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.