The Matrix and Epistemology

The Matrix and Epistemology

  • Submitted By: Genghis
  • Date Submitted: 05/11/2010 8:48 AM
  • Category: Philosophy
  • Words: 1830
  • Page: 8
  • Views: 2

In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, prisoners only have experience of the world through shadows on the cave wall and echoes of sound coming off of the wall. When a prisoner is set free, he experiences discomfort at his first sight of reality inside the cave, seeing the fire for the first time and seeing and hearing what is actually causing the shadows and echoes that he has been exposed to. Then when he is brought to the surface, he is shocked by what he sees. It takes time for his eyes to adjust to the sunlight in the outside world and he must slowly adapt to all that the real world has. After seeing the real world for what it is, returning to the cave is difficult. The man wants to free the other prisoners, but everyone sees him as a fool, and remarks that he has returned without his eyes.
Plato’s point is that mans experience of the world is only what he can sense, and that what he senses is not true reality. True reality has much more to it than we can sense, and once a person knows true reality, the apparent world we sense is much like that of the prisoner in the cave. Plato uses the Allegory of the Cave as an introduction to the forms, which he states cannot be sensed, but are part of an innate knowledge that must be rediscovered. When Morpheus first talks to Neo about the Matrix, he tells him that he has always sensed that something is not right with the world. This innate knowledge that something is wrong is similar to the innate knowledge of the forms; something that we know, but lies dormant until it is rediscovered. In the case of Plato, that innate something is a positive, whereas in “The Matrix” it is something negative, or something wrong with the world. Once a person has been unplugged and freed from the Matrix, this innate knowledge is confirmed and broadened, just as it is when a person discovers knowledge of the forms.

In “The Matrix”, humans are held as prisoners, but in this case, their senses tell them that the prison appears to...

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