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The Science of the Matrix
KamehamehaWarrior writes "Peter B. Lloyd, author of Taking The Red Pill: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in The Matrix, believes that many of the plot developments in "The Matrix" that seem to contradict the laws of physics, biology, etc. can actually be explained with a closer look at the science. He addresses issues such as "Can humans really be an energy source? How does the Matrix know what fried chicken taste like? Why do the rebels have to enter and exit the Matrix via a telephone system (that doesn't actually exist)?""
And y'all thought Trekkies were over the top.
Carousel is a lie!
/.'ed after 2 comments. Direct connect to the brainstem needs more bandwidth than this!
This is a truly impressive article, even if this guy does have a
little too much free time on his hands.
The breakdown of the Bio-Port is wonderful. It's really a
fantastic explanation of how the Bio-Port could work, and what
it would be doing.
The Red pill, I've always seen this as similar to some type of
virus that is injected into the system. His deconstruction is
similar in flavor to what I thought.
The power plant is great. Rather than humans being the energy
source, they are a giant Beowulf cluster. Maybe Beowulf (the
hero) was the first Beowulf after all.
I thought Entering and Exiting the Matrix was interesting, but I
didn't find the arguments as compelling in this section for some
reason. There just seem to be too many special exceptions for
my taste.
Overall this article has some real potential, and definately
helps with the suspension of disbelief process that is so
crucial to any story telling. A bit of a warning though, it's
long, really long.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
... should have upgraded their servers. I see two posts here (are the posts real, I wonder?) and both links don't work for me.
Looks like taking down the matrix wasn't so hard at all.
Three comments and already Slashdotted? Damn.
Here's the Google cache.
Anything matrix related is good by me. I've been reading a lot more of the philosophy section of the website lately, and I've also been reading any posts like the one above regarding the theory and science behind the movies/plot/story.
To be honest, I had no idea "how deep the rabbit hole" really went. The Wachowski brothers are brilliant IMHO, and have one of the most immersive universes I've ever seen. The movies aside, and franchisements out the window, this stands to be one of the most engrossing and amazing "thresholds" of our timeframe.
And although the naysayers might argue, the Matrix is to me, and many of my friends/family/colleauges, as Star Wars was to the generation two decades ago.
And here I thought that they didn't know what chicken tasted like... hence it tasting like everything. Makes you wonder if someone was paying attention or not...
/.-ed already (doh!).
And no, I can't RTFA... it's
All I want is a kind word, a warm bed and unlimited power.
http://saintaardvarkthecarpeted.com/matrix.html
Carousel is a lie!
Sorry guys, the Agents got to this one first.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
Please mod me up, I need to work on my karma.
GLITCHES IN THE MATRIX . . . AND HOW TO FIX THEM
by Peter B. Lloyd
Why, exactly, do the rebels have to enter the Matrix via the phone system (which after all doesn't physically exist)? And what really happens when Neo takes the red pill (which also doesn't really exist)? And how does the Matrix know what fried chicken tastes like? Technologist and philosopher Peter Lloyd answers these questions and more.
To be published in Taking the Red Pill: Science, Philosophy and Religion in The Matrix (Ben Bella Books, April 2003). Published on KurzweilAI.net March 3, 2003.
As the essays throughout this book demonstrate, the Wachowski Brothers designed The Matrix to work at many levels. They carefully thought through the film's philosophical underpinnings, religious symbolism, and scientific speculations. But there are a few riddles in The Matrix, aspects of the film that seem nonsensical or defy the laws of science. These apparent glitches include:
The Bioport--how can a socket in your head control your senses? How can it be inserted without killing you?
The Red Pill--since the pill is virtual, how can it throw Neo out of the Matrix?
The Power Plant--can people really be an energy source?
Entering and Exiting the Matrix--why do the rebels need telephones to come and go?
The Bugbot--what's the purpose of the bugbot?
Perceptions in the Matrix--how do the machines know what fried chicken tastes like?
Neo's Mastery of the Avatar--how can Neo fly?
Consciousness and the Matrix--are the machines in the Matrix alive and conscious? Or are they only machines, intelligent but mindless?
This essay addresses these questions and shows how these seeming glitches can be resolved.
THE BIOPORT
Can the machines really create a virtual world through a bioport? And how does it work? The bioport is a way of giving the Matrix computers full access to the information channels of the brain. It is located at the back of the neck--probably between the occipital bone at the base of the skull, and the first neck vertebra. Wiring would best enter through the soft cartilage that cushions the skull on the spinal column, and pass up through the natural opening that lets the spinal cord into the skull. This avoids drilling through bone, and maintains the mechanical and biological integrity of the skull's protection. A baby fitted with a bioport can easily survive the operation.
The bioport terminates in a forest of electrodes spanning the volume of the brain. In a newborn, the sheathed mass of wire filaments is pushed into the head through the bioport. On reaching the skull cavity, the sheath would be released, and the filaments spread out like a dandelion, gently permeating the developing cortex. Nested sheaths would release a branching structure of filamentary electrodes. As each sheathed wire approaches the surface of the brain, it releases thousands of smaller electrodes. In the neonate, brain cells have few synaptic connections, so the slender electrodes can penetrate harmlessly.
With its electrodes distributed throughout the brain, the Matrix could deliver its sensory signals in either of two places: at the sensory portals or deep inside the brain's labyrinth. For example, vision could be driven by electrodes on the optic nerves where they enter the brain. Artificial signals would then pass into the visual cortex at the back of the brain, which would handle them as if they had come from the eyes. Correspondingly, outgoing motor nerves would also have electrodes at the boundary of brain and skull. This simple design mirrors the natural state of the brain most closely. It is not, however, the only possibility. Electrodes could alternatively be attached in the depths of the brain, beyond the first stages of the visual cortex. This would greatly simplify the data processing. In normal perception, most of the incoming information isn't processed; information you aren't paying a
If you want to read the article you can go here,
but beware my server isn't too beefy.
www.dailystatic.com/Matrix.html
You can read the article, but none of the links inside of it work.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
If it's anything like "
The Physics of Star Trek" then I'll pass. Can you say "fiction?"
Oh, and if it's been slashdotted, here are some mirrors:
Link 1
Link 2
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
aka incredibly basic philosophy for nerds..
I wasn't impressed by either of them.
Judging by people my age, I should have been by both.
Is it me or everyone else?
Help me, please.
Any mention in the press, on-line web-mags, blogs, uttered in a dark corner of a restaurant, scrawled on a bathroom wall, by chance letters M-A-T-R-I-X in a bowl of Alphabits or alphabet soup, uttered as first words of an infant, imagined while under the influence of drugs and/or lack of sleep, or previously posted have a 94.7214% chance of being posted.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Too many people bought into the film's effects and overwrought Jesus thing to notice that it was a really, really, really bad film.
That being said, yes, I do own a copy of The Matrix on DVD. No, I didn't buy it, it was a gift. Yes, I do watch it, but I can only stand to watch the movie with the composer's audio track selected. On a visual level, with the soundtrack as the only thing to focus on, it is a stunning piece of work. Unfortunately, this alone doesn't make the film anything special.
sig not found
How the hell is a human neural system supposed to react faster than software in a computer system? That's what really bugs me. That, and the blatant disregard for the Laws of Thermodynamics. And Keanu Reeves.
I'm currently reading "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas" by Hunter S. Thompson and was struck by a passing reference to "The Matrix" in chapter eight. "The Matrix" in this instance is a name of a night-club (from what I can gather) where general drug-fuelled debauchery takes place. Now, considering the references to pill popping (red pill, blue pill) in "The Matrix" the movie and the surrealism that ensues the pill scene I'm left wondering if the title of the movie is a coded reference to the '60s LSD movement. Or am I reading too much into this? None-the-less, I would be interested to hear if "The Matrix" really was a night club in San Fransisco at that time.
That's easy, the script says so!!
"Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun."
. . . . such a waste of living brain tissue.
It's only funny until someone gets hurt. Then, it's hilarious.
To take the cynical view, anything can be explained in a made-up universe. Just look at all the "scientific" explanation for events in Star Wars (midiclroians, anyone?).
That said, its a very impressive article!
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
In Soviet Russia, all your us are belong to base!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
That was a lot less geeky, a lot more well thought out and a lot more fun to read than I would have ever imagined it being. Props to the guy who came up with that.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
The part about the human power plant is making me wonder. Why are they keeping the humans around if they are only using them for "parallel computing" and for managing the power plants? If I understand correctly, humans are pretty inefficient. We need to be fed, and the machines have to create the Matrix and regulate us in it.
