The first draft-- The Matrix and Reality

The Matrix and Reality

            The Matrix is good movie, it helps us to discover the reality in the world and develop our mind. The story in The Matrix talks about Neo who is a computer programmer drawn into a rebellion against the intelligence machine with other people who have been freed from the "dream world" and into reality. The entire movie tries to tell us the reality in the world. I think the most important thing the movie wants to tell us is that everything is impossible in the world even you didn’t imagine before. So we have to discover the meaning of reality to ourselves and the definition of reality.

            Remember the beginning of the movie, Morpheus arrests Neo and give two pills for Neo to choose. The red pill is to know what is Matrix; the blue bill is to come back to his old life. Neo chooses the red pill and he find himself in a liquid-filled pod whose body connected by the tubes and cables. Morpheus rescued him and begins to tell him what the Matrix is. He tells Neo: “the world you live is the unreal world called Matrix, and we all controlled by a intelligence machine which is created by the early 21 century.”  The time Neo thinks is 1999, but Morpheus tells him is not, now is 2199. Morpheus shows the image of the world he lives, it looks like a ghost town, and everything is destroyed. Everything, Morpheus tells and shows to Neo is seems to be truth and drives Neo hard to believe that is real in a short time.  I think everything you can touch and you see that is real to your. But after listen Morpheus’s conversation, it looks like the thing you see and touch is fake, all these thing are the illusion created by a machine. In the end I will wonder what is real in the world. Baudrillard is a famous philosopher, his idea about “Simulacra and Simulation is that there is no such thing as reality, but it becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. His point is that we have lost all ability to make sense of the distinction between nature and artifice” (Wikipedia  05,2011). Base on Baudrillard’s idea, everything said by Morpheus is true. We can understand his words as the thing Neo touches and sees in the “dream world” like a presentation of reality but not the reality itself. But as a person, we don’t have ability to distinguish the real  and artificial. So we can consider the matrix world is rely on the model and the map, it actually is a simulated reality created by sentient machines.

            Remember one scene in The Matrix, is about after Neo become cyborg in the real world. Morpheus begins training Neo. He download the Chinese gongfu in Neo’s brain and brings Neo in a virtual world. In there, he fights with Neo and teaches him how defeat your enemy. Morpheus tells Neo: “Don not try to hit somebody and hit somebody, you have to pay attention to your mind.” After the training, Neo comes back to the real worlds and wake up. He finds some blood is in his teeth and he talks to Morpheus: “I think this is real.” And Morpheus says: “your mind makes it real.” How can we know our memory real or not? Our mind has an important role to helps us distinguish the thing we see and touch is real or not. According to the psychology textbook, we know “our memory processing in three stages. The first stage is get information into our brain; the second stage is retain that information, and the three stage is later get it back out”(Myers 235). After these three stages, our past experience becomes our one part of the memory in our brain. Neo think that is real because he thinks the training becomes one part of his memory. Also sensation and perception play an important role in our mind and let us decide what is real in our life. Base on our psychology textbook: “Sensation and perception are stages of processing of the senses in our brain. Sensations are the first stages in the functioning of senses to represent stimuli from the environment, and perception is a higher brain function about interpreting events and objects in the world”(Myers 635). As I mentioned before, Neo finds out there are some blood in his mouth after he wake up. This is one of his sensations, and this information will transfer to his brain. His brain begins to make a judgment and tells Neo that is real experience.