Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
Plato, Descartes, And the Matrix
The Matrix can be compared with Plato and Descartes. While that might seem like a very odd comparison, there are many similarities. In each scenario, there is the concept of reality and how to determine what is real and what is not. While it may seem as though it is easy to tell if something is real or not real, the truth is more complicated. People can have experiences in their lives that feel completely unreal to them, and they can have dreams that feel so real that they have trouble understanding why they have ended once they wake up. Naturally, that is a serious concern for people who are attempting to really understand the truth. There are some differences in the three works, though, because Plato was fixated more on people seeing something while they were awake and not being exposed to anything else. Descartes was focused mainly on dreams, and the Matrix was dealing with a computer that everyone was hooked into that provided them with "reality." Of course, there are arguments about this issue and there are opinions to the contrary. Since technology can provide a person with so many different experiences and the human mind can do the same, it is conceivable that what people are experiencing and what they find real to them is not actually the truth regarding what occurs in life. People could be dreaming, living in a cave like Plato where they are not aware that there is more to life, or trapped in a matrix like the one in the movie. There is more to this issue, as well, because it is not just about whether these things are taking place, but about whether a person who was actually in that situation would want to know the truth about his or her "life."
In the Matrix, Cypher betrays Morpheus and implies that is it much better to live in the Matrix instead of being…
The Matrix and the Search for Truth In Descartes’ Meditations, he gives license to the idea that doubt can actually be a way of beginning one’s movement towards truth, just as doubt regarding the flickering of images on the cave wall by the inhabitant of Plato’s Cave begins his movement of turning around and seeing the outside sun and beginning the climb upward towards truth. Descartes seemingly encourages his philosopher-reader to
Matrix or the Cave? The Matrix (1999) has singlehandedly brought the debate over the epistemology of the Real into popular dialogue. For the first time in centuries --if not in history-- a large section of the common crowd had a metaphor by which to question the very existence of objective reality. At bus-stops and street-corners, in fast-food restaurants and movie-houses, populations who would never have read Plato or Heidegger were discussing
Matrix and Descartes The film The Matrix represents many of the ideas of Descartes regarding perception and reality, truth and selfhood, knowledge and falsehood. The film is about a man who is awakened from a simulated world and shown the reality of his life. The man's objective is to free humankind from its enslavement by machines. He achieves this objective by essentially putting mind over matter. This paper will discuss how
Philosophical Discussion of Descartes Man's incredible thirst for knowledge has spurred our species domination of the physical world, while also guiding the refinement of our morality, but throughout history the role of assumption in shaping knowledge has been the subject of intense philosophical debate. While Plato uses the sudden comprehension of geometric rules a slave in his classic Meno as proof that the paradox of learning is false, Descartes remained unconvinced
Objects had primary qualities of an independent of the observer, like mass, motion, texture, etcetera, as opposed to subjective qualities like color, taste, and smell. As the Matrix world was wholly subjective, it was therefore a false world and one should seek to escape it, as it shut a person out from full participation in a world of external substances, including God, and also the primary qualities of other
Seeking to strip his conception of knowledge to the bare minimum by removing all notions which can subject to reasonable doubt, Descartes differentiates between assumptions and true knowledge because, in his estimation, any perception based solely on sensory input is inevitably flawed, as the human sensory system is known to be fallible (Collingwood). By rejecting the role of assumptions in forming knowledge, Descartes devises perhaps the most well recognized