In the movie, The Matrix, the character ‘Neo’ wakes up to a world that is much different from the one he formerly knew. Prior to his awakening the world seemed to consist of individuals going about their daily lives – working, playing, and ‘paying their taxes’ in a manner essentially identical to the world that we live in. Now, after having been ‘woken up’ by the character Morpheus, Neo sees that what he formerly thought about reality has turned out to be a complete lie – an illusion foisted upon him by an inhuman race of beings (the machines) for there own ends.

But is Neo’s knowledge of this ‘new world’ any more certain to him than the ‘knowledge’ he thought himself to possess of his former world? If it is not, why is this the case? And what light does this shed on the issue for us, as beings trying to find a satisfactory explanation the relation between ourselves and the world

To put it quite simply, Neo’s knowledge of his newfound world - ‘outside’ the matrix – is no more certain than the knowledge of his previous world – ‘inside’ the matrix – because his experiences of the two worlds are qualitatively identical. Inside the matrix, he approaches an object, makes certain observations and forms judgments about it and so forth, and moves on to the next object. Whether this experience is based on a ‘real’ object or a computer generated stimulation of his nervous system he cannot know (although before his awakening, this was almost certainly his assumption). Now we examine Neo outside the matrix – how have his experiences of objects really changed? He again holds the same relationship to them - he remains absolutely external to objects which are merely ‘given’ to him. Again, Neo does not really know whether his experiences are based on ‘real’ objects or if these are not just simply more illusory (computer generated or otherwise) experiences – their illusory nature to be discovered at some later time.

*

I have described Neo’s experience of his transition from his matrix experiences to his real world experiences as an ‘awakening’. But can we truly describe the transition that Neo has undergone as an awakening? I term my experience ‘falling asleep’, when my picture of the world changes every night as I lay down and close my eyes. I then term my experience in the morning as an ‘awakening’ when I open my eyes and get up. Accurately describing this difference between the sleeping and waking states is really quite difficult - however, I believe that we can best conceptualize this difference by saying it involves a qualitative change in our conscious experience of the world – or a qualitative change of consciousness. What I mean here is that just like in the waking world I can see 2 colors in front of me, look from one to the other and say that a qualitative difference holds between them, so can I say of my waking experience of a chair and my sleeping experience of a chair (for example, of a chair that approaches me in a dream) that a qualitative difference holds between them. My consciousness of a real chair is qualitatively different than that of a dream chair. One may object that, since I cannot accurately describe the experience of a dream chair to someone, I do not really know what I am talking about - I have only had a ‘fuzzy inner experience’. Therefore I can no more conceptualize this experience as qualitatively different from others, than I can conceptualize a nonsense belief, such as the belief in an invisible blue object. But if, just because an experience is an inner one, we cannot apply concepts to them, then one who holds such an objection would also have to say that nothing of sense could be said about the world of color, either. For how does one go about accurately characterizing the qualitative differences between the color ‘blue’ and the color ‘red’? Even if it were impossible to do so, I could still say that a qualitative difference holds between them. But here again, one could say that my talk of the qualitative differences between colors only makes sense because other people can see color. But they would be forgetting that I am after all only speaking of something that makes sense to me. Even if every other person in the world were color blind, the color that I experience would still have a content.

So the fact that the qualitative distinction between the waking and sleeping state is difficult to characterize or describe has nothing at all to do with the fact of its existence.

So, in accord with this train of thought, the distinction between sleeping and waking largely - if not solely - has to do with a qualitative change in one’s state of consciousness. But in Neo’s case, it is difficult to see how his experience before and after his release from the Matrix involves any significant change in his state of consciousness. As pointed out above, his experience of objects in both worlds is qualitatively the same. And for this reason, Neo cannot truly be said to have ‘woken up’ from anything. As stated above, for all he knows, he is still in some type of virtual – or otherwise illusory – world.

