In a dream, humans can experience any sort of sensory experience but visual experiences are the most common. They draw upon the dreamer’s own memory and imagination to build upon. The movie “The Matrix” put forth the idea that one could live an entire life as a vegetable being fed an illusionary life via brain stimulation. The plot not only raises questions about the relationship of mind to body and the uncertainty of knowledge, but also more modern concerns about political power in a cyber-infected world.
Carolyn Korsmeyer examines the issue of sense experience and how the movie portrays the classic problems of perception in her essay “Seeing, Believing, Touching, Truth.” She links her evaluation of the use of senses in the movie to the problems philosophers have faced over the years when trying to ascertain the role senses play in our belief systems.
The philosopher Descartes, after the focus changed from “what is real” to “even if I think I know what is real, how do I know it?”; realized that all his previous work was based on his own senses and the senses of others and so had no basis other than his belief in it. He knew that under certain conditions, such as distance and poor lighting, that his senses could be misled, but that those conditions could be compensated for. He realized that his senses could be misled when dreaming, and like the movie, challenges all to uncover ways to tell the difference between the two. All of us have had the experience of living a piece of time in our lives, such as waking and going to school to take a big test, only to find it a dream and we are actually still at home in our beds and that day we already lived in our mind, is actually just beginning. How do we know w...
... middle of paper ...
...st on past experiences. In our past, the sense of trust was established by the levels of pleasure received during the process of touching. A person whose past includes a more than average amount of violence might perceive the movie scenes in a less than trusting manner. They might be more inclined to be like Cypher, willing to forgo the experiences of a real world for one that he feels safe in. But no matter which direction our personal experiences have us leaning towards, it is this sense of trust in a belief, even if that belief is but a sensual perception that allows us to go on the ride and experience ideas.
Works Cited
The Matrix”. The Wachowski Brothers. DVD. Warner Bros., 1999.
Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, 1-3 (182-198)
Descartes power point
Seeing believing touching truth
Hume An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (237-262)
Sometimes, what we see and remember is not always accurate or real. For instance, Gould talked about a trip that he took to the Devils tower when he was fifteen, he remember that he can see the Devils tower from afar and as he approaches it, it rises and gets bigger. However, about thirty years later, Gould went back to see the Devils tower with his family, he wanted to show them the awesome view of the Devils tower when it rises as they approach closer to it, but when they got there everything was different from what he remembered. Then he found out that the Devils tower that he saw when he was younger wasn’t really...
The world is not what it appears to humans, but there are things that may be recorded, repeated, and experienced by others. Though each person is different, it is believed that we all experience the world in the same way more or less. Touch, taste, sight, smell and sound are the ways we interpret our environment. However, from time to time people have experiences that occur beyond those five senses and defy explanation as anything other than an otherworldly. Those experiences became a large part of religion, yet the manner in which most occur begs the question – why?
The knowledge question being pursued in this essay is: what role does what we expect to see- or are used to seeing- play in what we observe? What we expect to see greatly influences the observations that we make, as confirmation bias is created therefore we are more likely to accept something as true. It is difficult to make observations with neutrality once bias is formed.
If it’s your imagination or an illusion. The difficulty is that he cannot be certain about his sense
At the beginning of the very first meditation, Descartes states that he has lost his trust with his senses because they can be easily deceived (Descartes, 18). While dreaming sometimes it feels very real just as it does whi...
through our senses is actually an accurate interpretation of reality. After we’ve established that our senses aren’t
Rather than kill me they make me watch old 1970's television shows over and over.
