Return to the Source – Philosophy and the Matrix (2004)

This documentary goes over many philosophical concepts that inspired, and are presented in, the trilogy. They spend the first half on the original film, and the rest of the time then goes over parts 2 and 3, with a couple of things on the Animatrix shorts.

It consists of clips of aforementioned releases and interviews. It does a good job of informing the audience about the various thoughts, although it would obviously take far longer to go over all the symbolism in them, and one can ask the very appropriate question if something anywhere near that definite and final is even desired, by viewers or the Wachowskis alike.

That does mean that this is limited, but it is likely enough to enlighten and provide food for thought. In line with the series, this may provoke debate, rather than give answers set in stone. Whether one cares for this or not may depend on the extent of their knowledge on the subject, the old ideas, as well as how much they've thought about the presence of such in these three silver screen efforts.

Obviously, it also makes a difference if one particularly wants to think about the meanings one could possibly take out of them.

TEXT:

Have you ever had a dream, Neo, that you were so sure was real? What if you were unable to wake from that dream? How would you know the difference between the dream world and the real world? Philosophy always needs examples. It needs illustrations. And the more lively and juicy those illustrations are, the more effectively you can get points across. I only try to realize the truth. What truth? There is no truth. Philosophy is a very abstract subject, and it doesn't lend itself very easily to dramatic or fictional or film presentation. So it's interesting when a film succeeds in doing it. It's very rare that you can find a movie that engages you in that and is damn entertaining at the same time. It's a sprawling, brawling, wonderful action-adventure that works on that level so completely. What was startling to me was that the Wachowski brothers managed to cram so much that was philosophically interesting into one feature-length movie. The Wachowski brothers are very, very concerned about piercing through the mendacity, piercing through the superficiality, not just of America, but of our own modern, post-modern society and culture. The philosophical issues in The Matrix slapped you in the face. And don't worry about the days. What days? The days. They're able to pose and set certain philosophical problems to a very broad audience. What's really going to bake your noodle later on is, would you still have broken it if I hadn't said anything? They've updated classic philosophical analogies like Plato's allegory of the cave and Descartes' story of the evil deceiver in ways that actually interest people. Each character and each symbol is also sort of a hypertext of metaphor, of illusion, in philosophy, in math or science, physics, biology, in computer language, and in religion. It's a story of enlightenment, a way of looking at the world, a way of being in the world, a way of treating other people, a way of relating to authorities, a way of relating to underlings. God damn it, movies. Not everyone believes what you believe. My beliefs don't require them to. It's like this big thought experiment that helps us to think about things that are going to be really important in the future. Looking at The Matrix world as it's depicted in the movies, I think, leads one to this radical, revisionary metaphysics of how things could be. It's not just about making movies, it's about also deep messaging. It's a very prophetic message, a very progressive message, and still entertaining, amusing, unsettling, soothing, all the things that create our number of people. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain. But you feel it. You've felt it your entire life. I'm somebody who believes in truth, and I think that sort of everybody does in a certain sense. If you define truth loosely enough, and broadly enough, the truth is whatever is really the case. Once you have that, you're left with a problem of method. How are you going to discover what is really the case? One method, traditionally, is something like revelation, where God somehow tells human beings what the truth is, and so just gives you the answer. But then there's another method that arises around science and philosophy, which is called critical reason. And the idea there is that human beings are going to figure out the truth for themselves. What is real? You still have to go out to science, you still have to go out to morals, you still have to go out to art. Philosophy was always the coordinator of these. Philosophy always tried to stand back and say, this is how they all fit together, and this is driven out of a sense of wonder about, why am I here, what's going on? Very fundamental, deep questions that human beings ask. A lot of people know more philosophy than they realize, because philosophy is basically all around them. It's in the culture that they live and breathe. I can't imagine anybody not being interested in philosophy, because the questions are so fantastic. How do we know what we know? Or how can we be sure that what we think we know, we do know? How do I know that the world, as it appears to me in my experience, is anything like the world as it is in itself in my experience? Human consciousness. What is this thing? How is subjective experience of the mind in the world? Why do we have it? How is the mind related to the body? Do we have free will? What is causation? What's the law of nature? Why something is right or something is wrong? There's a rhetorical incongruity, a mystery, a dissonant thing, that the mystery of what it is. What it means for God to be outside of time, what it means for God to be qualitatively other than anything we experience. Our relationship between ourselves and our behavior, and the way our environment shapes or influences us. What can I know? What should I do? And what may I hope for? Put differently, perhaps, what is real? Do you know the question? Just as I did. What is the matrix? The answer is out there in you. Philosophy can go deeply into ideas, but unless those ideas grab people at some level, then you're going to talk past them. In philosophy, we use a lot of things that are called thought experiments, where we suppose these are hypothetical cases, and then ask, what do