So it looks like the inner/outer distinction introduced by Descartes holds only for thought. At the basic level of involved skillful coping, one is simply what Merleau-Ponty calls an empty head turned towards the world. But this doesn't at all show The Matrix is old fashioned or mistaken. On the contrary it shows that The Matrix has gone further than philosophers who hold we can't get outside our mind. It suggests a more convincing argument - one that Descartes pioneered but didn't develop - that we can't get outside our brain.

It was no accident that Descartes proclaimed the priority of the inner in the 17th Century. At that time, instruments like the telescope and microscope were extending man's perceptual powers. At the same time, the sense organs themselves were being understood as transducers bringing information to the brain. Descartes pioneered this research with an account of how the eye responded to light energy from the external world and passed the information on to the brain by means of "the small fibers of the optic nerve."12 Likewise, Descartes used the phantom limb phenomenon to argue that other nerves brought information about the body to the brain and from there to the mind.

It seemed to follow that we are all brains in cranial vats,13 and we can never be directly in contact with the world or even with our own bodies. So, even if phenomenologists like Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Taylor are right that we are not confined to our inner experiences, it still seems plausible to suppose that, as long as the impulses to and from the nervous system reproduce the complex feedback loop between the brain's out-going behavior-producing impulses and the incoming perceptual ones, the person whose brain is being so stimulated would have the experience of directly coming to grips with the things in the world. Yet, in the brain in the vat case, there is no house and no city, indeed, no real world, to interact with.

What the phenomenologist can and should claim is that, in a Matrix world where bodies are in vats, the people whose brains are getting virtual reality inputs correlated with their action outputs, are nonetheless directly coping with perceived reality, and that that reality isn't experienced as inner. Even in the Matrix world, people directly relate to perceived chairs by sitting on them. Thus coping, even in the Matrix, is more direct than conceived of by any of the inner/outer views of the mind's relation to the external world that have been held from Descartes to Husserl.

Yet, wouldn't each brain in the Matrix have a lot of false beliefs, for example that its Matrix body is its real body whereas its real body is in the vat? No. It's a mistake to think that each of us is a brain in a cranial vat. True, each of us has a brain in their skull and the brain provides the causal basis of our experience, but we aren't in our brain. Likewise, the people in the Matrix world are not brains in vats any more than we are. They are people who grew up in the Matrix world and their experience of their Matrix body and how to use it makes that phenomenal body their body, even if another body they can't even imagine has in its skull the brain that is the causal basis of their experience.

After all, the people who live in the Matrix have no other source of experience than what happens in the Matrix. Thus, a person in the Matrix has no beliefs at all about his vat-enclosed body and brain and couldn't have any. That brain is merely the unknowable causal basis of that person's experiences. The only body he sees and moves is the one he has in the Matrix world. So, the AI programmers could have given people Matrix bodies radically unlike their bodies in the vat. After all, the brain in the vat started life as a baby brain and could be given any content the AI programmer's chose. They could have taken a white baby who was going to grow up short and fat and given him the Matrix body of a tall African-American.14

But there is still at least one problem. The Matricians' beliefs about their perceived bodies and the perceptual world may be shared and reliable, and in that sense true, but what about the causal beliefs of the people in the Matrix? They believe, as we do, that pin pricks cause pain, that the sun causes things to get warm, and gravity causes things to fall. Aren't all these beliefs false? It depends on their understanding of causality. People don't normally have beliefs about the nature of causality. Rather, they simply take for granted a shared sense that they are coping with a shared world whose entities are causing their experience. Unless they are philosophizing, they do not believe that the world is real or that it is an illusion, they just count on it behaving in a consistent way so they can cope with things successfully. If, however, as philosophers, they believe that there is a physical universe with causal powers that makes things happen in their world, they are mistaken. But if they believe that causes are constant conjunctions of experiences as David Hume thought, or universal laws relating experiences as Kant held, then their causal beliefs will be true of the causal relations in the Matrix world.15

In fact, the Matricians would seem to be in the same epistemological position that we all are in according to Kant. Kant claims we experience the world as a public, objective reality, and science then relates these experiences by rules we call laws, but we can't know the causal ground of the phenomena we perceive. Specifically, according to Kant, we experience the world as in space and time but things as they are in themselves aren't in space and time. So Kant says we can know the phenomenal world of objects and causal correlations but we can't know the things in themselves that are the ground of these appearances.

