And I wouldn't either. In fact, I won't even try to argue for that because I honestly worry "that guy" from my freshman Phil class in undergrad will show up—still dressed in his trench coat! But here's the thing: In reality, life is not as simple as "knowledge means power" and "ignorance means slavery.
But IRL, you just don't know everything or nothing. Everyone lives somewhere in the middle. You know some stuff, not all of it. And moreover, just because you are awake to one problem doesn't mean you aren't causing the others. And even people who verge on complete ignorance can still have power, and vice versa. Consider the dumb, rich child kings of history, born into a position of absolute power and lacking knowledge of, really, most things!
Or the deeply knowledgeable social reformers who are out there working day in and day out to right the wrongs of society. They know a lot! They'll tell you they are seeing behind the screen and they are still in the cave, shackled to a system. A system that can't be undone just by suddenly seeing it exists. In the movie, as soon as you take the red pill you're supposedly partially freed up from the systems that enable those lies.
The red pill lets you literally fly and hack the code that powers the world. Should a red pill exist IRL, that wouldn't be the case. There's no code to hack. To me that's the biggest argument against the red pill, which makes it seem like if you just could—zap! It's not an argument in favor of the blue pill as the movie defines it, but it's a reason to think red pilling is, well, impossible.
Emma Grey Ellis: Hang on, Emily, are you saying that knowledge and truth actually aren't power? I hear you on the oversimplification—anybody who's ever been milkshake ducked knows the pain of rooting for something or someone who seems good and righteous, but winds up being deeply flawed.
Those betrayals might shake your faith in activism or institutions, but I don't think individual failings mean that the pursuit of knowledge is a doomed exercise. To me, problems like brilliant Nobel Prize winners somehow missing that they, and the institution that honored them , are wildly sexist are issues of people feeling that their education is somehow complete as-is.
If we take Morpheus at his word, the red pill, in all its science fiction glory, is a sweeping dose of unalloyed truth—something akin to a complete education. That doesn't exist in the real world, but empathetic, lifelong learners, people who acknowledge their own inevitable ignorance and strive to reduce it, do. Imagining a world without them, or considering their efforts useless, is bleak enough to make me want to reach for that blue pill.
I think you're onto something with uncoupling knowledge from freedom, though. In a way, I think Neo and company model the way good, thoughtful people are forced to operate within a bad system even after they're awake to its faults. Their knowledge gives them the power to navigate the Matrix, and, at times, bend it to their will, but while they're inside, they're still shackled to a chair by their headjacks, the same technology that used to be the primary tool of their enslavement.
That continued dependency is deeply unpleasant, way less glamorous than dodging bullets or suddenly knowing kung fu, and somebody under the influence of the system might come along and rip out your brainstem. But recognizing that you still have to work within the system in order to create systemic change is part of being someone who favors the red pill.
And I don't disagree. Of course there are systems that we can't escape from and that we have to fight against from the inside. I guess my problem with just saying, "yep, the red pill is better" is that the red pill is now something that exists in the real world. Its meaning has been totally corrupted and co-opted by message boards and people who define "truth" as something terrifying according to their own ideologies. With that in mind, it's hard to talk about the Aristotelian ideal of the blue or red pill as it was meant to be.
Now it's something else. The red pill is now conspiracy theories and hatred, and oftentimes muting them sounds like a good idea. What does that make the blue pill?
It's too far from the original meaning to suddenly define the blue pill as truth, as opposed to the red pills conspiratorial agenda, but I think there's something to the idea that the blue pill could be something like the state of ignorance—or safetly, bliss, etc. Sign me up. Ellis: OK, that made me laugh. And If I could blue pill away all my lurking in the internet's worst corners, I'd seriously consider it.
Without question, being constantly buffeted by online toxicity has made me a more cynical, more anxious person. But also, I learned valuable stuff—terrible glimpses into the United States' fractured soul, misinformation and propaganda networks—in my time there.
I know probably better than most that picking the red pill puts me in bad company. Online, the red pill has become an emblem of misogyny and white supremacy because bigots mistake their own prejudices for inconvenient truths. Sounds ridiculous and it is , but this reading of Neo's choice is so widespread that it's made its way to some very unlikely places—like Kanye West 's Twitter account.
The Matrix is a computer simulation, not physical reality. This is actually a very common point of confusion in real-world software as well: an object representing a square is not actually a square but a logical model of a square no matter how square-like it looks or behaves.
