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Comparing Plato's Allegory And The Matrix

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Many films of the modern era are influenced by greek philosophy. Plato’s allegroy of the cave being one of the more popular choices. Been present in films such as Wall-e, Chicken Run, and but in the event of The Matrix its no longer a pleasant allusion to the original media its down right plagiarism.
As Morpheus says, “Welcome to the desert of the real.” In apocalyptic fashion, the real world of The Matrix is a desolate post-apocalyptic nihilism where machines have taken over and enslaved humans as battery pods, where they are cloned and grown in vats. The quote of Baudrillard is appropriate as well due to the film’s focus on simulated reality. Because western civilization and modernity as a whole have rejected meaning and objectivity (based …show more content…

In the Matrix, a similar situation occurs when Neo is being held in a liquid chamber attached to a large pillar, which the machines use to harvest his heat in order to power them. Between Plato’s allegory and the Matrix, you can see that both people in both stories (prisoner and Neo) are brought from their caves and into the light to seek their true …show more content…

In Plato’s cave story, prisoners are restrained in such a way that they cannot observe anything other than a blank wall before them. Behind them is a fire that projects shadows onto the cave wall. Men on scaffolds use puppets to cast further shadows and the reverberation of sound in the cave makes it sound as though all the sound is coming from the shadows. The only perception these prisoners have are the shadows on the wall.The Matrix likewise artificially limits the terms of reality for its characters. The Matrix (the system not the movie itself) is a digital prison of shared consciousness and while the deception is more elaborate than Plato’s cave, the effect is the same. The prisoners’ sense of reality is controlled. Every aspect of it is merely a simulated reality, smoke and mirrors used to make people feel what is going on is all there is. No one in the system is aware of it unless they are awoken or told about it, and even then they have trouble believing it. Neo is drenched in the mundanity and feels there is something more but has no evidence to support that. His life is as a prisoner in Plato’s cave, only seeing what he is allowed to see and altogether unaware of a greater reality.
When the prisoner observes the fire, it is blinding, overwhelming. The prisoner would not be likely to accept this as reality and prefer to return to the shadows he was comfortable with before. In The Matrix we can

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The movie The Matrix has many similar themes and differences to “The Allegory of the Cave”. The Matrix is about a man named Neo, he believes that he’s a normal man with a normal life but then he is contacted by a man named Morpheus. Morpheus exposes Neo to the truth that his world, where he is just regular Tom Anderson is made up. The Matrix , was created by sentient machines that subdue the human population, while their bodies ' heat and electrical activity are used as an energy source. Neo is reluctant to accept this truth that his old world, the matrix it is called, does not really exist.

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In reality, many people live without an absolute knowledge of the world and often times, they are comfortable with this ignorance. Likewise, Plato introduces the idea of this unawareness through The Allegory of the Cave, a short story in his published book, The Republic: Book VII. In his book, he narrates the story of a few prisoners who are held captive in a dark cave, where the only light that shines through is from a fire that burns behind them. He further explains that the prisoners are completely bound and unable to move their body or head. Moreover, he reveals that the captives grew up with no outside communication and consequently, the way of life in the cave was all they knew.

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Humankind perceives that its day-in, day out world is real, but this film shows the “reality” that the perceived world is a hoax, an elaborate computer program that generates a simulated reality. All-powerful machines of artificial intelligence created this generated dream world in order to keep human beings under control and use them as a power source. To accomplish their desired outcome, the machines relegated humankind to an inactive, physical existence in pods that keep them alive for the purpose of energy production. In the pods, human beings are plugged into the matrix, which keeps them docile and mentally satisfied through a virtual

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One’s perception might not be the truth and one’s perception might not be reality, but Avi’s novel “Nothing But The Truth” and Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave”display the difference between truth,perception and reality. The texts interestingly approached the ideas similarly. In the “Allegory of the Cave” written by Plato a liberated prisoner was once trapped in a cave since birth. The darkness and shadows were all the prisoner once knew until liberated.

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Plato’s The Allegory of the Cave and the Matrix have a lot of similarities. The Matrix is very similar to the allegory because both act as a prison of false reality. The prisoners in the allegory are people who have grown up in the cave and never seen anything other than their reality. In The Matrix, Neo and other humans are the prisoners of a computer simulation that resembles our society. Plato wanted to portray that reality isn’t always what it seems.

