The Matrix (1999) is a film built around the idea that machines enslave humans for their heat. To keep humans happy they replace sensory input with a computer simulating a real world so that humans think they are living in a regular world and never suspect they are really just in a vast battery for enslaving machines. The main character Neo meets people who help him wake up from the computer simulation into the "true" world where his senses reveal the story I opened with.
As commented on before in this blog, why does Neo believe this Morpheus world any more real than the first one. How does he know that Morpheus is not just a second layer of simulation designed to keep humans happy. And obviously in another sense he is, because The Matrix is a film designed to trick us real viewers into at least following a story. Some films try to trick the audience into believing the film is real like "Blair Witch Project" but The Matrix does not do this. But what if it did? Perhaps sitting in the cinema watching the film really is just part of a real Matrix and we really are trapped inside a computer controlled simulation. Morpheus then becomes not just messiah for Neo but is speaking to us in the audience. Perhaps some people had this collapse of Ego as their world crumbled and they started to feel everything was a lie and they were living in a simulation.
Before I continue... woah slow down. Lets check the logic so far for this cinema goer. We went to the cinema and some random bloke Morpheus starts to tell us that everything is an illusion simulated by a computer. He offers us 2 pills the blue one which keeps us asleep in the simulation, or the blue one which wakes us up. How do we know that the blue one doesn't keeps us in reality, and the red one actually puts us into an hallucination and fake reality. And picking up from what is already said how do know that Morpheus is not the simulation?
We can't just go believing random people. We need real evidence. And the problem for the Matrix is, like Descartes, once we start doubting what is real it all falls apart. Which one do we believe? This one, the next one, do we believe Morpheus or do we think in fact he is the dream.
Never-the-less it does raise the question of how would we escape all this? This is a 21st Century Descartes. Altho as will be seen it is really a C6th BC Descartes or even older. This quest for freedom from false reality is as old as humankind.
Now suppose on the Nebuchadnezzar we meet a second Morpheus (2) who tells us that Morpheus 1 is actually like Agent Smith and has trapped us in a second simulation where we think we are battling a computer. All that stuff about being enslaved as heat generators is nonsense and he has a blue pill that will wake us up to the "true" reality. We go through a few levels of this like in Inception (2010). Now we are really confused which reality is true? Each reality has as part of it a person breaking through who claims we can enter a new "better" reality.
What if the truth of realities is not like a lift with different levels? One thing we can note is each reality is quite similar. In every reality we have our sense consciousness (sight, sound, smell, taste, and feeling) and we can think, imagine, remember.
One thing Matrix does not explore and I have blogged on this before is that surely Neo would change in each reality? Why does he look the same between fake reality and "true" reality. This was done well in Quantum Leap (1989-1993) where Sam Beckett enters each reality as a different person. Well externally but inside he is still Sam Beckett. For a real play with reality why would we even be the same person when we shift reality? Why can't the computer simulate everything including our thoughts and memories?
Now perhaps this has gone too far because we assume that the fake reality is being simulated for a real human brain. But why should it? Could not the brain itself be part of the computer and there is no "real" original human here at all. Simulations for the sake of it? Perhaps even the computer is just a fake reality.
Okay these speculations while fun, or just mental gymnastics and don't move this along. Where we have got to do far is that regardless how we think about it the key thing we have definitely got are senses. We don't care "which" reality the point is that ALL of them have some consciousness of senses and some thoughts and a few other mental features. No number of Agent Smiths can get inside this. This cannot be faked! Awareness is Real.
But we are still not done. How do we get outside this? How do we get outside consciousness and awareness.
Well we can sleep. While we are not dreaming all this is switched off. Some people take this to extremes (like Shakespeare's Hamlet considered ending "a sea of troubles") and think that killing them self is a way out of all this. But whoa how school kid is this. They haven't even started to realise the problem yet.
If you kill yourself, what are you killing and who is doing the killing? Why can't this just be a simulation itself? You can't get out of a simulation by playing the game! We need think much bigger than this.
Okay its late now, trying to wind this up. The point we get to is that the prison we are within is one of "existence". Things exist, this is the most obvious reality. If we wish to get beyond this we need to get beyond existence somehow. But its no good smashing things up cos this just creates new existences. The problem is existence itself. It is existence that apparently brought us into being and will relinquish us in time.
The thing to note with existence is that nothing ever happens by itself. Things pop into existence at a particular time, and this suggests that they didn't just decide to pop into existence at random, there is some clock or mechanism. On inspection things come into existence because something else has triggered them. This is the absolutely most fundamental thing to observe. Things are born of other things. A chair is produced by a chair factory etc
So taking a chair factory as a model of things coming into existence. To get beyond existence we realise we can't go backwards into the chair factory, which is just another existing thing, and we can't go forward into the chairs which are other existing things we need get into the middle between the trigger and the thing triggered. In here the magic happens. Things exist in relation to one another. If we wish to escape the world of things we need to place ourselves between the things, in the very moments of creation when things come together and trigger something else.
Now we are deeply escaping The Matrix. We are no longer concerned with what we can see and sense and not even with what we think. We are interested in the moment when all these things are created. Agent Smith is now a distant moment of thought, The Matrix and everything in it are just moments of creation along side everything else. Even our self is just a series of moments of creation. Even these thoughts and understanding if we look very closely are coming together in a series of creations. At the start of the blog there was one thing and slowly through time and a series of events something else is unfolding and being created. Extraordinary irony there as the thing unfolding is about the unfolding itself.
Now we might that this leads into a regression. How can the moment of creation be creating itself? But there is an even deeper factor here. Existence of the type we are talking about here, is Present existence, it is manifest, it is real, it is being watched (to some extent). It is not a series of facts in a book or bits in a computer simulation. What is the sound of a tree falling in the deep Carboniferous Period forest with no one there to hear it. We know this happened when we find a fossil in a coal seam. But the experience of it happening clearly did not happen because we are told no one was there. We can write the facts out after analysis (we might call Savoir from the French), but this is different from the Present experience and unveiling and acquaintance with actual Reality, Connaitre from the french. Into this we can note that every observation above, even the coming together of things into existence can be observed. This kind of existence is not an abstract solid factual thing, it is intimately observed and real. And that ability of existence to be observed transcends every existence. I'm trying to be careful with words here because this is not saying there is a solid factual observer rocking up to see the solid factual things in the world. This is to say that when factual things come together they create and cause new existences and in the Present, where that happens, it has the quality of being real and observed. This is how Present existence is known, it is how current creation appears as a real existing thing. This kind of manifest existence is the key to this blog entry. It is deeper even that existence itself and offers us the doorway out of the turmoil of the real Matrix.
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