If you say "But I see a square drawn on my screen", then I can modify that object so that it no longer draws a square. The logical object itself is not a square. This non-thingness of everything in the Matrix was Neo's breakthrough when he realized there was no spoon. The spoon wasn't a spoon, but simply code that at that moment was rendering a spoon in the Matrix, but which he could modify for his own purpose.
I think the woman in the red dress was another explicit example of this, but it's been a long time since I last watched it so I don't remember exactly.
Morpheus wasn't physically offering Neo two colored pills, but providing him with two mutually exclusive options in a purely logical sense. It was effectively a confirmation window with "OK" and "Cancel" buttons. And the operation would be "destructive" in that whichever option was selected would close off the other option.
Or at least that was the premise he presented, and there's no reason to doubt him considering he was the one presenting the option. From my programming perspective, it depends on the order he takes them in, and no, I will not be examining "He takes them both at the exact same moment" as an argument, because it's almost certain that one pill will hit his "stomach" and run its code at least a couple of milliseconds before the other even if he swallowed both at the exact same moment, and the topic of what happens if both run concurrently as coroutines is virtually impossible to answer without being able to analyse the exact code used in the pills, which we can't.
He would then most likely wake up on the Nebuchadnezzar with no memory of the past day's events. He would know about Morpheus and Trinity, as he knew them before anyway, but he would not remember having met them or being interrogated by Agents.
The whole experience probably would have been a lot more jarring. After this code has executed, the blue pill's code then attempts to send him to sleep and wipe his memory, except Neo is no longer connected to The Matrix thanks to the red pill, so the blue pill gets what is called a NullReferenceException.
This means that whatever reference it needed to run, in this case, a reference to Neo's brain, no longer existed and one of two things will happen, depending on just how well the machines programmed this version of The Matrix. So, basically, the most likely scenario is that nothing really changes.
He wakes up on the Nebuchadnezzar whatever happens. The only difference is whether or not he keeps his memory of meeting Morpheus and Trinity. The main thing to understand is that there is no physical pill. Neo is in the Matrix.
Morpheus can't get a physical pill to him. It's all just software. Neo has to make an irrevocable choice. As Morpheus says in the film, and as the Wachowskis have said, once that choice is made then there's no going back.
The software represented by the red pill disrupts the Matrix's hold on the person and allows them to be traced by Morpheus so that the Matrix dumps them out. So once the red pill has been taken, there is no blue pill. The Matrix stops running your consciousness and you stop being able to interact with it. Imagine erasing your hard disk; would you then ask "what happens if I try running Minesweeper now?
What the Wachowskis weren't really clear on is why Neo can't say "let me think about it" and come back another day - in other words, why there needs to be a blue pill at all. Of course Neo might not survive his next encounter with Agent Smith, but Morpheus doesn't give that as a justification, and the supplementary Matrix literature doesn't make it clear.
The pills represent the illusion of choice. Neo was already on this path - if he chose the "wrong" pill he eventually would be presented with another choice that would have kept him on the path his destiny dictated. Neo needed this illusion because he was not yet ready to accept the mantle of his ultimate calling. One pill alone shows that he's either not ready for the path yet, or that he's ready for the path, but still has questions and reservations, depending on the pill chosen.
Had he taken both pills he would have essentially been saying that he rejects the idea of his choice or freedom, and demonstrating that he has already surpassed the need for the illusion of choice, and was ready to embark the path without question. Were that the case, though, the pills would not have been needed - he could have broken free from his binding without aid.
Nowhere in the movie does it suggest that this is Neo's first time. We can only assume that it is, but one pill clearly erases all trace of ever having been presented the option in the first place. It's possible, likely even, that this is yet another attempt to awaken Neo, and it's simply the one that worked. Therefore it's unlikely that he would have leapt from desiring his old life all the way through to accepting his destiny between two attempts, and thus he would not have, could not have, chosen both pills.
I believe that the red pill somehow updates the Machines' database record so that the person taking the pill reads as being dead, incapacitated, or otherwise outlived their usefulness; that is why that person is decoupled from the power plant.
The blue pill, on the other hand, restores the human to a known checkpoint - recovers the human from a backup, in other words.
While I subscribe to the theory that a particular program of the two encapsulated in the pills will be run first, let's see what happens in each particular sequence. We'll assume that the Red Pill program runs for less time than the Blue Pill one. After all, real-life backup recovery is slower than media unmounting. We'll also assume that the computers of the Matrix are not unlike today's computers. The recovery program starts running. The person begins to forget last day's events.