you think of this hypothetical? In science fiction, these are really well-worked out thought experiments. Sometimes people say the basic question in science fiction is, what if you're doing some sort of thought experiment? It's another way of telling you, what if I change the parameters of the world thus and so? Whenever Philip Dick was talking about an altered reality, or reality wasn't what it seemed, on the one hand, he was questioning reality, but he was also talking about a political reality. He was talking metaphorically about a lot of the things that are discussed in the matrix. To some extent, that led to the beginning of the cyberpunk movement in science fiction, where we're trying to write literary science fiction. We're not the first people to have tried to do that, but we were the best. Cyberpunk is about the street having its own uses for high technology, people appropriating and altering technology for their own purposes, to get ahead, kind of get around the system, or for subversion. The theme of cyberpunk is people turning into machines, and machines turning into people. There are these holes in the CUNY, and these faults and flaws, and that the technologies rot, and that there's technical failures, and that the establishment is not really a reality at all. If you back off a few steps, you can see a larger picture, which is not particularly flattering. Free your mind. I'm a sci-fi geek, and a fantasy geek, and a comic book geek, and all of those things were present in the original matrix, and so I immediately had the same reaction as geeks all over America. This is the ultimate geek movie. It's like watching, I don't know, the blooming of a rare sumatran fungus or something. You see guys who are genuinely hip, and so very counter-culturally aware, having just a massive, blow-out-the-door-style popular success. I am not as much a fan of action films as some other people, so the first time I saw The Matrix, I was overwhelmed by it, overwhelmed by the imagery and the ideas, and didn't have a very clear, coherent sense of how one should understand it. For the first time, I was so wowed by all of the effects that it took a second viewing, actually, to start to think more clearly about all of the philosophical ideas you could find in it. The philosophical aspects, I think, weren't obvious to people at the beginning. I thought when I watched it, since I was a philosopher, I could see what they were, but it took a bit of work to see it philosophical, especially as the film progressed, and then after a while, people started to talk about those philosophical themes, and then it became a subject of philosophical discussion. I have these memories for my life. None of them happened. What does that mean? The Matrix cannot tell you who you are. But an oracle can. That's different. The film, in some way, articulates the modern myths that a culture finds relevant. This is a very savvy, modern myth. One of the dominant metaphors that runs through a lot of stories in literature, and myths of religion, is that we're all on a journey or some kind of a quest in life. We're trying to go from one stage to the next and figure out how to behave ethically on that journey, and the myths are just a great storehouse of knowledge about that, and techniques and ways to survive on the road of life, so to speak. What we have in the Matrix trilogy is jazz mythology. You don't have a single rigid scheme in the mythological content of Matrix films. The Wachowskis have introduced little elements of mythology here and there, sticking them together, which is a very rich, textured way of making a film. Jesus Christ, he's fast. Am I saving, man? You know my personal Jesus Christ? He's scared to put Jesus out of here. I hope the oracle gave you some good news. In the first Matrix film, the mythological drive is clearly based around Jesus of Nazareth. You are the one, Neil. It's all about prophecy and expectation of the one, which, from a Christian perspective, that's what the Hebrew Bible's about. It's about expectation of prophecy of a messiah. Thomas Anderson? Anderson sounds a lot like Andros, Greek for man, which provides us with the phrase son of man. He dies and is resurrected. He can do miracles. So it seemed like very overt Christian imagery. When I began to think about what kind of Christianity that was, it became clear to me that it wasn't just traditional Christianity, but it was Gnostic Christianity. Gnostic Christianity first in the early centuries of the first millennium, and it was a fierce competitor with traditional Christianity as we would understand it today. Gnosticism frames the fundamental human problem in terms of ignorance, the solution being enlightenment, whereas traditional Christianity, Orthodox Christianity, tends to frame the problem in terms of sin and repentance. This is where the parallel to Matrix becomes so interesting. Gnosticism would hold that the fundamental human problem is that we are diamonds in the mud. We are a soul or spirit that's trapped in a material body, and we need to get out because we are divine spark and we don't belong here. There's a term in Buddhism called samsara, and this has to do with the way we ordinarily perceive our world. The Matrix, which is a web of illusions in which people are enmeshed or trapped, is not parallel with the Buddhist notion of samsara. Ignorance is the problem within the Matrix and within Buddhism, and the solution is awakening, which is achieved through knowledge. There are enough forms of belief that you have to believe this and you're safe. There are forms of liberation or awakening. If you do these certain kinds of practice in consciousness, you can awaken to this life or this interior reality or this ultimate spirit. In a certain sense, you're living in a dream world until you wake up to that reality. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this. The point of the Matrix probably is to raise questions about our world. It's to make us think about our own world in slightly different ways and maybe to make us ask questions about what the real limits and bounds on our own behavior are. You know, you see this in the scene at the end of the first movie where everyone's moving around in a sort of trance-like way and Neo seems to be the only one that in that sense is awake in the phone box. But that notion of awakening seems to me more like a social and political notion. I don't look at the story of the Matrix as being literally a story of man versus technology. It's much more about the robots and the machines and the computers represent rigid thinking, institutionalized control, which people generally allow themselves to be subjected to. You have a social critique on the outside. Dialectical materialism is sort of Marx filtered through Cornel West. But the irony is that in the Matrix, people are the means of production eventually. This great symbol of people being batteries, while they sleep, their bodies are actually batteries that power the city of the robots and this whole mechanical society. It's a very powerful symbol. These people, when they're completely asleep to what's going on around them, are exploited to that extent. They're giving up their very life force to run the society in a lot of ways. When we become passive consumers, we're surrendering our life force. You are a slave, Neo. Like everyone else, you were born into bondage, born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch. A prison for your mind. Cornel West has written about how black people can see themselves through white eyes. They don't see themselves with their own eyes as authentic human beings. They view themselves through a framework of ideas given to them by the hegemonistic white society. I think that's an idea which the Wachowski brothers have really taken to heart and incorporated as one of the strands in this multiplex of prisons that have people breaking out on. Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many of them are so nervous, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it. One ought to be suspicious of all forms of authority. One ought to be suspicious of all forms of obedience that require a certain kind of blind submission to authority. The only thing that we know for certain is that nothing is certain and that idea goes back in some form to Socrates. Socrates was famous for saying that he didn't know in particular what virtue was and he wasn't sure that anybody did and in one place he says perhaps only God knows this. Socratic wisdom famously is knowing that you do not know and knowing the limits of things. This recognition of the limits of our knowledge seems to be foundational for beginning to remedy that condition. There's something wrong in the world. You don't know what it is but it's there like a splinter in your mind driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. The Matrix succeeds in sucking in the viewer precisely the same way that the Allegory of the Cave sucks in the reader. Allegory of the Cave appears in the central books of Plato's Republic. We discover that there are prisoners who've been bound from infancy to a single place in a dark underground cavern. What they see is the interior of a cave wall and on it are projected shadowy images from a fire behind them. These prisoners don't know they're prisoners, don't think they're prisoners. This is the only reality that they've ever known. This level of reality Plato and his mentor Socrates equate to the level of reality at the bottom. The life you've led is not in fact the totality of what is possible for you and if you could release yourself from bonds you don't even see you would then be able to see the world as it truly is. Similarly we have Neo's situation in The Matrix. We have Trinity and Morpheus reaching out to Neo bringing him through his own choice into being unchained or in this case unplugged. What does that mean? It means buckle your seatbelt Dorothy because Kansas is going bye-bye. Yes, Ken. Be what? Be real. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that asks the question what is real? How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. These questions of casting doubt on all of our knowledge are the first step in tearing down that knowledge reducing it to its foundations and then building it back up again. Rene Descartes was one of the great Renaissance geniuses. Descartes was amazing. He was a great scientist and a tremendously imaginative and resourceful scientist. I think no scientist has ever been more ambitious. He thought he had a theory of everything. He saw himself ultimately as a natural scientist. And philosophy for him was just part of his program. He wanted to get everything down to its foundation. When he performed that methodical doubt the one thing he thought he could not doubt was cogito vivosum I think therefore I am. That is I as a thinker am as a race cogitans a thinking thing. His basic idea that we only have access to the content of our own minds gives us this thing called the problem of the external world. The matrix is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work when you go to church when you pay your taxes. There are no general features Descartes thought that you can use from within a dream to be certainly the dream. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth. And he raised the question of the evil genius. He said how do you know there is an evil genius deceiving you into thinking there is a world of people, tables and chairs and objects out there when in fact none of that exists. Right now we are inside a computer program. Is it really so hard to believe? Your clothes are different the plugs in your arms and head are gone. Your hair has changed. Your appearance now is what we call residual self-image. It is the mental projection of your digital self. When the Matrix film came out I thought wow this is Barclay for a popular mass audience. George Barclay was an Anglican bishop living in 18th century Ireland. He came right after Sir Isaac Newton and he was very worried about the effects of the Newtonian worldview. Barclay realised correctly that if we follow the Newtonian ideology you don't need God you don't need spirituality you don't need the soul you don't need anything other than what we describe by equations. And that bothered him because he wanted to feel there is a divine presence in the world. Barclay got the mathematical solution which was to deny there is a world external to our ideas. Reality just is the idea that you have all day. Well he said you have an over-inflated conception of reality. Here is what reality is. Appearance is reality. To exist is to be perceived. So reality only exists in your own subjective experience. We think of ourselves as subjects over against objects. Subjects are these self-sufficient beings and objects are these things that they dominate and control