The Matrix

“You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes.”

-Morpheus,  Matrix (1999)

Starring Keanu Reeves, the movie was phenomenal since it was first released.  Not only because of its amazing action performance, which presents Carry Ann Moss jumps to the air in slow motion and kicked the police officers who try to arrest her as the opening scene, the movie itself also has relation to a philosophical understanding.

In the allegory of the Cave, Plato engaged the idea of the experience of prisoners that have been kept away from civilization. They were seated faced to a big wall, and were only presented with shadows of people, trees, and animals. To them the shadows were reality because they had not been exposed to any other thing besides the shadow. However, one prisoner was freed, and he had the opportunity to explore other things, such as the brightness of the sun, the real animals, and was exposed to other humans. The meaning behind the story is that the prisoners in the cave symbolize how human being were exposed to things others offer them in life, but the freed prisoners symbolizes how human being perceive the true meaning of life by having a philosophy.

I can really see the connection between The Allegory of the Cave and the movie Matrix. Neo’s experience in the Matrix, who had double lives, as a computer hacker and an office worker resembles the prisoners who were kept in the cave. He just perceived the world as it is and just kept on doing what he’s doing without knowing that he’s a part of the Matrix. Orpheus resembles the guard who freed the prisoner, as he opens Neo’s way to find meaning of his life by choosing whether he wants to stay and continue to live without meaning and expectation, or he wants to explore an unimaginable truth and find who he truly is. 

When faced with the situation of choosing between taking the blue pill or the red pill, I personally need a lot of thinking to make up my mind. In the Plato’s allegory of the cave, of course the choice would be to see the real world instead of just living handcuffed on the cave just watching shadows on the wall. But on The Matrix, choosing between the regular life and this other digital life is more difficult. On one occasion, who would want to live in a situation where everything until know is generated by a bunch of machines? On the other hand, who are ready to accept the fact that people are controlled by machines and being the chosen one to battle it? Both of them are tough choices, and if I were given the opportunity, I would not want to live in such a way that people just lay down, plugged into some kind of machine and just basically “dream”. And because I have my prima facie value, I avoid being away from my family and friends and being taken to some ship where all I do is sit and think while eating vitamin oatmeal. Maybe it is easier for Neo because in the movie, there is no scene where he has family or loved ones, and most likely he pretty much hates his life. So by taking the red pill, Neo would be able to start over again and at last being excited and have goals. But for me, blue pill would be nice :)

The Examined Life

Examined life is a documentary film, which shows top philosophers of our time to share their own view about a particular philosophical idea in the everyday world. I want to mainly focus on a philosopher called Slavoj Zizek, who specializes in cultural study as his ideology, shared his opinion about the world. He is called as one of the hippest philosopher by The Telegraph for his interesting way of thinking about basically everything, particularly about how would it feel like to be trapped inside an all-body condom. He is also a brilliant critic of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic and pop cultural topics. What makes his video interesting is because he really brings the audience to an actual site of what is really called an ecological catastrophe.

The first thing Slavoj Zizek points out is people’s perception of reality. Almost everyday, people throw something away to the garbage but all they know is that the trash guy is going to take it all away from our sight. Trash does disappear from their sight, but what people do not see is that it is not really gone, but it is being accumulated together, creating a mountainous problem. I have never been aware of this problem before I watched Zizek’s video, so I am really surprised about the outcome of people’s actions, which are thought was really normal, could bring such unimaginable amount of dump. Just in United States, average people produced approximately 4 pounds everyday. The biggest landfill, which is located in Las Vegas called Apex, carries 50 million tons of rotting trash. As more and more trash is produced, more landfills are also needed, which could destroy the natural resources, disturb animal’s ways of life, and also cause health problems. So this is how messed up our world is. That is why Slavoj Zizek describes the world as a catastrophe.

Zizek also connects ecological problem to ideology. Ideology is often being interpreted in a wrong way, which is often viewed as an imaginary concept of ideas. On the contrary, ideology really addresses real problems. One of the ideology mechanism is the “temptation of meaning”, which basically searching for a meaning to every incident that happens. For example, some people view AIDS disease as a punishment for living a sinful life. That is where ideology enters, which is when people have meaning to something.

The most interesting idea that Zizek brought up in the video was that there is no such thing as a balanced world. The idea that people always perceive is that the world was once a very beautiful place that is filled with everything perfect, but then human started to live, exploiting the resources, and developing new technologies that harm the nature and cause lots of environmental problems, including global warming, extinction, etc. However, Zizek stated that there is no such thing as a balanced world. The nature had already been in catastrophe, and the best thing is that people are allowed to benefit from it. For example, the most wanted natural resource is oil, which is often used for fuel. Oil itself is made from a natural catastrophe, including various unknown remnants from the past. One thing that we can do to the environment is to accept it and appreciate it the way it is.

