What is real, Morpheus?

Kudos to our Matrix reporters in section 9 on Tuesday, your dramatic entrance from the rear, your black leather look, your dimmed lights... it all created a powerful effect. Good job!

But I hope we'll find time eventually - take note, section 14 Matrix reporters - to revisit Morpheus' little speech:

What is real?  How do you define
real?  If you're talking about
your senses, what you feel, taste,

smell, or see, then all you're
talking about are electrical
signals interpreted by your brain.

If that's all we're talking about, we're going to have a hard time refuting Bishop Berkeley and the metaphysical idealists who say the world is nothing more than our ideas. Kicking stones will prove nothing. Maybe some of us are ok with that, I'm not. I think the whole external world/internal ideas paradigm is flawed.

But notice, "electrical signals interpreted by your brain" seems already to presuppose the substantial reality of brains and bodies as material entities... unless "brain" and everything else is interpreted, Berkeley-fashion, to mean merely "my idea of brain" etc.

I swallowed the red ("reality") pill in class, btw, and saved the blue one for bedtime. Sweet dreams!