and as the story goes objectify. This idea of being a self-contained subject is a Descartes invention and that name is a Descartes invention. She's not the spoon that bends she's only yourself. So he invents modernity and he invents, takes Kant to come along and finish it. Kant was taken by the question of how do we know what things are in and of themselves. Is appearance any reasonable reflection of reality? And Kant is famous for concluding that there's really very little we know about what reality is like in and of itself. And his point was that actually the mind has structures that impose structure on the world and actually create worlds in certain ways so that we're not perceiving a pre-given world but the structures of the mind are bringing forth phenomena created as much by the mind as by whatever it is that's out there. When you sit at a table and you touch the table and you see the table you have these phenomena you have these conscious experiences of colour, of shape, of tactile pressure but these phenomena are not the ultimate causes. Kant was convinced that there was something beyond that which is reasonable because we don't control our phenomena. If I look up at the sky I can't change it from blue to pink. There's something out there which is generating big sense perceptions, these phenomena and giving them to us. A simple way to summarise Kant is that he maintained that the world was the product of a matrix. The structures of the mind bring forth the world but it wasn't real. Your mind makes it real. Then of course Nietzsche is always a shadow. I mean, you know, God is dead, love is dead, we are dead. How do you come to terms with new conceptions of love after you've crossed the Rubicon in which you acknowledge that it's not simply about obedience to an authority it's about grading yourself to choices and decisions. You have to break out It's so wacky that if you think of athletes in flow when they're playing at their best they say they don't even know what they're doing until afterward. And chess grandmasters I've heard say the same thing that their arm goes out and makes a move before they even have time to become aware of or think about what's going on. In Nietzsche's philosophy there is simply a world of people who are locked into their constructs. They are born into systems of valuation in which one thing is good another thing is bad they must do this they must do that and what defines a superman is that he rejects all of those constructs. Yeah no one has ever done anything like this. That's why it's going to work. He doesn't give them force he sees through them and decides he will use his own will to do what he wants. Her mentality can be thought of as the matrix everybody's having a collective hallucination and everybody's thinking the same thing so it's just a absolute nightmare for somebody who wants to wake up which would be a nightmare for Nietzsche. Welcome to the desert. According to continental philosophers we're now in the postmodern condition a condition in which reality has all but disappeared and in fact one of the interesting things about Baudrillard is that if you take him seriously he appears to hold that reality has disappeared. Postmodernists are fond of thinking that they work on things that are radically different from what's gone before but I think it's a sort of straightforward extrapolation of the sort of stuff we get in Kent and the idea that the world is in some way or other a construction of what's going on in my mind. It's really striking that it's one of the few movies that shows a work by a real philosopher in the context of the movie so Baudrillard's Simulacrum Simulation turns up towards the beginning of the movie in this book that now has its contraband software. If we turn to page one of Simulacrum Simulation we see Baudrillard commenting on a Borges fable in which cartographers of an empire create a map that is so perfect and co-extensive with geography that it touches the real geography at every point. What's really interesting is that for Baudrillard the map is what's important. The map has primacy for us. The map is a Simulacrum that as a model loses all reference to reality. In Baudrillard's fable reality exists only as rotting shreds that are attached to the map and this is the state of our age according to Baudrillard that the model itself has primacy for us. The real has become relevant if undefinable and claims only as vestiges and he's coined the phrase the desert of the real to describe the state of our age. In the case of Cypher the film is quite clear that the life of the people within the matrix is quite agreeable it's quite happy it's quite pleasant. I know this thing doesn't exist you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss. It's just that all my beliefs are false so they're happy that they don't know anything he's making a deal to be plugged in in a paradisiacal setting and that is a metaphor of what it is that keeps us asleep we want illusory safety being asleep when we think we're awake we want to be numb. This relates to a very famous thought experiment in philosophy the philosopher Robert Nozick imagined a thing called the experience machine. Nozick says imagine that you have this machine that's a kind of perfect simulation machine that can give you any experience you desire no strings attached plug in live out a fantasy life and then not even ever know that you plugged in. I can't go back, can I? No. But if you could would you really want to? Nozick says well most people wouldn't plug in because you don't just care about pleasure you care about being in touch with reality in a kind of basic primitive logically primitive way I mean this is just one of our fundamental concerns that not just that we live a happy life but that we live a real life and we be in touch with the truth. Do you believe in fate, Neo? No. Why not? Because I don't like the idea that I'm not in control of my life. I know exactly what you mean. In philosophy one of the perennial questions is the nature of free will and we all think that we have free will but it turns out when you start to try to answer the question of what free will is it looks uncomfortably like we couldn't have it. If we're purely physical beings as the first Matrix film seems to suggest then perhaps we have no free will at all. I'd ask you to sit down but you're not going to anyway. If the Oracle's knowledge really reflected one way that