Seasons

The "Seasons" forums tend to bleed into each other.

I'm not sure if I'm summerizing this right, but I'll try.

I heard an interesting argument in philosophy class once that attempted to prove that we don't live in The Matrix. The argument (IIRC) was simply that there is no way that we could ever know or prove if we were in The Matrix, so Occam's Razor ('the simplest solution is usually correct') states that we must not be.

Some translations of Taoist and Buddhist texts talk about enlightenment as 'escaping the matrix.' I don't know what the original Chinese word was, though (and, yes, these predate the movie).

dj froggy, if that were true, then that supports the statement "if you cannot know or peove god, he must not exist."

-and everyone learns in math class that the simplest solution is not always correct

Well, he said "usually," not "always". But even if true, that isn't exactly proof.

Besides which, I'm not convinced that 'simplest' is a well-defined term. Someone might find it 'simpler' to believe that the world is a hallucination, for instance.

technically the matrix was a hallucination

Not if you define a hallucination as something that exists only in one person's mind. The Matrix would still exist without any human minds to perceive it. It's 'stored' in the physical memory of a machine, presumably. And anyone hooked into the system would experience the same Matrix as anyone else. Not true of hallucinations and hallucinogens.

The easy way to prove whether or not we were in the matrix would be to follow the rabbit, and take the pill.

but would you take the red pill or the blue pill? i mean, why risk it? If we ARE in the matrix, would you want to escape it into a world worse than hell?

Yeah, I've always believed in the truth, no matter how harsh it is.

But what if the pill merely produces a hallucination that seems as real as the Matrix?