May 16, 2003
please don't wake me
I saw the Matrix Reloaded last night. There are many important philosophical questions raised in the movie, but I think that it will be remembered, in the end, as one of the more profound rebuttals to Robert Nozick's notion of the Experience Machine (explained here, by Michael Barrish, cooking oatmeal.)The question, of course, is whether it is better to live in an inauthentic world where your psychic experience is manufactured and governed by matrices of power, or to unplug and live an authentic psychic experience outside of the matrix. Typically, the correct response to this question is that you would sacrifice inauthentic pleasure for the truth, no matter how ugly and violent it might be.
But the Matrix Reloaded complicates the debate by suggesting that the “real”
world is actually one where people have massive rave parties in the center of
the earth and make love to one another in traditional brick pizza ovens. A world
where Keanu
Reeves reads Baudrillard and is worshiped as a savior. Obviously, given
these complications, any thinking person would take the blue pill.
