:ufo is the matrix real? depends on your definition of "real."
if real is what you can see, touch taste and smell, then real is nothing more than electrical impulses in the brain.
i posit that real is more than this, that real extends into other non-material realms. sounds crazy, but stay with me.
is love real? how about family? or state? even friends? if i say, show me a friend, you can pull out pictures of wallets and say "there's my friend." all i see is a picture. you take me to his house, pull him out of bed and say there, there is my friend. i only see a homo sapien who just got pulled out of bed. "friend" doesn't exist in the material sight/smell/touch/taste/hear realm, but yet friend is real! so is love. so is state.
do you see the prison you're in? the prison for you mind?
i'm going to paint for you a picture of a geek. someone who is into video games / anime, plays chess, drinks too much coffee, knows lots about lots of stuff, probably computer literate to the extent that the rest of the population is in awe, though knowing full well that what he knows is nothing compared to the "true" experts, soemone who may or may not have great ties to mainstream society, has a hard time with girls. now what you see is the matrix representation. the image. the woman in the red dress. but we can be like neo, we can see the code. ultimately it's a real person, but with layers upon layers of code overlayed. for example, the code for geek is: computer, chess, video games, anime, relation to mainstream, relation to opposite sex. each of these things by themselves is just a glowing green character, but lump them together, along iwth countless other codes i didn't put in, and suddenly the image of geek appears. how many people are stuck on the image without looking at the code? how many people can SEE the code and manipulate others with it? hmmm...a difficult place to live, no? why would it be like this?
the machine. back in the day, man had no rational thought. everything came from the gods, from mystical inspriation, from tradition. then, man created reason. reason is a real thing, though it has no material basis. with reason, man recreated his world. the ancient greeks were aware of this. the machine of reason created a system that legitimated the owning of one human by another. how many incarnations of the matrix have we had? monarchy, democracy, despotism, feudalism. these system cannot survive on their own...they need to feed off of human energy...human activity to live. without people doing certain actions every day....DOING them, MAKING THEM REAL....these do not exist. the machine of capitalism is eating people. look at what happened in iraq, all of africa, in south america, in southeast asia. look at our environment...the machine EATS life.
this is the system we are trapped in. this is the matrix that makes millions of americans work shitty jobs "doing" nothing of importance (making ads, telemarketing, "insurance," etc.) spending their entire lives in the illusion that this is life...to work until you're old and worthless, to spend the last of your days in the freedom of retirement, but the prison of your used-up body. don't think of the machine as a LITERAL machine plugged literally in to the back of your head...think of it more metaphorically. i implore you to read plato's allegory of the cave (
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~wldciv/world_civ_reader/world_civ_reader_1/plato.html i don't know how to make links) for the greek version of the matrix.
free your mind, but you'll become an exhile like me. there's many of us out here.