Do you take the red pill or the blue pill? The question, which at its heart has to do with either accepting or rejecting the illusions that constitute some or all of life as you know it, became part of the culture almost immediately after Morpheus, Lawrence Fishburne’s character in The Matrix, put it to Keanu Reeves’ protagonist Neo. That film, a career-making success for its directors the Wachowski sisters (then the Wachowski brothers), had its own elaborate vision of a false reality entrapping humanity as the actual one surrounds it, a vision made realizable by the finest late-1990s computer-generated special effects. But the ideas behind it, as this Film Radar video essay shows, go back a long way indeed.
The first and by far the most respected of the trilogy, The Matrix “largely interprets Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Imagine a cave. Inside are people who were born and have spent their entire lives there, chained into a fixed position, only able to see the wall in front of them. As far as they know, this is the entire world.” The Wachowskis ask the same question Plato does: “How do we know what our reality really is?”
When they have Morpheus bring Neo out of his “cave” of everyday late-20th-century existence, they do it in a manner analogous to Plato’s Analogy of the Sun, in which “the sun is a metaphor for the nature of reality and knowledge concerning it,” and the eyes of the fearful few forced out of their cave need some time to adjust to it.
But when one “unplugs” from the illusion-generating Matrix of the title — a concept now in consideration again thanks to the popularity of the “simulation argument” — a longer journey toward that really-real reality still awaits. The second and third installments of the trilogy involve a dive into “religious philosophy from the East,” especially the idea of escape from the eternal soul’s reincarnation “into other physical forms in an infinite cycle where the soul is left to wander and suffer” by means of a spiritual quest for “enlightenment, by uniting body and mind with spirit.” This leads, inevitably, to self-sacrifice: by finally “allowing himself to die,” Neo “is reunited with spirit” and “becomes the true savior of humanity” — a narrative element not unknown in religious texts even outside the East.
These count as only “a few of the philosophical ideas the Wachowskis explore in the Matrix trilogy,” the others including Robert Nozick’s “Experience Machine,” Descartes’ “Great Deceiver,” and other concepts from Kant and Hume “questioning reality, causality, and free will, not to mention the obvious commentary on technology or a submissive society.” Of course, philosophical exploration in The Matrix involve countless flying — and gravity-defying — fists and bullets, much of it performed by characters clad in reflective sunglasses and black leather. Perhaps that datedness has prompted the recent announcement of a Matrix reboot: though the styles may change, if it happens, the ideas would no doubt remain recognizable to Plato himself.
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Daniel Dennett and Cornel West Decode the Philosophy of The Matrix
The Matrix: What Went Into The Mix
Free Online Philosophy Courses
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The ‘Matrix’ film was of a population as ‘prisoner’s because they were all living within a reality and a ‘body’ both of which weren’t real. In other words, you are essentially a prisoner specifically because your body and your reality are FAKE. You are then in effect nothing more than a ‘shadow’ on the wall of a fake reality.
As the entire basis of the ‘Matrix’ artificial reality type rests on the premise that your current body is fake then you’d imagine that a search for:
‘Plato’s cave two bodies interfaced together Matrix reality’
… would return more than a handful of pages.
I’ve also never seen mentioned in any Plato’s cave matrix artificial reality comparison discussions and particularly on philosophy orientated web sites that a fake reality would have both the MOTIVE as well as the opportunity to directly manipulate it’s residents and would perhaps particularly do this when the residents of a fake reality are discussing the possibility of whether they are living within a fake reality or not!!!
Some reasoned/rational ‘Matrix’ reality speculation pages can be found on clivehetherington.com
The cave and the Matrix both have the
Motive to control its residents if they ate living in a fake reality or a living
We live in two spaces, the feeling space centered in our organs, and the thinking space centered in our brain. The first one works in quantum time, the second in linear time. Child amnesia is when the second takes the lead because our society favored it. The fabric of our life is made of feelings and we only have that. A feeling or affect has a tridimensional structure: body tension, body activation and proto-representation of belly malaise or belly well-being which will give “it’s bad” or “it’s good” and the conotation of all the concepts ( on side of the definition of the dictionary). the reason is for survival: at any time we need to know if our situation is good or bad, to cope with the situation and have our body ready to fight or flee or freeze. The feeling space is an on-going monitoring process which compute all the stimuli from the outside and internal in no time, and resume them in a feeling. Remember the last time you jump back while you wanted to cross the street but didnt see the motorcycle…your on-going monitoring process is here for you to thank. The gut feeling that saved it all but never recognized for what it is. The free will that fleeting moment where you will have the precipitate of a feeling as good or bad. Most of us, borderline, have cut the bridge between the two spaces because we didn’t receive our count of unconditional love as infant, and the big monster anger inside us was so frightening as all power baby who could destroy the world and kill the caregivers. That the eternal internal conflict most of us drag on, until you recognize that lowering the anger allows you to get self-confidence. then, you become more difficult to manipulate and to keep in the matrix. It happens that mediation is a way to renew the bridge: put the tension as low as possible, don’t move, let you thinking stop. no words because there is none in the feeling space. With your true self aside of your feelings: have anger, no more angry, You don’t blur with your feelings no more, as you don’t blur with the words.I could develop more, but I only want to add, we are safe from the AI as long as they don’t have feelings (not imitation). Truth is, I don’t know what a quantum computer is capable of. The crisis we are going on with the militaro-industrial complex and deepstate and CB, is centered around quantum computers, but far from our eyes. Last time they organized the death camps with IBM machines, no they hope the all planet with become a death camp where they can decide who lives and who dies. I hope you are awaken, it is frightening but also exciting time to be alive. Cheers!