Philosophy: core concepts and historical perspectives

¶ … Matrix" Neo-is offered the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. The red pill will free him with what he thought to be the truth and offer him a new reality. The blue pill will have him forget that the world is not as he thought and have him awake in his bed, accepting his reality.

As we see the red pill is the hard way, it does not mean an easy solution, it means struggling to understand the truth. The blue pill is the easy way, it means living in a world that is created to keep people satisfied. The world of the blue pill is not as satisfying as the world of the red pill, but it is real. In that situation, I would chose the red pill.

The issue can be looked at from a philosophical viewpoint and the main question that needs answering is 'what is reality?' I argue that reality is not what is real, but only what is real in our minds.

We can start by looking at the views of the ancient philosophers and of the Renaissance humanists. The one thing that underlined the ideas of both was that the importance of humans lay in their ability to interact as individuals with the world around them and extract meaning from it.

Man himself became the measure of all things. If man is the measure of all things, does it matter if the world around him is not one of reality? A man lives within his own mind, responding to the outside world. In my view, it is better to live a life within your own mind that satisfies you, than to live in the world where you recognize the truth but gain nothing for it. As Morpheus says in the movie, "all I am offering is the truth, nothing more." This refers to the fact that he does not offer him happiness, satisfaction or stimulation. All he can offer is the truth, and the truth brings with it no other benefit.

It could be argued that it is better to know the truth and suffer, than to believe a lie and be happy. This could be seen as false happiness. But again, we are asked what happiness and suffering really are. The answer is that they are products of the human mind.

Hume's philosophies also expand on this idea. Hume believes that meaning only comes from repeated experience which gives us 'habit,' so that if we see one thing, we automatically associate it with another, and in this way we come to understand things without experiencing them. We come to see something as a fact because we have come to associate it with something in our mind. This reinforces that reality is what is in our minds, not what is in the outside environment.

It could also be argued that by recognizing reality we could communicate it with others and the human race as a whole could develop. The first point against this is that a person's reality can never really be communicated. They can express their reality and in response another person can listen to them, associate it with their own knowledge and create their own understanding of what they have been told. But there is no way to know if what one person was thinking has truly been transferred to the other person. Again we see that things have meaning in the mind. What one person sees as reality is not understood by another because it is said, it is understood when another mind interprets it.

I believe that the idea of humans progressing is just another idea that has been accepted. It is accepted because people want to believe it. But for an individual, human progress serves no immediate purpose.

The fact is that reality is determined by every individual, and reality is what is in the minds of a person. Many philosophers agree with this point, however many also believe that a person's reality reflects the environment and its purpose is to shed light on the real nature of things.

If reality is really in the mind, then the real nature of things does not matter. The environment's purpose is just to create a human response to it. It is in this response that the truth lies. Whether the environment is real or imagined, our reaction to it as real. Just as with a movie or a book. The characters and the story are not real, but as a person watches or reads they extract meaning from it. That reaction is still real, even though the events in the movie are not.

Taking the blue pill and entering the real world actually takes away the stimulation of the environment for Neo. He no longer has the society, the food and many other experiences. While his world is in fact now real, in his mind it has less meaning because it offers less stimulation. What he once saw as reality now becomes more like a movie to him. He can still access it and can still live a life in the invented world. But he can no longer interact as fully because he now knows it is not real. This is just as an event in real life will always have greater impact than an event in a movie, because we know it is real. No matter what the programs for his mind can offer him, as long as he knows they are invented, he is stimulated less.