>Love your analysis on The Matrix. Here is some stuff that I have been noodling on that I thought might be useful.
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>1. The Wachowskis brothers suggest looking at Schopenhauer.
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>2. Quote from Carrie-Anne Moss: "It's about fate. It's about believing. About making choices that support your destiny. Being responsible for the choices you make. Believing in something you're willing to fight for. Believing in good. Understanding that unless you have choice, there is no freedom. I could go on and on."
>[http://www.startribune.com/stories/1553/3867885.html]
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>3. Joseph Campbell on Schopenhauer:
>CAMPBELL: Schopenhauer, in his splendid essay called "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual," points out that when you reach an advanced age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in the composition of a consistent plot. So who composed that plot? Schopenhauer suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by the will within you. And just as people whom you will have met apparently by mere chance became leading agents in the structuring of your life, so, too, will you have served unknowingly as an agent, giving meaning to the lives of others, The whole thing gears together like one big symphony, with everything unconsciously structuring everything else. And Schopenhauer concludes that it is as though our lives were the features of the one great dream of a single dreamer in which all the dream characters dream, too; so that everything links to everything else, moved by the one will to life which is the universal will in nature.
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Thanks for taking the time to forward those quotes - very interesting.
Nietzsche also comments of the serendipity of life seeming like a serious of irrevocable choices -- yet only in retrospect, but then Nietzsche was also influenced by Schopenhauer and the notion of will.
Actually I'm surprised I haven't heard anyone compare the Matrix to Foucault's theory of power, which IIRC is described as a "grid" and is most threatened not by violence per se (which merely replicates the patterns of power… like Agent Smith?) but by misbehavior and subversion.
And one could certainly throw in the sociological concept (put forward by Mead?) of the "looking-glass self" in which we derive a large part of our notions of reality from the reactions of others... that is why the machines construct a Matrix and not simply as series of dream boxes. Humans as a species require social interaction -- even if mediated through a dreamworld -- and that interaction provides one of the stabilizing components of the Matrix itself. Such interaction is not, however, in and of itself sufficient… the human subjects within the Matrix also require a sense of positive affirmation – choice or legitimacy, if you will – for them to continue to accept the Matrix rather than reject it, even if only unconsciously, and wake up. I’ll take a flyer here and say same is also true of the concept of will, for even if in retrospect it seems like “fate,” it only seems so through the prism of an experience of choice.
Socrates was also big on choice being “free” but not “free” in the way we understand the term, rather as an expression of who we are. For him there is no homunculus hiding in our head, making our decisions but immune to the consequences – each decision we make and the experiences it engenders shapes who and what we are, whether we like it or not. We choose our identity and destiny through the choices we make. That is why Socrates was convinced it was better to suffer harm than to do harm, because in suffering harm all that is damaged is the body but by choosing to do harm one corrupts one’s very soul.
This may help speak to the dance Neo and the Oracle do concerning whether he is the One and the making of choices more generally – he isn’t the One until and unless he makes the choices that enable him to be the One, but by embracing hope and making those choices (and succeeding at them) he changes something that was merely contingent into a fate. That’s why we’re watching this movie and not the one about Joe Schlubb who chose to take the blue pill.
And regarding choice and fate… you just know that in Revolutions Neo choices are going to vindicate Morpheus’ prior beliefs, despite (or in part because of?) Morpheus’ loss of faith…. just not in a way Morpheus – or anyone else – would (or could) have understood…. Morpheus, like Neo before him, had to be awakened to the necessity of choice in fulfilling a destiny. Prior to his disappointment Morpheus was as fatalistic as the Architect. Now he is awake. It should be interesting to see how it all plays out.
10:10:29 PM 
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