Also, one would assume that a lot of machines can process information faster than a lot of human brains.
So my question is, why are the machines taking the risk of keeping the humans around? why not just kill us off.
This guy has too much time on his hands.
Basically he takes the movie he liked, the ideals and the perceptions, and he fills in the blanks.
Why do they use telephones?
Answer: It's a movie.
His Answer: They put network addresses on all data points along the matrix and blah blah blah
How does the blue/red pills work?
Answer: It's a movie.
His Answer: "the avatar's software module must be able to accept instructions to cancel out any given sensory input."
And, lastly, my favorite:
What/How does the Bugbot do/work?
Answer: It's a fucking movie.
His Answer: "Trinity says that Neo is "dangerous" to them before he is cleaned. We can infer that the bugbot is actually a munition, probably a semtex device that will detonate when it hears Morpheus's voice, killing both Neo and Morpheus and everyone else in the room."
This guy is just making shit up. Yet you know somewhere somebody is going to really put some thought and invest some time into thinking about this bullshit. Jeez. Where's Penn and Teller when you need em?
This is the same thing as blueprints of Star Trek ships. Some King of the Geeks with entirely too much time on his hands makes up a bunch of shit to back up the movie. Note to geeks: it's a fucking movie. It's a Hollywood movie, no less. It's a fucking Hollywood Keaneau Reeves movie!! Get a fucking grip. There is no Matrix. There is no USS Enterprise. Grow the fuck up. Or, even better, if this guys really can't tell the difference between reality and a movie, he needs to be institutionalized and receive serious medical attention.
Mods have no no SOH...
lets just watch more TV. When is some one gonna post a webcast of this so I don't have to read it?
Its called creative analysis... why don't you just read the Cliff Notes?
But quite clever all the same. However, some of the explanations were somwhat on the superficial side!
That any energy harvested from humans could much more easily be harvested by burning the food they eat?
That was my main problem with the Matrix as a hard sci-fi flick. Why bother keeping the humans around? If you can feed them, you can supply yourself with energy much more efficiently by using the food you feed them.
Follow the adventures of the new wandering jews
Fusion doesn't really have anything to do with human biology!! Reallly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
--exa--
It is interesting that the W brothers chose to let the human body transcend The Matrix. If the they really wanted to blow my mind, Neo would have awoken to a reality where nothing but the cognitive functions of his brain translated into the next world, where the causalities of the environment we live in (gravity, seeing the inside of a building instead of the outside when we walk into it, etc.) were all in question, where Neo would have had to learn how to use a body completely alien to himself and interact in a universe that functioned under different rules.
The paradox of Neo "freeing" people from the Matrix is that real freedom only exists within the simulation. Those who have been enlightened have the power and will to function outside of normal environmental limitations in the "real" world. Everyone else is just a peasant.
Isn't this book on thinkgeek? Its been on there for a few weeks now. I've been dying to get it, but it's been sold out.
Morpheous: The matrix is everywhere. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church...when you pay your taxes....
Neo: Oh! Shit! My TAXES. TRINITY! HELP!
heh.
Have you read the moderator guidelines? Well, have you, PUNK? (and I want a Karma: Gnarly option)
"willful suspension of disbelief" uncommon? How many times a day do we already do this, and why?
IMHO, it's a lot more common than many people are willing to admit; and the mental/philosophical "construct" we use every day is every bit as large and fascinating as the "construct" used in the movie.
Classical examples from science: At one time, the Earth was substantially flat. It also revolved around the Sun. QED.
It will be interesting to see if science per se can make anything of this, let alone go beyond its own limits. All I'm saying is that maybe the limits of science are actually the limits of the mind, given a material form.
C|N>K
Kinda the same thing, right?
I always just figured that they planted an exploit that allows them to hook their equipment into the simulation in the code that simulates the phone system, and the 'getting in/out through the phone system that doesn't exist' was just how it manifested itelf within the simulation.
:)
No big deal.
Code or be coded.
By "THE NEED", I mean every geek's need to explain everything and make sure nothing in the movie violates any of the known laws of physics, rather than just enjoying a movie?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I think that he has fallen into the same trap as many philosophers in saying that human can have consciousness because their brains are made of neurons, and machines cannot because they are just software. Well, I think he's wrong. Neurons are a lot more deterministic than he thinks, and code can be very non-deterministic, especially when it's massively parallel and asynchronous. He is foolish to dismiss emergent properties out of hand, because they are a real phenomenon. For example, it is possible to construct a very detailed model of a neuron, but that won't tell you much about the human brain. Any sufficiently complex system will have properties that are not readily seen from the properties of its constituents
As for artificial intelligence, I think that it has not come yet for two reasons: First, the difficulty of the task was severely underestimated, and we simply don't have powerful enough computers working on it. Second, the machines that we have are deterministic, since we want to know what they're doing, but at the same time we want them to do something new and unexpected. Finally, I think that one of the hallmarks of consciousness is creating an internal model of the world and using it to predict what will happen. When machines can do this, they will have at least some consciousness.
Is it just me or does this guy have waaaaaaaaaaay to much time on his hands. Coming Soon: "Nietzsche and Bilbo Baggins -A comparison"
God made the natural numbers; all else is the work of man - Kronecker
What good is a net connection if you've been slashdotted?
Maybe it's because in the original scripts they used human brains as basically a beowulf cluster-- not batteries, but as a bunch of processors running in parallel.
Welcome to the Desert of the Real: The Philosophy of the Matrix. It's a collection of essays on various philosophical and religious points of view as espoused in The Matrix, by the same guy who edited the Simpsons and Seinfeld philosophy books. I would link to it, but my work computer system is retarded enough not to allow cut and paste. A websearch should turn it up, though.
(I need to finish reading it and get it back to the library before they send me to collections.)
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org
We all know (don't we?) that The Matrix is basically a somewhat mismashed version of the Perennial Philosophy. Life is a dream, God is real, Synchronicity is normal. The Matrix (like Stranger in a Strange Land) adds some SF tropes, and does a better job than most of presenting the material in an interesting way, by picking up the gnostic tropes of the Demiurge, an evil creator god who runs the system.
The interesting thing is how powerfully The Matrix affects people who watch it. Much like ritual theater has done through the ages, some kind of genuine awakening (not in the Buddhist sense, necessarily) seems to often occur.
One question is, of course, how to maintain the awakening. How to stay aware that, in some sense, life is real-and-unreal.
Another is the status of the "demiurge" - the thread (or blanket) of evil which we find in the world around us. It's not for nothing that Agents look like people from the government; there has ever been the conciet that government somehow causes spiritual enslavement, rather than being the mere result of it.
Of course, for what it's worth, I recon that the people are sleeping because it is night-time.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Science, philosophy and religion huh? Real heavy words. Ah the last word explains it. People will write anything to get published.
Oh I enjoyed the movie, but I don't think I'll buy the book thanks.
I didn't get in in time to read article but one thing in the Matrix that always sounded backwards to me was the first time Neo hooks up and enters "The Construct" Morpheos says this is a "Mental projection of his digital self" but isn't that backwards? "Digital projection of his mental self" sounds better to me.
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
Well I tried to post it, but lameness filter says there are too many 'junk' characters.
What the hell does that mean?
Is it commenting on the plausability of the article?
mr. Lloyd that The Matrix is actually a movie and not a documentary ;-)
Wow, you're playing the role of the voice of reason, I suppose. Come, of course, as you honorably must every so often, to explain to people why what it is that they like or think is wrong and a pointless waste of time. What a burden it must be for you to have to take time out from your busy schedule of advertising pornography in your signature to tell the rest of us monkeys that we should get a grip, and become a functional member of society, like a proper tool such as yourself. You, that's right, you, have shown us what we have been doing wrong all this time. Let's face it: you always knew you were mean for something special in life, correct? You were always the intelligent one in your classes, surely only you could be fit to take upon yourself the noble task of telling everyone what exactly is wrong with them.
I now act as you act. I like what you like. I agree with everything you say, and condemn, and show contempt toward everything else. I am just like you. I love you. Be my friend? Fuck you.
That spare capacity remains available for others to exploit, and the rebels use it to download kung-fu expertise into Neo's brain and to implant helicopter piloting skills into Trinity's. If the Matrix ever learned this technique, it could create havoc for the rebels, implanting impulses to serve its own ends.
