak’s novel Donovan’s Brain, absolute certainly is the sort of neurotic fantasy that only a surgically removed mind would look for after it had lost everything else. Like a heart taken out of a young woman who has just died in an accident and soon to be transplanted into someone else’s thorax thousands of miles away, Descartes’s mind requires artificial life-support to keep it viable. Only a mind put in the strangest position, looking at a world from the inside out and linked to the outside by nothing but the tenuous connection of the gaze will throb in the constant fear of losing reality; only such a bodiless observer will desperately look for some absolute life-supporting survival kit.

The Platonic allusion is unmistakable; we cannot but think of the famous simile of the cave, described in the Republic, Book VII. According to it, we are all like prisoners in an undergro

Some topics in this essay:
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