Essay

Name

Course (PHI2010),

Semester,

Date

In the film Matrix 1999, Keanu Reeves plays a computer programmer called Neo, leading a double life. Neo started looking for elusive Morpheus (Laurence Morpheus) after a cryptic message popped up on his screen. Morpheus was a leader of a clandestine group believes to be behind the cryptic message. When Neo finds Morpheus, he gets to be told that the reality is much different from what people perceive. Morpheus tells Neo that human existence is merely a façade as humans are being framed as an energy provider by a race of vicious, sentient machines (Palmer, 7, 82). Neo was further told that humans live their entire lives as pods with brain sensors that give the illusion of leading ordinary lives. Morpheus convinces Neo that the life he has been living until then is a computer-generated dream world made up of interactive neural simulation known as the matrix. Comment by Armando Piloto: You already gave context for what happens in the film with your first sentence. The rest of this paragraph is you summarizing the film, which is not what the assignment is about. There's no thesis here, and you aren't leading the reader to any conclusions or detailing a connection between the movie and a philosophical theory.

The film Matrix is based on French philosopher Rene Descartes’ philosophical question of the 17th century. One of the most central theses by Descartes is the ability to think for oneself or intellectual autonomy, which means having a sound mind and applying them in real life (12:45 to 16:01). Descartes always believed that his sensory experience was different from reality. Using the Wax argument, he demonstrated how unreliable senses could be. For instance, the senses can inform us of s specific shape, colors, smell, and texture of wax, but these features soon change when the wax is brought near a fire.

Descartes was always suspicious of the knowledge and percepts obtained from his beliefs and senses. He conclusively convinces that people should use their minds rather than their senses to obtain information about the world. He suggests that perception is an unreliable way of gathering information. The most efficient and reliable way of acquiring knowledge for the outside world is through metal deduction (Palmer, 7, 44). Descartes approached all knowledge and information from high perspectives. He believes that no one should be fooled about their own experience even despite his skepticism. His approaches were his famous dictum cogito ergo sum, which means I think therefore I am. Descartes did not doubt his existence because the act of thinking about his experience and doubt, in essence, affirmed his existence.

Although seemingly a rehash in Descartes's argument, the brain in a vat is closely connected to The Matrix. The vat is represented as the pods in which humans spend their lives. The only feature differentiating the two is that the vat contains disembodied brains while the pods contain the entire body. If the sensory stimuli corresponding to human experience could be determined and executed as computer programs, computers could easily simulate reality (Palmer, 7, 24). The computer implants could run in some advanced brain implants. But in real life, there is no computer powerful enough to perform the necessary calculation of the exact computations required to generate a simulated constant stream of consciousness. The world's most powerful computers cannot process the visuals of information entering the eye of a fruit fly, let alone generate a stream of consciousness. Comment by Armando Piloto: This sentence adds nothing

Descartes propounded that perception is false at first seems ridiculous, but it is impossible to disprove it. The fact proves debates distrust his senses in an optical illusion that supports a discrepancy between what we see and what and what we experience. Many other experiences prove this, including psychiatric conditions that show auditory hallucinations as one of its symptoms. Even when we perceive reality in how we should perceive it without optical illusions, we are still being fooled by our senses.

According to Descartes's dreams argument, dreams and waking life can be the same because they share many seminaries. Thus, the dreaming phenomenon is used as a shred of key evidence. Descartes believes that a dream is made up of a series of experiences similar to skeptical hypotheses because what we see as truth would be false and generated by a dream. As a result, the dream makes us feel like dreamers are practicing their dreaming life in real life. Principally, Descartes believes that dreaming life is the same as waking life because it lacks sufficient differences to render it.

In brief, the film matrix and Descartes's philosophy intertwine as they share similar notions about life. The film propounded that the reality at the end of the 20th century was a replica of computer-generated dream work and a prison of mind created to control and contain the human minds. Matrix renders a specific version of reality that is both unavoidable as an experience and indiscernible as a construct; the metaphors used in the film denote some practices and notions (00:45 to 01:15). Most people believe that the word exists pretty much as they look and sound what it seems. As a result, Descartes's suspended sense suggests that information collected through our sense of hearing, sight, touch, and states is more likely deceiving. We tend to justify them based on the sensor evidence, which Descartes terms as unrealizable justification mechanisms. Comment by Armando Piloto: There are a lot of big words here and none of them mean anything. You can't B.S. your way through an essay, it needs some amount of direction, so we've got a bit to work on here.