This week I watched The Matrix for the first time, and I am so glad that I was finally able to see this classic movie. Not only were some of the visuals incredible, especially considering the movie is 20 years old, but the plot was very complex and well thought through. What stood out to me the most was one particular scene where Morpheus said that reality is whatever your senses perceive it to be. In a literal sense, he is right. Everything that we know of the world, and of reality, is based off of what we have sensed through our senses, and there is no way to confirm that the reality that we are sensing is the same as someone else’s. For instance, although everyone may be able to see an object, feel it, maybe even taste it, and we can come to a consensus of what that object may look, feel or taste like, how do we know that the image that each of us have in our mind of that object is the same? Take a coloured object for example. Physically that object absorbs and reflects certain wavelengths of light that fall in the visible spectrum, and we are able to perceive those wavelengths with our eyes, but what is to say that two different people do not perceive the same wavelength of light as two different colours, but nonetheless each call the colour they are “seeing” red? This idea of reality also reminded me of the saying, “if a tree falls down in the woods and no one is there to hear it, does it still make a sound?” As a teacher once highlighted to me, the tree may make sound waves as it crashes to the forest floor, but they said that sound is dependent on someone hearing those waves, and thus if there is no one around the tree does not actually make a sound. Overall, I found this movie’s concept of reality to be very thought provoking, and I enjoyed talking about many of the implications of reality with my friends afterwards.