With Descartes’ ideology of the senses and how they allow for deception of the individual, how are we supposed to be able to differentiate between when we are in a dream or when we are actually in reality? When we are in a dream as well as in reality, the senses seem real and we believe that what we experience is true; however, according to Descartes, the only way to determine whether or not an individual is experiencing a dream is through the use of their thought processing. Within reality, there are certain aspects that allow one to realize that they are presently living in reality. These two main aspects are routine and patterns that are performed on the daily basis such as, going to work, eating breakfast, or even brushing your
In “Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy and the Matrix”, Christopher Grau explains Rene Descartes argument in Meditation. What one may interpret as reality may not be more than a figment of one’s imagination. One argument that Grau points out in Descartes essay is how one knows that what one think is an everyday experience awake is not all a part of a hallucination. He uses the example of dreams to draw a conclusion about is claim based on experiences one would experience with dreaming. He asserts that there are times when one wake up from a dream that seems to be “vivid and realistic” however soon finds that it was not. The experience of reality in the dream was all a part of the mind. If dreams seem to be reality and one would not have any concept that one is dreaming how does one know that one is not dreaming now? Descartes point is that one cannot justify reality in the sense that one could be dreaming right at this moment and not know therefore one cannot trust the brain as an indicator of what is reality.
In meditation one of Descartes Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes presents the framework for his philosophy. Recalling unjustified views that he held as a child, Descartes presents his goal as the search for beliefs that are beyond doubt. If we can find what these beliefs are, Descartes posits, we have found a stable foundation with which to build off of in the pursuit of all further knowledge. In pursuit of this goal, Descartes outlines his methods: he will assume nothing, and only accept as true that which cannot be doubted for any reason, ridiculous or otherwise. Two arguments are presented to provide a seed of doubt into as many of our beliefs as possible. The first argument is often refereed to as the Dream Argument. When we dream while asleep, the things that the we perceive are often not in accordance with reality; suppose we dream that we are flying though in reality we are merely lying down in bed for example. Descartes argues that, despite whatever distinctions we thi...
Many movies are created without the notion of conveying any sort of message. The movie “Fight Club” relates the problems faced by the main character to philosophy but more specifically, to Idealism. It is both frightening and intriguing to know that ones mind can control ones perceptions of reality and whether or not what they are seeing is real. In summary, idealism offers the idea that ones mind determines what is real based on their perceptions of the physical world. With perceptions being completely different from one individual to the next, determining what is real may be indefinable.
Sense Perception is a way of knowing in which a person can acquire knowledge using their five senses - taste, touch, sight, sound and smell. Sense perception is an important in our understanding of the world, and is a source of much of the pleasure in our lives. But, can we trust our senses to give us the truth? This may come out as an odd question to many because according to experience and history it is known that humans greatly rely on sense perception as a means of survival. However, like all ways of knowing, sense perception has its weakness; our senses can easily be deceived. In his TED Talk, “Are we in control of our decisions?” behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses examples and optical illusions to demonstrate the roles, strengths and limitations of sense perception as a way of knowing.
In 2002, Brent Staples communicated with Jean Baudrillard about the use of his philosophy in The Matrix (1999), a film written and directed by Andy and Larry Wachowski. Staples wrote, “He [Baudrillard] noted that the film’s “borrowings” from his work “stemmed mostly from misunderstandings” and suggested that no movie could ever do justice to the themes of this book”. In this paper, I will argue that the Wachowski Brothers did not want to “do justice to the themes of this book”; they wanted to adapt Baudrillard’s theories about the blurring of the real and unreal, and the eventual extermination of the real, into a story that provides hope for humans wanting to escape the suffocation of the “hyperreal”. The “hyperreal” was first coined by Baudrillard in his book, Simulacra and Simulations (1983); it is the product of the distortions of the real through endless simulations of it in radio, newspaper, television, and film.
Millions of people flock to the movie theater year after year on a quest to be entertained. Even a mediocre movie has the ability to take the audience to another place, escaping the realities of their own life, if only for a mere two hours. Some movies are simply pure entertainment. And then, there are those movies that provoke conversation long after the film has been viewed. Dystopian themes are not new, and have historically provided a template to gage the course of human existence. The Matrix portrays a society where humans exist without freedom. The film is not only entertaining, but also thought provoking. It paints a world with two different dimensions, one with the mind numbing constraint of technology, the second with endless possibilities and free will. When closely examined, a world very much like today’s. The Matrix uses technology to dominate humankind, by implementing a socially stabilizing virtual reality program, thus warning that humanity’s obsession with technology can weaken the mind.
trust, or of wonder and awe – sensing that there must be a high being