Seconds later, the person begins being decoupled. Next one of the following happens. What happens here is much less problematic for the person concerned, but potentially much more so for the Matrix itself.
Feasibly, taking both pills at the same time would render some psychoactive effect causing hallucinations and forgetfulness, perhaps both and long term side effects. Morpheus is the Greek God of dreams, representing either taking Neo out of or into his reality, both can be assumed to be a dream.
As he is the God of dreams, taking Neo out of the Matrix could only be taking him into another dream, or rather truly putting him to sleep and allowing his dream world to reign as reality.
Looking at it as a computer software that we can comprehend I think is a mistake as we can not comprehend matrix programming. I believe if he took both pills at the same time it would have a similar effect, where he would be the God of his own reality due to forgetting any stimulus that made him think of the boundaries of life within the matrix and due to awakening through hallucinations and being disconnected from the matrix, there might be some canceling effect where he is partially still in the matrix perhaps never left yet in a more lucid dream state where he could control his reality more so than previously.
Eventually, Neo realises this and says "fuck this bullshit", creating his own path outside the confines of the dichotomy presented to him. But the interesting thing is that Neo at this point in the story, is far more interested in the outcome of the choice and the answer to the question of "What is the Matrix?
Honestly, how would you feel if some wealthy celebrity that you idolised came up to you and said "Hey baby, wanna take my helicopter out to my mega-yacht and see how the rich kids party? But what about Morpheus' perspective? Let's say Neo immediately asks "what happens when I take both? Maybe Neo loses consciousness, he wakes up in his bed again, then shit gets weird as if the hallucinations of just taking the Red Pill weren't enough.
Neo would experience an increasingly rapid succession of reset-inducing hallucinations until he wakes up for real in his holding tank. This too, is consistent with the story and computer programming, being stuck in an infinite loop until the operating system brings a halt to that kind of nonsense. Although I'm not so sure that the tracking program will be very effective under these circumstances.
Probably not. Or maybe, because this is the story of the hero who miraculously survived, they got just enough data between resets to extract him. Another possibility is that Neo has a "Chaotic Good" orientation right out of the gate. He'd be completely out of the control of both The Matrix and The Resistance. He'd be a loose cannon, screwing everything up for everyone.
The Machines don't know how to take care of that one, they can't go and attack Zion because Neo isn't there, Neo could block any attempts to disconnect him from within the Matrix and the Real World, and The Matrix collapses in the same sort of end scenario as the third movie. To what end, I'm not sure, but it's exactly the sort of thing the entire construct of The Matrix and Zion were built to avoid, and worse, it's already happened before.
The fact of the matter is that Neo was the star-struck proto-superman at just the right time, for the good of everyone involved. And perhaps just not quite bright enough to really be a problem. Not until his meeting with The Architect. Neo would be trapped in a never ending cycle of being reborn disconnecting from the system then spat back out into the world reconnected to the system then press repeat forever until the bad guys win.
You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.
Remember: all I'm offering is the truth. Nothing more. So - Nothing would ever be the same again - and you'd wake up in your bed, not realise that everything had completely changed and would believe whatever you wanted to believe. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What would have happened if Neo had taken the red pill and blue pill at the same time?
Ask Question. Asked 5 years, 1 month ago. Active 6 months ago. Viewed 37k times. Let's assume Morpheus wasn't quick enough to stop him.
Improve this question. Valorum k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. This would have happened. As we're talking about computer code that's mutually exclusive, and colors which can be combined, the answer is obvious. Neo's interface to the Matrix would have crashed and thrown a Purple Screen of Death. Show 3 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Valorum Valorum k gold badges silver badges bronze badges. You could possibly interpret an existential answer to this.
The choice between the blue and red pills could be purely symbolic in terms of how Neo progresses through or out of the Matrix. There's only the choice of having either one or the other - he can't choose both, he can't choose neither. It's the left or right in the fork in the road Yes, you're right - I was confusing this with the pill in "Total Recall", I'm always making that mistake The red pill disrupts your carrier code, the blue pill is a tranquiliser of some sort.
I disagree with parts of this answer. The blue pill is more than a sedative. Morpheus says "Take the blue pill, you wake up and remember nothing". So it is also a memory wipe of meeting Morpheus and probably more. Thus if we follow your conclusion in this answer, taking both would result in you being ejected from the Matrix, but with no memory at all of the events that might have caused it.
Morpheus might still be there to pick you up, but you'd have no clue what was going on even less clue than Neo actually had. Simba - Except that isn't what Morpheus says.
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