[joquarky]

I agree with your perspective on our social/cultural "matrix". It's amazing how much we take for granted and how deeply ingrained these constructs are in our everyday lives.

I used to gloss over the words representing "constructs" as I had used in my last sentence. I finally groked what was being referred to while listening to some lectures by Alan Watts during my recent sabbatical from burnout.

He was able to explain the differences between eastern and western philosophy in a way that made me see things in a completely different light. It was like waking up from the matrix.

Since then, I've been constantly aware of the constructed nature of reality and have had to re-evaluate many of my assumptions. For example, just learning that words are just abstractions and don't always accurately reflect reality was something I had never considered before. Now I try to be more careful with my word selection, but nobody's prefect :)

[crabkin]

Not sure if you're subtly being critical of my use of the word. However I do have something to add to your thought. Richard Feynman has a really interesting quote, I'm paraphrasing, but he says it's hard to learn some things initially because everything is named slightly wrong. At the time I was also reading some Wittgenstein and that got me thinking about words and what they correspond to. I really do think they simply just correspond to the multitude of contexts they exist in now. For instance, if you look up the definition of words, you get more words, and then for those words, other words. It's turtles all the way down, it's all circular. The only grounding is the situation where the noises are made and then consequences follow, that's what I think characterizes them, and so atomic words are meaningless, they only have any discernible meaning in time and place in configuration with certain other words and with certain people.

I think using a word like the matrix in a strict sense when it comes from a movie about just about all the evocative ideas in Western thought is ludicrous. It's pedanticism on steroids.