The Matrix: Awakening From The Matrix

Within the dream world of the movie,”‘The Matrix”, only Neo (symbolic of the term ‘neophyte) is able to awaken and to see that it is not the reality; nor, does the machine run and operated world created by it actually allow for real human existence. Awakening from the Matrix; Neo seeks a new way for himself. First, he meets, Morpheus, a character named after the Greek God of Dreams, who comes to Neo and gives him a choice between the world of the Matrix or reality (the red pill vs the blue pill); Neo accepts reality and emulating Plato’s man in the cave, he is able to see the light. Once Neo discovers that he, and all of humanity is trapped within the Matrix, he tries to bring ‘the light’ and to show other people the way…He tries to come

back and save others by destroying the Matrix and taking away the power of the machines over humans. His challenge is the question the way of his existence and to seek to free himself from the controls and limits placed upon him by the machines that use humans for their own existence. Similarly, in the novel, Sophie’s World, Alberto, the philosopher, and Sophie the girl studying philosophy by correspondence turn out to only exist in a book that is being written by Albert Knag for his own daugher, Hilde. The characters in the book, like Neo in “The Matrix” are part of a construction; in other words, their realities and worlds do not exist in the same dimension as human reality like that of Albert and Hilde; yet, they believe in their own existence and even Hilde comes to think that they must exist on some different level or plane. Like Morpheus and the Oracle who speak to Neo, Alberto is teaching Sophie about the existence and the history of human beings through philosophy and science. The book does this through explanation of philosophical origins in Plato, Aristotle, and Democritus and the beginnings of logic and argument and the ideas of existence and nonexistence. Alberto helps Sophie to do an overview of Western philosophical thinking from the time of the Greeks and Romans towards Judeo-Christian philosophy and the concept of God and the meaning of existence in a world that has order, or, for existentialists may have no meaning or be based in only chaos. In both the movie and the novel, the human condition is at the centre; whether in a futuristic dystopia, or in a contemporary sense;