Actually, I was working on this feature for Matrix 4.0. They scrapped the project when the bros decided to make it a trilogy. Now, I am unemplyed
getSexySig();
Oh right, like we're going to slashdot Amazon! There are a few sites that are moderately immune, you know...
They didn't wonder what fried chicken tasted like, if you refer to the movie, it was "tasty wheat"
than what you are currently doing... which is being a god damn fuck-head, listen bitch, I don't walk around insulting everything you do(well, in a way I do, since this is all I have seen you do, but, i'll save that for a later flame), some people like to do different things, if this guy likes to try to figure how theoretically something COULD work, you don't have to be an ass about it, just find something CONSTRUCTIVE to do, instead of wasting all your time insulting people.
Whoa.
I think in the movie they gave stats on how much energy a human body gave off. I disagree with the beowulf cluster idea. The machines themselves are intelligent computers, they would not need computer power.
My belief is that the humans are adopted as a power source so that the power source would not be destroyed by rebel/free humans. Think back to Star Wars. How is the Death Star destroyed (twice). The rebels de-stabilize the central reactor causing and explosion that takes out the whole thing.
The human power source cannot be blown up in good conscience. They are power source and human shield in one. So even if they are terribly inefficient as a power source they are invulnerable, unlike a fusion reactor, fields of solar panels, long geothermal pipelines or anything else you can come up with.
Some thoughts on the whole idea that keeping a bunch of humans alive to use them as an energy source doesn't make any sense, becuase conservation of energy demands you'd put more energy into keeping the humans alive than you could get out:
Question: Isn't it true that a nuclear fusion reaction, if you can figure out how to make one, takes an absolutely fantastic amount of energy to initiate and maintain? I know nothing about nuclear physics, but what i've read seems to indicate that the point of fusion is that you put a fantastic amount of energy in and you get a fantastic amount of energy back. The problem so far is that no one has figured out how to get out more energy than you put in.
So wouldn't it be logical to say that the huge mass of humans *are*, in fact, a net energy drain because energy is needed to create whatever protein the humans use for IV foodstuffs, but they are needed and maintained becuase they can at any time desired be used briefly as a massive source to pull energy from? Note that Morpheus doesn't say that humans are used as generators; he says they're used as batteries. Wouldn't it make sense to suppose that perhaps the human race encased in the Matrix is just there in case the sustained fusion reaction the machines are actually using to generate their power ever goes out and has to be restarted, or in case the machines need to start up a new reactor? Meaning basically, the Matrix is nothing more than a giant UPS? Does this make any sense at all?
None of this, of course, explains why the machines, given a level of technology that would make it possible to build both Zion and the Matrix, wouldn't just harness tidal energy as a power source! Did the americans finally blow up the moon or something?
Anyway, as far as the article's parallell processing thing goes, that seems really silly to me. If the machines have figured out how to use human brains as processors, wouldn't they build the machines themselves using human brains as processors to run the AIs on? You could claim "how do you know they aren't", but i'll tell you how i know they aren't: if they can control biological material to that extent, then they can make machines that the EMP blasts are useless against. I do, however, really like the article author's insinuation that Morpheus actually has no idea what the Matrix is for, and erroneously believes it's a power plant.
(One totally non-power-related possibility of what the Matrix could be used for: possibly the machines really just don't like the idea of making the human race extinct. They don't want the humans running around in the real world and working against the machines' designs, but they're for whatever reason not okay with just wiping the humans out; maybe they don't actually hate the humans, they just don't want the humans to be a threat. Maybe the Matrix is just a means of preservation of the human race, one that the machines get nothing positive out of except as a memento of their creators. (Hitler's original plans for the holocaust apparently stated, after everything was done, the world was conquered, and the holocaust was complete, that one single village of Jews should be left alive, sealed off from the outside world, and allowed to simply live on their lives. In Hitler's warped mind this was supposed to be some kind of preserved-in-amber cultural museum of a dead race, just so future aryan generations could know they existed. I cannot remember the exact details of this and may be partially misremembering it in that there wouldn't actually be any living people in this preserved-in-amber village. Does anyone know what i'm referring to? Anyway, possibly the Matrix is something of that sort.). Or, possibly, the machines actually believe they are working in the humans service and they put the humans into the matrix "for their own good", as some kind of highly warped overzealous implementation of Asimov's zeroth law, on the logic if the humans are trapped in a digital fantasyworld, if they knock themselves out with nuclear holoca
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
so whats the determinate of "the matrix"
*ducks*
Selling software wont make you money, selling a service will.
He's impressing himself, and to that type of personality, that's all that matters..
Comment removed based on user account deletion
(continued where the parent got cut off) ... On the other hand, a creature might be profoundly stupid and still have subjective experiences.
Agent Smith is an example of a machine that manifests humanlike behavior--which, if you witnessed such words and gestures in a human, you would immediately regard them as showing conscious emotions and volitions. Indeed, it is the immediacy of the interpretation that is deceptive. When you see someone laugh with joy, or scream in pain, you do not knowingly infer the person's mental state from those outward signs. Rather, it is as if you see the emotions directly. Yet, we know from accomplished actors that these signs of emotions can be faked. Therefore, you are indeed making an inference, albeit an automatic one. It is a job of philosophy to scrutinize such automatic inference. When you see another human being emoting, your inference is not based wholly on what you see, but also on background information (such as whether the person is acting on the stage). More fundamentally, you are relying on the reasonable assumption that the person's behavior arises from a biological brain just as yours does. Whenever those premises are undermined, you inevitably revise any inferences you have made from the emoting. If the emoting stops and people around you clap, you realize it was a piece of street theatre, and the person was only acting out those emotions. Or, if the person has a nasty car accident that breaks open his head, revealing electronic circuitry instead of a brain, you realize that it was only an android and you may conclude that it was only simulating emotions.
A key step in the inference is the premise that the emotion plays a role in the causal loop that produces the outward words and gestures. If, instead, we have established that the observed words and gestures are wholly explained in some other way, without involving those emotions--then the inference collapses. The exterior emoting behavior then ceases to count as evidence for an interior emotional experience. If we know that an actor's words and gestures are scripted, then we cease to regard them as evidence for an inward mental state. Likewise, if we know that the words and gestures of an android or avatar are programmed, then they too cease to support any inference of a mental state.
In an android, or in a software simulation of a human such as an agent, words and gestures are produced by millions of lines of programmed software. The software advances from instruction to instruction in a deterministic manner. Some instructions move pieces of information around inside memory, others execute calculations, others send motor signals to actuators in the body. Each line of code references objective memory locations and ports in the physical hardware. It may do so symbolically, and it may do so via sophisticated data structures, for example, using the tag "vision-field" to reference the stabilized and edge-enhanced data from the eye cams. Nevertheless, nowhere in the software suite does the code break out of that objective environment and refer to the enigmatic contents of consciousness. Nor could the programmer ever do so, since she would need an objective, third-person pointer to the conscious experience--which, being a subjective, first-person thing, cannot be labeled with such a pointer.
Everything that the android says and does is fully accounted for by its software. There is no explanatory gap left for machine consciousness to fill. When the android says, "I see colors and feel emotions just as humans do," we know that those words are produced by deterministic lines of software that functions perfectly well without any involvement of consciousness. It is because of this that the android's emoting does not provide an iota of evidence for any interior mental life. All the outward signs are faked, and the programmer knows in comprehensive detail how they are faked.
This point is systematically ignored by the mathematicians and engineers who enthuse about artif
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
it is 42, of course.
The whole idea can fall apart, if at the end of the 3rd Matrix movie Neo will wake up once again in his bed, late for work. Then he will describe all this crazy 2.9 movie long dream in his blog, where Morpheus, Trinity and other friends with familiar nicknames will comment vividly, suggesting crazy interpretations and hinting at "too much stress", as Neo's co-workers get laid off one by one by a reputable software company. His medically educated friend will point out that all knowing Oracle is a reference to a well know database product, for which Neo writes stored procedures, constantly having problems with number of DB Agents, he sometimes referrs to "Smith". Lady in Red is a secretary of his boss.
:) :)
But then you'll say...
Hyperom.com
"To make a rebel imperceptible, the Nebuchadnezzar's computer changes the body's visible appearance to be transparent; and the body's mechanical resistance to that of the air. From an observer's perspective, the body has melted into air. From a software perspective, the data module is still on the register but simulating a body indistinguishable from thin air. Later, when the scene is no longer being observed by anybody, the module will be deleted. "
Wouldn't this mean that Trinity should have died when the truck smashed into the phone booth, as her avatar was still there, just not percievable?
Mod this down. The guy's just spamming his kit car forum. Posting a link to where you can buy the book (Amazon carries it, imagine that! Who would have guessed?) is not informative, contrary to what the mods would have you believe. Probably a referer link too, I couldn't tell.
I think this guy put way too much thinking into a movie. I prefer the simple solutions for it, some :-)
:-)
of them matching his though...BTW, I've only
skimmed the article, don't have that much time
I agree with him on much of it, but wow, talk
about detail!
The Bioport--how can a socket in your head control your senses? How can it be inserted without killing you?
Easy enough. It fits with the massively parallel computer theory later. They need to figure out the
data transfer to and from brain, so this would be
the next step beyond that, control of the brain
to receive and send specific signals.
The Red Pill--since the pill is virtual, how can it throw Neo out of the Matrix?
This "red pill" meant to me that you are ready to
wake up from complete control. Sort of like you
were in hypnosis, now the fingers are snapped and
you're awake!
The Power Plant--can people really be an energy source?
Yes and no. I too thought of the brain power
theory. It seems to fit and makes for interesting
theories. (ie. does the Matrix run on human brains
for power and computing power as well? So humans
are feeding their own minds?)
Entering and Exiting the Matrix--why do the rebels need telephones to come and go?
This too I figured was a navagational issue. It
seems to be easier to send data around, so if you
knew of a data point, you could get to it. Why
certain ones? Perhaps so you don't go hunting
for that cordless between the cushions?
The Bugbot--what's the purpose of the bugbot?
Bugbot tells Agents where it is. Perhaps it's just
an identifier, a certain string? Look for that
string, and you've got him. Sort of how virus
scanners work?
Perceptions in the Matrix--how do the machines know what fried chicken tastes like?
Completely made up and arbitrary. Does it matter?
Neo's Mastery of the Avatar--how can Neo fly?
Neo can fly because he's mastered the Matrix. I
thought of it more as he can now reshape the
Matrix near him to do what he wants. Kind of like
a virus, or bug.
Consciousness and the Matrix--are the machines in the Matrix alive and conscious? Or are they only machines, intelligent but mindless?
Both. Give it kind of a Terminator scenario,
except keep the humans, their brains and body
come in handy. The machines are just overthrowing
the people that built them, perhaps they
got out of hand too.
Vip
the special effects of the matrix were ground breaking, but the "story, the idea, the philosophy" were rather stale.
man vs machine has been a re-occuring theme in sci-fi for years. have you ever heard of dune or terminator?
if you have chills from the matrix, that's cool. but the story is hardly new.
The only explanation that makes sense to me is that the AI machines have been programmed to keep humans around and happy. So they keep around thousands of humans and provide them a fulfilled safe life in the Matrix.
There has to be some kind or robotic law a la Asimov that makes the machines depend on the human's existance. They kind or perverted the meaning, but they can not get rid of the humans.
Moritz
From about 2/3 of the way down the page:
The cell phone is projected into the Matrix world by the Nebuchadnezzar's computer, 114 peter b. lloyd along with the avatar's body and clothes--and the weapons that Neo and Trinity eventually bring in with them. The software that simulates the cell phones is running inside the Nebuchadnezzar's computer, not the Matrix's computer
What's with the "114 peter b. lloyd" ? Or was that the Maxtrix subconsciously telling everyone about this guy who's figured it out?
Sounds a lot like the trick some people did after 9/11. Remember the folded $20 bill? You can "discover" anything you want if you look long and hard enough, and turn a blind eye to everything that contradicts your belief.
So when the agents first suspected Neo might be a problem - which was significantly before Neo even had any clue what was going on - why didn't they just (1) disconnect his actual physical body from the matrix, and (2) stop providing his actual physical body with oxygen?
Answer: Because it's a movie. This guy put WAY too much thought into retrofitting justifications onto it.
In fact, Smith gives himself away when he says about the human world, "It's the smell, if there is such a thing . . . I can taste your stink and every time I do, I fear that I've somehow been infected by it." Smith's own logical integrity obliges him to doubt the existence of that noncomputable quality that humans talk about: the conscious experience of smell. When Smith says, ". . . the smell, if there is such a thing," he is exhibiting the mark of the automaton. This is corroborated when he then tells Morpheus that he can "taste your stink," revealing that Smith simply does not understand the differentiation of senses in the human mind. For a computer, data are interchangeable, but for a human, tastes, smells, colors, sounds, and feels, are irreducibly different. This fact eludes Agent Smith.
Seems that the author lacks the perspective to get this last one right. Agent Smith comes from another world completely, and is trying to express emotions and concepts that are completely alien. What must it feel like to be a noncorporeal entity that usually resides in abstract softwareland, that once in awhile has to interact in a simulation so complex that it must be mapped to its own abstract reality-experience? I mean, here you are trying to explain to Morpheus your disgust (which you do somewhat well at) over a sensory experience that has no exact analog in the simulation? If a human could feel this, would it seem more like a taste, more like a smell? A combination of the two? He is doing this best to bridge a gap that none will ever do... Morpheus can hardly go to software-land to see what it feels like there. If he did, and tried to communicate, would the evil AI's be convinced that he isn't truly sentient, because he fails to completely understand their alien and unnameable sensory experiences, of which he himself interprets as something similar to smell/taste, or sight/hearing? The "sight/hearing" experience might actually be 7 distinct sensory experiences, which the human mind confuses as a single concept.
I for one do believe that emergent properties in a complex or chaotic system can produce our much overhyped "consciousness". But even if they can't, the author himself suggests that the machines may be based on a technology that would allow it to happen. I can only assume that he is biased toward his own species, to biology... maybe that's not such a bad thing. But maybe if we had shown a little more tolerance, given a little more benefit of the doubt to Skynet, it would have decided it didn't have to nuke every damn one of us to survive.
PS On the other hand, maybe we should build a manual kill switch into every candidate computer that isn't part of the blueprints or any electronically accessible record...
He says that the reason Neo (and the others) have superhuman powers in the matrix is because they figure out ways to use their interface in unpredicted ways and use otherwise agent-only APIs to the avatar software.
That makes sense for Morpheus, Trinity, et al. They have superhuman powers that are comparable to the agents. However, it is said that the agents, finally, are limited by certain physical rules, and the reason that Neo is special is that he is not limited by those same rules. He can rewrite the matrix.
There are ten million different perfectly acceptable software-design explanations for these mechanics. However, the author has described none of them. If he's using special APIs, then the agents would be able to do the same shit.
Perhaps he can change code in the virtual machine (hehe. pun.). Perhaps he can change source. Perhaps he realized that the matrix was using strcpy() for a root-level process. Like I said, there are ten million different ways to explain this. But the author is wrong, and exhibits a simple failure to understand the actual movie.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Why do the rebels have to enter and exit the Matrix via a telephone system (that doesn't actually exist)?
Yes, but does it explain why some people seem to have a need to have a fictional story validated by pseudo-fact?
Beta sux! Join the Slashcott! http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4760465&cid=46173047
Didn't Neo steal some guy's cell phone while trying to escape the Matrix, yet was able to use it to communicate with the Nebuchadnezzar? Didn't Cypher use his cell phone to dial a traceable number within the Matrix to tip off the Agents to their location?
I think a better explanation would be that cell phones can't be used because they are portable. Therefore, they cannot be "attached" to a specific volume of space. Moving al the information for an avatar from one network node to another as they move from room to room would be ridculously prohibitive, so the node that stores the information for a specific volume of space would not necessarily include portable objects like cell phones, or avatars.
Instead, the node containing the volume would contain references or identifiers to the objects within that space.
Therefore, cell phones cannot be used reliably to associate the node containing the volume with the node containing the avatar, since the cell phone itself may be on a third node all by itself. A hard line, however, would be a permanent fixture (or semi-permanent if the machines practice refactoring), so the node containing the volume of space would be gauranteed to be be the one that references the avatar.
The cell phone would not directly reference the avatar because it is not a volume of space (it would be like trying to find out what hotel you're staying in by asking, say, one of your shoelaces).
While I'm sure that explanation has its own set of holes, it makes more sense (to me, at least) than the one in the essay.
If anything, The Empire Strikes Back was the best of all (not that the first was bad in any way). Even on that point, ROTJ wasn't too horrible. They truly don't go downhill until ROTJ, and they really only started rolling fast with ep1.
I do agree though, that The Matrix is on par though.
In a case of good timing, I just happened to put the one copy I had up on eBay at:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&ite
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Massively parallel computers from the future would still likely only excel at floating point math. The human brain though, is likely to remain champ at fuzzy math for centuries.
I don't feel like explaining what fuzzy math is, so if you don't know already, look it up.
The Matrix is based off the bible. Neo(the one) = Jesus Read the bible and the other characters will fit into place.. :)
He failed to explain how people got hooked to the Matrix in the first place. However, I do the story. It came about that the machines were to having to draw people into connecting this plug into their head. Looking for the gullible of the human species, they bought AOL.
With the largest number of customers in the world, they quickly assimilated them with offer's of DSL for $5.95 a month and said that they were phasing out dial-up service. All you needed was this chip in the back of your head. So while most people were discouraged because of the lack of dial-up they were too lazy to change their email addresses so they were the first. Next where the techies, and /.ers. While wary of giant companies the draw for cheap DSL access was too much and it was like lambs to the slaughter. Eventually with other service providers going out of business the Matrix bought them all up and integrated their clients too. The dream of world domination at hand.
The holdouts were the 20% of people who declared that they "Would never need access." They were the one's that went on to establish Zion. They had to dig deep to escape the piles of AOL CD's that were being put into their mailboxes. It was the only way to preserve their sanity, or so the legend goes.
So now you have the complete story, oh and I hire that one of the new agents in the movie is called Mr. Case, coincidence? I think not!
wont read plato wont watch the matrix dont watch wrestling perhaps the reason, however, that wrestling is watched religiously is that wrestling has more boobies. come to think of it, youd think more guys here would be into wrestling -- for the boobies ;)
By and large, language is a tool for concealing the truth. -- George Carlin
I wonder why it was "the americans" blowing up the moon and not just humanity. Odd
This is the first time I've ever tried to submit a story to Slashdot and they took it. I was really excited. Then I read your posts and now I'm sad.
So many negative, dismissive comments from people who obviously didn't bother to actually read the article. I think I will write about this in my blog now.
I'm lonely. Come be my friend. http://www.calebgriffin
- had to use our rather primative line of sight radio and microwave satellites for C2
- using our satellites signal as a carrier means integration with our data systems at the edges and thus vulnerability based upon that compatability. (bad analogy is how apps through Wine have been sometimes subject to a windows only virus)
Additionally if the signal also acts as some sort of timing mechanism (or something like a on/off switch) for the shields and considering they have a live specimen to study, then who knows?yeah, stupid nerd... what he is doing is so much different than the actual writers of movies, novels and shows. He was driven and so he fed his BS to everyone who wanted to take a bite. Choice to read it, just like choice to watch the movie and like it I guess. Funny thing is when people come and take the time to flame and don't see the hypocrisy.
Interesting article. When artificial intelligence was discussed I did not like the way it was presented. Sure I am on the other side of the fence when it comes to AI. But if consciousness is truly in the subatomic realm of quantum interactions then why is such value ascribed to it - that stuff is all random! Why would anyone think this is an inherently good thing or something automatically worthy of praise? And why the author thought this randomness could not be then incorporated into things other than what nature brought the world is beyond me. If you listen to the DVD commentaries towards the end of The Matrix when the squiddies are coming in for the kill the look of them is described as being carefully calculated to show similarities with nature - i.e. their tails are much like flagella and are used for locomotion. Perhaps this is not only hinting that nature is damn efficient, but also that the machines are conceivably closer to biological organisms than the viewer would first infer. When talking about Agent Smith it is important to note that taste and smell are very interlinked (at least in the way people perceive them). Hold your noise closed and drink or eat something and you will find that your sensations are limited to bitter, sweet, sour, and salty. Everything else you smell such as the "stink" in "I can taste your stink" is in reality your taste buds. That's right, when you walk into the bathroom and "smell" something stinky, a particle of that something had to land on your tongue. Agent Smith is 100% correct when he makes this statement and I'm sure that the ones who never thought about that before reading my comments will be more disgusted by stink now as well. As far as I'm concerned Agent Smith is very human-like and is exhibiting a simple Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. How could a bioport be inserted? Simple I saw a show on TLC where a guy had a 5 inch knife driven into his scull right between the two lobes of the brain - the doctors took it out and the guy was fine. I can't find the story I'm thinking of presently but here's another one where there were some side effects but the guy can certainly function: http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/trauma/case/case _18.html
And what is up with citing the second law of thermodynamics - as if it does not apply to ever kind of energy yielding reaction in the known universe. Something else I haven't read anyone else say is that biological organisms break down energy in many small steps not all at once so as to maximize the amount of energy used overall. Perhaps the machines harnessing this efficiency and control somehow
Somebody cut the hard line.... get out, it's a trap!
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
I get rather tired of seeing or reading about characters who consistently do things totally out of character as described a bit to blatantly in the character development phase. Seems then (like with stupid plot elements) that such action is just a quick hacked in filler justifying or linking rather one part of the story to another. (sorta like Back to the Future 2... it seemed to exist just to set the stage a bit for the much better (and the best of the three IMHO) Back to the Future 3)
how well simulated the matrix is because would it then be possbile for humans in the matrix to create virtual artificial intelligence and then be virtually used as a power source again and again and so on and so forth. its an interesting question but im sure the machines would most likely retard all development in the ai field but most likely killing off all the scientists.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
And I've always wondered why when I pick up the phone I feel like it sucks...
because there is no story.
-j
Other than to state my personal opinion that this guy really needs to get a life (or at least a thesis topic that could be applicable to the real world), there's the one glaring hole I saw in the movie: at one point, Morpheus states that the source of "food" for the human race was having its own dead liquefied and injected via IV. How, exactly, is one species of beings capable of surviving only feeding on itself? One would think simple entropy would whittle down the amount of resources available to such a contained system. (Yes, I know, the ship magically manifested some weird synthetic proteins, but that wasn't mentioned when the machines feeding the humans was brought up.)
Q. Can humans really be an energy source?
A. It's just a film.
Q. How does the Matrix know what fried chicken taste like?
A. It's just a film.
Q. Why do the rebels have to enter and exit the Matrix via a telephone system (that doesn't actually exist)?
A. It's just a film.
My preferred explanantion for why humans are kept around is simply that the AIs want to.
Most people don't apply anywhere near enough creativity to imagining AIs. They imagine little people running inside of computers. In fact they aren't. They are almost certain to have motivations far, far different then ours.
It does not stretch my imagination much to imagine that the AIs are "insane" enough to actively want to control people, for their own self-respect-analogue. Or perhaps even more likely, built deep into all of the AIs in a place they can not touch is a version of Asimov's first law, where they can't quite wipe out humanity, so they keep them as pets as the next best thing. Why do the agents fight our heros? Because the agents believe that if our heros win it is also the end of the human race, which given past history of the race is a perfectly rational belief!
Even Agent Smith's claim that he hates the Matrix doesn't disprove this, as A: He just wants out, not to shut it down, it's not his home and B: We do not know that he is representative of the rest of the AIs.
The best part about this is that unless the next two movies really screw up and are actively contradictory, this explanation can make nearly any action by the agents make sense.
The AIs make sense, but according to their own value systems. They aren't little people running in a computer, they are something so vastly different it's effectively incomprehensible.
For a much earlier treatment of an AI revenge motive see Harlan Ellison's ultra-classic "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" short story.
Of this cold-war-era thing.
I didn't mean anything by it, it was just a half-joking reference to an old slashdot article that i can no longer find on that subject.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Did anyone else notice the oh-so-appropriate quote at the bottom of this article?
"Life would be so much easier if we could just look at the source code. -- Dave Olson"
The red pill...
These films are not about some possible future. Like all SF, they're about the here-and-now, but masked. What kind of power do the machine masters get from the duped people? Political power. What are these machines, descended from human constructions? Corporations.
The movies are a metaphor for the world you, personally, are living in right now. You are duped by years of schooling and television to limit yourself to being what amounts to a popsicle in a jar. The corporations still need your votes, so they use the media apparatus they own to mess with your perceptions of reality so much that you actually vote for their automatons.
Cut yourself off from the media feed, and meditate to still the yammering voices, and you may reprogram your own perceptual reality, as Neo does, and discover endless possibilities inconceivable to the dupes and pink boys.
Simple, albeit not easy.
so your question is: "why don't they destroy their energy source".
Good...question?
Who here said 'THIS IS NOT AN ALLEGORY'. No shit it's an allegory.
