i wrote this for my girlfriend. Its not very good, but ahh well

Once

Bitter lemon stars from a black void fell

In scorched clouds of fire, a glimpse of hell

And the sinking of the sun, hopes death knell

 

Now

Stars as bright as day, hang in my sky of night

Rifts in heaven, rip my sky in light

And in my sunset, shattered rainbows fight

 

 

 

 

Yay , i thought i'd write in this thing again. I just had the best summer holidays ever. I managed to get the natalie lady to go out with me (it involved several death threats, but ahh well). So i spent most of it with her.
she's so amazing and i love her to bits ( really small bits, we're talking atomic sized pieces here), and i get to sleep next to her tonight, so i guess i can't  complain
Some more things have changed since the last update-
-i'm seventeen
- i had to get a new counter, so its whatevers there + about 2000. i'm not a sad loner (honestly)
-i'm happy

This is the first day back for me at college for the second year of english language and programming courses, not that you ( the reader) care, but anyway. I shall make an effort this year and try to get some kind of qualification. possibly.

Wow, how things have changed. I decided to start posting again, and i looked at my profile, and its completely different now so i decided to change it. This is what it used to be-



I'm not in the band anymore, everbody moved on. ashame i guess, but, ahh well, all good things


the new ones at the side.
"Hello!"


Name: Matthew
Age: 16
Location:Manchester

Just another guy. Almost, well probably, but anyway. Likes playing the guitar for my band My band site
(www.davidwhitney.co.uk/badidea) , and for personal pleasure. Have done for 7 years. I should probably save up and buy one though. Music and stuff, like the prodigy, Rage against... Jimmy eat world and the song operation blade from the film errr. blade. Like the Matrix. LOVE the matrix. Multiple orgasms.(not literally though) nOT many people can bring off an INTELLECTUAL philosophical action film. Live with ermmm. foster parents in Moss-side. It's a Shit hole(for all you non british people). Friends with Jill. who's possibly on this journally thing too. If you want to be all friendly, ye can email me at matthewleegreenhalgh@hotmail.com, cos i'm a lonely soul really.

If you want to laugh at how ignorant and stupid i am, email me at fake_person@domainthatdoesntexist.com.




People
victoria
jen
ally




I'm not wih my girlfriend lee anymore :( but, theres a girl at collge who's got to be the most amazing person in the world. We went on a date to the cinema, but nothing happened. I rang her after and said she could call if she wanted, so it's up to her, i don't want to pressure her. She probably won't ring though. Oh well. I came into college to do some work, but i left my damn assignment at home, so it was a waste of time i guess. Might as well blog while i'm here

Wow this'll be my first entry in ages, i'd completely forgotten about blogdrive, and i would hae thought that my blog wouldbe history by now, but i guess not.

Let me see , whats happended since october, hmmmmm

well i went to my families for christmas, and that was awful, everybody completely ignored me and i don't think i'll go again

I like idlewild, the lostprophets and the deftones. VEEEERRY MUCHH.

woooooww theyre very cool.
I've seen just about every film under the sun, because life is very boring and sucks big time.

Has anyone seen the news lately ? If the government stopped creating scandals ,enquies and all that bullshit and actually did some governing then the world would be a better place.Also Tony Blair and Geoge bush are idiots. keeping suspected Terrorists at Guantanamo wih the barest of rights under god knows what kind of interrogation and no rights to a fair trial is blatant hipocrasy and undermines the fundamental ideals of any democratic country. Especially America, land of the free, home of the brave and all that.I read lord of the rings again the last 2 days, Its a great book.

hmm. I'll keep updating and try to gather some interesting things to write. ahh well .

off home now (from college)
 

Many, many months and about half an hour of actual work on it later, the first website layout design complete. nothings actually on it, but the design is......... well, bad , but it's what i came up with.