That should sound familiar. Indeed, if there are Kantians in the Matrix world, most of their beliefs will be true. They will understand that they are experiencing a coordinated system of appearances, and understand too that they can't know things as they are in themselves; that they can't know what is causing their shared experience of the world and universe. Kantians don't hold that our shared and tested beliefs about the world, and scientists' confirmed beliefs about the universe, are false just because they are about phenomena and do not and cannot correspond to things in themselves. So, as long as Kantians, and, indeed, everyone in the Matrix, don't claim to know about things in themselves, most of their beliefs will be true.

Nonetheless, the Matrix philosophy obviously does not subscribe to the Kantian view that we can never know things in themselves. In The Matrix one can come to know reality. We have seen that existential phenomenologists acknowledge that we are sometimes mistaken about particular things and have to retroactively take back our understanding of them. But, as Merleau-Ponty and Taylor add, we only do so in terms of a new and better prima facie contact with reality. Likewise, in The Matrix version of the brain in the vat situation, those who have been hauled from the vat into what they experience as the everyday world can see that what they took for granted about the causal ground of their experience before was mistaken. They can understand the "thing in itself" as a computer program.16

III. A New Brave New World

We are now in a position to try to understand and answer Cypher's question: Why live in the miserable world the war has produced rather than in a satisfying illusion? Some answers just won't do. It doesn't seem to be a question of whether one should face the truth rather than live in an illusion. Indeed, most of the beliefs of the average Matrician are true; when they sit on a chair it usually supports them, when they enter a house they see the inside, people have bodies that can be injured, and they can perform some actions and not others. Even our background sense that in our actions we are coping with something independent of us and that others are coping with it too, is justified. As we have seen, Kant argued, even if this is a phenomenal world, a world of appearances, most of our beliefs would still be true. Likewise, living in the Matrix world does not seem to be less moral than living in this world. The Matricians are free to choose what they will do; they can be selfish like Cypher and betray their friends, or they can be loyal to their friends, or try to provide for the future happiness of those they love. None of these issues seem to give us a grip on what, if anything, is wrong with the Matrix world.

To understand what is wrong with living in the Matrix world we have to understand the source of the power of the Matrix illusion. Part of the power comes from the way the inputs and outputs from the computer are plugged directly in the brain's sensory motor-system. When we experience ourselves as acting in a certain way, say walking inside a house, the computer gives us the correlated experiences of seeing the interior. These correlations produce a systematic perceptual world that is impervious to what we believe, like the wrap-around IMAX illusion that forces one to sway to keep one's balance on a skateboard even though one knows one is sitting in a stationary seat watching a movie.

Thus, believing that the Matrix world is illusory can't change our perception of it. That is, even for Neo, objects look solid and as if they have backs and insides already present and waiting to be seen, even when Neo knows they are being produced by a computer to accompany his experience of moving around them. Knowing the Matrix world is an illusion doesn't change the look of it, just as in our world the moon looks bigger on the horizon even though we know it isn't.

The inputs to our perceptual system produce the perceptual world whether we believe it is real or not. But, once one realizes that the causality in the Matrix world is only virtual, since causality is not built into our perceptional system, one can violate the Matrix's simulated causal laws. Neo can fly, he can fall from buildings without getting hurt, if he wanted to, he could bend spoons.17 About the causal principles governing the Matrix world, Morpheus tells Neo, "It is all in your mind."