the future could unfold well then Neo isn't free or responsible for any of his actions. He's just playing out a path that's been set in nature or in motion by something completely independent of him. But are the people in this film free? Are they in control of their destinies? The first film raises this in an interesting way because you have these pronouncements from the Oracle which suggest a kind of fatalism or suggest that maybe everything's already written in stone. You're going to have to make a choice. In the one hand you'll have Morpheus's life and in the other hand you'll have your own. Second World Trilogies typically are the best ones because everything's up in the air. In a way I think Wachowski has delivered an entertaining action film with the first Matrix and then wanted to bring in more of their riddles more of their rich tapestry of ideas in the second and third films. Every story you've ever heard about vampires, werewolves or aliens is a system assimilated in some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing. The story of the first Matrix doesn't just get started it leaves you with a thousand different fun interpretations that you can make and it doesn't really challenge you in terms of fundamental issues about what's a messiah what's a savior what is liberation what is waking up. The second renaissance animatrix cartoons actually tell you the fall of man. It starts out everything was happy sort of Garden of Eden situation. Civil society was fine they had machines all that was fine but then two things happen they use two words to describe original sin here. Vanity and corruption. Lusty man become the architect of his own demise. Humans basically attack the machines the machines never return on the humans and imprison them. And instead they use the phrase that the machines have the pure spirit of humanity. Most of the traditions say that spirit is loving, kind, benevolent in your true nature until you find it. Then it appears as a demon but then it appears as a horrifying machine. Neo is going through his own literally awakening or liberation how he's going to return to source and that means merge with spirit or light. If you look at just the first installment it can be read as a simple dualistic tale that the Matrix is bad if you get out of the Matrix that's good and it's a very simplistic kind of notion if it's read that way. In the context of all three of them it's clearly a non-dual statement because consciousness and matter are basically all interwoven. At the end of the first film Neo has attained what he was supposed to attain so he is the master he is the adept there is nowhere else for him to go in terms of this gnosis. And what I think the second film shows is that that may be true but the gnosis is only a means to another end it's not an end in itself. I wish I knew what I'm supposed to do that's all I just wish I knew. In the first film we only get that glimpse of the really ugly drab horrible real world the desert of the real and we spend most of the time in the realm of mentally projected images. In the second film we finally get some bodies. The sex between Neo and Trinity seem to affirm the body so beautifully and the rave scenes seem to affirm material incarnation too and that seemed to be what we possessed over and against the machines. There's a whole school of spirituality you know east and west called Tantra that basically maintains that neither men nor women can get final enlightenment without each other. Some of those tantric schools make it that you have to have sexual union in order to get the energy to unite in a really binding way that will allow you to transcend your own ego and your own separateness. It's a celebration of embodiment it's a celebration of physicality and sensuality there's no ideas there's no minds and there's a real interesting contrast there because the dance is a ritual it's a communal event this is not the first time they've done this the drums are there they're all set to go you know this is what they do this is their sacrament and one of the important things about it is that it's public everybody's body is equal but what Neo and Trinity are doing is dangerous because it's private it's the elevation of a certain body over all the other bodies and you're not fighting for the survival of the group anymore you're fighting for this one person that you love but he's supposed to be special so if gnosticism is about freeing yourself from those attachments then Neo is definitely a failure at that. All must be done as one if one fails all fail. When the keymaker says all must work as one it sounds like the Upanishads and I hear overtones of Ivita Vedanta. The Upanishads were scriptures essentially that were written about 800 B.C. They are texts which discuss philosophy and I think they are probably the earliest serious philosophical texts. And them is teaching of monism sometimes it's called Ivita Vedanta and this is the belief that all things are united as one all things come from the same source Raman who is the foundation of all being and so the goal of this form of Hinduism is to realize your identity with the all. A program can either choose to hide here or return to the source. The machine mainframe. Yes. Where it must go. Where the path of the one ends. You can see reloaded as analogous to the New Testament because the New Testament is the Old Testament reloaded, made new and one of the main concerns of the New Testament especially Paul's letters especially viewed from within a Protestant interpretive context is free will and grace and this is free will as a central concern of the second film. Dandy? You already know if I'm going to take it. Wouldn't be much of an oracle if I didn't. But if you already know how can I make a choice? Because you didn't come here to make the choice you've already made it. You're here to try to understand why you made it. Well the second film seemed to me to shift focus away from epistemology questions about skepticism and knowledge towards questions about free will. You know why we are here. I am a trafficker of information. I know everything I can. The question is do you know why we are here? Free will is a deep philosophical problem and a deep philosophical problem always arises because of two things. On the one hand it seems things have to be a certain way but on the other it seems they can't be. We start off with determinism. Determinism is a combination