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Plagiarism of any kind will result in a 0 for the assignment and may result in being dropped from the course. A word about the readings: The first reading is a synopsis of The Matrix. You may have seen the movie and so this would function as a review for you. If you haven’t seen the movie, you may choose to do so. However, you should know that the movie is rated R for language and violence. It is not necessary to view the movie to fulfill the assignment as the synopsis is enough to consider the questions. The second reading comes room Plat’s classic work, The Republic.
It is in the form of a dialogue between Socrates and Glaucoma, a brother of Plato, and contains the famous cave allegory. The final reading is a section from Meditation from Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes who offers some reasons to doubt his senses. Questions to consider: 1 Compare and contrast The Matrix with the readings from Plato and Descartes. What are some similarities and differences? 2 Can we prove the world we are experiencing is real? How do we know we are not dreaming, vying in a Platonic cave, or trapped in some sort of matrix? At the end of the cave allegory, Socrates implies that most men would want to escape the cave and see reality as it really is. However, in his betrayal of Morpheme, Cipher implies that it is better to live in the artificial world of the Matrix. Which is better: the harshness of reality or the “ignorance is bliss” of illusion? Defend your answer. Since much of our knowledge is based on sense experience, and since our senses are imperfect and can be deceived, can we ever be certain that our beliefs are true? Defend or explain your answer Question 1 .
Compare and contrast The Matrix with the readings from Plato and Descartes. What are some of the similarities and differences? Answer: Some of the similarities are clear in that The Matrix and in the readings from Plato and Descartes that they all had a sense of skepticism in terms of how they looked at the world around them. Morpheme in a lot of way is very similar to Descartes in terms of being driven to find knowledge. They exemplified the same type of characteristics of having systematic doubt, knees, reason, dreaming hypothesis, evil demon hypothesis, brain in the vat type of mentality.
A lot of the things that both the Matrix and readings from Plato and Descartes all presented a immigrate type of thesis whereas they believe that from a skeptical thesis its true but don’t know that it’s absolutely true. The Matrix presented a lot of challenges in that you had a man Morpheme trying to help others see a the true nature oftener world and that in truth the world that they were living in was an illusion, just an elaborate system Of deception designed to keep people in control.