The Matrix, when compared to Plato’s The Republic (“The Allegory of a Cave”), and Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy has numerous similarities and a few differences. It would seem that the creators of The Matrix were inspired, to an extent, by these writing of Plato and Descartes. Although each of these display it in a different way, the root of each of them is the desire of knowledge and truth rather than being deceived.
Comparing The Matrix and “The Allegory of a Cave” excerpt from Plato’s The Republic, there are few parallels to be noted. Each story deals with being deceived of what reality is. Neo, in The Matrix, believed he was living in the truth until Morpheus offers to show him what the true reality is. In “The Allegory of
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In The Matrix the character Cypher, states this when he says that he believes it better to live in the fake reality of the unknown than to identify the truth. Reality is harsh, often times knowing the truth breeds pain, but with the pain comes the freedom and joy of actually knowing what truth is. There cannot be freedom and joy if one is living in a lie. This is evident in the reality of how Neo continued and helped others understand this reality, and the man from the cave wanted to free the other man so they all could experience the good that comes with truth. The good is ultimately worth the pain. Descartes also supports that knowledge is better than ignorance as now he knows the truth and thankful to know longer be ignorant.
After comparing Hillary Putnam’s The Matrix to Plato’s The Republic (“The Allegory of a Cave”) and Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy, the emphasis on the importance having knowledge is seen continually. Each story explained it differently, but related back the deceitfulness of our senses versus knowledge. Living in lie is not reality and each character strived to exemplify the importance of why ultimately knowledge is worth having, even though it can bring
In one of Plato’s works called The Allegory of the Cave he goes over what it means to get higher knowledge and the path you have to take to get to this higher knowledge. Plato also goes over how this higher knowledge or enlightenment will affect people and how they act. He ties this all together through what he calls the cave. Plato tells Glaucon a sort of story about how the cave works and what the people within the cave have to do to get to the enlightenment. A while down the road the Wachowski siblings with the help of Warner Brothers Studios made a movie titled The Matrix. This movie follows the came concept that Plato does in the cave. With saying that the world that Neo (the main character) was living in was in fact not real but a made
This student of Philosophy now sees the movie The Matrix in a whole new way after gaining an understanding of some of the underlying philosophical concepts that the writers of the movie used to develop an intriguing and well thought out plot. Some of the philosophical concepts were clear, while others were only hinted at and most likely overlooked by those unfamiliar with those concepts, as was this student when the movie first came out in theaters all those many years ago. In this part of the essay we will take a look at the obvious and not so obvious concepts of: what exactly is the Matrix and how does it related to both Descartes and Plato, can we trust our own senses once we understand what the Matrix is, and how Neo taking the Red Pill is symbolic of the beginning of the journey out of Pl...
Throughout the novel Blood Music, by Greg Bear, remarkable similarities to the movie Matrix are observed. From the fact that both stories create an entirely new world to the main characters ultimately being in control, these two stories are one in the same. Seen in both the novel and the movie, the question of what is real? arises quite often. The characters also share the quality of being in more than one place at a time. The most incredible occurrence though is the ability to have unlimited knowledge. If looked at critically, many of the same elements or basic ideas are shared between Blood Music and Matrix.
The movie “The Matrix” contains many aspects that are similar to the works of Descartes, especially in his “Meditations on First Philosophy” where he has doubts about knowing if what he is experiencing is real life or if he is really just in a dream. In The Matrix, a computer programmer named Neo meets with a man named Morpheus after receiving anonymous messages from him through his computer. When he meets with Morpheus, he is given the option to either go back to his “normal” life in the matrix, or to find out what the matrix is and what true reality is. Neo chooses to find out more.