My question to Zizek, if we continue to love the earth the way it is and keeps on taking advantage of it, wouldn’t we just hurt the environment? If we just enjoy it like we do now, how much time will we have left to enjoy the rest of it? The undeniable fact is that our world is injured right now, whether it is already impaired from the beginning or not does not really matter anymore. What people can do now is to support and actually take part to perform eco-friendly activities, such as recycling and conserving energy, which could save our planet.

Implicit Association Test

The Implicit Association Test is used as a tool to determine people’s roots of thinking and feeling. The Implicit Association Test that I took was Race-Weapons one. At first I was told to categorized two groups of people, which is African Americans and Caucasian by pressing button “i” or “e”. The instruction was given by the test, and I had to follow which one should we press, between “I” and “e” depending on what I was told to. After that, I was told to categorized two groups of things, which was “weapons” and “ harmful thing”, which was given in the same instruction. Then I had to connect both of the categories into one activity. At the end of the test, there are questions about what I think about Caucasian and African American in general, followed by questions about my personality. The result I got from the test suggests me that I have a moderate association of African Americans with weapons compared to Caucasian American.

Racial profiling often happens in real life, effecting people’s decision making. For example, a police officer who stops people because he or she belongs to a certain racial group. Some people do racial profiling consciously, but some don’t. Since I was little, I was taught to hang out with people who come from different race and to see them through their personality, not from their race. So I basically always try not to racial profile people. However, the test shows that I moderately associate African American with weapons compared to Caucasian American, which reveals how I feel unconsciously about the idea. I personally think that the result is related to an incident that just happened to me a couple years ago. When I was waiting at the bus stop with my friends, five African American came towards our direction. We thought that they were also waiting for the bus.  Slowly, they came near us, started to ask for our wallet, while showing us a gun that one of them had inside their pants. When we refused hand out our wallets, they brutally took our bags and ran away. So even though I have tried not to have negative impression as such towards African Americans, because not all African Americans have the same rude attitude, the test shows that I am affected by that particular experience. From this experience, I learn that the test really helps to reveal how people feel unconsciously about a particular topic.

After the Race-Weapons test, I decided to take the Gender-Career one. In this test, I was asked about my general view about the topic first, such as how important is family or career to me, what is my family’s income, whether I am planning to have children, and who my caregiver was when I was a kid. After that basically the same thing was done like on the first test regarding the “I” and “e” part, except this time, the group is between female and male names, with family or career. The result suggested that I moderately associate male with career and female with family, compared to female with career and male with family.

Looking at the result, I think this test does not really reveal to my own condition, but also reveals about what kind of environment I am exposed to. Both of my parents are working, so personally I think that working females are very normal. My father and mother both equally work hard and try the best they could on their field. So since I was little, I have always wanted to work in the office just like my mother and grew up with Oprah Winfrey as my role model besides my mother. I envy her hard work and her accomplishments, which really brings out her charisma. However, as I grew up, I am exposed to the environment where most of my friends’ mothers are housewives. So I began to absorb the thoughts that most of women stay at home to take care of their family. Even though until now, my goal is to become a successful businesswoman, being exposed to other kind of environment really affects me unconsciously about certain topic.

Scavanger Hunt

I think the scavenger hunt was a lot of fun especially if it is done at the beginning of the class. The students who just met could really get along with each other by sharing ideas and solving the way in order to complete the game. In my group, which involved three people, which is me, Freddy, and Yimming, we quickly bond together. At first I thought that freddy and yimming had known each other before, but apparently they were just met. If I had to do the same hunt again, I might want a more challenging restriction so that we can't just take the photos from the internet. The strategy my group used was to find things that we could not find in the campus in the internet, and it did worked. We decided to take a photo of the bus stop, art museum, coke, and person authentically, but the rest we found them through the Google search engine. We tried to find all 14 of the items on the list. We went to the computers in the library to look for the items listed on the sheet. The only obstacle we had was that there was not enough time to find things on the list, even though the thought of finding the item was already there, so there's pretty much nothing we could do to solve the problems. Based on my experience, the Scavenger Hunt really encourages us to think creatively because we want to finish the assignment on time. There is no way we could finish them all if we do the tasks traditionally. Moreover, the Scavenger Hunt really brings individuals to be a part of the society, which involves practicing team work and problem solving.