The Matrix and Philosophy: Explaining the Ideas Beneath the Groundbreaking Sci-Fi Trilogy - Associated Content |
Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:31 PM PST But when The Matrix came out in 1999, it seemed as if the glory days of cerebral sci-fi fare were back with a vengeance. The movie asked us to contemplate a philosophical theme at least as old as Rene Descartes. How do I know that the experiences I have are actually real, and not simply cognitive stimuli coming from some hidden source? To Descartes, this became what we now call the evil demon hypothesis. Descartes wondered how we could disprove the idea that every single thing we experience wasn't really some nefarious entity tricking our minds. That illustration seems rather antiquated to the secular mind, and Harvard philosopher Hillary Putnam repopularized the idea by asking how do I know I'm not just a brain in a vat? Putnam asked us to imagine a disembodied brain, suspended in some life sustaining goo, that was hooked up to a set of wires that transmit signals to the brain the way our own nervous system does. At the other end of those wires is a computer that sends inputs to our mind, causing us to process sensory information that we perceive to be sights, sounds, tastes, etc. In reality, however, we're just receiving electrical impulses via some unseen source. This is the world Neo finds himself in when he finally "wakes up" from the matrix. He was, in quite a literal sense, plugged in to a machine that fed his mind a false reality. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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