of basically two claims. The first is that everything which exists or occurs has a cause. The second is that causes make their effects inevitable. You combine those two claims and you've got a real problem for free will. We're not here because we're free. We're here because we're not free. Laplace in the early 19th century gave us the image of physical determinism that we still tend to use very vividly. He says in effect everything that happens in nature is simply the result of the interactions of all the smallest parts called the atoms if you like or the subatomic particles. If we knew the position of every atom at a moment then we could predict the next instant. An omniscient demon who had a complete snapshot in effect of the universe at any instant could then predict the whole future forever because what happens at every moment is simply a deterministic outcome of the interaction of those small parts. Contemporary physicists tell us it's wildly wrong that quantum indeterminacy reigns but even if that's true at a more macroscopic level things seem to be very deterministic indeed in many regards. You are here because you were sent here. You were told to come here and then you obeyed. We usually think we can know about what's going to happen next in the future based on our knowledge of laws of nature. That's how I know if I hold up my keys or a wallet or something like this and I'm like oh it's going to definitely fall downward. And Hume said well how do we know that? There is only one constant. One universe that is the only real cause. Causality. Whenever gravity operates in any way that's causality. Hume called it the cement of the universe it's what ties one event to another. People don't generally have a philosophical view about causality. They just think that things happen and that when something happens and something else happens that regularly after it then the A caused B. Hume said really strictly speaking the most we can say is up until now heavy objects have always fallen downwards. And the only basis we have for thinking that it's going to fall downwards again the next time I drop it is he says in his belief that the future will continue to be like the past. And he says that's really a matter of for us custom or habit. Hume is perhaps the latest skeptical philosopher ever to have lived and takes pleasure Socratic pleasure in showing people how their attempts to solve skepticism don't succeed. Action, reaction, cause and effect. Everything begins with choice. Not wrong. Choice is an illusion created between Zozo's power and Zozo's mouth. We have all kinds of fascinating dilemmas that are presented to the characters in the second film. Most prominent are the kind of binary choices that are presented to Neo. You can save Zion if you reach the source but to do that you will need the keymaker. If you want the keymaker follow me. You'll know which door. There are two doors. The door to your right leads to the source and the salvation of Zion. The door to your left leads back to the matrix to her and to the end of your species. Over and over again in the matrix Neo is not able to transcend those dichotomies. He gets his percent. He doesn't look for a third way, way out. He takes one or the other of the doors. I can't do that. No more. You have to. Why? Because you are the one. Usually when those dichotomies happen we look for somebody to figure out a way that the dichotomy is false. Somebody to figure out a way to smash through the choices being given. In the second movie Neo is revealed as a slave to those choices. The prophecy was a lie. The one was never meant to end anything. It was all under a system of control. I don't believe that. Many philosophers Mark Schopenhauer and Nietzsche recognize there's one form of making things happen that we are very familiar with which is volition, which is free will. We don't really make choices. We think we make choices and we don't. That's what characterizes the second level. Schopenhauer's will as he called it, mindless desire. In his book The Will and Representation he talks about human experience as very subjective and that the only grounding that you can come to is human will, human choice. Choice. The problem is choice. Schopenhauer was one of the really great philosophers and there have been many who gave a very detailed account of the manifest world which serves as its matrix and then outside of the manifest world there's a deeper world reality. Schopenhauer's view is that our perception, our consciousness is the physical brain seen from the inside and not what externally looks like cause and effect. If I knock a vase and it falls over that seems externally to be cause and effect. The corresponding process is lots of powerful impulses pushing the situation that way but all ultimately combined into one vast wheel. And when the Apartheid hit the bookshelves in Latin he was as thrilled as I was when the matrix came out. He said, wow, these people had discovered the same notions and had evolved a whole religion centered on the process of enlightenment by seeing through that illusion. And this is one of the interesting differences between Eastern philosophy and Western philosophy. Western philosophy in a way is a big head trip. We sit at our desks and we work out these theories and we write out our Buckleyian notions and Schopenhauerian notions but we don't integrate them into our lives. Why is what separates us from Zen you from me? Why is the only real source of power without it you are powerless? In Hinduism it's regarded as a spiritual path to really feel that enlightenment and really feeling that you're being prominent. Every human being carries in the very center of their being a spiritual reality and so you're going to intuitively know that in a certain sense you're living in a dream world until you wake up. Schopenhauer is one of the first really great modern philosophers to write about that. Where are you? While your first question may be the most pertinent you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant. Why am I here? The architect's speech is one of the really pivotal most important explanatory pieces of the whole thing. The matrix is older than you know. I prefer counting from the emergence of one integral anomaly to the emergence of the next, in which case this is the sixth conclusion. We learn that Neo is not a particular unrepeatably unique non-fungible individual. In fact he is something