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Shayna or Sheness Israel's picture

The Matrix: Digital Reality: Further from Reality than You Think

This past weekend, I watched the Matrix. For all sorts of reasons, many things in it are directly applicable to things we have learned in class thus far. The one that interested me was the idea of not really seeing reality.

In the Matrix, Neo evolved in his consciousness when he saw that the world he believed was "real" was just a program that he did not learn to hack yet. Once he opened his mind, he saw the world as a number series, something like a digital number series. When he saw this code, he realized that he could manipulate its once seemingly insurmountable configuration for his benefit: he was stopping bullets, moving at ridiculous speeds, and whatnot.

It made me wonder, are we even further from seeing reality than we thought? What does it mean for people who always defy or bend rules? Are they more equipped to see reality or at least know the ways to manipulate it? What about people who break clay blocks with their head without harming themselves? Have they learned to hack the code?

Another thing that was intriguing in the Matrix was the fact that people were actually grown and were plugged into the Matrix. While plugged in, their lives were encoded in this film that they were unaware of. Would I want to know a reality where I found out that I was plugged into some Matrix and all I knew to be “real” was programmed? Hell yeah; however, I would not want to be the only one “freed.”

 

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