This is a sight for the people(you) by the people(me). So give nme critisism. CRITISIZM DAMMIT

Page

“Philosophy involves seeing the absolute oddity of what is familiar and trying to formulate really probing questions about it.” –Iris Murdoch1

“They say about me that I am the strangest person, always making people confused.” –Socrates

Imagine a dark, subterranean prison in which humans are bound by their necks to a single place from infancy. Elaborate steps are taken by unseen forces to supply and manipulate the content of the prisoner’s visual experience. This is so effective that the prisoners do not recognize their imprisonment and are satisfied to live their lives in this way. Moreover, the cumulative effects of this imprisonment are so thorough that if freed, the prisoners would be virtually helpless. They could not stand up on their own, their eyes would be overloaded initially with sensory information, and even their minds would refuse to accept what the senses eventually presented them. It is not unreasonable to expect that some prisoners would wish to remain imprisoned even after their minds grasped the horror of their condition. But if a prisoner was dragged out and compelled to understand the relationship between the prison and outside, matters would be different. In time the prisoner would come to have genuine knowledge superior to the succession of representations that made up the whole of experience before. This freed prisoner would understand those representations as imperfect—like pale copies of the full reality now grasped in the mind. Yet if returned to the prison, the freed prisoner would be the object of ridicule, disbelief, and hostility.

I. Introduction

Viewers of The Matrix remember the moment in the film when Neo is released from his prison and made to grasp the truth of his life and the world. The account above roughly captures that turning point in the 1999 film, and yet it is drawn from an image crafted almost twenty-four hundred years ago by the Greek philosopher, Plato (427-347 B.C.E.). Today the Republic is the most influential work by Plato, and the allegory of the Cave the most famous part of the Republic. If you know that Socrates was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death by drinking hemlock, or that Socrates thought that the unexamined life is not worth living, you may also know that Socrates in the Republic likened the human condition to the state of prisoners bound in a cave seeing only shadows projected on the wall in front of them. Transcending this state is the aim of genuine education, conceived as a release from imprisonment, a turning or reorientation of one’s whole life, an upward journey from darkness into light:

The release from the bonds, the turning around from shadows to statues and the light of the fire and, then, the way up out of the cave to the sunlight…: [education] has the power to awaken the best part of the soul and lead it upward to the study of the best among the things that are.3

The allegory of the Cave gives literary shape to Socrates’ most fundamental concern, namely that our souls be in the best condition possible (Plato, Apology 30a7-b4). Socrates also believed he was commanded by the god Apollo to practice philosophy; it both animated and cost him his life. Yet it is not obvious how philosophical investigation improves the condition of the soul—still less how the Socratic method in particular does so, consisting as it does in testing the consistency of a person’s beliefs through a series of questions Socrates asks.

I believe, and will show here, that the allegory of the Cave is part of Plato’s effort to make philosophical sense of Socrates’ philosophical life, to link Socrates’ persistent questioning to his unwavering aim at what he called the “care of the soul.” On this theme of care of the soul, there is a deep resonance between The Matrix and Plato’s thought in the Republic. Like the allegory of the Cave, The Matrix dramatically conveys the view that ordinary appearances do not depict true reality and that gaining the truth changes one’s life. Neo’s movements toward greater understanding nicely parallel the movements of the prisoner in the cave whose bonds are loosened. The surface similarities between the film and the allegory can run to a long catalog. The first paragraph of this essay reveals some of these connections. But there remains a deeper affinity between the two that I shall draw out here, especially in Part IV, having to do with Socrates’ notion of the care of the soul.

To see what I am calling a deeper connection between the film and the allegory of the Cave, I begin in Part II by recounting the context in which the Cave appears and the philosophical positions it figuratively depicts.4 In Part III I compare and contrast the film and the allegory, focusing attention on the difficulty in sorting out deceptive sensory information. Finally, in Part IV I examine the warnings and concessions Plato places in the dramatic spaces of Republic. The allegory of the Cave is a strange image, as one of Socrates’ friends says (515a4), while Socrates himself confesses that the Cave is not exact (504b5; cf. 435c9-d2).5 Rereading the Cave after a recent viewing of the film shows that these are not throwaway remarks. The Matrix likewise privileges the work that strangeness and calculated vagueness do; Morpheus, after all, cannot show Neo what he most needs to see, but must get him to see for himself something that is difficult to recognize. In this way, The Matrix and Plato’s Cave are faithful to a central tenet in Socrates’ philosophical examinations: that proper teaching only occurs when students are prepared to make discoveries for themselves. Furthermore, the discovery that is most crucial is the discovery of oneself. Readiness for self-examination is, after all, what makes “care of the soul” possible.


II. Plato’s Cave and The Matrix

There are no forms in The Matrix, and thus our epistemic and metaphysical circumstances in Plato’s Republic look very different from those in the film. The world inside the cave is a diminished one, a shadow or reflection of the real, but broadly continuous with the true world. Even though there is a marked difference between the sensible and intelligible realms viz. method, epistemic certainty, and metaphysical reality, on Plato’s view the sensible is somehow derived from the intelligible. Thus, for Plato, our speaking and thinking in the cave is not meaningless, and some of our opinions are true, in spite of our ignorance of the deeper causes of things.