If one jumps from a building believing the fall is an illusion, the computer, nonetheless, gives one the appropriate visual experience of falling, and the fall still looks dangerous, but, if one doesn't believe in the causal laws governing falls, one understands one is free from the causal consequences, viz. getting hurt, and that somehow blocks the visual and tactile experiences one would have had as one was spattered over the pavement. One's disbelief in the illusion somehow forces the computer to give one the experience of still being intact. Or, to take a simpler example, if one doesn't accept the causal relations of rigidity and force, when one's brain gives out the neural output of bending a spoon, the computer is forced to give back the visual input that the spoon is bending. This is a literal example of what Morpheus calls "bending the rules." Likewise, if one believes that one can stop bullets, one will look for them where one stopped them and the computer will obediently display them there. So, after he learns the Matrix world is an illusion, Neo doesn't see things differently - the impulses to his brain still control what he sees - but he is able to do things that he couldn't do before (like bend spoons) and that affects what he sees (the spoon bending). How this suspension of causality works in not explained in the film.18

What, then, is the sinister source of power of the Matrix world that keeps people conforming to the supposed constraints of a causal universe, even though there are no such constraints? If it isn't just that they are locked into the sensory motor correlations of their perceptual world, what sort of control is it? It has to be some sort of control of the Matricians' intellectual powers, which we learn early on in the movie are free from the control of direct sensory-motor computer input.19 It must, then, be some sort of mind control.

In fact, the Matrix simply takes advantage of a sort of mind control already operating in the everyday world. We are told that what keeps people from taking control of the Matrix world is their taking for granted the common sense view of how things behave, such as, if you fall you will get hurt. More generally, what keeps people in line is their tendency to believe what the average person believes, and consequently doing (and not doing) what one does. (As in one eats peas with a fork, one doesn't throw food at the dinner table, and one gets hurt when one falls.) Heidegger describes the resulting conformism as letting oneself be taken over by "the one" (Das Man).20 Aldous Huxley similarly lamented the conformity of the brainwashed masses in Brave New World.

Thus, The Matrix can be seen as an attack on what Nietzsche calls herd mentality. Nietzsche points out that human beings are normally socialized into shared, banal social meanings, and that it is hard to think differently. As he puts it, "as long as there have been humans, there have also been herds of men (clans, communities, tribes, peoples, states, churches) and always a great many people who obey, __ considering, then, that nothing has been exercised and cultivated better and longer among men than obedience, one may fairly assume that the need for it is now innate in the average man."21

Waking in the movie, then, amounts to freeing oneself from the taken for granted views that one has been brought up to accept. But how is this possible? Heidegger claims that everyone dimly senses that there is more to life than conforming. As Morpheus says to Neo, "It's like a splinter in your mind." We know that, in the Matrix the Agents take care of those who, like Neo, get out of line. But most people flee the thought that their conformist world lacks something important. According to Heidegger it takes an attack of anxiety, the experience that none of the taken for granted normal ways of doing things and seeing things have any basis, to jolt someone out of the herd. It is important to understand that Heidegger's anxiety is not the wringing of hands that we witness in the everyday world. It is a feeling of the overwhelming meaninglessness of the world. How fitting then that a barely expressible unease seems to permeate Neo's life _ an anxiety that prompts him to begin the process of breaking free. Finally, Neo has a dramatic version of such an anxiety attack. When he learns that the world he has been taking for granted is an illusion used to turn people into energy resources, he falls to the floor and throws up.

IV. A Really Brave New World

One might reasonably object that all the dreaming talk in the film, even if it could not be literal, is too strong a religious metaphor to refer to what Heidegger calls living a tranquilized existence in the one. And waking seems to be more than becoming a non-conformist. After all, there are all those mentions of Jesus in connection with Neo collected by Colin McGinn.22 There can be no doubt that Neo is meant to be a kind of Savior, but what kind?

It's easy to think that this is a Gnostic, Buddhist or Platonic/Christian parable, in which what we take to be reality is an illusion, and we have to wake from the world of appearances to some kind of higher spiritual reality. On this reading, Neo would lead people out of the illusions of Plato's cave, the veil of Maya, or the darkness of the world into a disembodied eternal life. But this association would be all wrong! True, the conformist Matrix world is a sort of tranquilizing illusion and Neo will lead us out of it. But this does not mean learning that our mortal bodies are an illusion and that salvation consists in leaving our vulnerable bodies behind in exchange for some kind of eternal bliss.

