The Matrix Argumentative Essay

Dreams are a phenomena that has perplexed humans for hundreds of years. Our waking state of consciousness, the one in which we get out of bed, drink our coffee, go to work, and fulfill our own role in society is one that we have memory of, and that we can understand. But once we lay down in our beds, and fall asleep, a whole new world is presented to us, a world happening inside our minds. Ideas, places we might have visited, people we might have once seen, are all drawn from our subconscious to create a play that we explore in our sleep. The Matrix, the 1999 sci-fi movie by the Wachowskis, explores an alternate reality, where our minds are in a different state of consciousness. While the people in the movie are motionless bodies held in liquid pods, their minds explore a world, similar to our own, but generated by a computer. This hyper reality that could be

Human sense are known to often deceive, making some philosophers reflect on our own trust in them. In Descartes “Meditation on first Philosophy”, attention is put on the Dream argument Hypothesis, where he wonders if life itself is not one big dream. The Matrix brings this idea to reality, where most people are unaware that they are “dreaming”. In the beginning of the film, we hear a famous quote from Neo: "Do you ever get that feeling where you don’t know whether you are awake or dreaming?”. This link between the movies modified state of consciousness and the dream argument is where we find one of the important messages in the film. Should this lead to question all the knowledge our society has gathered, since knowledge itself comes at the root from what our senses interpret? Perhaps we will never find out whether our reality is a dream, and our dreams are reality, but for us, and for 99% of the people in the matrix, it should not make anything we perceive less