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  • Essay / A projection of the deception hypothesis in "The Matrix"

    The Matrix, like Meditations on First Philosophy, presents a scenario in which an individual is radically deceived about the nature of the external world. Skeptics sometimes argue that if it is possible that we are deceived about the nature of the external world, then we do not really know the propositions that we take to be ordinary knowledge claims. I believe that The Matrix, in conjunction with the skeptical principle (skepticism), constitutes an argument that your ordinary knowledge claims are not really knowledge. The Matrix shows a fictional world created and maintained by the computers that have taken over the world. With this scenario, The Matrix presents what I call an examination of the deception hypothesis. In other words, when watching The Matrix, a viewer must ask themselves whether their entire perceptual experience could not be what it is now without there being a world that resembles these perceptions. This raises a number of questions. How does the film raise the skeptical question about the viewer's experience? Does this amount to truly filtering a philosophical statement? Does the filtered version of Descartes' statement convey the same conviction as the written version? What, if anything, does this tell us about the nature of cinema? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The protagonist of The Matrix, Neo is clearly bothered by something in his world and is trying to get to the bottom of his worries. Neo is not convinced that the world he believes to be real is anything other than that. It is only thanks to the intervention of Trinity and his acolytes that he realizes that the world he believed to be real is in fact only apparent. Neo's revelation occurs after he swallows a pill given to him by Morpheus, the rebel leader. Neo is led into a large room filled with computer and video equipment operated by a number of people. He is placed on a chair and electrodes are stuck to his chest and inserted into his ear. Morpheus explains that the pill Neo took is part of a research program that will help him and his associates find Neo's location. Neo will be able to see reality as it really is for the first time. Neo sees his own image in a mirror and suddenly the image fractures, lights appear in it and it seems to move as if it were a liquid. Neo reaches out to touch the mirror and his finger goes into it, as if it were a liquid metal, like mercury. When he removes his finger, the liquid mirror is pulled with it, but it eventually returns to its original form. While this is happening, Morpheus asks Neo if he ever had a dream that he was sure was real. Once you wake up, how will you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? As the mirror-like substance begins to travel up his arm and over the rest of his body, Neo begins to fibrillate and go into cardiac arrest. I argue that the film offers its viewers a visual experience analogous to that of Neo, one in which the world they take to be real. A world of skeptical thought experimentation that the film projects begins to exhibit irregularities that suggest that the individual's perceptual experience is not an accurate guide to the nature of that reality. After all, when looking at the screen, we assume that the images we see provide us with accurate information about the fictional world of the film. In other words, we have always interpreted the images we see projected onthe film screen as images of real objects and people in the fictional world of the film. But as Neo begins to experience disruptions in the regularities of his world, the filmmakers also disrupt our experience of the world of cinema, providing us viewers with a real (albeit fictional) experience in which we recognize that our senses are deceiving us about the nature of reality. In doing so, the film transforms our awareness of the screen as opening a fictional world to us into an awareness of the screen as protecting us from that world through representations for which there are no corresponding objects in its fictional world (or only objects whose natures differ from the way in which they are presented). This realization is an exact parallel to Neo's, even though his realization has to do with a world that is real to him. The film achieves this by making us aware that it possesses abilities similar to those it attributes to the giant computers that simulate the Matrix, because The Matrix also presents its viewers with a world that is not real, even in a fictional meaning. We are systematically wrong about the nature of reality. A skeptical thought experiment about the real situation of humans in his fictional world. Thus, what most of the Matrix's inhabitants had taken to be real – and what we, the audience, had accepted as the film's fictional reality – turns out to be nothing more than an appearance generated by an interactive computer program, just as Descartes hypothesized that reality might be nothing. but an appearance generated by an evil demon. The viewer usually does not immediately grasp the full meaning of what he saw, because everything happens very quickly in the film. Later scenes help viewers understand the metaphysics of what they saw by including shots in which the characters exist as they do in the Matrix interspersed with scenes of the reality behind this orchestrated illusion. One example involves a fight between Neo and Morpheus. As Morpheus repeatedly asks Neo to reject his belief that the world of Matrix is ​​the real world so that he can realize his true power and abilities, the film cuts to the other members of the ship's crew watching Neo and Morpheus on CRT screens. . This juxtaposition of the apparent world of the Matrix with Trinity keeps Neo in the "real world" as she watches him on screen in the Matrix. As Neo realizes that the world he thought was real was just a computer simulation, so do we. That is to say, we live an experience analogous to his: we come to see that the “real world” of the film is only a computer projection – the Matrix – and, therefore, merely apparent, and that there is an underlying (fictitious) element. reality which differs markedly from the apparent one. But what we find is that what we thought of as the “real” world of the film was only a projected world. What I am suggesting is that The Matrix, through its ability to make its viewers see the world of The Matrix as (fictitiously) real when it is (fictitiously) only apparent, brings a new twist to the Descartes' hypothesis of deception. By replacing the evil demon with a vast network of rebellious computers, the film shows itself capable of deceiving its spectators similar to that of which Descartes imagines the evil demon capable of in relation to itself. Viewers therefore come to recognize that The Matrix itself has the power to deceive them about (fictional) reality. The film thus did to us what computers do to Neo and the other inhabitants of the Matrix: made us take a generated and simply apparent world for the real world. Films are not the only ones to bring.