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“Celebrity ‘culture’ & info tech is so overrated. I don’t owe any fellow human an explanation for my actions. I only answer to God. I know who I am & what I want out of life. Peace out!”
“Descartes carried over from medieval philosophers like Aquinas the view that reality consists of both material and immaterial (or “spiritual”) entities. Hobbes rejected this dualistic view.”
“The recent astronomical discoveries of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo had all been based on the observation of moving bodies. Influenced by their approach to reality, Hobbes reasoned that perhaps all reality could be explained in terms of the moving bodies in space.”
Jorge J.E. Gracia Jonathan J. Sandford The real world in The Matrix, as far as we can tell, does not depend on something else for its existence; it stands by itself, as it were. There is no mention of a malicious demon, no evil or benign genie, on whose will the real world depends. But even if there were, that is, even if the existence of things in the real world were dependent on such a genie, the ontological status of the unreal world can be seen to be much weaker, much less independent, than that of the real world. This is so because the unreal world depends entirely on things in the real world for its existence. The virtual world exists only so long as the artificially intelligent machines keep running the program and generating electrical signals which affect human brains -and remember that machines, programs, electrical signals, and brains are real -which prompt the mind -also real -to produce the digital entities and appearances of the unreal world. A related issue concerns how we come to recognize the metaphysical distinction between the 2 worlds. It is only because there was a first man who knew the Matrix for what it is and escaped, that other prisoners were able to escape from the Matrix. We are not told how this first man came to this knowledge, just as we don’t know how there came to be a first freed prisoner in Plato’s cave analogy. Though knowing the difference between the 2 worlds requires a teacher, Neo, Trinity, and others were open to such teaching because they had paid attention to hints indicating that something is amiss in their world, as Morpheus indicates in his conversation with Neo just before Neo chooses to take the red pill: “What you know you can’t explain but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life….That there’s something wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is, but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad.” The issue of how we come to know the distinction between the 2 worlds concerns the nature of knowledge. It is thus an epistemological, not a metaphysical issue.
The Ladder Theory
Sally: We are just going to be friends, OK?
“The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
- Alphonse Karr (1808-90) |