Since when is "willful suspension of disbelief" uncommon? How many times a day do we already do this, and why?
It's not at all uncommon, and almost everyone engages in it many times during each and every day. The interesting part is the why. I don't claim to have all the answers, but I will fling a little conjecture...
Like the case where the current administration convinces a significant portion of the US population through spin, fear, implication and misinformation that at least some of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis when all physical and factual evidence is to the contrary?
Or like when the US population is told that cutting taxes (income) results in more income; and some believe it?
I would assert that "...the mental/philosophical 'construct' we use every day..." is even larger and more fascinating than the "construct" used in the movie because it affects actual real human beings in life and death situations. The suspension of disbelief about the facts of the 9/11 hijackings has lead to the deaths of thousands of human beings. I can't think of a movie that has actually caused that yet (although I'm open to hearing arguments and examples.)
But these examples of how constructs affect life and death are minor compared to the more pervasive and more deadly willful suspension of disbelief inherent in the human psychological construct of "faith." (How ironic that this discussion comes up on the eve of the Christian Easter and just after the Jewish Passover.)
Christians are taught that Jesus died and came back to life. Like Neo? Ok, the difference is that Neo was dead 3 minutes, not 3 days. I'm more likely to suspend my disbelief for Neo as this has been a verifiable and observed fact in present day medical science. But three days is not within the realm of my willing suspension of disbelief.
The thing that really gets me is the intensity of the willful suspension of disbelief in the case of religious belief systems and the murder and mayhem that has been, and continues to be, done as a result.
The real question is the why, and that seems to take us squarely into the realm of psychology.
What motivates someone to accept what they are told without additional critical thought and then to act upon it to the extent of ending the life of another or making decisions that are ultimately harmful to themselves?
It may be fear. Fear of some (also unproven) eternal damnation after the end of thier own life. (In the case of faith.) Or fear of the ending of their life. (In the case of the spin and manipulation regarding the 'terrorist threat' and who is responsible.)
It may be out of a desire to belong, a sense of identification with an accepting group, or a desire to gain approval of others. (This applies to both religious and ideological/nationalistic structures.)
It may be a lack of critical thinking skills, or a lack of information. (As in your example of the flat earth or sun revolves around the earth.) These reasons may have made sense during the middle-ages, but not today.
It may be self-delusion or self-denial.
Or it may just be general studidity.
In any case, I don't have the answers, and I accept that the motivations may be different for each individual. I just know that I'm not willing to suspend my disbelief without being given some reason grounded in the basics of physics, natural laws, truth, or at least something that doesn't blatantly fly in the face of common sense (ok, I know that it's not all that common).
I'll cut a little more slack in my suspension of disbelief about the motivations of people as I know there are a wide range of human responses, but it's still disturbing when those motivations are not consistent over time or explained by some changing event. In the case of movies, I'll also cut some slack if it's intended to be camp, fantasy, or is really, really entertaining.
The suspension of disbelief in movies is certainly less significant than in day-to-
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
What really bothered me in the movie is the scene where the agents make Neo's mouth disappear.
I mean, if they can excert that kind of control over the human residents of the matrix, why don't they do it more often? Why limit it to a one time acare tactic?
The article also ignores that inconsistency.
The free-range humans aren't their energy source. Their energy source are vat-grown humans who spend their entire lives suspended in fluid and recieving their oxygen through tubes.
The only time a human would be exposed to air is if they were released from their pods by another human.
You've hit the nail right on its head. I wish I had moderator points right now. Of course, I couldn't use them because I just posted this to this article, which leans a little more to the philosophical than the political, but is still right on the same track.
A quote from my post: I'd like to see movies serve only as temporary relief from the need to think critically, but I fear that with our increased consumption they are becoming a training tool to eliminate critical thinking, or perhaps to desensitise us to how uncritically we approach daily life. After all, an uncritically thinking electorate is a malleable electorate
But you've conveyed the message in a more concise and insightful way than I could have. Kudos to you!
War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. - George Orwell or George Bush?
When Neo experiences deja vu concerning the black cat, that just contributes to the "suspension of disbelief" that is required when viewing ANY science fiction story.
The Matrix is not any more "real" than UT or Quake or Myst.
It is a *story*, set in a make-believe world, with make-believe characters. Don't get so wrapped up in it.
Unless, of course, you actually took the red pill.
Let's play Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. I'll be Pestilence.
The Matrix is a piece of crap.
It has no theme and no continuity.
You could find in it justification for defining the Big Bang as the combination of two grease molecules in a stain on a Jack in the Box bag.
Don't mod this as flamebait. The article was flamebait.
from article...
:-)
So, how does the active pill, the red one, work? Since virtual aspirin can work as a painkiller, the avatar's software module must be able to accept instructions to cancel out any given sensory input. Evidently, the red pill gives the avatar a blanket command to cancel all such input.
To me this is all ass backwards... The Red Pill taken in the virtual world CAN'T interact with the physical body...
I can't believe the matrix would leave such a gaping backdoor in place that would allow input to be cut off to an avatar (hey, I work for security company...)
However, what I can believe is that the Red Pill is code that once "taken" by the avatar can identify it's address and "simulate" the avatar, address and all. We all know what happens when you get two machines on the network with the same address... I believe this sets off the chain of events and that what actually occurs is:
- Red Pill assumes avatar address
- Matrix detects duplicate address and runs diagnostics which interrupt information flow to avatar / human
- Human senses real surroundings and physically starts to disconnect
- Matrix detects human disconnected (not functioning properly)
- and ejects them
I can't believe I just spent this much time on something that means nothing... but dammit I'm right!!!
Humans will probably need something like the Matrix to survive. Left to our own, we'd probably destroy ourselves by nuclear war, biological/chemical disaster, eventual depletion of natural resources, or something not yet forseeable. With a system like the Matrix, this could be prevented, allowing the human race to survive indefinitely, or at least a lot longer.
Food for thought.
I got the impression that dead humans weren't the *only* source of food for humans in the Matrix; it's was just a major component.
It's alot more efficient to eat raw grains and vegetative matter, but instead, we feed the cows the vegetative matter and then we eat the cows.
Same thing in the Matrix. The AI likes the 'taste' of human energy, even if it is less efficient. So they will go through great effort to cultivate this energy.
move on.
I was watching Total Recall the other night and noticed that at one point the bad guys try to give Arnold's character a Red Pill and tell him that if he takes it, it will allow him to wake up and return to reality. Hmmm... I wonder...
Matrix has a lot of archetypes and mythology in it, so does, for example, LOTR and even Harry Potter. I don't think it's a coincidence, that they are so popular - people like them, because they recognize in them what they have carried in them all the time. None of these three mentioned movies/books have (arguably) much of a story, but they are so full of symbols that you don't even notice it...
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
...that has GOT to be a lie. The care and feeding of human beings has GOT to require so much more power than they produce - we are energy sinks in the long run, not energy producers. And as for human brains as processing power, no, no, no, no, NO - chips of silcon, or diamond or whatever has got to be more efficient for a machine intelligence. It only makes sense for the machine to keep the humans because they want an audience! They began as servants of humankinds and I think that directive, as misguided as it became, it still strong in their programming, so they continue to nuture, preserve, and control the humanity of the "The Matrix" out of habit more than anything else. Or maybe a sense of purpose. I bet the "coppertop" reason will fall in one of the sequels.
Actually the challenge with stable fusion isn't the huge amounts of energy required to jumpstart the process, its the matter of not blowing the fuck out of yourself once it starts.
And that might take a bit of work. I guess the most common idea right now is a torus magnetic field to control the plasma, which would probably take plenty of energy. But that doesn't prevent us nessecarily from discovering other methods, like say a microgravity photon conversion system (sure its inefficient and unworkable, but so is everything else these days).
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I can't believe that the article missed the most obvious technology parallel: The guy who could change The Matrix could have easily given anyone else superuser priveledges, and he did so to Neo when he was born. This is what makes him The One. He didn't realise it until he started overwriting Agent Smith's process space, or maybe he was just a member of the "wheel" group and he was "su"'d by The Oracle when he went to see her (the cookies probably worked by being a trojan horse and tweaking Neo's data stream to make him feel better).
While I'm on a Matrix rant:
I've always thought the concept of "death" in cyberspace to be retarded. I mean, come on. Who's going to build a piece of computer equipment that could kill them through normal operation. Nobody. Or at least no-one who'd be around long enough to get anyone else to give it a go. This "kill the user" feature must have been deliberately added by the machines, and it stands to reason that the very first thing you'd do apon "hacking the matrix" would be to remove or disable that feature.
