QUESTION:

Dear Mr. Glasersfeld,

 

I started studying at the University of Zurich in Summer 2005.

In Dezember 2005 I now picked up the Task to prepare a presentation about

your text "Einführung in den radikalen Konstruktivismus".

To make the text simpler to understand for my audience I came up with the

idea to compare this text with the movie "The Matrix".

In one certain scene near the end of the movie the viewer can see how Neo

(main character of the movie) finally sees the world around him as a

combination of numbers and letters scrolling down his view, a

computer-language-like code, which (and this is the main idea of the whole

movie) machines created for human beings as a "virtual reality", so nobody

ever finds out about the truth; which is that the machines have taken the

control over the planet earth and use human beings as "batteries" to live

on their selves.

 

I now wanted to know if this comparison, in which I take this scene from

the "Matrix" to explain the main idea of the radical constructivism

(namely that we don’t know if what we see with our eyes and construct with

our knowledge really is the truth), is correct?

I’m really looking forward to hearing from you soon!

 

Yours sincerely

Andreas Schwarzinger

 

 

ANSWER:

 

Dear Mr. Schwarzinger,

 

Thank you for your summary of "The Matrix". I haven't seen the movie

because my hearing is now so bad that I don't often go to the cinema.

 

When Neo sees the numbers and letters scrolling down, it would be

necessary to mention that this, too, is his way of seeing and that

neither these symbols nor the machines he believes responsible for them

are any less "virtual" than anything else he perceives or conceives. A

point of radical constructivism, that many interpreters have shied away

from, is that the inaccessibility of an objective reality is total. The

way we live, think, and operate arises within the world of our

exrperience and cannot not represent anything beyond it.

 

Best wishes and a happy New Year!

 

Ernst von Glasersfeld

 

PS: The chapter in Watzlawick's book was written 25 years ago. My views

have not changed, but i may have learned to express them more clearly.

There are some more recent papers that can be downloaded from

http://www.univie.ac.at/constructivism/EvG/

 

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