In The Matrix, by contrast, the two worlds are far less continuous with one another. The real world is profoundly dystopian, and the substance of lives inside the Matrix is supplied in mental states almost entirely cut off from this reality. (Ironically, the real world in The Matrix is very like the world inside the cave.) In spite of its realism, the world inside the Matrix is not a copy of the real world but is a simulation. Nevertheless, there is at least one continuity between the real world and the computer-simulated world: your body. Owing to an unexplained principle, called “residual body memory,” your body looks the same to you and to others in both worlds. And you are able to retain your memories of one world when you are in the other and when you return back to the first. (This means that Cypher will have to have his memories of the time spent outside the Matrix removed if he is to return to the illusion of reality inside the Matrix.)

Since the real world and the simulated world are worlds in which the senses receive information, the practical problem is not that they are discontinuous, but that they are indiscernible. This is part of the initial difficulty for Neo since he cannot determine which sensory information is genuine and which false. Although he (and the viewer) settles this question soon enough, a skeptical worry remains in the wake: how can he ever be sure his sensory information is truthful if there is no certificate of authenticity on his experiences?

Suppose Agent Smith creates a program that launches right when Neo picks up a phone within the Matrix. Instead of being whisked back aboard the ship, Neo’s consciousness is supplied with a computer-generated experience of the interior of the Nebuchadnezzar, and of course he believes he has successfully exited the Matrix. Such a trick might enable Agent Smith to obtain compromising information about the Nebuchadnezzar and its crew or, worse, the passwords for Zion.

It is hard to imagine how Neo might see past Agent Smith’s ruse, especially if he only had a few moments to figure things out. Would Plato’s freed prisoner fair better? Recall, Plato urges us to regard the sensible world as unreliable, no matter the source of our information about it.12 We must adopt a different method for apprehending the truth of things. This is, of course, not nearly as simple as it sounds, nor is it obviously helpful; after all, what we are to grasp is the intelligible world from which our ordinary, sensible world is copied, not the sensible world itself. The reward is that once you grasp the forms in the intelligible world, you would be an expert in discriminating items in the sensible world (cf. 520c1-6). This doesn’t mean you’d never be mistaken, however; rather, you would simply be the best sensible world discriminator there could be. Therefore, in the case where Agent Smith launches his deceptive program, the only advantage the freed prisoner might have is slight: a general unease about all sensory information. Since the ordinary world is too murky and ever-changing to permit genuine knowledge of it, our awareness of this mutability should assist us in determining which of our beliefs were relatively more reliable.

It seems that the metaphysical differences between Plato and The Matrix do not prevent them from telling a roughly similar story about the epistemological unreliability of the senses and the need to abstract from the senses in order to gain genuine knowledge. In fact, we find Neo at the end of the film doing more than simply bending the laws of physics with the Matrix. He has, it seems, stepped almost entirely out of that very world itself. He does not, however, appear in two places at once, but his destruction of one of the Agents, and his ability to fly, suggest that the laws of physics are more than merely bent.


Where Plato’s dialogue and The Matrix agree most is in drawing out the enormous psychological difficulty in calling the world into question and the ethical dimensions of failing to do so. Neo and Plato’s freed prisoner must accept truths about themselves (namely, that their lives have been unreal) before they can acquire deeper knowledge about fundamental truths. To achieve this, both Neo and the freed prisoner need the shocking demonstration that the senses are inadequate and that they can be systematically deceived. Both then undertake an introspective turn to discover the truth, and must take steps to disregard knowledge derived from the senses.

This is the point to ask, finally, what knowledge Neo attains that operates in him like the knowledge of the Platonic form of the good. What does Neo know only after great difficulty but whose truth is fundamental? What object is grasped by Neo’s intellect that he understands to be the condition of his knowing anything else? What knowledge enables him to be productive, to be a savior of himself and others? It is nothing more than proper self-understanding. In both The Matrix and in the Cave, there is a single item the knowledge of which makes the knower more integrated and more powerful, and for Neo it is self-knowledge.

