It takes the released prisoner a long time to absorb the entire truth, but when he does, and is ready to go back and inform the other prisoners of the truth, they will certainly deny him, as he would be trying to tell them that all that they have been perceiving is false, and the only truth is that which they haven’t seen. This goes back to the concept of “seeing is believing” where even Neo would have not been convinced of the matrix simply through communication.
Therefore, the matrix is like the cave (the system) in the way that we discover that there are prisoners (everyone connected to the system) who have been bound since infancy, in a dark, underground cavern (the matrix). All that they see is the interior of a cave wall, and on it are projected shadowy images from a fire behind them (the neural messages in the matrix machine). These prisoners don’t know they’re prisoners; don’t think they’re prisoners, just like the encapsulated humans. This is the only reality that they’ve ever known. The life they’ve lead is not in fact the totality for them, what is possible for them. And if they can release themselves from bonds they don’t even see, they then will able to see the world as it truly is. And similarly we have Neo’s situation in the matrix, we have trinity and Morpheus reaching out to neo, bringing him, through his own choice, into being unchained, or in this case, unplugged.
The idea of the matrix is primarily centered on the philosophical views of Socrates “All that is certain is that nothing is certain.” And thus, the viewers understand that there is no possible way of distinguishing the world that we perceive and the imagination of the human mind. In fact, there is no way to determine whether this ‘reality’ is genuinely real, regardless of the perceiver being a direct realist or a representative realist, unless there is intervention from the ‘real world’, as what happens with Neo. Socrates also advocates famously that true knowledge is “knowing that which you do not know”, and hence the recognition of the limits of our knowledge would be foundational to beginning to remedy that condition, because once the limits are identified, one may try to break them, as Neo comes to realise exponentially. This untapped knowledge is evident in the quote: “You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel 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 is there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me.“
The irony is that in the matrix, people are eventually the means of production. This is conveyed through a powerful symbol of people being batteries. While they sleep their bodies are actually energy sources that power this whole mechanical society. These people, when they are completely asleep to what’s going on around them are exploited to an extent that they’ve given up their very life force to run the society in a lot of ways. When we become passive consumers, we are surrendering our life force. It shows how people, have had their perceptions blinded and enslaved by the drive to create a functional society, and so “we see things not as they are, but as we are”. It is because of this that one ought to be suspicious of all forms of obedience that requires a certain kind of blind submission to authority.
Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that asks the questions: “what is reality? How do you define real?” It casts doubt on all of human knowledge, reducing it to its foundations and then trying to build it back up again. The matrix shows us that the reality, as a harmonious uniformity of matter, as materiality, is potentially unreal, due to the fact that we simply cannot prove that what we see is not the product of our thinking. The philosophy of the Matrix has very common features with the philosophy of Descartes. Rene’ Descartes went further than Socrates and thought that he had a theory to everything, and where he mentions methodical doubt, the only thing that he could not doubt is In his quote: “Cogito ergo sum”, meaning “I think therefore I am”, basically referring to his individual existence. If neo was to doubt the existence of everything around him, the world which he perceives, he would not be non-existent, because by simply doubting, he is thinking, and hence he evidently exists, or at least, his mind does. In conclusion it is by doubting that Neo came to understand and accept the ‘fact’ that he had been living a dream world until he was enlightened and introduced to the ‘real’ world, but who is to say that this ‘real’ world is not another product of the matrix? To eliminate any skepticism towards the system? In fact, who is to say that anything besides the mind of the individual thinker exists? Because there are no absolute distinctions between what is true and what is false.
Bibliography
http://groups.google.com.au/group/platoscave?hl=en
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/René_Descartes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plato
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates
www.youtube.com/?gl=GB&hl=en-GB
