I will argue in this paper that living in a Matrix or as a brain-in-a-vat is not bad, and it can actually be very good in some cases. This is, however, taking into account two things James Pryor says at the end of his essay. The first is that the matrix is not a sort of enslavement like in the movie The Matrix. The other is that there is still interactions with other real people like in the movie. As long as these two conditions are followed, I concur that there is nothing bad about the matrix in my opinion. In fact, I would argue that the matrix would actually be a huge benefit to the real world for three main reasons.
The first reason living in the matrix would be a good thing is that one can imagine any circumstance possible and have it
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come to life. Just imagine riding a dinosaur millions of years in the past. Imagine taking your highschool crush on a date on top of the Eiffel Tower. Imagine being the star of the United States soccer team and winning the World Cup. The possibilities are endless. The experience machine is perfect for anyone who wants to experience something they have never felt before. In addition to being used for cool and interesting circumstances, the experience machine could also be used to help benefit the real world. Businesses could test their products, inventions, and other ideas in the matrix to help make their products better and increase profit. For example, a car manufacturer could test a new design of a car in many different weather conditions to make sure the car it as safe as possible. The matrix would be a designers paradise because they could literally design anything they want, with anything they want, wherever they want. For example, I could design a huge castle made entirely out of trees and other natural items and actually walk around in it. My point is that the possibilities are endless, and what happens in the matrix does not need to stay limited to the matrix. The second reason living in the matrix would be good is that you still feel like you are doing something and living in real life. Even though you might not be actually running a marathon while in the experience machine, it will give you the exact same feelings as if you did run it. You will get the energy, the tiredness, and the eventual glory of running a marathon. In a sense, the experience machine is like a dream come to life. In a way, the experience machine could act like an inspiration tool. A person could opt to experience their dream world and after, they would be even more motivated to go out and achieve that goal in reality. I do not view the experiences from the experience machine limited to the machine but rather it opens up a whole world of possibilities of what the world could be like if people put more effort into their real lives. The final reason living in the matrix would be good is that it would allow people in the real world to escape from brainwashing by machines, school, society, and the government. The stresses of school, the government, and society altogether is hard for some people to handle all at once. Because of all this stress, people become depressed and sometimes they decide to commit suicide. This is where the experience machine comes in handy. The experience machine could be used to help people escape from all the stress. Instead of worrying, you could go to a beautiful, relaxing beach to relieve the stress. This will ultimately lead to better, higher-quality lives and more people will be happy. People will live longer lives because they will have less stress overall. There are two main arguments on why living in the matrix is a bad thing. The first is that a matrix is nothing more than a neural interactive machine. Someone arguing this position would say that there is no point in going into the machine because nothing you do in there has a direct effect on the real world. In a sense, you would be daydreaming and wasting your life away instead of spending it doing things in reality. People want to see the world how it is, not just experience different things. As Nozick stated, people want to actually do certain things and to actually be a certain way. By entering the experience machine, one is giving up their identity to become something that they are not. Although this is a solid argument against the matrix, there are some things about it that are flawed.
The first thing I would like to point out is that our body is also just a neural interactive machine. The only reason we feel, see, taste, smell, and hear what we do is because our bodies send neural signals to the brain just like the experience machine.The only difference is that the body has limitations such as one’s strength, intelligence, and speed while the experience machine’s only limit is human imagination. By entering the experience machine, one is not constraining oneself but rather freeing one's mind to go beyond bodily limitations. Even though what is experienced and done in the machine might not carry over to the real world, it can inspire new ideas, or motivate one to change one’s habits. For example, if a smoker experiences the benefits and feeling of quitting smoking, it will most likely act as an inspiration to help them quit smoking. Even though it did not directly help the person stop, it did give the needed motivation to quit. Even if you spent a year in the experience machine relaxing and relieving stress, it would still not be a waste of one's time. This long period of time spent away from reality is sometimes what a person needs to be put on track. It is like having summer break except extended over a longer period of time. During summer break, students and teachers have time to escape from the stress of the school year. However, after a certain period of time, students run out of new things to do and end up fresh and ready to return to school. This year-long break is preparing the person to face the world and be more productive than before. Finally, Nozick's idea that people want to do certain things and be a certain way is not hindered in any way when you enter an experience machine. Instead, the experience machine could actually help one discover who they actually want to be. By experiencing different things, it could help move
