The Matrix And The Matrix

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Recommended: Plato's arguments and critique

The Matrix is a sci-fi action film created in 1999 by Andy and Lana Wachowski. The Matrix explores each branch of philosophy with great depth, giving the viewers a reason to question the world we live in today. The Matrix trilogy uses philosophical issues to present the question of reality modelled by the premise of the film. Plato, an ancient philosopher attempted to answer this question in the allegory of the cave. The Matrix and the analogy of the cave both share the major philosophical issue of metaphysics, with the ongoing questions: “Are we really living in the real world or just an delusion of the real world?” and “What is reality?”

Other main philosophical issues evident in The Matrix are ethics: “is it morally acceptable to kill someone to save another person’s life?” or “is someone’s life worth sacrificing to save a lot of people”. When studying the political aspect we discover ethical issue: ‘is it acceptable for the government to keep things from us that we wouldn’t like or want to know?” Epistemology is another major ethical issue we can perceive in The Matrix: “How do we really know what we know?” and “How do we know that our fullest potential has been reached?”

Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and The Matrix are similar in the way that they both give us an understanding of how we can never really perceive our own reality and distinguish between what is real and what is not real by showing us how the people living in the Matrix world are living like being trapped in the cave, not knowing what reality actually is.
The real world in The Matrix is a physical reality of humans being controlled and kept prisoners in what they thought was reality by the machines where energy is harvested from the humans, and kept unknown f...

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...hen he tires the spoon did not bend. The young boy taught him to stop seeing what is solid and start seeing what isn’t solid soon enough Neo bent the spoon.

A Quote from The Matrix: "Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world?" -- Morpheus
This is a philosophical issue because it explores metaphysics, which is a branch of philosophy.

In conclusion the intriguing sci-fi film The Matrix directed by the Wachowskis explores each branch of philosophy with great depth, especially epistemology, ethics and metaphysics giving the viewers a reason to question the world we live in today. Metaphysics is the main Philosophical Issue in the Matrix studying ‘What is real? which is also an evident issue in the analogy of Plato’s cave.

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