The Philosophical Influences In The Matrix

Is Seeing Believing?: The Philosophical Influences in The Matrix

The idea that the real world is an illusion has been a popular topic among philosophers for centuries. Does reality differ from person to person? What is the difference between dreams and reality? What if we what we think we know is actually an illusion created by someone or something else? From Plato to Kant, philosophers from all different backgrounds have questions our perception of reality. In more recent years, the focus of philosophers have switched from wondering if the human race is in a constant dream or being controlled by an evil demon to whether or not our technology has created a world realer than reality. The film, The Matrix is riddled with references to different philosophers who
The book argues that late-twentieth-century consumer culture will become a world in which simulations of reality have become more real than reality itself, or “hyper-real” as Baudrillard calls it. Baudrillard argues that consumer culture has evolved from representations of things that in reality exist to stimulate us (Baudrillard). Objects and even activities may look like something, but they are really more of a reference to it. For example, we no longer walk and run the way they did in pre-modern societies. We now have means of transportation to replace walking and we do not chase after prey or run from danger as pre-modern civilizations had to. Instead, we jog recreationally. Jogging stimulates running in pre-modern times, but rather than being used for survival and protection, it is used for exercise. We also no longer rely on local produce as a food source. Instead of growing and consuming food we grew ourselves, we have “health food” that replicates the pre-modern peasant’s diet