The Matrix and Plato's Allegory of the Cave

Berenice Eumana
May 16, 2011
The Matrix and Imagination
Dr.Elizabeth H. McCormick

            Existence is difficult to understand; even for great philosophers like Plato it was difficult to explain life. People came to believe that what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell are what exists and determines what’s real. We’ve accepted a long time ago that these five senses are what reveal everything and we tend to ignore what’s beyond them, and beyond our boundaries. The truth is someone’s pulling the wool over our eyes, some unknown elite, God, or maybe machines keeping us in an incubator, and as long as the people under him/her are comfortable they’ll accept the lies. People might be living a lie their whole life, just like in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave and the Wachowski brothers The Matrix, without a choice or chance of freedom. In both cases, a handful of people are broken free from the oppression and show the people of the world that they have two choices; to continue living in an illusion or to know the truth and fight for change. In The Matrix, which is similar to Plato’s story, the main character Neo is given this choice. He made the decision to discover the truth knowing there’s no turning back from the nightmare. Understanding reality reminded Neo of the bliss of ignorance, but the feeling of freedom was much more satisfying and he wants to share it with the world, just like the prisoner in The Allegory of the Cave.
            In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave there are human beings who have lived in a cave since their childhood, where their legs and necks have been chained, not allowing them to move.  In front of them are shadows being presented by a fire in the distance and a low wall built to create a screen. These shadows are projected by people holding up puppets, sometimes making sounds. The humans were only able to look forward, so their “truth” would be nothing more than the shadows they have seen their whole life. These humans can be seen as prisoners, but to the prisoners they are just living life. One day, one of the prisoners escapes from the cave and as he looks back, he recognizes that the shadows are just objects that are shown by the fire. The brightness of the fire, hurts his eyes since he is accustomed to the darkness. As he steps out of the cave he is exposed to the sun, which gave off such a light that it didn’t allow him to quickly observe his surroundings. He first sees shadows of the objects around him, then the reflection on the water, then the objects themselves, then the stars and moon at night, and finally the sun. He would see the sun in his own proper way and argue that the sun “gives the season and the years, and is the guardian of all that is in the visible world” (Kreis 3). The man decides to go back to the cave where he can share the real world experiences with the prisoners, but it’s hard to convince them right away that the shadows are not real. If the man had a contest to measure the shadows with the prisoners, the prisoners would win because all their life they have seen these objects rather than the escaped man who has been exposed to a new habit of sight. The prisoners would laugh at him and tell him how foolish he was for leaving the cave and that he came back without his eyes. These prisoners don’t know their prisoners, don’t think their prisoners this is the only reality that they ever known.

            The Matrix had an interesting concept on life, that it’s a computer program. The movie’s main story began when Neo, The One, was contacted by Morpheus, a person who’s been already enlightened. Something about Neo made him very valuable to this stranger, and also a target of the agents, the machines who created the Matrix. He finally met Morpheus in person and was asked to pick one of two pills. 

The option Neo chose at this point was going to be the most important and symbolic decision he would ever make in his life. It involved a blue pill and red pill and each one had a special outcome. If he took the blue pill “The story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you wanted” (Wachowski ). If he took it he’d remain a computer programmer in his Matrix life, and a slave to the machines. If he took the red pill “You stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes”  (Wachowski ). He took the red pill and discovered reality and how ugly and damaged life is. He also discovered the ridiculous fact that humans are being used as batteries by machines. The metaphor is very similar to Plato’s allegory. Neo went out to discover reality and think of a way to retrain and wake up all the drones in the Matrix. To save humanity is a tough journey, especially since most people rather live in ignorance and bliss, but he set out to do it.
The two stories go hand in hand when it comes to the theory of being enlightened. In the Allegory of the Cave there were shadows of statues held by unseen puppeteers reflected on the wall by the fire.  The Cave has a theme that it’s a poor copy of the real world, which to the prisoners is their only reality. According to Plato, “our world is nothing but shadows, imperfect manifestations of the forms” (Allegory). The Matrix is very similar to this belief of being lost in the dark because it is also about people being prisoners and believing what they are born into. The Matrix is their cave and the machines are their puppet masters. In the Matrix it’s a lot trickier, life could be so comfortable that you forget to even think you’re in bondage. Your mind is enslaved by an artificial life, your senses may be working but you’re only a brain in a glass jar. People accept these senses by completely listening to them and believing everything like it really exists, and nothing more. Some people break out though and enjoy the freedom. Morpheus and his ship are a prime example of what an enlightened person should do. They went back, knowing the threat of death, in an attempt to enlighten and free more victims of the puppet masters. Unfortunately, the grasp of the machines is so strong that the person, their very own race turns against them because they’re seen as a threat. The prisoners in the cave do the same thing, laugh at the enlightened one and tell him the light has ruined his eyes. However the escaped prisoner would not want to have the same perception in life as the others because his mind has been expanded to so many new horizons. Just like in the Matrix when Morpheus tells Neo “I’m trying to free your mind Neo, but I can only show you the door, you’re the one that has to walk through it” (Wachowski ). This compares to when the escaped prisoner would tell the other prisoners that they would have a different perception in life if they could see what he has been exposed to. The prisoners would enter a new environment where they might question existence, question their old world, due to the shadows being an unreal projection by people before them. The scene when Neo is slowly drawn into the mirror represents the gateway between the bondage of stimulation, of the beginning, and of the new world. This is the rebirth of Neo being involved in the actual real world and not the Matrix. The escaped prisoner goes through this rebirth as well as he steps out of the cave, to recover his eyes and to use them like he never used them before.

