As can be easily found on the Internet, The Matrix’s plot is concerned with the war between humans who were released from the computer generated program of the virtual world (the matrix) and the machines that want to keep people hold in the pods (sort of crib in which humans are bred by the machines and in which they receive and produce ‘alimentation’), in order to sustain their existence, in a postapocalyptic real world around the year of 2199. Some of the freed humans, headed by Morpheus, believe in a savior, known in a prophecy as ‘The One’, who is destined to free the whole human race from the matrix. The simulation of the world as it was in 1999, “the peak of modern civilization at the end of the millennium”, is the setting chosen by the machines to build the simulacrum.
In The Matrix, people is ‘cultivated’ from embryonic stage of development to death, the dead ones are liquefied to nurture the ones still plugged in the matrix, cables connect the people with the matrix and are responsible for sending electrical impulses for their brains in order to simulate reality (these stimuli reproduce memories, experiences, personal relationships in a view of the world as it was in 1999).
It is this opposition between the ones concerned about the real world and the ones who did not want to realize that something is very wrong with the ‘world’ responsible for establishing the motif of this paper. The conflict between the real world (or the desert of the real) and the reality created by the matrix can be seen as two sides of human perception about the world in which they are inserted.
Throughout centuries, philosophers, theorists and scientists are concerned in theorizing about how reality is perceived by humans, in what basis this knowledge is settled. Works of art play with this philosophical or, better, epistemological problem, dealing with reality in ways that resemble or share information as the humans see in the “real” world. However, although the representations of art may be similar to what is seen as real, the perception, the human perception, of it is based in electrical stimulus. Thus, the sense of reality the humans make are representations of what they believe to be seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching.
As a consequence of the above supposition, that reality is made up on physical sensations that the human brain receives as input of the external part of the individual, emerge the questions: What is real?; What is unreal or illusion?; How can anyone differentiate between the real and the unreal?. There is no possibility for the humans to conceive the ‘real’ or the truth. Strictly speaking, the truth about everything in the world would be conscience that all things are a gather of molecules more or less agitated by the heat.
This was one side; the other is concerned with human awareness about the relativity of reality. In the matrix, regarding just what is seen when the freed humans enter in the matrix, there is no poverty in the street, nor beggars, all the persons seems to be business people. It is a perfect reality, although the one of Agents (computer generated program responsible for protecting the matrix) states that, originally, the first matrix was developed to be perfect (no suffering, everyone would be happy, nobody would die), but it was a complete disaster and entire crops were lost, for “human beings define their reality through suffering and misery”.
The author of this paper shares this speculation with Agent Smith, the human beings cannot conceive a world in which things such as suffering, misery, and illness, no longer exist; it is a great part of the reality in the 20th and 21st century.
