Descartes and The Matrix to address a topic - Essay Example

It is about human beings being deceived by their own senses into believing that the state of events in the world around them is true but in actual sense they are in a dream state. In analysing the film in light of Descartes first three meditations, the first meditation is about the things that people may doubt, the second about the nature of people’s minds and how it is easier to know it than the body while the third meditation is about God and whether he actually exists (Wilson 13). In the film, Descartes malicious and evil deceivers are represented by the agents within the matrix whose core aim is to hide the truth and cause doubt in our minds.

They deny us the chance of actually differentiating between what is reality and what is false. In the first meditation, Descartes suggested that he believed not an optimal God but somewhat an evil demon was responsible for hiding the truth from him and thus leading him to spiral down a trail of doubts and scepticism that eventually led him to a possible truth that nothing is actually certain (Wilson 34). In the movie, the matrix is displayed as a program that is fed into one’s mind which causes the person to believe the reality of the false world that is being projected to them.

The program deceives senses into thinking that an individual is at that time experiencing a false world but in essence they are just lying in a pod which is wired to the Matrix. The agents, as mentioned earlier, are part of the programme that is fed into a person’s mind to stop people from discovering reality. However, the difference between what is real and what is a dream is still hard to correctly identify as was exemplified in the movie where the main character, Neo, is captured by the agents in the matrix and bugged but instead he wakes up in his bed thinking that it was all a dream.

It is with his dream argument that Descartes is able to exercise his doubts on the evidence given to us by our senses. He goes to the extreme of questioning his own existence in his second mediation where he wrote: “I am--I exist: this is certain; but how often? As often as I think; for perhaps it would even happen, if I should wholly cease to think, that I should at the same time altogether cease to be” (Chappell 56). Further, in his second meditation, he posits that there is a truth in the existence of a powerful malignant being who is omnipresent and all his endeavours are toward deceiving him.

Descartes says “But [as to myself, what can I now say that I am], since I suppose there exists an extremely powerful, and, if I may so speak, malignant being, whose whole endeavours are directed toward deceiving me? Can I affirm that I possess any one of all those attributes of which I have lately spoken as belonging to the nature of body? After attentively considering them in my own mind, I find none of them that can properly be said to belong to myself.”-Descartes (Wilson 23). He also believes that the possibility of an external world that remains true may also be meddled by the Evil deceiver and still cannot be trusted fully without question.

Later, he also introduced the concept of God into his third meditation who actually overpowers the Evil deceiver’s power much like in the matrix where Neo’s Powers was much stronger than the agents who were keeping him and people from discovering reality. The deceiver presented in the Matrix and that proposed have shown certain