The "Allegory of the cave "is broken down into four levels. The cave itself representing the tunnel we as humans have dug for ourselves away from the world of learning and knowledge to a world of safe answers where nothing is ever questioned . The cave represents the human's subconscious struggle to be safe and hide from the unknown. Beginning with Level one . The shadow watchers(the mystified )Illusion the figures and shadows reflection on the cave wall.This level is best described as such because the prisoners are not seeing what is real .They are seeing a copy or illusion of what is the real.They are seeing what they want to see.Level two The shadow casters .I believe the shadow casters area people who realize that the world is not as it
The movie "Matrix" is drawn from an image created almost twenty-four hundred years ago by the greek philosopher, Plato in his work, ''Allegory of the Cave''.The Matrix is a 1999 American-Australian film written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. Plato, the creator of the Allegory of the Cave was a famous philosopher who was taught by the father of philosophy Socrates. Plato was explaining the perciption of reality from others views to his disciple Aristotle. The Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave share a simmilar relationship where both views the perciption of reality, but the Matrix is a revised modern perciption of the cave. In this comparison essay I am going to explain the similarities and deifferences that the Matrix and The Allegory of the Cave shares.In the Matrix, the main character,Neo,is trapped in a false reality created by AI (artificial intelligence), where as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave a prisoner is able to grasp the reality of the cave and the real life. One can see many similarities and differences in the film and the allegory. The most important similarity was between the film and the Allegory is the perception of reality.Another simmilarity that the movie Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave shares is that both Neo and the Freed man are prisoners to a system. The most important difference was that Neo never actually lived and experienced anything, but the freed man actually lived and experinced life.
They both examine the questions of how we comprehend & how to know what truth really is & reality is. Plato developed his theory within a cave. Based on his theory occupants of cave are noted to be the truth with the restricted reality that is seen to them. They don't acknowledge nothing but a contour view of the world & do not have any grasp to the truth of reality. This is the samething that was explained in the synopsis of the Matrix. Althought the people are unconscious in machines only seeing the world im which is present to them at the moment. At no point did these people question the world that was showed to them; instead they accepted it for what it is was & believed it was true by accepting what they believed was true. At some point Neo came to his senses & believed that what was presented to him was a sense of "false reality"; which is very similar to Plato case just in a cave. They know not anymore of reality then what was presented to them & just couldn't seem to grasp on what was actual reality. The excerpt of Descartes theory is very similary to those of Plato & the Matrix. Descartes excerpt goes on to add to Plato & Descartes theory on how even our own senses (sight, touch, smell, hearing, & taste) cannot be trustworthy. Based on Descartes approach; he proceeds to ask the question of how do we know if what we know is really accurate? Both excerpts & the movie all show similarities regarding the
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction film written and directed by The Wachowskis, starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. It tells a story of a future in which reality to most humans is actually a computer program called "the Matrix”. In "the Matrix” humans are really sleep while their bodies are fed on my machines. The movie while directed to entertain audiences but also gave us many insights into philosophy. Many scenes in this movie reflect Descartes, and his many writings explaining them in a visual manner. In this paper I will show various examples of philosophy within the scenes and give commentary explaining each scene.
In Plato’s The Republic, Book seven, he discusses the cliché “seeing is believing”. By Plato’s use of symbols to help explain his point of ignorance in truth due to our traditions, society’s constant fear of change and our natural ability to question what we see. In this allegory, the depictions of humans as they are chained, to only learn by sight. Plato toy’s with the notion of what would happen to people should they embrace the concepts of philosophy, to become enlightened by it, to see things as they truly are. As we have seen in class, Plato’s theory did not only present itself in his allegory, but also in the Wachowski brothers’ hit-film, The Matrix. In the film, the protagonist, Neo, suffers from a similar difficulty of adapting to reality, or the truth, which we will see later on. Throughout this paper, it will be argued that, Plato’s use of these symbols, he ultimately concludes that true knowledge is knowledge that we have of what we see and not knowledge of what we see, as was the case of the prisoners in The Allegory of the Cave.
Imagine living through life completely bound and facing a reality that doesn’t even exist. The prisoners in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” are blind from true reality as well as the people in the movie “The Matrix” written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. They are given false images and they accept what their senses are telling them, and they believe what they are experiencing is all that really exists. Plato the ancient Greek philosopher wrote “The Allegory of the Cave”, to explain the process of enlightenment and what true reality may be. In the movie “The Matrix”, Neo (the main character) was born into a world of illusions called the matrix. His true reality is being controlled by the puppet- handlers called the machines who use the human body as a source of energy. In the movie, Neo, finds and alternate reality and he has to go on a journey to discover himself and what is around him. Much like “The Allegory of the Cave” the prisoners in a dark underground cave, who are chained to the wall, have a view of reality solely based upon this limited view of the cave which is but a poor copy of the real world. Both the prisoners of the cave, and Neo from the Matrix, have to transcend on the path of ‘enlightenment’ to know the truth of their own worlds.
