Matrix and Descartes The film The Matrix represents many of the ideas of Descartes regarding perception and reality, truth and selfhood, knowledge and falsehood. The film is about a man who is awakened from a simulated world and shown the reality of his life. The man's objective is to free humankind from its enslavement by machines. He achieves this objective by essentially putting mind over matter. This paper will discuss how scenes in The Matrix represent Descartes' ideas on doubt, reason, self and knowledge, and explain how the film correlates with our own society today.

Doubt

In the quest for certainty, Descartes turns to doubt. Doubting in order to find the truth is a way to check oneself to see if whether what one believes is actually correspondent with reality. When researchers conduct research, they typically test a hypothesis, which is a form of doubting whether a thing is true and running a test to see if what is expected as an outcome is actually what happens. For Neo in The Matrix, this same moment occurs in the scene in which he is escaping from the Agents at his work. Morpheus is guiding him on the phone and Neo asks, "How do you know all this?" Morpheus says there is no time to explain and Neo trusts his guidance -- but when things get tricky outside the window, Neo begins to doubt his capacity to do as he is being instructed. The result is that he ends up in the hands of the Agents. His doubt has caused him to have to interact directly with that which he fears and this interaction ends up reinforcing his conviction that Morpheus and he are right in the truth and the need to fight the Matrix, which represents falsehood.

Three Reasons for Doubting

The first scene that represents one of Descartes' reasons for doubting current beliefs (i.e., the inability to distinguish dreams from reality) comes early on in the film, when Neo wakes up after having passed out at his computer to see a message from Trinity on his computer screen. This has never happened to him before and he is confused. He even asks his visitors, whose arrival Trinity predicts, whether they have ever been unsure if what is happening is a dream or reality. His visitors make a joke and invite him out. The irony of course is that Neo is in reality asleep inside the Matrix; the fact that he is beginning to ask questions is what awakens him to the possibility of arriving at a true understanding of his situation. It is similar to the individual inside Plato's cave, who begins to see that what he is watching are shadows on the wall and not real life.

The second scene that represents one of Descartes' reasons for doubting current beliefs (i.e., the deceptive nature of sense perception) comes when Neo is beginning to train to fight the Matrix. Because when he is plugged into the Matrix, the Matrix sends powerful signals to the brain, Neo has to learn to reject these signals and know that he is actually in control of his own body. When Neo shows that he can adjust accordingly and dodge...

Neo doubts the evil genius of the Matrix and takes the red pill to proceed on to a true discovery of reality.
Proof of the Existence of the Self

Descartes' proof of the existence of the self is the utility of the mind. I think, therefore I exist, is the way that Descartes puts it. For Neo, this realization comes when he learns that if he dies in the Matrix, he dies in real life, too. Why this should be so is explained by Morpheus who says that the body cannot live without the mind. This is essentially the same principle as that which Descartes espouses when he states his proof of the existence of the self. The fact that a man can reason, can think -- even if it is to doubt his own existence -- is proof enough of the fact that he does indeed exist. In the Matrix, if you stop thinking, you are dead. A death of the mind in the Matrix results in the death of the mind for the individual in the real world. As Morpheus puts it, the body cannot live without the mind -- and Neo agrees with this expression, as it makes sense to him and correlates with everything he has experienced -- namely, that the mind is the life of the man and that which the body, ultimately, depends upon.

Reason is the Only Path to Truth/Knowledge

Descartes emphasizes the need to rely upon reason to arrive at truth and knowledge. This principle is represented in the film when Neo realizes that the "real world" simulation stimuli of the Matrix can be overridden by his own use of reason. By using his mind to discern the truth of the matter from the simulation, Neo is able to stop bullets and, later, to literally dive into the Matrix's code and destroy the Agents from within (in the film's climax). He is even able to overcome death in the Matrix, because his mind is able to reason that while he may "die" in the computer simulation, he has not been hit by a bullet in real life so there is really no reason for his body to stop living. Thus, he is able to "come back to life" at the end of the film -- all because he uses his mind. His mind, his use of reason and intellect leads him to truth -- to the knowledge that in the Matrix, nothing is real, so he is able to do as he likes -- to fly if he so desires -- which is exactly what he chooses to do in the very last scene of the film. His mind has literally set him free in the Matrix and empowered him to defy the fakeness of the computer simulated world.

Can reason find a way to reliably distinguish appearance from reality? Descartes argues that the only way to do this is to reason that there is a God, Who is good, Who would not deceive us, and Who puts in us the faculty to recognize truth when we encounter it. The ancient Greek philosophers, such as Plato, identified this faculty as innate ideas -- the truth of God written on men's souls, so that whenever an individual encountered knowledge or truth in real life, recognizing it as true was simply a matter of recollection, since all truth was already written inside the human being by God when the soul was created. The fact that man can think of the existence of a perfect God is proof of the being's existence in the first place -- for if a perfect God did not exist, our minds would not be able to think of such a thing. This is like Anselm's proof of the existence of God: God is that than which nothing greater can…