The Matrix

The many ways of life and everything that surrounds us will always derive questions on the basis of our existence. What is our purpose here? How did we really get here? What does it all mean? Questions that will forever boggle our minds with frustration because there is no real answer to any of them. Fortunately for Neo in the film The Matrix, he received guidance from Morpheus, the oracle, and others around him to help him find his answers. What is reality? The world in which he lived in was not what he presumed it to be, instead, he was living in a false world (the matrix), and the real world was this gloomy place in which machines had taken over. There are many connections in the movie to those of philosophy and questions of life and reality. It’s hard to determine a “reality” in my opinion because we are all different as human beings and ones reality might not be the same to another. Others might not want to accept what is “real” as well and choose to stay unenlightened in the matrix. In that sense, it was very similar to the “allegory of the cave”, in where the one guy goes out to seek the truth and tries to instill his new found knowledge onto the others left in the dark. In the beginning that man is Morpheus, when he searches for Neo and pulls him out of the matrix to reveal to him the truth of his existence. In this situation it is very hard for me to say what I would truthfully do. Blue pill or red pill? The red pill is very tempting in the sense that I would uncover a new reality and have this new form of knowledge, but then again what is the actual reality in the matrix? A dark and scary place where the last humans alive are hiding from the machines. If it were put like that, then yea, why leave the matrix? Yes it’s a false world where you are being manipulated by a “greater” being, but what is the alternative to that? Either way I don’t think the matrix or its reality have any type of freedom. In the matrix you are controlled by the “agents”, and in the real world you have to be on the lookout for machines? I never had to really look at The Matrix in a philosophical way, but there are so many different possibilities and choices that it becomes confusing, which I think is the point, because that’s when we come up with all these questions concerning the meaning, existence, and reality. The only thing in the movie that I can connect to our real world is their whole concept on the difference of the two “realities”. I don’t really know if it can be a real comparison, but how different is their world from ours? Their reality is consumed by these machines that the humans built, yet they have taken over and they have to figure out a way to make it how it was before. Then there is the matrix where nobody is aware of what is really going on and they’re living in this picture perfect world. I can only say that some people maybe do live in “the matrix”, because they are ignoring the reality that is out there today, that our world really is consumed by machines. We aren’t necessarily hiding from them, but when will that time come? Because I do believe that one day it will. We depend on them WAY too much and there are only a handful of things that we do in life that does not require the assistance of technology. Ultimately what I think we can learn from this movie is that we need to wake up from the “matrix” and realize that we are letting ourselves become overpowered by machines. Sooner or later we will have to figure out a way to keep away from technology and start over from fresh, to reestablish the bond of human interaction.