someone on a path to finding one's true self. For example, a student might be deciding what to major in in college. To help him find out what he wants to be, the experience machine could give him the experience as people in different professions to help guide him in his decision. In a similar fashion, the machine could give someone the experience of skydiving, and this might motivate them to go skydiving in the real world. The second main objection is that something bad could happen to the body on in the outside world killing you in both the outside and inside world. There would be nothing you could do to stop your death because you would be stuck in the matrix. For example, some radical people decide to come raid the room where you are plugged into the machine and shoot your body in the real world. There would be nothing you could do to prevent this from happening. It would be essentially like digging your own grave. Why would anyone put themselves in a position where they have no control? I agree with this point that something bad could happen to the body on the outside, however, this is not a fault of the matrix itself but rather the outside world. In this outside world which we call modern society, so many terrible things can happen regardless of whether you are in the matrix or not. Sometimes there is just no way to avoid death. For example, if a massive asteroid hit earth today, there would be nothing anyone on earth could do to save their life. It does not matter if they could control their body or if they were in the experience machine because there is no way to escape unless you had a rocket ready to launch. Just because someone has control of one’s body does not mean they have control over a situation. Death is sometimes just inevitable and random. People can be killed anytime regardless of whether one can move or not. There is a risk of death in anything that we do. Even just by staying at home, there is a chance someone could rob your house and shoot you. Just because this is a possibility, it does not keep me from staying home. Similarly, just because someone could kill you in the outside world while you are in the matrix, it should not be blamed on the matrix but rather on the cruelty of the outside world. This cruel reality is actually a good reason people should go in the experience machine for a break from this reality we call our own. In conclusion, my stance that the matrix is a good and beneficial concept for all society stands. The matrix should not be seen just as a fake reality but as a world of great and endless possibilities. Although, the experiences and things done in the machine do not directly transfer over, the time spent in the machine could be the much needed time to escape from society, or the motivation to get out of your bubble and try something new.
In the book Ready Player One, being able to be in a virtual reality almost sound like you’re in a dream, but in the movie The Matrix being stuck inside a virtual reality without being aware of it is more like a nightmare. Being able have total control of entering and exiting to a different world where you can do anything you like can sound like fun. but what happens when you live inside a virtual reality and not being aware of it feels like you are a prisoner. In both these stories the protagonist are jumping in and out the virtual world, but are they both doing it so they can survive in the real world.
In “Bad Dreams, Evil Demons, and the Experience Machine: Philosophy and the Matrix”, Christopher Grau explains Rene Descartes argument in Meditation. What one may interpret as reality may not be more than a figment of one’s imagination. One argument that Grau points out in Descartes essay is how one knows that what one think is an everyday experience awake is not all a part of a hallucination. He uses the example of dreams to draw a conclusion about is claim based on experiences one would experience with dreaming. He asserts that there are times when one wake up from a dream that seems to be “vivid and realistic” however soon finds that it was not. The experience of reality in the dream was all a part of the mind. If dreams seem to be reality and one would not have any concept that one is dreaming how does one know that one is not dreaming now? Descartes point is that one cannot justify reality in the sense that one could be dreaming right at this moment and not know therefore one cannot trust the brain as an indicator of what is reality.
The movie, "The Matrix," parallels Platos's Allegory Of The Cave in a number of ways. Similar to the prisoners of the cave, the humans trapped in the matrix (the cave) only see what the machines (the modern day puppet-handlers) want them to see. They are tricked into believing that what they hear in the cave and see before them is the true reality that exists. Furthermore, they accept what their senses are telling them and they believe that what they are experiencing is all that really exists--nothing more.
This essay will examine the philosophical questions raised in the movie The Matrix. It will step through how the questions from the movie directly relate to both skepticism and the mind-body problem, and further how similarly those problems look to concepts raised by both Descartes’ and Plato’s philosophies. It will attempt to show that many of the questions raised in the movie are metaphor for concepts from each philosopher’s works, and why those concepts are important in relation to how they are presented in the film. In this analysis, we will examine the questions of skepticism and the mind-body problem separately. Part one will examine how the film broached the subject of skepticism, and in doing so how it ties in to Descartes and Plato. Part two will analyze the mind-body problems as raised by the movie and how those problems hold true or not to Descartes’ and Plato’s ideas.
...The Matrix” and Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” almost gives the idea that the movies writers may have had a lot of influence from Plato’s allegory. The creation of this movie gives and futuristic prospective of “The Allegory of the Cave” letting the people who have seen the movie think about reality and the truth. In conclusion, Plato’s story of the cave brings up many philosophical points and most significantly, addresses the topic of society’s role in our lives. On some level, we are all influenced by the thoughts and actions of everyone else, but at the same time, we as humans have the ability to question, make our own conclusions, and finally make our own choices.
One of the main reasons humans would not devote their lives to this experience machine is because they would be giving up more than they were gaining. As humans we are constantly trying to be a certain sort of person. We all have differing traits and personalities which we spend much time discovering and refining for our entire lives. A person who enters into this machine is only, “someone floating in a tank as an indeterminate blob”. Humans are the only species that can be so vastly different from each other. Being this blob diminishes our perso...
Hollinger, Veronica. "Cybernetic Deconstruction." Storming the Reality Studio. Larry McCaffrey, ed. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1992.
