Idealism The Philosophy Of The Matrix

mikal

IDEALISM
THE PHILOSOPHY OF
THE MATRIX
AND THE TRUE NATURE OF MATTER
Do i see the bright and colorful world in my dark brain?

http://www.harunyahya.com/matrix.php

DadaKopf

Hmm, an Islamic interpretation of the Matrix. Why not? I think the genius of that film is it invites so many interpretations by touching off ancient philosophical questions but not saying enough to nail its colours to any particular mast.

But the Wachoski brothers planted a few 'signs' in there to point us in the right direction. When Neo takes a book off his shelf with contraband minidiscs in it, the camera makes the point to show the book's name: Simulacra and Simulations by Jean Baudrillard. It was he who coined the phrase the "desert of the real". Other philosophers that influenced them must have been Foucault, Habermas and Adorno.

I think this is the most interesting interpretation:

The New York Times wrote:

The basic conceit of “The Matrix”—the notion that the material world is a malevolent delusion, designed by the forces of evil with the purpose of keeping people in a state of slavery, has a history. It is most famous as the belief for which the medieval Christian sect known as the Cathars fought and died, and in great numbers, too. The Cathars were sure that the material world was a phantasm created by Satan, and that Jesus of Nazareth—their Neo—had shown mankind a way beyond that matrix by standing outside it and seeing through it. The Cathars were fighting a losing battle, but the interesting thing was that they were fighting at all. It is not unusual to take up a sword and die for a belief. It is unusual to take up a sword to die for the belief that swords do not exist.

The Cathars, like the heroes of “The Matrix,” had an especially handy rationale for violence: if it ain’t real, it can’t really bleed. One reason that the violence in “The Matrix”—those floating fistfights, the annihilation of entire squads of soldiers by cartwheeling guerrillas—can fairly be called balletic is that, according to the rules of the movie, what is being destroyed is not real in the first place: the action has the safety of play and the excitement of the apocalyptic. Of course, the destruction of a blank, featureless, mirrored skyscraper by a helicopter, and the massacre of the soldiers who protect it, has a different resonance now than it did in 1999. The notion that some human beings are not really human but, rather, mere slaves, nonhuman ciphers, and therefore expendable, is exactly the vision of the revolutionary hero—and also of the mass terrorist. The Matrix is where all violent fanatics insist that they are living, even when they are not. (Source)

Kinda puts The Matrix in a historical setting.

Zombrex

DadaKopf wrote:

Hmm, an Islamic interpretation of the Matrix. Why not? I think the genius of that film is it invites so many interpretations by touching off ancient philosophical questions but not saying enough to nail its colours to any particular mast.

I am not sure if I would call that "genius." To me the Matrix was always more like film version of a 16 year olds note book scribles after they just read "Sophies World" ... and don't get me started on the plots of the sequels .. :rolleyes:

simu

Here's a translation of an interview with Baudrillard about "The Matrix" that first appeared in the Nouvel Observateur: look!

He claims the Wachowskis didn't quite get his ideas. Owned!

Personally, I liked the first matrix but after that, it all went downhill. Also, anybody who follows less mainstream sci-fi will know that the ideas of the Wachowskis aren't all that new.

DadaKopf

Wicknight wrote:

I am not sure if I would call that "genius." To me the Matrix was always more like film version of a 16 year olds note book scribles after they just read "Sophies World" ... and don't get me started on the plots of the sequels .. :rolleyes:

Perhaps "genius" was putting it a bit too far, I mean I wouldn't call Ridley Scott a genius either but I'd definitely call Blade Runner a postmodern masterpiece, a meisterwerk even! Huzzah!

I've only see the first and the second ones. Never even bothered with the third. Wachowskis' biggest mistake was to make any sequels.

Thanks for the link simu. Baudrillard is completely right about this:

The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment.

And this:

What is notable about Matrix Reloaded is the absence of a glimmer of irony that would allow viewers to turn this gigantic special effect on its head. ... Moreover, this is what makes the film an instructive symptom, and the actual fetish of this universe of technologies of the screen in which there is no longer a distinction between the real and the imaginary. ... The Matrix paints the picture of a monopolistic superpower, like we see today, and then collaborates in its refraction. Basically, its dissemination on a world scale is complicit with the film itself. On this point it is worth recalling Marshall McLuhan: the medium is the message. The message of The Matrix is its own diffusion by an uncontrollable and proliferating contamination.

This is kind of why I like it. I mean, Baudrillard's point is that things have to go the point that it's impossible to tell the difference between reality and simulation; the Matrix does preserve this difference, in the second episode it plays around with this but fails and, possibly, is doomed to fail anyway.

This is his most famous passage from Simulacra and Simulation:

The simulacrum is never what hides the truth—it is truth that hides the fact that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.
Ecclesiastes

If once we were able to view the Borges fable in which the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up covering the territory exactly (the decline of the Empire witnesses the fraying of this map, little by little, and fall into ruins, though some shreds are still discernible in the deserts—the metaphysical beauty of this ruined abstraction testifying to a pride equal to the Empire and rotting like a carcass, returning to the substance of the soil, a bit as the double ends by being confused with the real through aging)—as the most beautiful allegory of simulation, this fable has now come full circle for us, and possesses nothing but the discrete charm of second-order simulacra.

Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. It is nevertheless the map that precedes the territory—precession of simulacra—that engenders the territory, and if one must return to the fable, today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map. It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there in the deserts that are no longer those of the Empire, but ours. The desert of the real itself.

In fact, even inverted, Borge’s fable is unusable. Only the allegory of the Empire, perhaps, remains. Because it is with this same imperialism that present-day simulators attempt to make the real, all of the real, coincide with their models of simulation. But it is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of the abstraction. Because it is difference that constitutes the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real. This imaginary of representation, which simultaneously culminates in and is engulfed by the cartographer's mad project of the ideal coextensivity of map and territory, disappears in the simulation whose operation is nuclear and genetic, no longer at all specular or discursive. It is all of metaphysics that is lost. No more mirror of being and appearances, of the real and its concept. No more imaginary coextensivity: it is genetic miniaturization that is the dimension of simulation. The real is produced from miniaturized cells, from matrices, and memory banks, models of control—and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these. It no longer needs to be rational, because it is no longer measures itself against either and ideal or negative instance. It is no longer anything but operational. In fact, it is no longer real the real, because no imaginary envelopes it anymore. It is a hyperreal, produced from a radiating synthesis of combinatory models in a hyperspace without atmosphere.

By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials—worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself—such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.

This is how it's relevant to today's social world (from a Matrix article about Baudy):

Baudrillard is here reacting to, amongst other things, Marxist thought. Marx’s historical materialism postulated the necessity of the overthrow of the bourgouisie by the proletariat. Baudrillard claims instead that a different historical process is playing out—and the crucial factor is not the mode of production, but the mode of reproduction. Moreover, whereas Marx claimed that the masses suffered from false consciousness, Baudrillard writes that the masses are post-modernist, understanding that all consciousness is “false,” and hungrily consuming one “false” image after another.

We're trapped! Nah, some accident or cataclysm will shake us free some time. I think Baudrillar's too extreme in his views.