Although I doubt the makers of The Matrix actually believe there is any truth to the idea of the world being virtual or a computer program, the question is the world real? has been considered by philosophers. Plato used the prisoners-in-a-cave analogy to illustrate his belief that the world we inhabit isn’t real and that it comprises things that are mere shadows of their forms which are the perfect, real, eternal and changeless. C.S lewis’s Narnia books were influenced by these ideas (near the end of the story one of the children says it’s all in Plato); in the last battle it is revealed to the children that they are actually dead – they were killed in a railway accident. They pass over the shadowlands into the real world where they will live happily ever after.
Rene Descartes also considered the possibility that the world is a dreamworld; “I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from being asleep. The result is that I begin to feel dazed, and this very feeling only reinforces the notion that I may be asleep.” (Meditations, 13). He postulates that since dreams seem as vivid and realistic as real life we have no justification to believe that we are not dreaming or indeed that the world or our beliefs are real. In his argument Descartes is talking about a dreamworld created by a demon, but the principle can be applied to The Matrix and could be what influenced Morpeus’s lines: “Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real?” “What if you were unable to wake from this dream, Neo? How would you know the difference between the real world and the dreamworld?”
One would counter this scepticism with the common sense view that the world is real; as Bertrand Russell said of the universe, its “brute fact”. But history has shown common sense to be wrong eg the world being spherical, not flat. Furthermore, although the idea of a matrix seems untenable there is no real way to disprove; as the sceptics believe we will never really know. One could apply Ockham’s razor - when multiple probabilities are equally supported by evidence the simplest explanation is the correct one - to the dilemma of whether we are in a matrix but it remains ambiguous; if the world was real there would be only one world, but it would require far more real objects and minds.
http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_dream.html
- Film promotes truth, even at the expense of (comparative?) suffering; Cypher (‘ignorance is bliss’)is traitorous.
- Descartes meditation I & II
- Plato’s forms (prisoners in caves)
http://www.decentfilms.com/commentary/matrixissues.html
“Welcome to the real world.” First and foremost, although The Matrix depicts a world very much like our world as an illusion and a prison, it does not depict liberation or freedom from that illusion as escape from physicality into a state of disembodied happiness. On the contrary, the “real world” depicted in the film is even more intractably physical — and far more disturbing — than the illusions of the Matrix.
In fact, it’s precisely in the Matrix — not outside of it — that Neo and Morpheus and the others leave behind their real physical bodies and escape, at least partially, the constraints of gravity and other physical laws. Yet the film is quite clear that it’s the quasi-disembodied state of the Matrix that’s the prison, and the real, physical, bodily world, frightening as it is, that represents freedom.
The heroes of The Matrix are precisely those who have chosen to reject a comforting, disembodied illusion for the freedom of corporeal existence in the physical world, with all its rough edges and sharp corners. “Welcome to the real world,” Morpheus tells Neo when he emerges from the Matrix for the first time. Significantly, the one character who does finally choose the Matrix’s disembodied illusion over the reality of the physical world is precisely the traitor.
The film also establishes that, even while in the Matrix, the heroes remain inseparably dependent upon their physical bodies in the physical world. The importance of the body is graphically illustrated in a scene in which a character in the Matrix is prevented from returning to the real world when her body is forcibly unplugged from the Matrix. From a gnostic perspective, we might expect this to be the character’s moment of liberation from the prison of the body. Instead, she dies. This is hardly a gnostic repudiation of the body.
http://www.arrod.co.uk/essays/matrix.php