...n against machine in a noticeably strained battle, but they also despise that the humans are more machine like than they ponder, and that the machine possesses human qualities as well. The humans, for their part, are as persistently compelled as machines. The incredible fighting skills and superhuman strength of the character seem to put them in machine type category. It showed how dependent man and machine actually are, or might be. One terror of fake intelligence is that technology will trap us in level of dependency. It emphasized the idea that artificial intelligence enslaves the human race. With the time we people are also becoming slaves of the machines that we have created. In time people will be so dependent on machines that they can no longer survive without them. This is the implicit idea of the film matrix, idea which hardly people would have noticed.
Let me briefly explain a simplified plot of The Matrix. The story centers around a computer-generated world that has been created to hide the truth from humans. In this world people are kept in slavery without their knowledge. This world is designed to simulate the peak of human civilization which had been destroyed by nuclear war. The majority of the world's population is oblivious to the fact that their world is digital rather than real, and they continue living out their daily lives without questioning their reality. The main character, Neo, is a matrix-bound human who knows that something is not right with the world he lives in, and is eager to learn the truth. He is offered the truth from a character named Morpheus, who proclaims that Neo is “the One” (chosen one) who will eventually destroy the Matrix, thereby setting the humans “free.” For this to happen, Neo must first overcome the Sentient Program agents who can jump into anyone's digital body. They are the Gate Keepers and hold the keys to The Matrix.
The Matrix, directed by the Wachowski sisters, is a film that discusses free will, artificial intelligence and poses a question: ‘How do we know that our world is real?’ This question is covered in the philosophical branch of epistemology. Epistemology is a component of philosophy that is concerned with the theory of knowledge. The exploration of reality is referenced in the film when Neo discovers he has been living in an artificial world called ‘The Matrix’. He is shocked to learn that the world in which he grew up is a computer program that simulates reality. The questioning of knowledge and its irreversibility provoked by The Matrix invites the audience to wonder whether their own world is an imitation of true reality, thus making it a
The book is a collection of stories, references to the bible, references to ancient times, and examples all to help the reader understand what optimal experience is, and how to achieve this state of consciousness.
The movie "Matrix" is drawn from an image created almost twenty-four hundred years ago by the greek philosopher, Plato in his work, ''Allegory of the Cave''.The Matrix is a 1999 American-Australian film written and directed by the Wachowski brothers. Plato, the creator of the Allegory of the Cave was a famous philosopher who was taught by the father of philosophy Socrates. Plato was explaining the perciption of reality from others views to his disciple Aristotle. The Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave share a simmilar relationship where both views the perciption of reality, but the Matrix is a revised modern perciption of the cave. In this comparison essay I am going to explain the similarities and deifferences that the Matrix and The Allegory of the Cave shares.In the Matrix, the main character,Neo,is trapped in a false reality created by AI (artificial intelligence), where as in Plato's Allegory of the Cave a prisoner is able to grasp the reality of the cave and the real life. One can see many similarities and differences in the film and the allegory. The most important similarity was between the film and the Allegory is the perception of reality.Another simmilarity that the movie Matrix and the Allegory of the Cave shares is that both Neo and the Freed man are prisoners to a system. The most important difference was that Neo never actually lived and experienced anything, but the freed man actually lived and experinced life.
Setting the people free from the virtual reality they live in in The Matrix is morally wrong. Freeing them would only cause them more pain and suffering. John Stuart Mill’s utilitarianism shows that by allowing people to stay in the virtual world they will be more happy than in the real world and thus it will be the best for the general interest of society. Staying in the virtual world will bring about the most utility.
The Matrix specifically shows how advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (A.I.) may one day get out of the control of the people and become a dangerous enemy to mankind. It turns out that in the movie people believe that they are living normal lives in the 90's as common businessmen and families as we do today, when in reality the time is later in the 21st century and people are hooked up to machines in pods where they are merely interpreting electrical signals which tells them that the they are alive in the 90's. They call this set up The Matrix. The artificial intelligence machines put these people in these pods for their whole lives where they never use a muscle in their body; they only think that they are moving and living normal lives.The reason why the artificial intelligence machines put people into pods is because the sky is scorched and there is no source of electricity, so the A.I. units found an alternate source of energy: humans.
The Matrix is a 1999 science fiction film written and directed by The Wachowskis, starring Keanu Reeves and Laurence Fishburne. It tells a story of a future in which reality to most humans is actually a computer program called "the Matrix”. In "the Matrix” humans are really sleep while their bodies are fed on my machines. The movie while directed to entertain audiences but also gave us many insights into philosophy. Many scenes in this movie reflect Descartes, and his many writings explaining them in a visual manner. In this paper I will show various examples of philosophy within the scenes and give commentary explaining each scene.