determined by the needs of the computer system. You are the eventuality of an anomaly which despite my sincerest efforts I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision. In this respect the film maybe pays a nod to Plato's own view in saying that there aren't unique cells but just self-types or soul-types. Just as we learn there are philosopher soul-types who are best able to leave so too Neo becomes a particular iteration of a soul-type, the one which has led you inexorably here. We see a lot of monitors which at some points are showing Neo reacting in different ways. The architect says something and each of the Neo's says something different. The camera zooms into individual monitors and the film carries on as if that monitor is now the whole story. What those monitors are showing are parallel virtual renderings of what Neo is thinking of doing. But there is one point where Neo has exactly the same reaction in all of these monitors. When the architect is in the choice of going to the left door or the right door to save Trinity or to save the world every monitor gives the same reaction because at that point Neo doesn't have ambivalence, doesn't have multiple thoughts, multiple ideas of what to do. It's one single action which is to save Trinity which is the expression of his love, hope. It is the quintessential human delusion simultaneously the source of your greatest strength and your greatest weakness. What we see at the end of The Matrix Reloaded is that Neo is willing to sacrifice everybody in Zion for this one person and that means he hasn't grasped what Neo is really supposed to be all about. And he's certainly a failure at the calling he's supposed to have to free everybody because he just treats this one person as more special than everybody else. Love is held up as the ultimate reality. It is what motivates us and drives us and orients us. I don't think it's coincidental that so many of the world traditions not only speak about love in abstract terms but concretize it in terms of not human love but divine love. It is the highest glimpse that we can attain of divinity. In all the talk of traditions love is what holds Nirvana and Samsara together. The simplest explanation of that is love can conquer all. When the architect refers to things that can only be understood by a lesser mind the answer would be because it required a lesser mind or perhaps a mind less bound by the parameters of perfection. He means a different kind of mind. Rationality cannot solve the problems produced by the films otherwise the machines would have won. There's something else that seems to be essential that saves in this film. It's intuition, it's insight, it's perception. It's the kind of experience that comes in a flash. What the architect says is that the anomaly who is Neo will be revealed at the beginning and the end. And if he is the first and the last at the beginning and the end it points forward to revolutions in that he will be the programmer who reprograms from within and reboots the entire system in one giant cosmic reincarnation. Fuck. Everything that has a beginning has an end. When I walked out of the Matrix Revolutions I thought it was not very cool to have this but it had a warm glow about me. I thought it was like a really nice ending. It's an ending in which the notion of the good and the benevolent is attained and is disseminated throughout the world. It's a message of hope that in the ending of Matrix Revolutions there's a sense of not destroying the enemy externally, not destroying Smith from the outside but entering into Smith and bringing light, the light of enlightenment, the light of seeing through illusions into that darkness so the darkness itself disintegrates. The great 20th century interpreters of mythology have talked about the eternal return. What does the hero do in the Odyssey and the Iliad? He goes out and comes back. You go down to the end of the world you come back up. We all come from the truth, the light, the good and we fall down into these ladders of immaterial. We need to climb back up and really brush away the ladder underneath us until we get back to where we came from. Enlightenment to the true nature of reality is the solution in and of itself. What he's seeing is something to do with the program that makes up the very fabric of the universe. What he learns is real. Dreams, insight, prophecy. I'm not saying these things are divinity but he learns that they are real in a way that he didn't understand in the first two films. If there's an answer there's only one place you're going to find it. Where? In nowhere. And if you can't find the answer then I'm afraid there may be no tomorrow for any of us. By the third film you have a sense that he's like becoming more and more and more himself. You cannot stop him. But I can. As he defines who he is to the extent of being ready to sacrifice himself completely. And if you fail I'm all for it. It's pretty obvious that this is at least in some way evoking the book of Revelation and the apocalyptic themes of it are consistent with that. At the beginning God creates and at the end the world is destroyed but then there's a new beginning so a new heaven and a new earth at the end of all things is achieved in The Matrix. Just look at that. Beautiful. Did you do that? In Hinduism Sati is the first wife of Shiva. She is disrespected and Shiva is disrespected by her father and she decides to immolate herself. Shiva is consumed by grief carries her body around on his shoulder throughout the universe and Vishnu out of compassion takes Sati cuts her into a million pieces and her body falls upon the sacred land upon India. At each spot that her body falls a pilgrimage site is born. We have here a character in The Matrix through whom The Matrix is sacralized and in fact we see her as a program who can program who creates a sunset who creates a rainbow and those things are typically associated with divinity in many religious traditions. Do you believe in karma? Karma is a word like love a way of saying what I am here to do. Neo pilots the Logos to the machine city and Logos means word and so what he's doing is he's bringing the word to the machine city and the fact that Ramachandra very deliberately says that karma and love are words then maybe these are the things that Neo is bringing to the machine world symbolically speaking. Maybe he's bringing to them love so they can be fully human right, whatever