The Matrix

Which similarity does the thoughts of Descartes and The Matrix has?

The Matrix is about Thomas Anderson (Neo), which lives a secret life as a hacker, searching for an answer: What is the Matrix? He gets in contact with Morpheus, which offers to give the answer. I agree on the terms and join Morpheus and his crew. Neo wakes up in a tub with wires all other him. Around him he sees fields of humans lying just like him. The other pick him up in a hovercraft, and tells him the situation.

The thing is that it is really year 2199 and the humans are fighting a loosing battle against intelligent machines, created in the early 21st century. In the fight the humans has burned the sky, to cut the energy for the machine. Searching for other energy sources, they found humans. They started to grow humans and extract the energy, using huge fields of humans lying in a sate of coma. Connected to the Matrix, what we see as the “real world”. The fight for freedom begins.

The Matrix is obvious influenced by cyberpunk and the hacker culture, films like “Hackers” and “Ghost in the Shell”. There are also similarities to William Gibson’s “Neuromancer”.

There are also strong links to Descartes “scepticism”. The film asks the same questions as Decartes does, when Morpheus must explains when Neo refuses to believe what he sees; “What is real? How do you define, ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.” (http://www.janushead.org/7-2/Garza.pdf, 22/3-07)

How can you be sure that what you see and feel is real? “Everything I can be sure of, I question” (Descartes)
Descartes means that information can’t be trusted, how do you know it is real? The same goes with what you see and what you feel, it can betray you. We can be sure that our senses are true. We can’t either trust our mind, it can be affected of unknown stimuli, drugs, or we can be mentally ill and hallucinate. So question everything that you don’t know. “Descartes peels away the layers of beliefs and opinions that clouded his view of the truth” (http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/descarte.htm, 22/3-07). And the only thing you know for sure is that you are alive, in some way. “I think, therefore I am” (Descartes). This way of thinking is called “scepticism”.

Matrix is highly influenced by this way of thinking. We live in our own world without setting any questions to the world around us. When we in fact are bread by machines contained in a computer program. We should have asked the questions Descartes asked, because the world we live in is in fact not real! The conscious world “res cogitans” is in the Matrix, while the body’s world “res extenca” is in the real world. The body and the mind are divided.

The Better Life

The idea of being some one else has existed to all time. We have all had ideas like that, but that is briefly. Most of us are pleased with their self and life. But there are some that feel life isn’t too good. It is a way to escape from your self into another world, where you can become the person that you always wanted to be. There are role-plays and virtual worlds on the Internet.

The predecessors to the virtual worlds are role-plays. Role-plays there are no simple escapes from the real to the unreal. It operates between the non-real life and the real life. The virtual worlds, also called MUD’s (Multi-User Dungeons), builds on the same principles but are more intense in a way. The game never stops, continuing around the clock. You can decent into another and better world.

For many people this can become a rescue from a cruel and hard world. But is this all good? It can become an obsession, which they do not want to log out from the virtual world. Then you give up your real world and emerge completely to a face world that does not exist. By using all you time in a virtual game you may loose the grip on the real social world. By using all your time in the cyber world I see it as giving up the real world. “Virtual worlds provide environments for experiences that may be hard to come by in the real”. (Turkle 1994)
But on another hand, if you are able to control the use it can be a good way to build you self up. Becoming more confident on your self or working on different problems. It can be seen as an alternative therapy.


Herman

(Sherry Turkle_ Construction and Reconstructions of the Self in Virtual Reality_ 1994)

A Cyborg Manifesto

In A Cyborg Manifesto Donna Harraway wrights about the extend and importance of rearrangements, in the global social relations, which is tied to science and technology. She looks at the change we have seen from old hierarchical dominations to what she calls “scary” new networks. i.e.:

Old hierarchical dominations - New networks
Representation Simulation

Reproduction Simulation

Family/Factory Women in the integrated circuit

Sex Genetic engineering

Labour Robotics

Second World War Star Wars

This gives a good insight in Harraways thinking by comparing the old and the describing what the different things are going to become in the future.
Cyborg has a central role in her work. A cyborg is a person that is partly machine, partly human. She looks at the new times with the new technology as a tool to work for feminism.