Sovannara chhim midterm blog #1

Sovannara chhim midterm blog #1       


        For my midterm I am looking into the movie The Matrix and how it revolves around many references to historical myths and philosophy. It revolves around such ideas from philsopher Plato. In the movie one of the main things is the illusion of the Matrix. Plato explores the idea that the real world is an illusion in the allegory of the cave in The Republic. Plato imagines a cave in which people have been kept prisoner since birth. These people are bound in such a way that they can look only straight ahead, not behind them or to the side. On the wall in front of them, they can see flickering shadows in the shape of people, trees, and animals. Because these images are all they’ve ever seen, they believe these images constitute the real world. One day, a prisoner escapes his bonds. He looks behind him and sees that what he thought was the real world is actually an elaborate set of shadows, which free people create with statues and the light from a fire. The statues, he decides, are actually the real world, not the shadows. Then he is freed from the cave altogether, and sees the actual world for the first time. He has a difficult time adjusting his eyes to the bright light of the sun, but eventually he does. Fully aware of true reality, he must return to the cave and try to teach others what he knows. The experience of this prisoner is a metaphor for the process by which rare human beings free themselves from the world of appearances and, with the help of philosophy, perceive the world truly. Neo is pulled from a kind of cave in the first Matrix film when he is freed from Morpheus by choosing the red pill, when he sees the real world for the first time. Everything he thought was real is only an illusion much like the shadows on the cave walls and the statues that made the shadows were only copies of things in the real world. Plato insists that those who free themselves and come to perceive reality have a duty to return and teach others, and this holds true in the Matrix films as well. As in the film when Neo finally believes he is the one he finally understands that he does not have to dodge bullets but can just slow them down and take control of everything around him.

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       Yet another philosophical topic form the Matrix films is the work of René Descartes, the man responsible for Cartesian coordinates and the phrase "I think, therefore I am." In his 1641 book on Meditations First Philosophy, Descartes poses the question of how he can know with certainty that the world he experiences is not an illusion being forced upon him by an evil demon. He reasons since he believes in what he sees and feels while dreaming, he cannot trust his senses to tell him that he is not still dreaming. His senses cannot provide him with proof that the world even exists. He concludes that he cannot rely on his senses, and that for all he knows, he and the rest of the world might all be under the control of an evil demon.
      Descartes’ evil demon is vividly realized in the Matrix films as the artificial intelligence that forces a virtual reality on humans. Just as Descartes realized that the sensations in his dreams were vivid enough to convince him the dreams were real, the humans who are plugged into the Matrix have no idea that their sensations are false, created artificially instead of arising from actual experiences. Until Neo is yanked from the Matrix, he, too, has no idea that his life is a virtual reality. Like Descartes, Neo eventually knows to take nothing at face value, and to question the existence of even those things, such as chairs, that seem most real.