Morpheus's View on Reality

Despite this rather confusing comment, Morpheus actually relies on a pretty straightforward understanding of what it is that makes something real as opposed to unreal. He relies on this understanding when he refers to his hovercraft, the Nebuchadnezzar and the city of Zion as real. And he relies on it when he classifies the world of the Matrix and the virtual arena in which they first appear as unreal. He relies on it to make sense of his general mission as being to wake people up from unreality and into reality. And he relies on it to make sense of his particular mission as being to do this for Neo, the person who he believes will be able to destroy the unreality of the Matrix for good. In relying on it, Morpheus actually assumes that there’s an important difference between those electrical signals that are fed into our brains by computers when we’re floating in our tanks and those that he has when, for example, he’s sitting with his crew in the cockpit of the Nebuchadnezzar. If Morpheus thought that reality was simply a matter of having electrical signals interpreted by your brain then he’d think that people were just as much in touch with reality when they were floating in their tanks as he was when he was sitting in the cockpit of the Nebuchadnezzar. In both cases, there are electrical signals being interpreted by brains. Yet of course Morpheus doesn’t think that the experiences people have in their tanks are putting them in touch with reality, whereas he does think that the experiences he’s having as he sits in the cockpit of the Nebuchadnezzar are putting him in touch with reality. So he can’t believe that reality is simply a matter of having electrical signals interpreted by your brain. He must believe something else. In fact, he believes what the rest of us believe.

To put it simply, Morpheus believes that the real is that which exists exterior to our minds. The unreal is that which exists only in our minds. This is the understanding which guides him in classifying the cockpit of the Nebuchadnezzar as real and the world of the Construct as unreal. He thinks that his ship is there even when nobody’s experiencing it. He doesn’t think that the television he shows Neo in the Construct is there even when nobody’s experiencing it, when nobody is loaded up into that particular virtual world. The Nebuchadnezzar exists in its own right, independently of our ideas about it being real. The television exists only in the minds of those suitably loaded up which is unreal. We share with Morpheus the assumption that reality is a matter of being part of an independent world which is better off. Otherwise, we’d never understand what was going on in the films. We’d never understand what the difference was between being in the Matrix and being out of it. We’d never understand what it was Morpheus was