The Gospel According to the Matrix

I have posted some­thing for AC (Asso­ci­ated Con­tent), which has touted itself as “the people’s media com­pany”.

I am repost­ing the first part of the arti­cle here. Don’t for­get to click on the link at the bot­tom, con­tinue read­ing the rest of the arti­cle in AC and rate the arti­cle (the rat­ing wid­get is at the upper right side of the arti­cle). That would help raise my clout in AC.

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The Gospel Accord­ing to the Matrix
Eric San­til­lan

The Matrix has been called by some movie­go­ers as a modern-day ren­di­tion of Plato’s Alle­gory of the Cave. We notice for exam­ple the dif­fer­ent binary oppos­ing themes found in both the film and the Alle­gory: appearance/reality, dream/wakefulness, shadows/forms, vir­tual reality/actual real­ity. Sim­i­lar to the Alle­gory of the Cave, the basic ques­tion of the Matrix is: what if what I think of as the real world is not really real? What if I am in “a cave”? Or more specif­i­cally in the movie: “How do I know that this world I’m liv­ing in, is the real world and not a vir­tual real­ity pro­gram cre­ated by arti­fi­cial intelligence?”

Which also sounds like Descartes prob­lem in Med­i­ta­tions on First Phi­los­o­phy. How do I know that I am not just dream­ing? That I am not a fool imag­in­ing all this in my mind? How do I know that I am not being deceived? And a more fun­da­men­tal ques­tion: of what can I be cer­tain about? Where can I find the ground of cer­ti­tude?

In the film, the ques­tion of truth and the pre­sup­po­si­tions that go with it were pre­sented as a choice: the red pill or the blue pill. A choice between actual real­ity and the illu­sion of the Matrix. Cypher, the vil­lain, chose illu­sion. Neo, the main char­ac­ter, chose actual real­ity. Neo’s choice, of course, is what the film upholds.

Notice that the choice of Neo hinged on an expe­ri­ence of search­ing. Neo was already search­ing for a long time, feel­ing some kind of dis-ease, “know­ing” vaguely that there must be some­thing more to the world he is expe­ri­enc­ing at the moment. The choice of Neo hinged on a per­cep­tion that there is truth out there and truth–if it is to be truth at all–must be sought and found.

As Mor­pheus would describe it, “You’ve felt it your entire life, that there’s some­thing wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splin­ter in your mind, dri­ving you mad.” There were moments of doubt and skep­ti­cism, but his curios­ity about the pos­si­bil­ity of find­ing “the truth”, as well as that gnaw­ing feel­ing led him to Morpheus.

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