Descartes wrestles with the notions of consciousness and
existence. He begins his discussion by doubting everything that he
thought he knew and tries to find something that he can know for certain. How
do we know that we are not actually sleeping when awake and dreaming what we
think to be our lives? What is to say we are not just a brain in a vat
hooked up to a machine that stimulates the brain to think it is living out a
life? These are some of the same questions that Neo encounters. In
fact, we first see Neo awake (a motif that runs throughout the matrix) and ask
a customer at the door if he experiences the feeling when you are not sure if
you are awake or still dreaming. After having a conversation with the
mysterious woman from the opening scene of the Matrix, Neo wakes up in
his bed and is late for work. The reader
is supposed to question whether or not that was a dream. When Neo receives a call from Morpheus, the
man he has been looking for, and is chased down by three men in suits, known as
agents, we understand that the scene from the night before was real.
The agents bring Neo to an interrogation room. One agent begins to discuss Neo’s life and
mentions that Neo seems to live two lives, just another instance of questioning
the reality of life. The examination becomes disturbing when somehow Neo’s lips
melt together. The agents then force him
on to the table and plant a “bug” in him.
As if did not happen, we find Neo wake up in his bed, mouth back
to normal, and questioning whether or not he had just dreamt that horrific
scene. The questions that Descartes
brings up in the Second Meditation
come back in full force at this moment.
It is unclear to the viewer and Neo what he is actually experiencing and
whether he is awake or dreaming. We find out that all of these experiences were
“real” (to a certain degree, I will
explain how they are not actually real later) when Morpheus summons Neo and
they remove the bug that was implanted in him.
This leads
to the most crucial scene of the movie.
Morpheus offers Neo two options: the red pill or the blue pill. The red pill will give Neo the answers he is
looking for and the blue pill will let him return home and pretend like none of
these experiences ever happened. Neo
chooses the red pill. Morpheus then
pulls Neo out of the “Matrix.” He wakes
up in a vat filled with pink ooze, hooked up to a bunch of cables all over
his body. When he looks around him he
sees thousands of these vats everywhere and electrical pulses firing at
them. When Morpheus and his crew recover
Neo, he is too weak to do anything because he is using his real body for the
first time. As Neo gains strength,
Morpheus informs Neo and us that although we thought the year was 1999, the
real world is in the year 2199. He
continues to tell us that humans invented Artificial Intelligence and a battle
ensued. The computers won and they
generate their power from the electrical impulses of the human brain. We then figure out that the thousands of vats
that Neo saw were human fields for generating electricity for the machines.
This is the
issue that Descartes is trying to resolve in the Second Meditation. He wants
to figure out a way to know that what we know and experience is real. He wants to disprove that the world we live
in is actually a computer generated dream world and that we are all actually
just brains connected to plugs sitting in pink vats. Descartes answers these questions by
doubting. Not just plain old doubting,
but understanding that while thinking in the moment that he doubts, he knows
that he exists or cogito ergo sum. Although the process by which Neo understands
the “real” world is different then Descartes’ meditations, Neo too uses doubt
to come to terms with reality. If he had
not doubted his consciousness to begin with, he never would have searched for
Morpheus and answers to his questions.
Neo awakens one last time at the end of the movie, at which point
he becomes the One and finally overcomes his doubt and returns to life.
I hope you watch this interesting and intriguing film. And if you feel so obliged, check out the Matrix Reloaded and the Matrix Revolutions. These other films follow the story of Neo and complicate the philosophy of the Matrix to a whole new level.
I'm going to add a note from a Religious Studies major's perspective, and mention that this strain of philosophy that one can view is but one of many systems of thinking applicable to this film. The Matrix series can easily be considered to be an example of early Gnostic Christian beliefs. In short, early Gnostics believed that most humans were minor angels who had become entrapped by the physical realm and forgotten their true nature. They further believed that it was Jesus (a figured represented by the character Neo, in this instance) who was sent to share the secret of 'humanities' true identity and return them to their proper, higher level of existence. These bigger questions of human identity and human nature predate our questions here and even our philosophers by many centuries, and in more ways than we could address! I find it fascinating that we are still working through these questions of reality and human identity more than a millennium later.
ReplyDeleteWhat your blog post does a nice job of addressing is the way that the matrix walks the audience through the deceiver argument that Descartes makes. While in the real world neo is constantly running into the issue that the world he lives in does not exist, that there is another "more real" world aside from the one he inhabits, or there is something about his world that isn't quite right. In the matrix the machines play the role of Descartes deceiver creating a world inside of everyone plugged into it fooling everyone in the matrix into thinking they are part of the real world. Once neo is unplugged we learn that all aspects of his life are deceptions except, and this is Descartes key point here, for himself. The machines fooled him about everything in his world except for the fact that exists. Just as Descartes describes in his meditation, nothing is certain except that "I think".
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