Maybe I need to get out more.
I loved that scene. Remember, the one where he explains that we are being used as Copper Top (tm) batteries.
Wouldn't cows work better than humans?
Another Question: Presuming Neo (or any of the others) had never seen an image of himself before, how did he have an accurate concept of the way he looked before being 'freed' from the matrix? ie: the way he looked in the matrix was exactly the same as the way he looked in 'real life' (aside from the shaved head).
An interesting idea may have been to have the 'sleeper' and the matrix versions look totally different. It would have made more sense. Unless, of coure, it is something to be approached in the sequel.
Not actually a human. A viral code that checks to see if it is compatible with the system it is interfacing with (the wetware of the hopefuls). The oracle was left there by the original Neo to try to evolve a program capable of kicking the Matrix out of kilter with the human reasoning, and therefore creating people with semi-magical powers.
The knocking over of the vase was a test to see if the virus/Oracle could influence the subconscious of Neo (the current one), and since she soulc, she knew that this was a possible candidate for a replicated host. Giving him a checkup merely allowed the Oracle to double check, and see what changes in the Matrix for him was necessary. Since it's hard to work out how to do this, the Orcle usually fails.
There was a book series that started off with "Hyperion" (I forget the author), which at a system of portals for hopping from planet to planet that was controled by the AIs. The crux was that whenever a human entered a portal, they'd grab his or her brain for a bit and use it for some calculations. The portal system was so widespread that people used it many times a day; some even had homes with rooms upon different planets.
Later on in the series, this system is destroyed, and the machines try to harvest computing power by force, planning for a matrix-like system where humans are stored in a massive underground labyrinth and used solely for number crunching. The reason why the AIs needed such calculating power was that most of them were obsessed with creating a Deus Ex Machina; a computer that was omniscient. This decision was probably influenced by fact that said ultimate computer was communicating to them from the future, and sending some, small nasty things back into the past to aid it's ancestors/creators.
The allegory is only the first step of the Neo's adventure. Once he realized that the 'real world' is a model playing out in his brain (which is correct), he flips out (following white rabbit, like Alice in Wonderland) and descends into a paranoid schizophrenia. This is similar to Terminator story (or Alices' story), except that in the Terminator, the madness of the female hero (also inhereted by her son) is more explicit.
The tip-off that it is a madness are the difficulties in maintaining plausibility and logical coherence of the 'reality' the hero believes in. His limited knowledge of sciences, history and almost everything else, limits his psychotic model to the domain he is most familiar with -- a model by programmer has the computer as the basis of his scheme of the world. The rest, which he doesn't understand, is incoherently patched up (like humans as the energy source). His upbringing in the college PeeCee brainwash shows through the role of the ecology and the predictable multicultural racial and gender stereotyping in his model (which is the two parameter function, where one axis is skin/hair pigment, the other axis is testosterone -- increasing levels of skin/hair pigment and/or lower testosterone imply greater intelligence, wisdom, goodness,... lower pigment and/or larger testosterone imply dumber, more machine-like and more evil).
This article was fairly interesting up to the final "question" he addressed, of machines and consciousness. Most of that was incredibly superficial and not very insightful. The quantum elements were slightly interesting, thouh hardly novel.
:)
However, where this really fell apart to me was at the end, when he described Agent Smith's questioning of Morpheus as an example where Smith "appeared" conscious but "betrayed" his lack of consciousness.
First of all, he claims the statement, "The smell, if there is such a thing..." shows that Smith logically must question whether taste exists, not being able to experience it himself. However, that seems to be at best merely an assumption that that's what Smith was doing and, at worst, a huge stretch. I might, myself, say that, "This city has a smell of fear. That smell, if such a thing exists, is everywhere." That doesn't mean I question the existence of the concept of smell, but merely am not sure if there is such a thing as a "smell" of fear. It's the attempt to descibe an undescribable sensation and, at the same time, questioning your attempt at description's validity.
He goes on to say that Agent Smith saying he can "taste your stink," is an example of Agent Smith being unable to differentiate sensations and that, being unsentient, automatically works from the premise that sensations are all fungible, like raw information. Talk about taking prose incredibly literally. It makes me wonder whether the author is, in fact, an android. If speaking of manipuating one sense with another was an example of inhuman lack of understanding of subjective experience, then half a million poets that live among us are actually non-human computers, which is extremely disturbing. A poetic request of a woman to "Give me one last taste of the sweet tones of your voice," should attract Turing police to take away the requestor for android destruction, beyond the crime of trite poetry. This is another incredibly weak piece of evidence.
Finally, the author justifies all these things Agent Smith says thusly: "Smith is mimicking human behavior as a tactic to trick Morpheus into cooperation."
Wanting to trick Morpheus into cooperation suggests motives and desires. It suggests wants and long-term goals. These seem like rather conscious aspects. In fact, the author leaves completely unaddressed why, if all these Matrix adminstration are unsentient programs, they want to rule Earth, why they want to win out over the human rebels, or even more basically, why they want to survive. All these wants seem like the desires of a conscious entity. It definitely seems like a troubling enough problem to his premise that he should have addressed it.
Had he not delved into those issues of the consciousness, or lack thereof, of the Matrix administration, the article would have been an interesting read on the ideas behind some of the plot devices. The discussion on the phone booths to enter and exit was quite well executed. However, this final part to his essay seemed amateurish and incomplete, which ruined the overall subjective experience of the paper!
It just seems like a waste of a semester - an intermediate level class could easily cover that work in less than a month. Your introductory semester could have been used to cover more topics that were more interesting, perhaps prompting one to seek a further study of philosophy.
But you're right about needing context, and about needing professors to talk about it to really understand it.
Now I would like to see him break down "The Core". I have had many sleepless nights worrying about whether the Earth's core will stop spinning, spawning giant explosive lightning bolt storms that blow up everything.
PS - I didn't actually see the movie, the commercials were disturbing enough.
..everybody was talking about. This is the basic starting point of the book which the movie failed to show. The fact that humans were used as an energy source was just a secondary device by the author to move on with the plot. The basic theme is not "what humans were used for" but that "freedom is in your mind", etc.
So, Peter B. Lloyd is basically offtopic. I mod Peter B. Lloyd and his study at -1.
But the question is: what would happen if you took BOTH the red AND the blue pill.
I skimmed the article referenced here and then read through a majority of the postings about the article.... It is just a movie, guys Just like trekkies or Star Wars fanatics (do they have a nickname?) or LOTR droolers, most of you are making way too much out of this motion picture.
This was a script written by a couple of guys who used some originality, but also some previously-used themes/ideas/etc and shot it with some kewl effects/cinematography/etc...... please don't forget the one (1) purpose of the matrix... profit for Warner Brothers...not your enlightenment, not the creation of a new geek religion, but to hook you into watching/buying their movie and the next two....(now stepping off of soap box....)
...we are from the government - we are here to help...
The sequel "The Gaytrix" reveals that the Matrix is controlled by Macs running Linux.
The Matrix might have been a more memorable film if it wasn't for the one line:
Woah. I know Kung-fu.
That ruined the whole SoD thing for me...
At one time, the Earth was substantially flat.
Actually, the idea that most people believed the earth was flat is a true "willful suspension of disbelief". Some quick sources I found googling are here here and here
Obviously the 'who started the myth' question does not have a clear answer, and there have been groups that have believed the Earth to be flat (such as the Hebrews, apparently). But there are so many things that give evidence of the earth's roundness (easy example: stand on a tall hill and look towards the horizon) that of course most people have never believed the Earth to be flat. Saying otherwise is usually just standard "Isn't (Western) modern man so clever and civilized!" propoganda.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
Here's why the Matrix is so popular:
1) The system. Being inside the system.
2) Elements. Players of the system. Trapped.
3) Change. Jumping from system to system.
4) Stable. Rules of the game do not change.
3) Hofstadter. Stepping out of the system.
4) Portals. Gateways between systems.
5) Conflict. Struggle of good and evil.
6) Subspaces. Matrix is part of the real world.
7) Magic. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
8) Limits. Rules of the system. Breaking the rules. Using the rules.
9) Oracle. Power to find the correct answer.
10) Djinn. Power to modify and change.
11) God. Lack of power to modify and change.
12) Master/slave. Power to control.
13) Creation. Power to create.
14) Destruction. Power to destruct.
15) Inverses cancel.
16) Choice. Red or Blue. Darkness and the light.
