Rene Descartes Skepticism And The Matrix

Alec Shover
Dr. Darrell Cosden
Introduction to Philosophy
PHL260
Section 2
Descartes Skepticism and the Matrix
March 21, 2012
1197 Words

Reality is something that has been debated among philosophers for centuries. Rene Descartes is one of these philosophers who has come up with a unique way of understanding reality. Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy argues his method of doubt about the idea of skepticism and this is reflected in the Matrix when Neo chooses the red pill over the blue pill and his entire experience that followed. In The Matrix, Neo is given the choice by Morpheus to take the red pill, which will take him out of the Matrix, or the blue pill, which will leave him in the Matrix.
There is no true way to know that anything that is experienced is real. One’s senses often deceive him and therefore the senses are not the true way to understand reality. The way people know reality as they experience it is through their senses, but because the senses deceive, clearly no one is experiencing true reality. This is the skepticism Descartes looks into deeply. One experiences reality through the senses. But the senses deceive and there is, therefore, no way to reach one hundred percent certain
He raises the points, “If I am persuading myself of something, in so doing I assuredly do exist” and “if he is deceiving me, I exist” (Descartes 34). He claims that because he thinks and because some deceiver is trying to deceive him, he must exist or else these occurrences would not be happening. Knowing this, he goes on to question who he really is, so as not to lose this knowledge that he gained that he exists. He begins by questioning who he originally believed himself to be. He originally thought himself to be a man (whatever that may be) with a body that was nourished, walked, sensed, and thought (Descartes 34). He though all of these to correspond to the soul, but he put no consideration as to what the soul actually is. As he questions each of these, he finds that none of these actually belongs to him until he reaches thinking. He comes to the conclusion that he exists as long as he is thinking, that he is a mind or a thinking thing and that everything is truly known only through the mind. Karl Popper’s philosophy would claim that Descartes’ method of doubt and knowledge that he is only a thinking thing is non-falsifiable, and therefore non-scientific, because it cannot be proven by tests or experiments. But Popper cannot deny that Descartes has a very sound argument that although may have elements of falsity, clearly contains elements of