Ought we to see Neo as adhering to the letter of Socratic self-examination and care of the soul? Only at high-altitude will a perfect connection be visible. For Neo’s enlightenment is ultimately about his own specific path and role. Socratic care of the soul involves self-knowledge, but the parts of yourself that are peculiar to you, that make up your individuality, are not relevant.13 Since the prisoners in the cave have only dim self-awareness (they see only the shadows of themselves [515a5-8]), it might seem that release involves getting the right beliefs about oneself. But the very abstractness of the knowledge that Plato prizes, which is very unlike the specificity of the knowledge that Neo eventually gets (namely, that he is the One), suggests that the self-knowledge the prisoners need is neither the end of their search nor even the proper beginning.

In other dialogues Socrates was made to endorse the idea that knowledge was in you, that a kind of introspection aided by proper questioning could elicit true beliefs. But these are not truths that are about you, rather they are truths that are in you. Neo’s case is different. The truths he must grasp are both in him and about him. The film reveals furthermore how he must demonstrate and experience his capabilities before he is able to believe entirely that he possesses them. And when he believes in himself at last, his capabilities are further enhanced. This result is produced neither by the method nor the aim of Socratic care of the soul.

Most fundamentally, the film and the allegory share a pedagogical conceit. Both hold that in teaching the most basic truths, there is an important role for a strategic strangeness and the confusion it produces. The allegory of the Cave puzzles Socrates’ audience, yet as it hooks them, the Cave provides only the outline for solving the puzzle. Might Morpheus be doing the same? Might Morpheus, like the allegory, act as a kind of Socratic teacher, urging Neo toward self-understanding and care for his soul?



Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes . . . Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it isn’t turned the right way or where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately. (518b7-c2, d5-7)

John Partridge


Endnotes


506e1-3).

7. See 507b5-7. The essence of good things is called, variously, the good-itself (506d8-e1, 507b5) or form of the good (505a2, 508e2-3). This item is really what reason is attempting to grasp; not what is good for me, nor what is ‘a good x’, but something that is good in and of itself.


16. The film surely intends us to read the figurative sense of this expression alongside the literal one, and it may be Morpheus’ hope that Neo reflects on the figurative meaning as well. After all, one of the other messages that appears on his screen—“knock, knock, Neo”—is consciously riddling. It invites the question, “who’s there?”

17. Although the aim of the pill is to assist in locating Neo’s body, the suggestion of a psychoactive effect on him is unmistakable.

18. The Oracle eventually tells Neo “what he needed to hear,” namely that he is not the One. This inverts the account of Socrates’ oracle as Plato portrays it in the Apology. First, Socrates does not hear the oracle directly but relies on Chaerephon’s report that “no one is wiser than Socrates.” Second, Neo’s reluctance to believe that he is not in control of his actions requires that the Oracle tell him something false. This Neo is happy to hear, and thus he has no motive for questioning it; it is eminently believable that he is not their long-awaited savior. By contrast, Socrates’ oracle tells him something true but whose unlikely implications must be carefully interpreted through testing and questioning.


robbed from john partridge!!

For your consideration----


Why would anyone want to experience the relatively tough and dangerous life of being an individual human when he or she could be part of the Matrix?

So here we come on to the case of Cypher. As he eats his steak he says, "I know that this steak doesn’t exist. I know when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious" He goes on to conclude that "Ignorance is bliss." But is it ignorance? His brain is telling him, by whatever means, that he is eating a nice juicy steak. How many times do we nowadays enter a fast-food burger bar in order to partake of a burger that, through advertising, our brains have been conditioned into believing is the tastiest burger imaginable. When we enter we know, because we’ve seen the scientific papers, that the burger contains a high percentage of water, is mainly fat, and is devoid of vitamins. Yet we still buy such burgers by the billion. When we eat one, our conditioned brain is somehow telling us that it is juicy and delicious, yet we know it doesn’t quite exist in the form our brain is imagining.

We can thus understand Cypher’s choice. Why be out of the Matrix, living the dangerous, poor, tired, starving life of a disenfranchised human, when you can exist in a blissfully happy life, with all the nourishment you need? Due to the deal he made with Agent Smith, once Cypher is back inside he will have no knowledge of having made any deal in the first place. He appears to have nothing at all to lose. The only negative aspect is that before he is reinserted he may experience some inner moral human pangs of good or bad. Remember that being reinserted is actually good for the Matrix, although it is not so good for the renegade humans who are fighting the system.





so i ask this. What choice would you take?
Ignorance or truth?
Bliss or hardship?

Heya everyone how are you all. If you do this questionnare for me and then post me the results at matthewleegreenhalgh@hotmail.com I'll love you all for ever. and i'll post them up here for all to see!