that may mean and he's also bringing to them the notion of karma or duty which would bring with it an understanding of the interconnectedness a relationship among all things both machine and human. Noah, over the ladder sky, sea of light. We have the image of Trinity and Neo soaring above that world into a world of lightness that could be heaven that could be the Pleroma in Gnostic terminology it could be Nirvana it could be Moksha it could be the eternal unnameable Tao it could be the platonic form of the good and it's not named because it's indescribable. That's why all traditions ultimately say it is inevitable because you can't name it but you can perceive it and you can experience it but that scene of exiting the world of Zion the world of machines and going another level to me gestures to the idea that there is another level. The easiest place to see Taoism is in revolutions most potently in the yin yang earrings that the oracle wears throughout the film. The oracle herself seems to construe the architect as her polar opposite she unbalances equations he balances equations she is dark he is white she is intuition he is rationality and order she creates chaos he creates linearity and they seem to balance each other but there's another very important yin yang in revolutions which of course is Neo and Smith. The oracle explains to Neo he is your opposite I love the scene where Neo and Smith are cycling during the fight in the rainstorm it just looks like a big yin yang symbol to me and of course the matrix itself is rebooted and this cycle of beginning and ending the anomalies revealed at the beginning and the end is central to Taoism as the Tao Beijing says it arises and the Tao lets it be it dissolves and the Tao lets it be. It is done. You have to die to resurrect spirit and it's a very common motif not just in the Christian tradition it's a very common motif in Buddhism you have to die to your separate ego in order to awaken to being one with everything and so Trinity has to die because Neo's going to die to his physical body as well and he has to also have that same death in the matrix. What's so interesting about that scene is it's an intersection point between Nietzschean superman philosophy and a Ferdinandic notion of dissolving the personal ego and achieving immortality and union with Brahma union with the world because Neo allows himself to be dissolved but some part of him integrated into all the other beings all the other Smiths and shines out through their eyes with light. The primary creation myth of Jewish Kabbalah Jewish mysticism explains that in the beginning God creates a light that is a supernal light a divine light not sunlight and that it is contained within vessels that in the Shavira where the shattering cannot contain the light and the pieces scatter everywhere and then this light is released into the universe as sparks. That's the fundamental problem in Jewish mysticism that these sparks need to be reconstituted and brought back to divinity. And when that happens then the matrix itself is dissolved because it's no longer alienated. Machines showed up in gross realm as horrifying attacking machines only when men are alienated from spirit because that's how spirit appears when you're alienated from it. It appears as Smith attacking you in the matrix and as the machines attacking you in Zion where they correspond. And when spirit is recontacted both of those revert to their natural expressions of light and peace which is how the movie ends. The perennial philosophy is a term that Aldous Huxley used to describe a philosophy that goes back to the earliest known serious works of philosophy 800 years before Christ and it keeps recurring in different times. The matrix is sort of science fiction perennial philosophy. Down here sometimes I think about all those people still plugged into the matrix and when I look at these machines I can't help thinking that in a way we are plugged into them. It's the perfect movie to build a course around because modern philosophy begins with Descartes thinking that we're brains in vats. Billions of people just living out their lives oblivious. Even if a philosopher hadn't seen the film they found that students were assigning it to them as homework because when they would start talking about Descartes their students would say oh this is just like the matrix and then the teacher would say well I better go rent that. There is no escaping the nature of the universe it is that nature that has again brought you to me where some see coincidence I see consequence where others see chance I see cost. Everything is information that's the ultimate level of reality that I think is the metaphysics which is suggested by the matrix. I don't know the future I didn't come here to tell you how this is going to end I came here to tell you how it's going to begin. We've had emails from people all over the world who are seeking us out as religious gurus they see the film as this modern religious text that provides meaning for them and they want us to help them understand it. You think that's air you're breathing now? We've got a whole generation of young people who have more and more called themselves the matrix generation and the way I would move down a generation I wouldn't have been a sound generation if I didn't say it much. The overall matrix trilogy is incredibly subtle and complex if you watch all three of them they're a seamless artistic work this is one of the very few movies that has tried to make this sweeping statement about these grand dimensions of human existence that have been touched upon by the great traditions for two or three thousand years if you look at the whole trilogy it's really outlining this whole general view of body, mind and spirit and what has to happen when they're alienated and they're alienated because of men and women's vanity and corruption and they can be reunited when somebody either the individual or a saviour helping others reconnects with spirit and that realigns all these different dimensions which makes the full integrated human being that's the story that the trilogy tells and I don't know any movies that attempt to do that that broad of a scope and that's why I think you have to applaud the extraordinary ambition of it the fact that they would simply sit down and try to do that is to me astonishing that alone puts it in a very unique category and I think that's why it's so exclusive.