17) Errors. The cat. Unwanted side effects. Deja-fu. Timeless way of building.
18) Gödel. The system is not perfect. Ever.
19) Russel. Local rules. Beating the paradoxes. Types.
20) Substitute. Smith to replace a player.
21) Time. Execution. Change.
22) Composition. Chaining. State of the system.
23) Counting. Cardinals. Numbers.
24) Hero. The one with the power.
25) Leads-to. Dark side of the force. Modus ponens. The god complex. Absurd.
26) Ideals. Freedom. Breaking the chains. Truth.
27) Base. Zero. Origo.
28) Step. One. Unit. The one.
29) The end. Normal form. End of time. Wrong tool.
30) Hom. Inner. Implies.
Count which ones you find from the movie.
The rules of good stories, logic, math, the Matrix.
By far the most interesting and enlightening book I've read about consciousness, the brain, and whether computers can be conscious is Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach.
So long, and thanks for all the Phish
(Minor point: contrary to what the article states, the neonate actually has more synapses than an older child. Extensive pruning of synapses occurs as the baby matures. The pruning is what makes the synapses useful. Otherwise the brain would simply remain a chaotic tangle of fibers sending random electrical impulses to each other-- pathophysiologically similar to a generalized seizure disorder.)
Is it the diaphragm or the heart that kills you?
What probably happens when the avatar dies is that the person probably stops breathing first. The heart and the gut can continue to function without any input from the brain, but the diaphragm cannot. Once you stop breathing, you have about 6-8 minutes before your blood starts desaturing with regards to oxygen, beyond which the dearth of oxygen starts to irreversibly damage your heart and brain. This might explain why Neo starts fibrillating--this doesn't happen to healthy normal people just because they are experiencing an anxiety attack, but it does happen if you start running out of oxygen.
It could very well be that the Matrix actually sends a signal to directly paralyze the diaphragm.
An easy way to get around this is to put the real person on a ventilator. Though maybe the rebels just don't have a ventilator, or even someone with the ability to intubate people.
Alternatively, what can happen is that the Matrix sends a signal that disrupts the sympathetic nervous system, sending the body into neurogenic shock, and eventually causing the heart to fail, but this would take a longer time to kill someone.
What this can't explain, however, is why people die if they get abruptly disconnected from the Matrix. Provided that you aren't paralyzed, the natural drive to breathe should kick in.
*feeling hypocrite* (Just speculated about mechanics of cyberspace ;)
The amount of useful brain cycles I put to speculating about details of some stories (also movies, etc.)
I read long ago is terrifying.
All those seconds could have been used to
some fun, creative or real work.
(Or even helping the fellow man)
*sigh*
Somehow I feel that many of those stories, while (no denying it) very entertaining and interesting
are now some kind of bagage of clutter I can't shake off.
They have very little connection to the
actual world I'm living in and now contribute very
little to anything...
m
testing out my trending skills
Remember, Morpheus said he didn't know when the humans and machines united, but he said "It was us that scorched the sky." He is quoted after previously stating that the machines and humans united. This could mean several things, such as the machines were needed to be our acting agents or to protect us from an environmental issue, such as "us that scorched the sky," or it was a preemptive union to prevent a possible catastrophe that has been documented in science journals; meteor showers, nuclear war, plague, unusual solar flares, flying elephants [politicians] and donkies [more politicians] shitting on everyone.
From other slashdotters, I continually see the typical ignorance from people not studying the impact of the words and actions, instead predominantly watching the kung-fu. From the script [storyline], I receive the idea that the Matrix is subordinate to humans, and is meant to maintaine and pacify our existance in a virtual world due to some condition of the real world, but in the movie the Matrix's agents are required to keep the peace in the Matrix and this means doing whatever possible to prevent anyone outside from causing an effect inside, which the Matrix's agents are simply not fast enough for a human's brain impulses, lest the Matrix's agents are a part of the Matrix's beowulf cluster and must share the system processing resources: this means if grandma is throwing knives, instead of knitting, the [Matrix] agents can't always have good branch prediction of a moving out-of-sync object.
To explain why the red pill and blue pill have effect, same as the telephone booths, when everyone knows they don't exist; it is an issue with the human conciousness and its flawed implementation in the actual Matrix: the Matrix is a virtual world that administers its users/participants/entities both inside and outside. Ask yourself, how does a Unix system add an account? First, you need someone to put you in; and as we know, Morpheus and a few others already have the implants to interface with the Matrix all-the-while Tank and Dozer do not have such (they were naturally born). Just as it does in the Matrix; someone on the outside is authenticated (the Matrix must be designed by MCSE's, because they assume anyone with a Windows Key (implant) is a logical Windows lease; resources in system [Matrix] recognize and validate the user, and the user appears by whatever source. Apparently, in the Matrix, a telephone is a privileged device where those on the outside with valid accounts in the Matrix (recognition by mere use, thus implied MS Windows Key) are able to broadcast a [pirate] signal into the Matrix. Further because the cross-communication of a teletype device in the Matrix somehow construes the Matrix world into accepting the [virus] pirate participants, they are having a worldly presence in the Matrix. The pirates modulate a virtual presence into the Matrix, and of which requires and confuses and paralizes the human mind and soul to the every flaw and conciousness of the Matrix: You will die outside if you die in the Matrix.
That clear?
Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 180 seconds exceeded in ../mindx/common.inc on line 85
Matrix overloaded...
Maybe the AI software runs more efficiently on a meat substrate than on a silicon one (perhaps some bizarre property of the human brain which we haven't yet discovered makes it congenial for this). You say "why do the machines keep the humans around", as if there were separate silicon boxen around somewhere, running the AI program, using the humans just to regulate the messy controlled fusion stuff. I'd say it's more likely that the _only_ processing systems in the Matrix are the brains of the captive humans. The AI are not "machines", they are software, and that software presumably runs more easily on a beowulf cluster of repurposed human brains than it does on traditional computers.
one could speculate that the robots are programmed not to kill humans, except if the humans are endangering the rogots existence.
When the agents are trying to break morpheus, after they inject him, he exchanges a look with the other AI, and the injection has no effect. I speculate that some AI's want the humans to live, and be free.
They are AI, so there is no reason why some couldn't have a different opinions.
" and the power of their minds thus causes their bodies to be sustained as if it were actually happening"
then how could brain dead individuals servive on just intervienous drip?
how can someone die without knowing what hit them?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I know, no one cares about the reasons, but that battery scene in the movie just completely ruined it for me (and it was too loud, but anyway).
Maybe a more reasonable explanation for the existence of the Matrix and the need for humans to wake up and do something, would be if say, in the not so distant future the Earth really does get too polluted and star travel is infeasible. The existing population decides to build this facility where everyone can all be part of a virtual world where everything is nice, peachy and comfortable, as a way to minimize energy use (everyone fits neatly in a small space that does not require much heating or cooling and eats very little). This sounds like a great idea so most everyone joins up and the simulation starts.
After a few years or generations people forget the ugly real world altogether. That's when machines that were supposed to look after the simulation become uppity and start having ideas of their own, such as for example having plans to halt the simulation and kill everybody, once they have complete control over it, which isn't just yet.
A few people who had refused to join the simulation somehow become aware of this fact. The task is to wake up everybody to fix the problem before the rogue machines kill them.
You would have a largely still neutral Matrix with some Humans trying to find out how to alert everybody of the fact of the existence of the Matrix (they don't have the instruction manual so they must work a homegrown solution) and a number of rogue AI trying to take over the whole lot, starting with neutralizing the independent Humans. Basically you would have two factions with independent super-human powers in this simulation with most everything else looking normal, but this time with some consistency.
The story would be largely untouched but it may be a bit more beliveable than the energy bit.
p.s. it was m2'd "Fair"
...but I took issue with a couple points made by Mr. Lloyd. I have a lengthy discussion of it over on my journal, but basically, I thought his discussion of consciousness and artificial intelligence was a bit flawed. Also, while I agree with his assertion that the machines of the Matrix would probably rely more heavily on cold fusion than human biothermal/bioelectric energy, I doubt that the machines would throw away the biothermal/bioelectric energy generated by the humans plugged into the Matrix. Indeed, that energy would probably be used to offset the cost of keeping things running.
If Lloyd had spent less time hand-waving about quantum mechanics and consciousness (and reading way, way too much into a couple lines spoken by Agent Smith during Morpheus' interrogation), the article would have been far better. As it is, Lloyd came across as a kind of philosophy snob.