To further illustrate this point, let us consider the following: Take Neo, as he is outside the Matrix, having ‘woken up’. Some time later he has a similar experience, although this time he wakes up out of a deep sleep, surrounded by fire, and standing over him is an individual with a demonic countenance. This demon tells Neo how his previous awakening was an illusory awakening. He tells Neo that he was giving the images directly to Neo’s soul (Due to his all-powerful nature, he has no need of the matrix as an indirect stimulator of his nervous system to affect his soul). He further tells Neo that he was just simply having some fun in tormenting a weak, easily deceived human. Neo is even shown some of his previous experiences both inside and outside the matrix, side by side, proving that his previous experiences were illusory. Now say that Neo has a few more adventures in this new, ‘demon controlled’ world, only to be ‘woken up’ again some time later. Only this time he discovers that he does not have a body at all, and that he is solely composed of a brain in a laboratory which is being directly stimulated by a complex computer program to produce all of his previous experiences. As it really turns out, he was not in the grips of an evil robot race, or an evil demon, but this whole time he has been under the control of a mad scientist who has removed Neo’s brain from his body as part of an experiment! He learns of this predicament through the fact that the mad scientist has connected a video camera to his nervous system, and is showing him the live video feed of himself as a helpless brain in a vat. The scientist again gives him sufficient proof to support belief in his current situation (say all of his previous experiences – matrix, ‘real world’, and demon world experiences).

Now, suppose that these ‘awakenings’ persisted ad infinitum, happening regularly every so often. Neo might then come to be quite indifferent to these awakenings, and develop somewhat of a disinterested attitude to whatever ‘new experience’ might be around the corner for him. He would likely soon gain a distrust of whatever experience that might be given to him. He would now see that whatever experience is simply given to him – given in the way that all previous experience have been given - may always be illusion. Therefore, Neo concludes, what is needed is something which is beyond the given. He needs to truly wake up, and he comes to realize that this means he needs some type of expansion or elevation – a qualitative change – in his consciousness

Now to ground this entire discussion and show it’s relevance, let us add to Neo’s series of awakenings the modern scientific view of man’s relation to the world. This world view tells us the following: ‘Whereas previously you thought that all reality existed just in the way you see and experience it, I can show you through a series of demonstrations and experiments that all you are really seeing is the effect of light bouncing off of the microscopic particles which comprise your surroundings. We do not even experience these waves directly, but only the effects of these light waves on our sense organs as interpreted to us by our brains. Furthermore, the same can be shown for every other sense you possess – hearing, touch, smell, taste, etc. The world that you see, hear, and touch – which you naively think is simply spread out before you – is so completely dependent on the organization of your physical body that it can be said not to exist in any way whatsoever apart from this physical organization.’ Such a world view would seem to take the place of Morpheus himself – telling us that what we formerly thought about reality was all a lie and that all we really experience of reality are our own mental pictures, not that reality itself. And we can well imagine the naïve person in place of the character Neo, when he says in the film: "No! It isn’t true!"

But an answer to this anxious state, which seems to be carried more or less consciously by many here in the west, is suggested in what we have already established. When Neo believes that his previously held knowledge of the world is negated by experiences of a ‘new’ world, he falls into a trap. The trap consists precisely in believing in the validity of the ‘new world’ in the exact same way as he believed in the validity of his ‘old world’. In the same way, we fall into a trap if we believe that, for example, an experienced color is nothing more than our subjective response to the fine waves of light which physics teach us about, and which alone are ‘really there’. The demonstrations and experiments, ‘showing’ us ‘the real things of the world’ are all merely given to us in the exact same way (with no qualitative difference) as the naively taken objects of every day experience – tables, trees, animals, etc. The light that we find through investigation to bounce off the chair and the chair itself are both merely given to us in the exact same way. There is no qualitative difference establishing one field of experience as any more or less certain than the other.

Just because Neo’s experience inside the matrix and the world outside the matrix are essentially the same from an epistemological standpoint, so he cannot consider that his knowledge of the world outside the matrix is any kind of awakening to a more certain reality. In the exact same sense, knowledge, derived through modern scientific means, of atoms, genes, light waves, etc. cannot be considered as a knowledge that is waking us up to the ‘way the world really is’. And if we allow ourselves to fall into the trap of saying ‘So my senses really are deceiving me – the world really is my mental picture’ we would be repeating the same mistake as shown in all the previous scenarios involving Neo’s false awakenings. For in the same way that Neo would need to start all over again, in thinking about the ultimate foundation of a world newly awoken to, so would we need to start all over again in thinking about the ultimate foundation of this world of microscopic particles which we, according to natural science, construct our world out of. And therefore this world of microscopic particles is no more or less reliable than the world we see spread out in front of us every morning when we open our eyes.