Comparing Plato, Descartes, And The Matrix

Plato, Descartes, and the Matrix
Ricky Smith
Liberty University

Sometimes our mind can play tricks on us and it becomes hard to distinguish between reality and fantasy. This question of is it real or imagined has been a question that we all have found ourselves plagued with during a point in our lives. Throughout history philosophers have addressed this very subject and it still is a topic of debate. The topic of Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave and Descartes’s Meditation I of The Things Which We May Doubt in comparison to the movie The Matrix addresses this topic of real or imagined. The similarity among all of the passages that seems to stand out is the question of what is considered reality. The sense of reality displayed in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is warped. The shadows appear to be real to the …show more content…
Plato and Descartes’s passages show that there is no sense of altered perception through a machine such as the computer in The Matrix. The concept of what is reality or not has been created in the senses of their minds. In Plato’s excerpt the shadows that the prisoners saw were perceived to be reality because that was the only sense of reality that they had to hold on to. Descartes view of reality questioned how we view reality through our senses. There is a question of is what we comprehend to be an illusion or is what we see real reality. However, in The Matrix, once Neo takes the pill and follows Morpheus, he becomes aware that the people living there do not know that they are not living in true reality. The computer has engineered an ideal world that is really imagined, but the people seem to believe they are living in a real world and they are not. There then becomes an issue of whether it is best to live in oblivion and not know one is living in an imagined reality, or is it best to know the truth about how the computer have manipulated there actual

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