The Risk, the Real, and the Impossibility of Life: Examining the Matrix

Introduction

The film Matrix, a saga starred by Keanu Reeves, Carrie Anne Moss and Lawrence Fishburne, represented the philosophical dilemma between reality and fiction. The plot is as follows, Trinity who is a beauty hacker convinces Neo, jointly to Morpheus, the life he is living is a simple fake, produced by the matrix. To break with this Neo should take a pill and abandon the pseudo-reality where he was embedded with. Henceforth, Neo Trinity and Morpheus together other rebels start a rebellion against the oppression of matrix, a machine who subject humankind to live in a state of simulation where suffering and pain does not exist. Though philosophically speaking the Matrix did not add nothing new after the Cavern of Plato, it woke up much debate among philosophers and epistemologists, many of them gathered in the book The Matrix and Philosophy edited by Senior lecturer William Irwin. In this chapter we will discuss the ebbs and flows of this book, concentrating efforts in one of Morpheus`s phrases “welcome to the desert of the real” as well as the betrayal of Cypher, who opts for returning to Matrix to avoid the reality. The arrival of modernity not only altered the promise of well-farian state, but also proved to be a world where survival is not granted. If the world of our grand-parents was stable for them, postmodern cosmologies inscribes in an atmosphere of conflict and pain, where the basic resources for surviving are not ensured by state.