Member-only story
What Is The Matrix, Really?
The Real Meaning of Matrix Metaphor and its Implications
It has become a fashion these days to declare everything in society as a Matrix. Rich billionaires, social media influencers, gender identity activists and unsatisfied men are using Matrix as a metaphor for institutional censorship and exploitation. However, the original meaning of the Matrix metaphor has been lost somewhere along the line. Even the writers/directors of the Matrix franchise seem to have stuck in the rabbit hole themselves.
Symbolically, the word Matrix comes from the word Maya which means illusion. Illusion means something which appears different than it is. One can’t dissociate the word illusion from perception. Perception is the process of sensory experience from which we gather knowledge about the external world. Such knowledge helps a human survive and play a tiny role in the larger evolutionary process of survival of the species. Our sensory perception has evolved only to see a mere fraction of the truth which is essential for our survival. This means our sensory experience of the world is limited and provides only a window into the reality. For example, when we see an object, we are not seeing the intrinsic properties of the object but we are building an image of the object by the light reflected from it. This also means that it is not the fundamental reality itself but the variation in the source of light which creates the perception of reality in our brain. It can’t be very difficult to understand this phenomenon with the technology we have these days. Let’s take an example of this internet that you browse every day. Neither the text nor the images that you see exist in reality. They infact never existed. They are mere symbols/placeholders for beams of light from a light source (e.g., computer monitor) to tell it to generate light of a certain wavelength. When the light reaches your eyes, you start to experience as if a person/object/symbol in the image indeed exists.
we experience not even the projections of physical reality but the shadows of the shadows
We are living in the world of shadows. In the earlier technologies, we used to at-least experience the projections of the real objects. There used to be a real object which was captured by a camera and it required both the object…
