The Real World

The world is a wondrous place, isnt it?

It is filled with mundane things, like pens and chairs and people, amazing things,
like books and films and people, beautiful things, like flowers and sunsets and people,
and grand things, like miracles and life and love.
It is remarkable to be alive, to be seeing these things, to be feeling emotions and
to touch the lives of other people, isnt it?
All the wonders of the world are wonders that we claim to sense in a world which
we claim to be real. The possibility of the world we live in not being real is a possibility
that doesnt cross our minds often, because it is believed to be absurd, ridiculous, and
even impossible. Not necessarily.
1999 changed the worlds thinking with the introduction of the film The Matrix,
and beneath all its modern technology of robots and impressive action scenes, is an
embedded thought of the possibility of life being merely a computer simulation, of life
being not real, in brevity.
It is a thought that has riddled intellectuals of mankind for so long, from those of
the early Greeks who delved in philosophy. It was a concept central to their study, the
reality of reality, and it has been epitomized in a film hundreds of years later.
Intellectuals like Socrates, Plato and Rene Descartes provided a solid foundation of
which the film built upon and greatly utilized.
Plato told of an allegory of a cave, of which men were prisoners, shackled facing
the wall, unable to turn their heads, watching shadows of objects in front of them, in
belief that they are the real thing, before one man broke free and saw the world as it
truly is.
It is this man that Neo of The Matrix can be compared with, and he learns that
everything he thought was real is only an illusion, much like the shadows in the cave,
merely copies of the real world. Plato insists that people who have unbound themselves
from the chains of ignorance inside the cave must free others as well, and Neo takes it
upon himself to awaken and save humanity from the false reality too. However, not
everyone accepts this truth readily, much like the prisoners still chained in the cave
when the person freed attempts to convince them.
Upon Neos first awakening in the real world, he struggles to see things, because
it is the first time he opens his eyes. Much like the man from the cave, he is first blinded
by the sunlight outside the darkness, and had difficulty in seeing things as they really
are, clear and concrete and real. The Matrix is one great cave, and The Matrix is one
great adaptation of the allegory.
Rene Descartes thought of the same thing. He questions reality and all its
experiences, claiming it could all be an illusion forced by an evil demon. Feeling and
seeing can also be done in a dream, so he could easily be doing so, thus making the
senses unreliable under this consideration. All of these theories are in his publication,
Meditations.
In The Matrix, this concept is realised, but as an artificial intelligence who forces
mankind into a virtual reality, and mankind, just like in a dream state, does not realise
that everything is not real. People who have been freed from it, however, have learned
to perceive even the most common of things differently, questioning their existence and
certainty, especially those provided by our senses, much like Rene Descartes.
In the end of the film, when Neo dies in the virtual world, he also dies in the real
one, using Descartes theory on the Res Extensa and Res Cogitans, wherein what
happens to the mind has an effect on the body, and that each can exist without the
other.
Now we are left to ponder ourselves, whether this life we are living, waking up to
go to school, studying, eating, brushing our teeth and every day activities, is actually
real. Is any of this real? Are we under control by an evil genius, an artificial intelligence?
And finally, given the opportunity, will we take the blue pill or the red pill?
The world we live in is wondrous. Between the mundane and the grand things,
there is everything we believe to be real.
And these things are just simply astounding.
So if it isnt real, then the real world, if there is even one, must be really
something else.