matrix is a movie in which human beings have lost the war against the machines, and machines have confined the vast majority of the human race to remain connected to a gigantic device that extracts electrical energy from each brain so that the machines can live. So that there are no rebellions, each person has been induced a fantasy, which is the life we live. Therefore, according to the argument, we do not live in real life but in a fiction that seems real.
Plato told us a long time ago that we do not capture events as they are, but we only see shadows on the wall of a cave. Reality, supposing that such a thing exists, escapes us like water slips through our hands. Today we know that we do not see things as they are, because, for example, all colors beyond violet or below red are not captured by the human eye, in the same way that the ear does not capture ultrasound. Beyond that, human beings build representations of the world around us and, oddly enough, we do not act directly on reality, but on those symbolic models.
The world, as we perceive it, does not exist.
Plato was right, but what he didn’t tell us is how different these shadows we see are for each person. Lately science has begun to stop being so interested in the study of memory to become interested in the study of memories, and we have realized that episodic memory, the one that records events, is far from keeping them faithfully. The brain compresses and distorts what happens to us, building meaning. And that is why, for example, we all have false memories. Things that didn’t happen exactly as we remember them, but were modified by the mind to fit into a plot. From the plot of our own lives.
The conclusion of all this is that human beings live in a kind of bubble that is the context of their own subjectivity: we live in matrix.
The good news is that we often think that we live in a world of letters and figures where things are exact, measurable and objective, but in reality, fortunately, that is not true. Or at least it is not completely, because everything is interpretable and because it all depends on who is analyzing a certain event or behaviour, and of course the situation in which a team or company finds itself.
Whether things are going very well for us or very badly, it is always good to remember how relative everything is, and it is always good to let yourself be infected by the visions that other people have of the same reality. Understanding these facts and delving into them is one of the keys to communication, the construction of shared knowledge and group cohesion.
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