Dennis asked:

I was wondering, how do we define real? Yes, I know, that's a direct quote from 'The Matrix'. It seems
to me we're all slaves of senses and the way our bodies seem to work. It's all mechanics. But feelings
seem to be more real, the reason you're feeling doesn't have to be real, but that you feel is a fact;
because you feel it. But can we make up our feelings, aware or unaware. And if we make up what is
true for us, is that bad, our just something you should adapt to?

============

'The Matrix' is a very fine and challenging movie; but don't forget that ultimately it was written for you
to be entertained and only incidentally challenged in your philosophical beliefs. Moreover, it is heavily
slanted in favour of an approach to the mind via the so-called cognitive sciences, whose
presuppositions have yet to establish their credibility. Although, therefore, the dialogue is unusually
intelligent for a movie, the action sequences in large part contradict their underlying theory. And if
you've been unfortunate enough to sit through Part II, you'll probably have come to a recognition that
there is not enough to carry conviction throughout a saga. It would have been much better to just 'put
the question' than to attempt an answer, because the risk of triviality is overwhelming. QED.

Having said this, I will address only one other part of your question, namely the (unfounded and
erroneous) assumption that 'it's all mechanics'. I invite you to redress this fallacy as a matter of great
urgency, for as long as you (and anyone else who shares it) maintain this view, you will not come
anywhere within zillions of the mere possibility of understanding what reality is. This is because
'reality' is a two-fold thing, firstly of the body and secondly of the mind, but there is no mechanism
involved for either of these two.Consult a biological text (or even a picture book) and acquaint
yourself with the entity called 'organism'. When you have done this, you will find a lot of reality in the
way organisms make a living in the most multifarious circumstances and conditions, from the
sulphurous furnaces near the molten core of the earth, where bacteria who revel in the fine
nomenclatures of hyperthermofilia and pyrobalum ply their trade, to the icy wastes of Siberian
winters, where psychrophiles engage in a strange altruistic suicidal ritual in order to save their fellow
creatures from death by freezing. Neither here nor anywhere else in the world of living things can
these activities be reduced to mechanical functionality. Throughout, a residue of irreducible faculty, a
willto exert these functions, prevails, and most obviously in humans.

You said so yourself by pointing at feeling; and hence it is the exclusive emphasis in your thinking
that is at fault. Feelings, too, can be described materialistically as a kind of 'chemical jugglery', a
balancing act to provoke intentionality; but anyone who might be lured down this path to the
conclusion that 'it's all in the chemistry' would find every relevant avenue towards a proper
understanding of feelings barred. Feelings, like the mechanical whirring of muscles, tendons,
cartileges etc depend on some faculty to move them, which is not part of the pull-and-shove causality
of materialism.

Observe, in 'The Matrix', the window into 'real' reality, which is the mission of Morpheus and his
followers to reclaim for humans and which on the strength of certain prophecies they believe to be a
talent imbued in Neo. Note that in the film the parallel realities are mutually exclusive and that the
characters can be coupled only to one or the other. What I criticised above concerns the (not very
adequately founded) conception of the possibility of physical movement in the illusory domain
concocted by the machines, which we are to understand as the creation of our manipulated nervous
systems. This entails several weighty problems which are not glossed in the movie (the impactof the
film results not from its dialogue, but from the stirring cinematography). Thus: the nervous system is
not a standalone utility, but involved in the totality of all electrochemical activity of the body; to think
otherwise — and this is how it is depicted in 'The Matrix' — is a capital error.

For consider that it might be easy enough to deceive the tongue to savour the taste of cheese, which
in "reality" may be any cheese substitute you can think of (cork?): but this can not be the end of the
story. For even your taste buds trigger appropriatechemical signals to the digestive system, influence
the blood circulation and a thousand or million other correlated functions; and of course the stomach
extracts nutrients and cannot be fooled to "sense" food constituents where there aren't any. In the
end, the whole idea of mechanisms, epecially those which execute machine-like functions, is derived
from the biological realm in the first place. Just think of the many interesting things you can do with
fingers, hands and arms. What are our mechanical contraptions in their majority, if not imitations of
body units, or of particular "worker" organisms? We feel contemptuous of mechanisms because they
are cold and dead, but in extending this to biological functions that are not mechanical, we then
profess to despise them for an ill-understood "mechanicalness" and blame them for something which
they're not and don't do. And these are minor issues, because a sense like taste is relatively primitive
compared to vision or hearing, which engage not merely our perceptive and hedonic faculties, but
most especially the mind.

It is here, with this topic, where the movie makes its fundamental 'statement'. It assumes, and
presupposes in accordance with certain present-day paradigms (all which are valid merely 'for the
time being'), that mind is an emergent phenomenon of brain activity, a kind of software written by
evolution to run on the wetware inside our skulls; but you need understand little more than the
meaning of the term 'infinite regress' to see that thereby the problem of the homunculus or the 'ghost
in the machine' which Gilbert Ryle sought to banish from intelligent discourse, has returned via the
back door. This will not do; so much is evident. Depending on your own level of erudition, I would
suggest you pick up one of Gerald Edelman's books: his scientific writings if you can handle
embryology; if not his Bright Air, Brilliant Fire.These are written by a scientist who knows his facts
and has a good appreciation of what reality means to an organism, from the instant of its birth to its
moment of exit — from reality. In this traversal of life, the organism traverses reality. Non-reality is the
state that exists before and after. It does not surround the organism. You might like to ponder this in
the light of your remark of "making up what is true for us".

The issue of 'what is reality (to us)?' boils down eventually to this. Everything experienceable to an
organism is reality; illusions, delusions, fears and hopes are part of this. But there are (I should say
obviously) many layers of reality, and to some of these we don't have access or partial access only. It
is the latter which are the subject matter of 'The Matrix'. Without producing a thesis, I can say little
more now than that the 'manufactured reality' in which the humans live and work and play in the film
is a highly improbable state for an organism to function in; it is evolutionarily speaking a non sequitur
and would be 'found out' rather more quickly than suggested in the movie. We live and survive as
bodies because we acquire and store concrete knowledge of forms of reality which comprise our
habitat, and this reality tends to exert itself cruelly if offended against too long. Think of the
comparison with drugs manufactured by the body as part of its endocrinal routine: if these are
artificially injected, the result is inevitably hallucination, thus you see here an analogy to the "Matrix"
scenario. But in their majority the hallucinations I speak of are (at least) harmful, and in many cases
destructive or even fatal. So while omnilateral delusion may furnish a brilliant talking point and
highlight certain common human dilemmas, it doesn't measure up to "reality" all that well.

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney