Rene Descartes, for one, would have taken issue with Morpheus" claim. Descartes believed that the mind and body were necessarily separated; the mind consisted of an immaterial substance, and communicated its wants and needs to the body through a number of processes (Cahn, 352). The electrical signals in the brain, therefore, could only confuse this communication process and would not "be" reality as Morpheus said. .

             Nevertheless, Morpheus" statement does not go unchallenged by the subsequent events of the film. The fact that The Matrix is not based upon strictly materialist philosophies is first evidenced by the fact that Neo feels compelled to search for some unknown truth. Doubtlessly, materialists are often driven to uncover the truths of the universe, but Neo"s impetus is not exactly the same as theirs. Materialists believe that the world we experience is the real world, so any truths that we discover about it are universal truths of reality (Feinberg, 514). Neo, however, is driven by the notion that what he experiences every day is not real. Specifically, he feels that there is dissimilarity between the world his mind is interpreting and the world his body experiences. Obviously, he is almost completely unaware of how drastic this dissimilarity is. Still, the fact that he is aware of this difference on some innate level reveals that the perfectly tuned electrical impulses in his brain have been, on some level, rejected by his mind during the process of interpretation. If the electrical impulses were actually the same as his thoughts, it would be impossible for him to perceive that those impulses were artificially contrived by the matrix. So, early on we become aware that the materialist universe generated by the matrix is subject to individual interpretations that may either recognize the fallacy or not.

             Now, the properties of the matrix itself are primarily materialist.