I hate to quibble, but
Descartes did not say anything about our
idividuality or our concepts of ourselves at the level of his argument
Jobert refers to. All Descartes claims to know is that he
has a self, that there is some
being in the universe whom he is. He knows this because
he is thinking and perceiving, and to perceive himself thinking and perceiving, he must exist.
Another element
Neo,
Truman, and Descartes share in their stories is that of the
Evil Genius. In Descartes' argument,
God is not a deceiver, but in
The Matrix and
The Truman Show, the respective supreme forces are very pointedly deceiving Neo and Truman. Without the "God is not a deceiver" postulate,
all Descartes knows is that he is. He doesn't know his history, his gender, what he looks like, his species, his age. Nothing. Only that
somewhere in the universe, something is aware, and that he is that something.
Maybe when Neo took the
blue pill, he was merely accessing another part of the Matrix, a special hidden level for people whose minds had become restless. We
aren't necessarily who we are.
We just are.