Descartes Philosophy Depicted In The Film The Matrix

Jurassic Park is a classic science fiction film about the problems one may run into when cloning dinosaurs and creating a Jurassic environment. However, the meaning behind the film may not be so obvious. A viewing of the film makes us question the future for paleontology, cloning technology, and human relationships. Why would the park open with dangers like velociraptors, tyrannosaurus rexes, and other carnivorous, strong, fast, and practically unstoppable dinosaurs present? How do the characters in the film treat death? How does this film portray stereotypes and fears? How does technology play a role in the film, and what does it all mean?

What is the nature of reality? This has been the question on the minds of many philosophers and this mystery dates all the way back to the very first human being who studied the nature of one’s own existence. For centuries philosophers have offered their own theories about the nature of reality and died for their beliefs. The movie, The Matrix represents one of the most recent successful attempts by anyone to bring these philosophical questions to the public. The Matrix did a wonderful job of presenting a story that was both entertaining and also full of hidden allusions and secret messages.

In this essay, I will begin with describing John Locke’s Memory Criterion. I will then object to his theory by stating that a ‘something’ cannot exist and not exist and then continue to exist again. Objection two will deal with double-teletransportation. I will then provide a brief account of the story of the ship of Theseus, which will then lead to the ‘Brave Soldier’ story. Before my conclusion, I will mention compound and simple ‘somethings’ and inanimate and animate ‘somethings’. Throughout this essay, I will follow John Locke’s definition of a person as being “an intelligent thinking being that can know itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places” (Uzgalis, 2016, para. 5).

According to Plato’s analogy, some prisoners were kept in a dark cave with their neck and legs chained to the wall. They remain chained for a long time, and all they can see was shadows of objects. The shadow was made possible because of the fire behind the prisoners and the people who held the objects while hiding behind a walkway. The shadow on the wall was the only reality for the prisoners, but when one freed prisoner finally got to see the ‘real’ reality. Both of the stories have a person who sees this ‘genuine’ reality. The oppressor is the cave in Plato’s story, and the Matrix in the movie. The difference is the person in the cave is freed by someone else, but the characters in the movie are freed by themselves. Also, the cave people desire to stay in the cave because the outside world seemed too dangerous according to the person who explored the external world. After seeing the reality, however, the characters in the movie fight the Matrix, and refuse to go back to the cyber

There were many philosophers in the 17th and 18th century that influenced and inspired the founders of our country. For instance, John Locke believed that life, liberty, and property should be our natural rights as humans and if the government could not secure these rights then the people could get rid of them. That idea impacted Thomas Jefferson when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. This was the perfect time to develop different theories and contradictions because this was right around the time of the printing press and protestant reformation where people started to question the catholic church. Other philosophers like Thomas Hobbes, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau impacted founders like George Washington and James Madison who have positively affected this country in many different ways.

A few common themes shared between both of these works is the idea of freedom and control. In the Matrix, freedom is portrayed as the real world, Zion. The Matrix is a world that is controlled by the machines which Neo soon realises and wishes to escape. Although Zion is overrun by machines, Neo still wishes to dwell within Zion rather than have machines controlling his life and his memories unlike Cypher who believes that

He suggested that man was “born without innate ideas”, and that he began as a tabula rasa, which is a translation for an erased tablet (John Locke: The Mind as a “Tabula Rasa”). This concept of a tabula rasa stated that “people gradually acquired knowledge” from experience. He believed that man could distinguish from good and bad, and that he was also capable of and free to “order his actions and dispose of his possessions” without having to rely on others (Seminar #3: Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, p. 5). Everyone was equal to each other in terms of “power and jurisdiction being reciprocal”, and “no one having more than another” (p.

These ideas were expressed in his “Tabula Rasa Theory of Human Behavior”. In his writing, Locke says,”Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all characters, without any ideas—How comes it to be furnished? Whence comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the materials of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from experience.” According to this quote, Locke explains that people are born with empty minds, but individual learning and experiences will help to shape life. Experience comes from two different sources: outer experience and inner experience. Outer experience comes from the senses and provide sensory details like color, shapes, heat, and sweetness. Since these qualities exist in material objects, every human perception is the same and produce the same impact in each human. Inner experience comes through self reflexion and provides ideas such as beliefs, ideas, and thoughts. Unlike outer experiences, inner experiences can differ from person to person. Thomas Jefferson and his colleagues used the “Tabula Rasa Theory of Human Behavior” as reference when writing the Declaration of Independence because Locke believed every person deserves a shot at happiness since birth. In the Declaration of Independence, our founding fathers write that the “pursuit of

“Which is better--to have laws and agree, or to hunt and kill?” ― William Golding, Lord of the Flies. The Lord of the Flies is about a group of boys who get stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere and try to form a government with horrible consequences. John Locke(1632-1704) is a philosopher who is well known for his views on state of nature, laws of nature, social contract, and natural law. If John Locke saw what was happening on the island, he would have been aghast because of the state of nature, violation of rights, and the social contract.

In contrast, Locke believes, that knowledge can only have a high degree of certainty but cannot be certain. Since he does not focus much on certainty in his works, he believes that perception can play a major part in the process of knowledge. He further reiterates that knowledge is based on observations and senses. According to his him, ideas come from reflection and sensation while knowledge is founded on experience

Locke believed that the human mind is like a blank tablet at birth and in the movie, when the monster resurrect he was not able to walk, think and speak, and the same was for Dr. Frankenstein wife resurrected after the monster killed her, at first his wife was't able to talk and she did not recognize her husband. It was like the minds of the monster and Dr. Frankenstein's wife were

Although Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 preceded The Wachowskis’ The Matrix by almost half a century, they share many themes -- both overt, and covert. In Fahrenheit 451, the protagonist Montag goes through three phases of life: being oblivious to the dystopia, being in conflict about it, and resolving to be liberated from it. Montag’s ‘awakening’ was caused by his own curiosity and internal dissatisfaction with his life and the world he lived in. However, the actions that he took seemed to be completely subconscious, and not planned. In comparison, in the Wachowskis’ The Matrix, the protagonist Neo made the conscious decision to take the red pill, which represented his desire to learn the truth about the world. Although both stories share the common theme of individuals rebelling from a society, a more covert motif is the protagonists, Neo and Montag, finding themselves.

Personal identity is a much-disputed debate within metaphysics and is still a cause of concern for many philosophers because it raises questions about what we essentially are and what being a person, persisting from one day to the next, necessarily consists of. In this essay I discuss the very influential view from Locke, who argues that persons are essentially persons. He concludes that personal identity is a matter of psychological continuity. Additionally, I explain the view that was first developed by Olson known as animalism. He argues that a person is essentially an animal. Animalism is the view that to be a human person is to be an organism that belongs to the species of Homo sapiens and that is where

As Will Durant once stated, “Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.” Ignorance can make one unaware of the dismal reality he is living. Only the knowledge gained can be used to reach overall enlightenment. Similarly, these ideas are expressed through a prisoner trapped in a cave in “Allegory of the Cave” by Plato, as well as Neo stuck in a false world in The Matrix by the Wachowski’s. Both stories exhibit the struggle of escaping ignorance and reaching a place of knowledge. Both Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and the Wachowski’ The Matrix illustrate that overcoming ignorance through a journey of realization can lead one to knowledge and eventually grant him to the enlightenment necessary to spread the truth. The journey Neo from The Matrix and the cave dweller from Plato’s allegory take demonstrate this theme.