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Plato’s allegory of the cave paints us a picture of this prison. I will be discussing the similarities between Plato’s cave and The Matrix, the movie. Although we may feel content with our lives and feel a sense of completion, seeing the world as it truly is by breaking from this prison brings us to a whole new level of plenitude. Plato describes the cave as a dark cavern that houses prisoners. These prisoners are chained in such a way that they can only see what is in front of them.

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The prisoner has been kept in a cave, unknowing about the world outside of it. Both characters are required to accept truth before they can learn anything more about the worlds they live in. They also are both controlled by a higher power. The computer program controls the life of Neo, while the prisoner is controlled by the athenian government. Neo and

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In the movie “The Matrix” by Joel Silver, there are major philosophical idealistic views integrated into the plot that give a deeper meaning to the storyline. Since the release of the “The Matrix” in 1999, there has been major controversy over the hidden messages that lie between the viewers eyes when watching. There are endless conspiracies about the message that is being portrayed, most of which being biblical and philosophical references. What stood out to me the most while watching was Plato's Allegory of the Cave. Plato invests in the idea that the real world is in fact an illusion.

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In both “Allegory of the Cave” and The Matrix, the cave dwellers and Neo are both inherently chained to their false realities. These realities are symbolized as the cave and the matrix, respectively. Plato reveals in his allegory that there is a cave in which prisoners are held, chained to the wall, watching shadows cast against the wall in front of them. The shadows are what they perceive to be true and they have no conception of what is outside of their cave. In the allegory, Glaucon and Socrates discuss the character of the prisoners, calling them “strange, like ourselves” and their false veracity, which Socrates describes as “literally nothing but the shadows of the images” (Plato lines 14-15, 29).

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An individual’s life journey is linked to the process of enlightenment, which can be achieved when one realizes the world they have been dwelling in is an illusion and is not under their own control. The science-fiction movie The Matrix, Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, and Golden-Globe award winning film The Truman Show all have the same underlying theme of escaping an artificial reality. “The Allegory of the Cave” is a dialogue that criticizes human perception. In the dialogue, prisoners draw a parallel between the dwellers in the cave who believe the shadows on the walls are real to humans who believe in perceptions based on empirical knowledge.

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In "The Machine Stops," people have put their entire faith in a machine which eventually lets them down, and Communication is made as a kind of instant messaging/video conferencing machine called the speaking apparatus, with which people conduct their only activity, they sharing ideas and knowledge. In the Allegory of the Cave, Plato distinguishes between people who mistake sensory knowledge for the truth and people who do see the truth, the cave represents people who believe that knowledge comes from what we see and hear in the world empirical evidence. The cave shows that believers of empirical knowledge are trapped in a ‘cave’ of misunderstanding, Although, the prisoner managed to break his bonds and soon discovered that his reality was not what he thought it was and in “The Machine Stops," it’s a world in which most of the human population has lost the ability to live on the surface of the Earth. Now they live in isolation below ground in a standard 'cell ', with all bodily and spiritual needs met by the

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The movie The Matrix, was a film that is about a man who lives two lives. By day the main character named Neo is an average computer programmer and by night he is a well-known hacker known as Neo. After a while he finds himself targeted by the police when he is contacted by a legendary hacker named Morpheus. During the movie Morpheus shows Neo the real world which is a ravaged wasteland that most of humanity has been captured by machines that live off of human body heat and electrochemical energy and imprison their minds within an artificial reality known as the Matrix. This movie has a lot of philosophical theories that it can relate to but the 2 main philosophers and ideas that catch my eye with this movie is Plato and his allegory of the

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These shadows are the closest thing they will ever see to reality. They hear sounds of the fire and entities behind their heads but because they can’t move their heads, they assume that they’re the sounds of the shadows. Socrates asks us to imagine what would happen if one prisoner is free and he escapes. At first, the light of the fire causes great difficulty to him but he slowly

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However, his eyes adjust to the fire and the shadows become hard to see; shown in the quote, “the glare will distress him, and he will be unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows…” (Plato). The prisoner’s progress out of the cave is a struggle. Every step challenges his beliefs as said in, “… that he is reluctantly dragged up a steep and rugged ascent, and held fast until he’s forced into the presence of the sun himself, is he not likely to be pained and irritated?” (Plato).

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The emergence from the cave is an enlightenment of intellectualism, when all the difficulties and confusion of life is gone and only reality exists. Plato uses the shadow of fire as a metaphor for intelligence. The people who emerged out of the brightness represent truth; the freed prisoner. The chained prisoner would “look towards the firelight; all this would hurt him, and he would be too much dazzled to see distinctly those things whose shadows he had seen before”(Plato

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