            Humans are truly the biggest miracle of life. They are born with a blank slate, a “tabula rasa” as the psychologist Watson would call it, and are really capable of anything. At first we lived harmoniously by nature. Everything we observed taught us how to live and how to care. Unfortunately, nature could be reckless and painful. It has destruction and disease and that might have influenced the original human as much as anything. According to John B. Watson in the textbook, “Human emotions and behaviors, though biologically influenced, are mainly a bundle of conditioned responses” (Myers 303). In The Matrix, the agent said that he would most likely categorized a human as a disease than a mammal because of the fact that we look at the small picture and just rob all resources produced by earth and move on. Humans should be a category of their own. People could be destructive, but they can also be constructive. It all depends on what came before us and how we were trained to think and imagine. It’s so simple to teach a human, to program how they think.

 The phobia fear, a distressing emotion aroused by impending danger, could be taught to us. In an experiment conducted by John B. Watson he showed that even what we’re afraid of isn’t necessarily our choice or genetic. In his project “Little Albert” (Myers 303), he applied classical conditioning to an infant by exposing him to a white mouse and using a metal bar. The mouse, the neutral stimulus, brought no fear to the child; in fact the baby enjoyed it wandering around. The noise the metal bar makes, the unconditional stimulus in this experiment, was uncomfortable for the infant. Mixing the two and eventually exposing little Albert to the mouse without the hitting of the bar brought the same uncomfort to the baby and he feared the mouse, and five days later everything that was furry. We are as vulnerable as infants and people before us exploit it. Being put into an illusion, like the Matrix, is so simple for our predecessors, we don’t need any wires or complex computer programs like the machines used, they just need to tell us what they want and pull the wool over our eyes. Getting out of the illusion is very difficult, and the next step, accepting the truth, is probably the toughest a person could go through, but when the war is over and the fog is cleared, the greatest thing happen and people are engulfed by true reality. These things include Equality, freedom and happiness.
            Humans tend to believe in what they are taught reality is, or what is considered normal today. The Matrix and Plato’s Allegory of the Cave both show how there are people out there who wish to know the truth and spread it. Watson’s experiment shows how people are born with a blank slate, ready to be inscribed with knowledge, but accepting the truth can be difficult if you’ve been corrupted from the start. The life you lived is not in fact the totality that is possible for you, and if you can release yourself from bonds you don’t even see, you will then be able to see the world as it truly is.

                                         WORKS CITED

"ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE." Literary Cavalcade 54.2 (2001): 21. Academic Search            

            Complete. EBSCO. Web. 23 May 2011.

           

  The Matrix. Dir. Andy and Larry Wachowski. Wri. Sophia Stewart. 1999.Warner                   

                 Brothers. DVD.

Myers, David G. Psychology (Ninth edition). New York: Worth Publishers, 2010.                                     

                Print.

