The Matrix: Rejection of the absurd.

Hello there, dear reader, and welcome to Philosophy in Funny Places, where I look into popular culture and pluck from it a juicy morsel that makes us think about the real world.

I say real world, but I should say “real” world, because today I shall look at The Matrix, a 1999 film starring all the people you already know because they were in The Matrix.

We shall not (today) talk of the allegory of the filmmakers’ coming out as transgender.

Although a worthy topic of discussion, and a powerful message that resonated with like-minded or similarly persecuted peoples the world over, the more common theme was that of the very nature of our reality.

Nearly every person you talked to, even people that had no interest in philosophy or philosophical thinking, came out of that cinema wondering about the relationship between their perception and the world in which they live.

I can’t think of another blockbuster movie that can say the same.

Okay, so we’re going to talk about that right? About the way sense data can misrepresent reality and things aren’t always what they seem, and about whether we can we trust our own sensations?

Well, no actually. That’s an intriguing topic, but even without looking I know that fine work has already been done in that area. Give it a YouTube search or a Google of “Idealism and The Matrix” and I lay good odds you’ll find some deep stuff, of finer vintage that I could provide.

We’ll touch on it, as I lazily amble through these questions in my own amateurish way, but I think it’d be more interesting if we looked into the reasons why such philosophies, and the questions the movie creates, are interesting at all.

The basic idea of Idealism, as laid down by Bishop George Berkeley (he’s dead now), was that the only way we have of interacting with the world was through our senses. Sight, touch, smell etc. They create sense data, with which we can map out a world around us, one that was made up of and out of all of the sense data we could collect.

So the table at which I’m sat, to borrow Bertrand Russell’s example (he’s dead too, so he can’t complain), is brown, hard, rectangular and so on. I take that data and my brain amalgamates it into a definition that best summarises that data, and it calls it a table. Easy. That’s what brains do – if their primary function is to keep us alive internally, by beating our heart, breathing and what have you, then its secondary function is to keep us alive externally, by interpreting the world and translating it into something we can understand and survive.

So your brain interprets the world.

It doesn’t intrinsically know whether the data the senses provide it with is true or false. It just goes with what it’s got.

Just think of how many optical illusions you experience, or how many potential lovers have thrown a glance your way that it turns out to have meant something completely different than what you’d hoped?

All he brain can do is see, hear, feel, taste, touch and so on… it uses these qualities to perceive the world.

So if the world is not being perceived, does it have any of those qualities? And if it doesn’t and we define those things in our life using those qualities, does that mean that without them they have no definition? Do they cease to exist?

If my table was no longer brown, rectangular and whatever else I mentioned earlier, those qualities (or qualia) that make up the information the brain uses to summarise into the word table, does that mean it is no longer a table? If a tree falls in the woods where no one can hear it fall, is it even a tree?

Esse est percipi. To be is to be perceived.

That’s idealism. People who subscribe to its theorem are known as idealists. Not to be confused with ideals, or an idealist in the socio-political sense.

But we’re not talking about that, remember? We’re talking about why that idea is interesting.

A lot of people are idealists, it is a popular standpoint. Perhaps one reason for this is that the notion of personally created worlds offers insight into our capacity for creativity. Perhaps in this it is our closest imitation of God or even our connection to It/Them. In idealism, we perpetually generate a world around us in such an image as our subconscious allows.

Indeed the power of the brain to generate its reality is something as unmeasurable as it is ethereal. People have created not one God, but many thousand (even if we were to assume one of them is real, all the others would necessarily be creations), we have constructed realities in which we are in control, realities where the most important issue facing our continued existence is whether or not someone thinks we’re cute. Some of us have used this malleable perception to believe themselves important, powerful, or even somehow better than others.

I won’t say whether I also believe in the teachings of the good bishop, but I will say that the notion of disenchantment, of disenfranchisement or of dissatisfaction with reality is a very real, very palpable phenomena. There is enough distrust to cause a disconnection, and if I can squeeze in one more dis word to describe that feeling of separation between the mind and the world, it would be one of my favourites: dissonance.

There is a lack of harmony between us and the world as we see it, but it is this lack that has led to our minds creating new worlds in which we might holiday for a while, or even strive to reach.

Every mind that has ever existed has, out of nothing, created fantasies of infinite variety and scope. We have created worlds of wonder using our minds and our hearts, using print, paint, music, philosophical blog posts, and dance. That was a very important Oxford comma wasn’t it?

That catalogue of course includes the rich and varied works of fantasy authors, but also that of any fiction, and plenty of non-fiction too (I’m looking at you Aristotle). It means those moments of daydream, that look you thought your potential lover had given you, and whatever place springs into your mind when I say Utopia.

It includes any item of faith, including religion, and it includes a surprising amount of science – our technological advancement would not be what it is today if our scientists lacked the imagination needed to conjure a new, more advanced world.

Why do we feel this way? Why do we so distrust the world that we must create others to make it bearable?

One answer could be that of idealism of course, another could be the transcendent spirit of consciousness – if we have a soul, to what reality is it tethered?

Maybe, and bear with me on this one, just maybe we’re plugged into a giant computer program that generates for us those sensations we experience so that we can practically function as a battery for our machine overlords.

Perhaps, however, we should stop looking at ourselves and wondering why our minds work feverishly to generate alternatives to the immediate sensations we experience. What if it is not us that defies the outside world, but the outside world, the reality itself that refuses to conform to our expectations and perceptions?

Albert Camus (also dead, alas) wrote a book called The Myth of Sisyphus, in which he talks of the philosophical problem of suicide. To that end, he talks of the Absurd, the overwhelmingly obstinate nonsense that is our reality. The baffling illogicality of the inevitable heat-death of the universe. The ludicrous pain and suffering which occupy the mind of even the most privileged mortal. The all-encompassing entropy of life and certainty of death.

Ours is a nonsense universe, it is absurd. Living in it is difficult, brutal and inevitably doomed to fail.

To the protagonists of The Matrix, reality is something to be escaped, it is a fruitless waste of energy where everything you do you do for the betterment of oppressors. On the outside of it you have the chance to fight for real change, to work for a cause that matters to you and to the people you care about.

One of the villains of the piece sacrifices this cause for the ignorant (and ultimately masochistic) hedonism of the machine’s reality. Rather than live beyond the confines of a reality he knows to be draining him of his life, he would live within the parameters and boundaries to which he has become accustomed.

For Camus, the answer was acceptance. ‘All will be well’ was the mantra that best helps to maintain sanity. Those that refuse have two choices: death, or to change the world we have been given until it no longer feels alien to us.

Death is the individual’s escape, it solves no problem but your own.

Neo and his friends chose change. Not just change for themselves, but change for all. Not their reality, but the reality. Theirs is the great revolution, the revolution against the way we see the world. That is the movie’s battle cry.

Whether you cry “Viva la revolution” or condemn them for their anarchic antics against a little absurdity, you have to admit: a movie that makes you question what’s real and what’s not, makes you wonder what you really know about anything, that’s a strange place to find people dodging bullets in long leather coats.

Or, if you will, you might say that a movie with some of the best action scenes put to screen, and more Kung Fu than Kung Fu Panda, is quite a funny place to find philosophy.