Musings on "The Matrix"

** A new collection of essays, "The Matrix and Philosophy" explores that film's provocative philosophical implications. Reviewed by Laura Miller at Salon.com. Excerpts from her review:

For those few souls who haven't seen it, "The Matrix" describes the travails of Neo, a young programmer whose vague sense that there is "something wrong with the world ... a splinter in the mind" comes to fruition when he meets the unspeakably cool Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne). He takes a pill Morpheus offers, and after a few trippy effects, discovers that his late-20th-century urban life is merely a virtual reality simulation (the Matrix). He and almost all of the rest of humanity are actually kept in womb-like cells, where they supply energy to a vast computerized artificial intelligence, while their minds are occupied with a completely fake "existence."

Morpheus is the leader of that small band of rebels that always turns up in such stories, and Neo joins them in their fight to free humanity...
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The philosophers contributing to "The Matrix and Philosophy" … find the implied and explicit ontological questions posed by the film intriguing. "What is real? How do you define real?" Morpheus asks Neo at one point. "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."
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Since the senses have been known to lie, since when we're dreaming we often do not realize that we are dreaming (and therefore are having an "unreal" experience we mistakenly consider real), the ordinary sensory evidence we rely on to tell us what is true cannot necessarily be trusted. Can we really be sure that any of it is authentic?
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A member of Morpheus' crew, Cypher, decides he's had enough and betrays his leader in exchange for being reabsorbed into the Matrix with his memory of reality erased and a new virtual life as a wealthy actor. "After nine years, do you know what I realize?" he tells one of the agents. "Ignorance is bliss."
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The nature of reality and the validity of Cypher's choice are the two substantive philosophical questions the movie poses.

Full review: Salon.com Books | "The Matrix and Philosophy" by William Irwin, ed.

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