Sunday, February 6, 2011

The Matrix and Philosophy: Explaining the Ideas Beneath the Groundbreaking Sci-Fi Trilogy - Associated Content

The Matrix and Philosophy: Explaining the Ideas Beneath the Groundbreaking Sci-Fi Trilogy - Associated Content


The Matrix and Philosophy: Explaining the Ideas Beneath the Groundbreaking Sci-Fi Trilogy - Associated Content

Posted: 01 Feb 2011 12:31 PM PST

When Larry and Lana Wachowski presented us with the first Matrix film, they succeeded in reintroducing great philosophical debates within the context of a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster. Dating back to films such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, the sci-fi genre has a rich philosophical heritage. But as CGI effects and action oriented plots increasingly dominated science fiction films, it seemed as if popular science fiction was becoming a strictly visceral, rather than intellectual, cinematic experience.

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.

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