Kreis, Steven. “Plato, The Allegory of the Cave”. The History Guide. 2000. Web.                                                        

             13 May 2004. < http://www.historyguide.org/intellect/allegory.html>

Summary of "The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World"

The story “The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World” is an interesting and weird kind of story. At the beginning of the story the group of children who see the dead man wash up on the beach couldn't manage to figure out if it was a human at all until it they came closer. Then they start playing with the dead man which was very weird. When one man notices the dead man, he spreads the word among his village. It is clear that the village very small because it was “made up of only twenty-odd wooden houses” therefore it was not hard to find out that the dead man was a stranger to the village. The women in the village, who clean him up, tend to have some sort of admiration towards him describing him as the “tallest, strongest, most virile, and best built man they had ever seen”. The women in the village are the ones who make the dead man clothes, dress him, and clean him. They even start to fantasize how a great husband, strong, helpful man he would be in the village if he was still alive. His house would be huge and his wife would be the happiest women ever. Compared to their husbands who are “incapable of doing what he could do in one night... weakest, meanest, and most useless creatures on earth”. This shows how the women would imagine their perfect guy to take care of them and their household. The oldest woman however looked at the drowned man with more compassion than passion and says he looks like an Esteban. The stubborn, young people of the village disagree saying his name is Lautaro but “it was a vain illusion”. One woman who had cleaned the old man well was disappointment when the others had to drag the dead man rather than carry him because he was so heavy. This made her start imagine that people would view the dead man as a “handsome fool” since he would be too heavy to even sit down in a chair without breaking it. Towards the end when the man are going to throw the dead man’s body into the sea, the women keep decorating his body with flowers, holy-water jars and nails, the man of the village found it ridiculous because his body would be torn up by the sharks anyways. As a woman uncovers the dead man’s face, the man realizes that it’s really Esteban and they praise him even fighting over the privilege of carrying him.  In his honor, they name the village after Esteban and have a big funeral. The village image would represent the memory of Esteban by having huge houses, and breaking their backs planting flowers.          

Research and Writing

            This spring semester I’ve gotten a lot more experienced in writing papers and researching the topics. I’ve written papers before, but it wasn’t until this cluster that I’ve discovered how easy writing papers could become. Finding any information is easy these days, especially with Wikipedia, but I learned that not all sources can help give you a strong argument. In this class, and the others in the cluster, I learned how to navigate through the web, go to LaGuardia’s library website, and even use the texts we paid so much for. With the right amount of research, and too much is never enough, you could begin an outline. It’s good to have an outline of your essay before you actually start writing it. This gives you a bit of motivation that you can actually write the essay and with everything in place it just seems like you could free write your thoughts into the paper instead of staring at the computer screen for hours thinking what else can you add here and there. A good start leads to a great finish so having a good thesis is also important. With an outline and good research you can have a few arguments, sometimes you have to even argue against yourself but you know you could write a great A+ paper. Writing multiple thesis’ and picking one that fits your support the best really helps in getting a good grade and making writing a lot smoother. Finally what I have learned about writing a paper is the citation part and how Ms. McCormick stresses how it has to be perfect, it makes me realize that it’s really important. It lets the reader know that you put a lot of your thought and time into the paper and makes them feel better about reading it, and possibly enjoying it more. Overall writing a paper longer than three pages doesn’t scare me anymore because I have learned how to break it down.

“The Mirror in The Matrix of Media Ecology”

 This article “The Mirror in The Matrix of Media Ecology” by Kenneth Rufo is about the scene when Neo is about to enter the Matrix through the mirror. The mirror is like the beginning of what Neo is going to experience. This world that is to them the real world which describes the story of Lucan where it creates an ego. When Neo is entering this new world, there are a lot of changes through the mirror movements. Through the liquid exterior mirror, it represents a reborn occurring. The first scene which he goes through this river path describes him being born and then released to the Matrix. It’s like Neo was dead at one point, then alive and so on which leads to the statement that there was always a double him. There is a contraction between the real world and the matrix when it says that the iris always a battle among humanity to get freedom while in the matrix its “freedom”.  The mirror is the gateway to this new world where supernatural things occur and the rules of psychics don’t exist.  

