Walking around with my pile of soon-to-be-purchased books, I noticed a font, the font from The Matrix. Then the word comes in to focus, the word REALITY, and my mind, if there is such a thing, starts to ramble. I then spot a cute bunny rabbit on top in lieu of Neo with green lines faded in the background mocking The Matrix code. I had to buy it, there was no denying it, and this book was going to be good no matter what. And it was… it is.
Jim Baggott unapologetically admits that The Matrix influenced his inspiration for writing A Beginner's Guide to Reality, but iterates that the book is not about The Matrix and it isn’t. The Matrix served only as a jump point to get into the matter of reality. Because where Jimmy goes is much deeper than Alice ever went chasing that rabbit, deeper than the Wachowski brothers could have been permitted to go and keep their budget.
We start off with the original sin of philosophical discourse on reality, Plato’s cave allegory, travel down the timeline, stopping by for croissants in vats with Descartes and eventually trying to grip Beaudrillard’s quirky logic about hyperrealism—which was the starting point for the Wachowski’s philosophical aspect of The Matrix. Beaudrillard believes that we are already living in a hyperrealist world. As an example, from earlier readings, he suggests that most people know what a polar bear looks like from images, but that the vast majority of people will never set their eyes on a real polar bear in its environment. The polar bear in the image is the reality, the real bear.
But it only gets heavier from there. We got through so many views on consciousness and reality from all the great philosophers. Plato, Kant, Descartes and much more, all to, in the end, have a Socratic epiphany. All we know is that we know nothing.
So since philosophy doesn't have the answers he jumps into Quantum theory. We meet with Newton, Quantum's original bad boy, Einstein, and of course, trekky favorites such as Heisenberg and Hawking. And we meet the Banes to their Neos and learn about the Copenhagen interpretation—which I won’t explain here because I'm just a rank amateur when it comes to such science. By the end we learn that science has little more to offer for answers than do the philosophers.
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