1. How old were you when you lost your virginity? What did you think?
2. When was the last time you were ecstatically happy? Describe it.
3. How do you feel about gun control? (Yeah, I'm repeating myself amongst blogs here.)
4. What was the last really cool thing you bought for yourself
5. If you could do anything at all and money wasn't an option what would you be doing for a living?


Here's Jens answers. sorry Jen , don't kill me.

1. How old were you when you lost your virginity? What did you think?



Oh, funny story…really. First of all, I was 18 and it was prom night in my parents’ living room. We had been together for over a year and were both virgins. It was tremendously awkward and painful and I couldn’t figure out what all the fuss was about. I have never regretted it.



What I did regret was telling my best friend and telling her to keep it a secret. I didn’t want to be known as skanky or whatever. Well, on Monday morning when I walked into study hall all of my girlfriends stood up and applauded. I seriously wanted to die.



About a month later, when I realized all the fuss was good stuff, I went to my mother to go on the pill. Her first reaction was, “Thank God! I was starting to think something was wrong with you!” Gad, more embarrassment.


2. When was the last time you were ecstatically happy? Describe it.



Hrm. Well, personally, I think I should feel that way every damn day, but I don’t. If I had to pick a particular moment, I would say going back to my parents’ home in June and getting to be with them for a whole week. True happiness. I miss my family horribly, even as fucked up as they can tend to be.


3. How do you feel about gun control? (Yeah, I'm repeating myself amongst blogs here.)



Argh! Mixed feelings, really. Jay and I go round and round and round about this all the time.

On one hand, criminals will always be able to acquire guns, no matter how illegal you make them. That’s obvious. Furthermore, if I want a gun, I should be able to own it, right?



On the flipside, if I was hell bent on getting again, I’d wait the period, fill out the forms, go about it legally. If you need a gun right this very second and no man on earth is going to stop you, then I’d be very afraid of you.



Jay and I have talked about the guns he wants to get and my only stipulation is that he either keep them totally locked up or have gun locks on them. He scoffs at me, saying he knows what he’s doing and I’m sure he does, but accidents happen. One of my friends almost shot his buddy. He always slept with a gun under his pillow and got drunk one night…went to bed. Buddy walks in the bedroom just to scare him jokingly and my friend almost pulled the trigger. That gave him a real wake up call.



I used to sell shotguns and rifles when I worked retail and the federal form is a freakin joke. “Have you ever been in a mental institution?” “Do you currently use illegal drugs?” All you have to do is check yes or no. If you say yes to anything, you can’t have the gun and it says it right on the form. Good lord, do the feds think people are really that stupid?



So in the end, I don’t know where the hell I stand. You want a gun? Fine by me, use it responsibly.



Jay thinks I’ll change my tune when he starts taking me to the firing range.


4. What was the last really cool thing you bought for yourself?



Ooooooh! Les Miserables, The Tenth Anniversary Concert on DVD, starring the dream cast. I’ve had it for a couple of weeks and have watched it about four times. This what a true nerd I am: In high school, I used to sit in front of my boom box and play the Les Miz tape over and over again…I knew it all by heart. Could I sing? Nope, but I didn’t care. Now, I drive jay crazy with it…but he’s a good sport.

5. If you could do anything at all and money wasn't an option what would you be doing for a living?


Absolutely fucking nothing. There, I said it. I’d sit on my ass, take trips, work on my crafts, etc.



Now, if I was forced to get a job, I’d be a chef. Hands down, no question about it. I love cooking, I will always love cooking. My ex-husband used to complain, not about my food, but the fact that we never ate the same thing twice. I was always watching Emeril and then making the recipes he made; or I’d buy cookbooks all the time, constantly looking for new things to challenge myself with. I haven’t heard Jay complain one iota. J

I must agree with Matthew on that one. Why can't people just separate themselves from all the temporary physical pleasures in life? Golly by gosh wittakers. Who needs sex, drugs, and alcohol? I know I sure don't. There are many other things in this world worth living for. The ultimate pleasure in this world is still love. The feeling of knowing that someone loves you enough that they would give their own life for your happiness. The feeling of knowing that someone is sitting at home waiting for you to call them to hear you say "goodnight". There are many things that can bring happiness that aren't physical. But still, I say THE most wonderful thing of all is the butterfly in your stomach feeling you get when you're around that one true love of your life. Who knows...maybe one day I will be able to find that feeling again.