Humanities

Agrim Singh, 1000748

A short note on The Matrix and Descartes’ Meditations

“What is real? How do you define, ‘real’? If you’re talking about what you can feel, what you can

smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain.”

The film offers a decent alternative example of Descartes’ Evil Demon scenario, especially

considering Morpheus’ quote above in light of our readings but the bigger question to emerge from

the movie still is this - how does Keanu Reeves still keep getting work?

Getting back to the note, we read in the Meditations about Descartes being suspicious of his

percepts, the knowledge he obtained through his senses, and all his own beliefs. He was sure that

one must use their mind, rather than one’s senses, to obtain information about the world. In the

system of knowledge constructed by Descartes, perception is unreliable as means of gathering

information, and the mental process of deduction is the only way to acquire real knowledge of the

world. He took this to an extreme and suggested that his experiences are being conjured up by the

evil demon. Instead of inquiring into the nature of reality, Descartes questions his own knowledge

and interpretation of reality. Using methodological skepticism, Descartes doubted anything that

could be doubted, in order to lay a foundation for genuine knowledge. In terms of epistemology,

much of our acquired knowledge is adequate to explain the world, but there is no such thing as

“absolute” truth.

Descartes’ argument is similarly summarised by Putnam in her “brain in a vat” thought experiment

that was discussed in class and the analogy came closest to visualising the events of The Matrix

wherein the pods in which the humans spend their lives resemble the vat, the difference being that

instead of the brain the pod contains the entire body. The demon that Descartes talks about is well

embodied by the AI that forces a virtual reality on the humans wired...