In the film, salvation means the absolute opposite of this religious dream. True, the ones who see through the illusion of the Matrix can get over some of the limitations of having a body.23 But such flying takes place in the Matrix world. In the real world to which Neo "awakes" and into which he will, we suppose, eventually lead everyone, there will be no more flying. People will have earth-bound, vulnerable bodies and suffer cold, bad food, and death. It may look like Neo evades death, but his "resurrection" in the hovercraft is not to a world where death has been overcome by a miraculous divine love, rather, he has been saved by a loving intervention _ a sort of tender CPR _ quite within the bounds of physics and chemistry. So he still has his vulnerable body and will have to die a real death one day. What he has gotten over is not death but the herd's fear of death that presumably inhibits people in the Matrix world, and he has thereby overcome the most serious constraint that people normally accept.

If bending the rules accepted by the average person just amounts to being able to bend spoons, fly, and stop bullets, it doesn't seem any kind of salvation. Being creative must mean more than just being disruptive.24 We are lead to expect that, in return for accepting everyday vulnerability and suffering, the people liberated by Neo will be reborn to a new and better life. But what sort of life is that? To account for why it is morally preferable to confront risky reality rather than rest in the safe and tranquilized Matrix world whatever the quality of experience in each, we need an account of human nature, so we can understand what human beings need _ what brings out human beings at their best.

But, in our pluralistic world, there are many different cultures, each with its own understanding of human nature. Even our own culture has experienced many different worlds created by new interpretations of people and of nature that changed what counted as human beings and things. What mattered in the world of Homer was to be a hero and collect beautifully crafted artifacts; in the Hebrew World one had to obey God's law and to govern all other creatures; in the Christian World, the goal was to purify one's desires so as to become a Saint and to read the text of God's world in order to know God's will; and, after Descartes and Kant, people in the Modern World became autonomous, self-controlled subjects organizing and controlling objects and their own inner lives. While now, in the Postmodern World, many people, like Cypher, are egocentric hedonists treating themselves as resources by trying to maximize the quality of their private experiences.

But doesn't this just show, as Sartre famously observed, that there is no human nature? Here Heidegger makes an important meta-move. Perhaps our nature is to be able to open up new worlds and so to transform what is currently taken to be our nature. Perhaps human beings are essentially world disclosers. So, to determine what human beings need beyond just breaking out of the banal, it looks like we have to turn to the Heideggerian point that what is missing in the Matrix is the possibility of going beyond conventional preprogrammed reality and opening up radically new worlds; not just breaking the rules of the current game but inventing new ones. Nietzsche says we should "become those we are _ human beings who are new, unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves." Jesus did it in making possible the Christian World, and Descartes did it for the Modern World. On a less dramatic scale, Martin Luther King Jr. opened a new world for Afro-Americans.25

Heidegger thinks of our freedom to disclose new worlds as our special human freedom, and that this freedom implies that there is no fixed pre-existent set of possible worlds. Each exists only once it is disclosed. So it makes no sense to think that a computer could be programmed with rules for producing the sensory-motor connections that would allow the creation of all possible worlds in advance of their being opened by human beings. Artificial intelligences couldn't make room for such radical creativity. If there is such a human freedom to ground new worlds it must come from the higher mental powers left free by the computer-generated perceptual world.

If being world disclosers is our nature, that would explain why we feel a special joy when we are being creative in this strong sense. Once we experience world disclosing, we understand why it's better to be in the real world than the Matrix world, even if, in the world of the Matrix, one can enjoy steak and become that acme of the banal, a serene actor-president. Real salvation comes from transcending the world forclosing limits of the Matrix program. What's important to us, then, is not whether most of our beliefs are true or false, or whether we are brave enough to face a risky reality, but whether we are locked into a world of routine, standard activities or are free to transform the world and ourselves.

Indeed, Neo says at the end of the film, not that he will show people that a lot of their beliefs are false and that they should face the truth, but that he will show people they can break the rules and do things they never thought possible. If the Matricians were simply the victims of the Matrix computer program in that they had false beliefs about the causal basis of their experiences, Neo could show them that their beliefs about the causal basis of things were false and teach them to agree with Kant that the world is an appearance, but that wouldn't set the free _ not as long as they saw only the possibilities that one normally sees and never experienced anxiety. Neo has to do more. He has to do the job that Heidegger thinks anxiety does: he has to show people that the norms they formerly took for granted are ungrounded.

