Is This Real Life...?

Before taking this particular FYS, I had never been exposed to many of the ideas that are covered in the course. As the semester has continued, however, I have realized that there are many aspects of other courses that relate to the study of technology and innovation that I had not realized before taking this class. 

Take, for example, The Matrix. This sci-fi movie was one that I had never seen before taking this course. But, over this past weekend, when my workload was quite low, I sat down and watched the movie, giving it my full attention. Being a fan of action movies, I found the movie extremely enjoyable from the opening scenes. But soon I realized that the movie was more than just a conglomeration of action scenes involving people who were always wearing sunglasses, even inside at night. Many aspects of previous classes I had taken were present in the film, something that drew me even further into the movie. 

It is also important here to mention that my high school was not a typical AP high school. My average-sized high school employed a more unique, at least in the United States, IB (International Baccalaureate) program, in which we were required to take a course called Theory of Knowledge. In this class, we wrestled with ideas of past philosophers, including Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. 

Essentially, the Greek philosopher proposed an idea in which humanity was only exposed to “shadows” or “shapes” of the real world and that the world in which we perceived was not, for lack of a better word, existent. In the Allegory of the Cave, one of the members of humanity is allowed to leave the cave and enter the real world, a vision which corrupts him. After reentering the cave and telling his fellow cave-dwellers of what he has seen, the other members of the human race become so frightened with his ideas that they kill the man. 

I remember that the classes in which we discussed the Allegory of the Cave, many of my high school classmates seemed to be as frightened of the idea as the other cave-dwellers that Plate wrote of. They began to ask my teacher if their desk was real, if their books were real, if they were even really in the classroom. My teacher struggled to assure my classmates that Plato was simply expressing his viewpoints on the world and that we may never actually know what is real and what is not. 

This memory came flooding back when watching The Matrix. I think that the film did an excellent job of giving Plato’s Allegory of the Cave a futuristic twist, and a much more frightening one at that. I think that if my high school classmates had watched The Matrix after learning about the Allegory, their fear would have become magnified and my poor teacher would have struggled to reassure many of them about their perception of reality. 

Personally, I am not sure what I believe. I suppose that I would like to believe that the world in which I am living in (and will be living in for years to come) is real, but I guess you can never be sure. The only people who can be confident in the presence, or lack of, reality is the man who left the cave and those who chose to take the red pill.