The Matrix: Life how we see it vs Life how it is.

In 1999, The Matrix hit the big screen. As viewers sat, perplexed by the blinking green cursor in the top left of the screen, they watched a story unfold like no other they had seen before.

The Matrix was new: A block-buster action movie, sure, but not just a block-buster. The Matrix captured numerous philosophical ideas and presented them in a way to almost teases us. Ideas that seemed so real, and yet couldn't be grasped. For many, this is the nature of philosophy.

Anyway, so the reason I'm writing this is I found the image below. It captures the essence of what The Matrix is, the point it was making about life how we see it, and life how it is. I believe this idea can be transferred onto the real reality, our real lives because the life that we see everyday, is not life how it is. We interpret everything, we add meaning to everything, we create the life we see prompted by the life that is. Believing of course that the life we see is the life that is.

So what does this mean? Are we living a lie? Probably... But if we're living a lie, believing it fully, and have no power to discover what we do not see, where does that leave us. I suppose it leaves us in no better, or worse, place than we started, except now we know reality may not be how we see it. If we consider there are indeed facts, facts describing events in space and time, then our interpretations are merely meaning we've added. We create problems when we forget where the facts end and the interpretations begin. It is then that we can no longer distinguish between life how it is, and life how we see it.

Returning to The Matrix, it revealed that the interpretation was in-fact a lie, the interpretation was a lie, a lie covering a horrible truth. In reality though, our interpretations commonly create horrible truths, covering innocent or meaningless events...