In conclusion, in Naguib Mafouz’s Fountain and Tomb, we are faced with a central theme of Truth. It can be reasoned that most of the time the Truth (or knowledge) isn’t always something that it is necessary to know. The Truth can bring about happiness, prosperity, or a positive affect, but that seems to happen much less frequently. Sometimes being ignorant of the Truth is better because it makes lives easier and happier. People don’t necessarily need to know everything (the whole Truth), because what they don’t know can’t really hurt them. Truth comes with excess baggage, and it sometimes leads to conflict, hurt feelings, alienation, or broken hearts. As the old saying goes, “Ignorance is bliss.” Fountain and Tomb does an excellent job of illustrating that cliche.
In the movie The Matrix we find a character by the name of Neo and his struggle adapting to the truth...to reality. This story is closely similar to an ancient Greek text written by Plato called "The Allegory of the Cave." Now both stories are different but the ideas are basically the same. Both Stories have key points that can be analyzed and related to one another almost exactly. There is no doubt that The Matrix was based off Greek philosophy. The idea of freeing your mind or soul as even stated in "The Allegory of the Cave" is a well known idea connecting to Greek philosophy. The Matrix is more futuristic and scientific than "The Cave" but it's the same Idea. Neo is trapped in a false reality created by a computer program that was created by machines that took over the planet. Now the story of course has many themes such as Man vs. Machine, Good vs. Evil, and our favorite Reality vs. Illusion. Neo is unplugged from the matrix and learns the truth and becomes "the one" who is to save the humans from their machine oppressors. "The Cave" is similar in that it has humans trapped in a cave and chained up to only face one direction. The "puppeteers" then make shadows against the wall the humans face using the fire from the outside as a light source. One big difference is that "The Cave" is about two philosophers conversing about the cave as one explains what needs to happen and that the prisoners must free their souls to find truth. The Matrix is the actions of what the philosopher describes actually happening. The comparing of the two stories will show how things said in "The Cave" are the same as in The Matrix, of course with the exception that one is futuristic ...
In book seven of ‘The Republic’, Plato presents possibly one of the most prominent metaphors in Western philosophy to date titled ‘Allegory of the Cave’.
People in society spend their lives trying to give meaning on what purpose they have in life. Although each individual can possess certain attributes it is our doubts that create a desire to act upon them. These desires give us the motivation to create a meaning of our lives. It is common to form an idea in order to obtain a reason; this inevitably cannot occur because each individual will have their own view on their representation of that idea. The Matrix is a movie where Neo is given the opportunity to separate himself from the reality he is living, in order to fight against the artificial intelligence (AI) that have ultimately taken control of the ‘real’ world. Neo is faced with the decision to continue to live the life he sees or take the challenge that is given to him while facing the unknown: he is only given the hope of finding the truth. Philosophically, The Matrix has an ongoing battle between Plato’s idealist concepts and Nietzsche’s materialism, the view on how we internalize our ideas and use them as motivation to take action towards our desires. In the end, Nietzsche’s materialism defeats Plato’s idealism because it is the actions that individuals take; which allow them to fulfill their desires and lead them to an outcome. This essay will explain how the philosophies of both Plato and Nietzsche have relevance to the movie, how Plato’s idealism is significant to both human and AI, but in the end it is Nietzsche’s materialism that gives credibility to the outcome of the movie where the humans validate their idealistic conquest.
The Matrix, a film released in the year 1999 an action sci-fi film that stars the people off Keanu Reeves (Neo), Laurence Fishburne (Morpheus), Carrie-Anne Moss (Trinity) all part of a film that has changed the perspective of how people see the world, a better understanding of the philological side going into a deeper meaning exploring what is reality? What is real? And what is not real? , a revolutionary film with the most mind blowing special effects (CGI) you’d ever seen for a film made in the 90’s such as slow motion, with a mix of Kung-Fu that’s never happened in a western film before it links with Socrates and Plato’s believe because is saying who’s the wise and how do you know.