But by the end of the movie, Neo as the One (or the anti-one as Heidegger would see it), has only promised to give people in the Matrix freedom to bend the rules. He has not freed them from the Matrix and showed them how to open new worlds. But, of course, there are two more movies to come. We bet that, before number three is over, Neo gets to Zion and leads people in disclosing a really brave new world.

Endnotes

1. Names in the movie are generally very well chosen. The way the word "matrix" refers both to the womb and to an array of numbers works perfectly. Likewise, Neo is both a neophyte and the one who will renew the world. These names are so fitting one can't help looking for the aptness of the name, Morpheus, but it is hard to find. The Greek Morpheus is the god of dreams but the Morpheus in the movie is trying to wake people up. The only way to make some sense of the name is to think of the god, not as the producer of dreams, but as the one who has power over dreams: both to give them and to take them away.

2. "Imagine how his heart ached _and yet he never blinked; his eyes might have been made of horn or iron... He had this trick--wept, if he willed to, inwardly." Homer, The Odyssey, trans. Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Vintage Classics, 1990), 360.

Of course, the Homeric Greeks must have had some sort of private feelings for Odysseus to perform this trick, but they thought the inner was rare and usually trivial. As far as we know, there is no other reference to private feelings in Homer. Rather, there are many public displays of emotions, and lots of shared visions of gods, monsters, and future events.

3. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin (Penguin, l961), 114.

4. Letter to Gibieuf of 19 January 1642; English in Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford University Press 1970), 123.

5. Ren‚ Descartes, "Meditations on First Philosophy - Meditations VI", in Essential Works of Descartes, trans. Lowell Bair (New York: Bantam Books, 1961), 98.

6. Gottfried Leibniz, The Monadology and Other Philosophical Writings (London: Oxford University Press), 1898. A monad, according to Leibniz, is an immaterial entity lacking spatial parts, whose basic properties are a function of its perceptions and appetites.

7. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: The Humanities Press, 1950).

8. Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960).

9. See, Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson (New York: Harper Collins, 1962).

10. See, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).

11. Charles Taylor, "Overcoming Epistemology," Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995),

12. See also, Samuel Todes, Body and World (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2001).

12. Ren‚ Descartes, "Dioptric," Descartes: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Norman Kemp Smith (Modern Library, l958), 150.

13. The point has been made explicitly by John Searle: "[E]ach of us is precisely a brain in a vat; the vat is a skull and the 'messages' coming in are coming in by way of impacts on the nervous system." In Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 230.

14. There are limits of course. The Matrix programmers can't give a human being a dog's body. It's unlikely they could make a brain in a female body the causal basis of a man's body in the Matrix world. There would be gender problems for sure. The hormones of the body in the vat wouldn't match the physical attributes of the body in the Matrix world.

Nonetheless, it follows that a good way for the AI programmers to prevent bodies being rescued to the hovercraft would be to give each brain the experience of a radically different body (within whatever limits are imposed by biology) in the Matrix world than the body that brain is actually in. If rescued, such people would quite likely go crazy trying to reconcile the body they had experienced all their life with the alien body they found themselves in on the hovercraft.

15. Likewise, their beliefs about entities such as viruses and black holes would be true if, like empiricists, they held that theoretical entities are just convenient ways to refer to the experiences produced by experiments. See Bas van Frassen, The Scientific Image (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

16. Once Neo's body is flushed out of the vat and is on the hovercraft, he has a broader view of reality and sees that his previous understanding was limited. But that doesn't mean he had a lot of false beliefs about his body and the world when he was in the Matrix. He didn't think about these philosophical questions at all. But once he is out, he has a lot of new true beliefs about his former vat-enclosed body -- beliefs he didn't and couldn't have had while in the Matrix.

