Anno Domini
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What do you think about the new Matrix?
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| aiysha
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action movie
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| Bravo-man
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From 'The Economist' in the 'books&arts' section:
Nov 13th 2003
From The Economist print edition
What philosophers really have to say about "The Matrix"
WHEN the first film in the Wachowski brothers' "Matrix" trilogy came
out in 1999, academic philosophers everywhere were cock-a-hoop. Not
because they had a hitherto unrecognised fondness for shiny black
costumes, balletic mayhem, or Keanu Reeves, the film's permanently
baffled but pretty protagonist. They were pleased because it provided
a wildly popular bandwagon for them to jump on.
For over a quarter of a century, philosophers had been talking
about "brains in vats"—the idea that all our experiences might be
delusions produced by electronic stimulations of the brain. "The
Matrix" brilliantly dramatised this thought-experiment with its
premise that most people spend their lives in oversized test-tubes,
their "reality" a collective hallucination created by computer
programs. In the cinema at least, the hallucination has been a
lucrative one. The three films have taken over $1 billion at the box
office, according to their distributor, Warner Brothers, and hundreds
of millions of dollars more in videos, DVDs and games. At last, it
seemed, philosophers were somehow relevant.
Courses were soon designed around "The Matrix", books were published
with titles like "The Matrix and Philosophy", and the trilogy's
official website posted articles by eminent (and not-so-eminent)
academics on "Plato's Cave and The Matrix", and suchlike. But now the
philosophers are ready to slink away again. The final film of the
trilogy, "The Matrix Revolutions", which opened around the world last
week, was greeted with universal disdain by the critics. Box-office
takings in America for its opening weekend were 45% down compared
with the opening weekend of the second instalment, "The Matrix
Reloaded", in May, and that had pretty awful reviews too.
Perhaps it is time for the philosophers to come clean. Most of them
never really liked the brains-in-vats idea in the first place. In
fact the main thrust of most post-war Anglo-American philosophy—
rightly or wrongly—is that the notion is incoherent. Ever since
Wittgenstein, philosophers have argued that mental experience is
essentially public and objective in a way that makes it hard to make
sense of the internalised reality that is portrayed in "The Matrix".
Philosophers have largely raised the question of brains in vats in
order to dismiss it without another look.
The first extended discussion of the idea, by Hilary Putnam of
Harvard University, in 1981, sought to prove that "I am a brain in a
vat" is a type of self-defeating utterance, which can never be true.
This is (roughly) because terms like "brain" and "vat" could not
carry their usual meanings for someone who was cut off—in the way
that "The Matrix" supposes—from the everyday objects to which the
terms purportedly refer. Somebody might, in theory, have the
misfortune of having his brain artificially stimulated without any
normal connection to the external world. But he or she would not have
the language to state or even think that this was so. And thus,
according to Professor Putnam, they cannot intelligibly suppose that
it is so either.
A related train of thought is implied by the work of Donald Davidson,
who was, until his death in August, probably the most discussed of
living American philosophers. Davidson argued, ingeniously, that our
basic beliefs about the world cannot be wrong through and through
because otherwise we would have no reason to regard them as genuine
beliefs. In other words, Davidson maintained that it is literally
impossible to fool all of the people all of the time. For film
directors, though, there is plainly no harm in trying.
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| alice8
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I was disappointed when i watched Matrix 2 last year..It was totally rip-off :| Even i know this is going to be a rigid prejudice after that experience i am not sure if i would like to watch (waste time) the new part ..Never
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