Theories of knowledge and The Matrix - Essay Example

For example, with the power of vision a person can perceive height and width of three dimensional objects with ease but would have trouble knowing the depth (Thornton, 1987). The classic case of a mountain can be presented to clarify this idea because it is easy to see the height of the mountain and know how wide it is by sight alone but to realize that the mountain also has a certain depth and also extends deep into the ground has to come from the inferences made by the mind. This is in fact the central proposition made by Berkeley that people can never know what an object really is or they can never understand reality through their senses.

The objects around us and the reality we see is only a perception which depends on our senses. Therefore, all we know about objects are our perceptions of those objects. Of course we can also imagine about things which never existed or imagine certain situations which can not exist given the physical laws of the universe (Thornton, 1987). However, such imaginations are weak perceptions and have little bearing on the real world. On the other hand, real objects and things continue to remain present in our ideas even if we do not see them as their perception is strong.

The false reality is not false for the human inhabitants of The Matrix since it is the only reality they know. The information gathering which they do to function in their world comes from the same sources which provide information to other characters within the matrix, i.e. Neo, Morpheus or Trinity. The only difference is that the human inhabitants are getting signals sent to their brain from a supercomputer which is controlling how their reality functions. On the other hand, the characters which are free from the Matrix are using their natural abilities to experience the real world.

Morpheus explains this quite clearly when he defines the reality of the Matrix by questioning what Neo considers to be real. Morpheus says, “What is "real"? How do you define