Reality In Morpheus's The Allegory Of The Cave

When Morpheus first shows Neo the real world he says to him, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” The world as Neo knows it does not exist and is merely a construction by machines. Life inside the Matrix is similar to that of the end of the 20th century yet it is a computer generated dream world built to keep humans under control in order to change them into energy. While connected to the Matrix humans are none the wiser about the fact that what they perceive to be reality is actually just a façade. The real world, the world outside the Matrix, on the other hand is a barren wasteland, a dead earth with no sun and thus no natural life apart from the a small minority of humans that have been disconnected. Disconnecting in Moxyland is similar to The Matrix characters choosing to …show more content…
The machines place humans in the Matrix which is a construction to simulate life as it was before the machine takeover. The machines, through passing electrical signals through the brain, are able to make humans believe that what they are experiencing to be truth in order to exploit and use them to generate power. As a result the Matrix does become their reality because it is all they know. This idea was first suggested by Plato, classical Greek philosopher, in The Allegory of the Cave (1974). In his book he deconstructs the notion of what is real by arguing that reality subjective to what a person knows as real. Plato describes how if a person has been trapped in a dark cave all his life and has only ever seen shadows, then those shadows are the person’s reality. He has no knowledge of neither can he imagine life outside the cave. So although the shadow of a horse from outside the cave is not an actual horse, it is what the man knows to be a horse and is therefore his only