Examples Of Appearance And Reality In The Movie The Matrix

The Matrix: Final There is an assurance that at one point in life, the end will come for each individual and everybody will perish at one point. For now, as humans and living things, we are all doing what we do best, exist. However, imagine if the life one believes to be a part of was not actual and in fact, it was all just a virtual concept in the mind. Having had watched the film, The Matrix, this paper analyzes comparisons between appearance and reality to the writings of Bertrand Russell’s, Problems of Philosophy. Thenceforward, René Descartes’, Meditations on First Philosophy are examined and the Method of Doubt is conveyed, carefully analyzing each of its stages. As a final point, one of the three elements in Descartes’ Method of Doubt, …show more content…
The world demonstrated in the movie, does not seem like anything out of the ordinary. The people in the movie are all living their lives, juggling busy schedules and personal dramas. It is not until the main character, Neo, acknowledges for himself that the entire world he believed to be genuine, was in fact an illusion in his mind and that his entire body was hooked to a wire that teleported his reason into a Martian-like world. An interesting concept is brought up once Morpheus explains to Neo that his perceptions on reality are essentially flawed. Morpheus simply states that Neo was living in a fantasy world and all of the sensations Neo ever felt were purely simulators in his brain transmitted through electric currents in the pods. Appearance is how objects seem to be to us and it is subjective. Reality on the other hand, is how objects actually are in themselves, apart from any observers, and it is objective. To better explain what is subjective, take in consideration the following example; when the people wary of The Matrix are eating, they joke about the fact that whatever it is they are tasting is in fact virtual and only their mind generating ideas about the savor. Therefore, in actuality, the taste is artificial and there is no true taste. Even if there was, nobody can explain for sure what exactly it is that they savor. In Bertrand Russell’s publishing, he utilizes a table as an example. A …show more content…
The first is that the senses of one are deceiving, the second is the notion that life is nothing but a dream and the last is the evil genius. These forms of skepticism attempt to rule out everything that may be fictitious and appearance and reality plays a role in it. When senses deceive, one is fooled by whatever was originally perceived to be. Appearance itself plays a greater role than reality, simply because one is not aware of the objective aspect up until the person becomes aware that they were mislead. Appearance becomes the reality, until one can prove it otherwise. For example, a dark shadow at night might be perceived as one thing, but when one sees that same thing in the light, then one may realize their senses were mislead because it is something completely different than originally thought. Then, comes the idea of the dream. When one is dreaming, there is no possible form of reality. The images and ideas in the mind of one might be realistic. Still, appearance and reality contradict one another and those ideas cannot be taken for granted. Anybody could dream about eating a bowl of ice cream, that does not mean that they actually ate it. The appearance in the dream was one eating the ice cream, the reality is that it was all a dream and that ice cream bowl was only an image in the mind. Lastly, is the evil genius. The evil genius is the greatest deceiver of them all. Everything that one has ever been