Hero's journey--Joseph Campbell

Mythology as many people read say that its not real so if it’s not real why do people get so fascinated with it and what does it teach you? Myths don’t have to be real for one to acknowledge it such as the hero being presented in “The Hero with a Thousand Faces”. The Adventure of the Hero is where the hero is considers the one and is viewed in great admiration  while he goes through the three stages which are  separation, initiation ,and return. In separation their is the call where the hero often refuses but with the help of supernatural aid their is motivation. He crosses a symbolic threshold where he “rescues a maiden, recover a treasure — before returning to his society to receive the adulation accorded to one who braves the various kinds of demons that keep the more faint of heart from undertaking the Adventure”. He challenge is to adjust his emotions towards women when he meets with Temptress or a goddess. By experiencing this first stage, the hero uses what he has learned from his journey and shares his knowledge with the people in his society. The hero in part two is portrayed as a model for action whether he is seen as a saint, warrior, emperor, lover or redeemer.e is also modeled for existentialist lines where he relies on his own mid to get through though situations no demons or gods to support him. The citizens have hope for the hero to protect them against the forces of darkness by creating an  Edenic world. Campbell “ranges East and West, from the earliest recorded civilizations to contemporary cultures, to collect stories of heroes for examination and dissection under his critical microscope”. By having a hero and knowing his quest, it brings that security and restores happiness the society has lost and the hero can restore. 


Info link: http://ehis.ebscohost.com.rpa.laguardia.edu:2048/ehost/detail?sid=9505a7a9-71e5-44f8-bc85-d45555a01a25%40sessionmgr12&vid=64&hid=5&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=mjh&AN=103331NON11169260000095

The picture of Dorian Grey rough draft

There’s clearly a lot of thought and creativity put into The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The story and its details could reference The Bible, myths and history from the past, and a lot on human characteristics and psychology, which show a lot of work and a lot of imagination from the author. Imagination is a combination of experiences stored in a person’s memory along with thought and creativity to reach a specific goal or issue that the person may want to overcome. Imagination plays a huge part in the story and it also gives us a big role to understand it more after a little analytical review. The theme of imagination is very powerful and through Basil, Lord Henry, and Dorian Gray we can see how it can change lives, especially through the portrait drawn by Basil himself; however, imaginations true power can be seen and experienced by the readers themselves when we speculate and try to explain the events occurring in the book. Without our imagination this is just another story and Basil's painting of Dorian Gray is just another portrait, but because of many different backgrounds and beliefs we can see that there’s more to these objects. For example: Dorian Gray lives a simple life until two things enter his life, Lord Henry and the portrait. It's left ambiguous what corrupts Dorian the most, is it the portrait being magical, or is that just superstition and it’s really just Lord Henry’s bad influence that makes him believe somethings changing about the picture, as if his mind was playing tricks on him?




Some may believe that it’s ..(superstition or mind playing tricks) but I believe its .. ( the opposite.) because I can’t imagine it any other way.

-or-

This story is a great example of the power of imagination, it has a lot of ideas for us to take in, but also requires us to put in a lot more to answer questions like these

A Beautiful Mind

The movie “The beautiful mind’’ was very inspiring to me in the message behind this remarkable story. I felt that their is always hope for you to make things better or prove people wrong if you have faith and courage in your self. The main trick is to keep moving forward and not giving up. At the beginning of the movie, John Nash seemed to display a man who was socially awkward because he would not really interact with others as much, only his roommate Charles. Charles seemed like a good/supporting roommate to have while staying in Princeton University. He helped John when he was extremely stressed and had no control in certain situations. John spends most of his interest in a mathematical theorem using different formulas and codes to figure out a math problem. He was a mathematical genius who was acknowledged towards the years. Along the way he meets Alicia where they both find an interest in each other in a short period of time. When John is out of control by his hallucinations, Alicia never gives up on him. In the beginning of the movie it seems he is called for help on a top secret mission by a man named Parker. Parker needs John to break down codes. Along the way, John also meets a little girl named Marcee who is related to Charles. As the movie gets into dept, it is clear that Charles, Marcee, Parker are people made-up. These people who are John’s creation is like his support team, people who he can easily communicate with. However, John gets too lost in the unreal world that he doesn't recognize what’s real and unreal. As he goes for  check-up ,the doctor reveals that he has an disorder and most take medication. The medication erases the unreal people in his life and doesn't allow him to think clear anymore. Math is his passion and he needs to think clear to work his best. Towards the end of the movie, John slightly overcomes his illness and managed to ignore his hallucinations even though he still sees them. The intelligence of John makes him become confident in himself that he can mange whats real and unreal with faith and his lovely wife Alicia by his side.