Of course, things are really not so simple. Most people don't have beliefs about the reality of the world; they just take the world for granted. Neo has, however, been forced to raise the question, and he believes he is now facing reality. But Neo's current beliefs might be false. He could still be a brain in a vat fed the experience of being in the hovercraft. Given the conceivability of the brain in the vat fantasy, the most we can be sure of is that our coping experience reveals that we are directly up against some boundary conditions independent of our coping with which we must get in sync in order to act, and that, therefore, our coping experience is sensitive to the causal powers of these boundary conditions. Whether these independent causal conditions have the structure of an independent physical universe discovered by science, or whether they and even the universe (including the causal structures discovered by science) are the effect of an unknowable thing in itself that is the ground of appearances as postulated by Kant, or even whether the cause of all appearances is a computer, is something we could never know from inside our world.

17. Granted it's hard to resist believing in the Matrix illusion even where causality is concerned, nonetheless, Neo learns he can stop believing in it. This new understanding of reality is described by Morpheus talking to Neo near the beginning of the movie, and by Neo at the end, as like waking from a dream. But the brains in the vats are not literally dreaming. Their world is much too coherent and intersubjective to be made up of dreams. Or, to put it another way, dreams are the result of some quirk in our internal neural wiring and full of inconsistencies, although when dreaming we don't usually notice them. They are not the result of a systematic correlation between input and output to the brain's perceptual system that is meant to reproduce the consistent coordinated experience that we have when awake. When someone from the hovercraft returns to the Matrix world, it looks like their hovercraft body goes to sleep, but they do not enter a private dream world but an alternative intersubjective world where they are normally wide awake, but in which they can also seem to dream and wake from a dream, as Neo does after the Agents take away his mouth.

18. There is one unfortunate exception to this claim. At the end of the movie, Neo catches a glimpse of the computer program behind the perceptual illusion. This is a powerful visual effect, but, if what we've been saying is right, it makes no sense. If the computer is still feeding systematic sensory-motor impulses into Neo's brain when he is plugged into the Matrix world, then he will see the world the program is producing in his visual system. What the sight of the rows of numbers is meant to do is to remind us that Neo no longer believes in the Matrix illusion but understands it is a program, but even so, he should continue to see it.

19. The Agents are not subject to mass opinion, so they can violate causality but they can't violate their programs. Thus they are not as free as Neo. As Morpheus tells Neo: "I've seen an agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be." It might seem that Agent Smith shows his freedom when he removes his ear piece and tells Morpheus how disgusted he is with the Matrix world and that he wants to get out. We think it would be consistent with the limitations of the Agents to understand this as Smith's playing the good cop routine; trying to get Morpheus to believe Smith is on his side, so that Morpheus, in his weakened state, will give Smith the access codes for Zion.

20. Not to be confused with Neo as "the One" who will save us from the Matrix. For Heidegger's account of the power of the one, see his Being and Time, and also H. Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time, Division I (Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T Press, 1991), Chapter 8.

21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage Books, 1966). # 199.

22. Colin McGinn's essay can be found here.

23. Given the kind of bodies we have: that we move forward more easily than backwards, that we can only cope with what is in front of us, that we have to balance in a gravitational field, etc., we can question to what extant such body-relative constraints can be violated in The Matrix if what is going on is still to make sense.

To test these limits, the filmmakers occasionally blow our minds by using a wrap-around point of view from which action looks so far from normal as to be awesomely unintelligible. At the same time, they have successfully met the challenge of discovering which body-relative invariances can be intelligibly violated and which can't. For example, in the movie, gravity can be violated -- Neo can fly -- but the vertical dimension stays constant, unlike in a spaceship. Moreover, Neo can't see equally in all directions, cope equally in all directions, nor can he be in several places at once. What would it look like for a single person to surround somebody?

Time too has a structure that can't be violated with impunity. The way we make sense of time as moving forward from the past into the future depends on the way our forward directed body approaches objects and passes them by. (See Todes, Body and World). Could we make sense of a scene in which someone attacked an enemy not just from behind, but from the past? If, in the movie, the liberated ones were free of all bodily constraints governing their action we couldn't make sense of what they were doing and neither could they. They wouldn't be liberated but would be bewildered, as we often are in our dreams.

24. Although being disruptive is the best one can do in the Matrix world. That's why Neo, a hacker who, as Agent Smith says, has broken every rule in the book, is the natural candidate for savior.

25. F. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, (Vintage Books Edition, March 1974), # 335.