| Sumario: | When the first film in the Wachowski brothers "Matrix" trilogy came out in 1999, academic philosophers everywhere were excited. For over a quarter of a century, philosophers had been talking about" brains in vats"--the idea that all our experiences might be delusions produced by electronic stimulations of the brain. "The Matrix" brilliantly dramatized this thought-experiment with its premise that most people spend their lives in oversized test-tubes, their "reality" a collective hallucination created by computer programs. The final film of the trilogy, "The Matrix Revolutions", which opened around the world last week, was greeted with universal disdain by the critics. Box-office takings in America for its opening weekend were 45% down compared with the opening weekend of the second installment, "The Matrix Reloaded." Philosopher Donald Davidson argued that our basic beliefs about the world cannot be wrong through and through because otherwise we would have no reason to regard them as genuine beliefs. With regard to the Matrix, Davidson maintained that it is literally impossible to fool all of the people all of the time.
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