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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)?""
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
It very well could be personal preference on my part, but the theory had stood up against comparisons with friends/family/colleauges time and time again.
The yardstick I'm using to measure the validity of my statement is the fact that for myself and many others I know, it -does- infact stand the test of being dragged out once a year (or heck, once a quarter in my case) and watched time and time again... And each time I get chills.
And it's not the special effects that do it for me, not all of it anyways. And for surely not the acting ("woah!")... it's just the story, the idea, the philosophy.
It's one of those situations that you can't really point a finger at, it's just a gut feeling in the pit of your stomache as to "yay" or "nay". Not for everone, but it's everything for some (if that makes any sense).
The biggest thing that I've noticed is that it's UNIQUE (at least to modern popular TV-centric culture). I know it's been done in anime, in books, and in a variety of other entertainment forms, but for most of the North American/Europian world, it's unique and thusly stands out. Just like Starwars did in the 70's.
I won't say that LOTR isn't in the same category, but for me, who read the books as a young child in junior high, and who wasn't terribly impressed with them (Actually forced myself to read them all, found them fairly sluggish and grueling to read) it just doesn't press my "Best Thing Ever" buttons.
You've got it backwards (like the soviet russia joke..). In the matrix, they only know what fried chicken tastes like, thus everything tastes like fried chicken.
The article attempts to explain how the matrix can know the taste of fried chicken, but not the taste of anything else.
An online Starcraft RPG? Only at
In the matrix, soviet russia jokes about you!
Online Starcraft RPG? At
Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
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.
"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
Firstly, I really liked the matrix alot. It wasn't hyped when I saw it so I had no idea what to expect (I was actually expecting another sub-par Keanu movie). I was blown away, it had lots of awesome action themes all mixed together - guns and ammo, martial arts, computer hackery, electronica soundtrack, etc. I thought it rocked.
That said, I thought the dialog was rather weak and cheesy at times. Philosophically there was nothing really new to the matrix that hasn't been considered for at least several hundred years. I was a physics/philosophy major in college, so these were all topics we talked about constantly. In one of the philosophy classes called 'theory of knowledge' i think, we spent the first 6-8 weeks merely talking about how one can be sure they're not dreaming or about reality, etc. This, of course, can be nicely summarized in Descartes statement (translated) "I think therefore I am". Meaning the only thing we can ever really be sure of is that we exist, which we know by the fact we're capable of rational thought. None of our senses or other input can be trusted.
Anyway, suffice to say, I thought dialog was pretty cheesy in the Matrix "what is real, is it something we can see and touch or electric impulses in our neurons", etc. Age old material for the philosopher. Also things that most folks that laid back and smoked a doobie probably thought about as well. It was good to see these things brought out into a mainstream Hollywood flick that goes beyond a babe in a bikini doing kung fu. But I didn't think the movie really went particularly deep.
What I'm saying is that it's good this movie seems to have opened new avenues of thinking for you that you weren't aware of. And I'm glad to see it encourage philosophical thought. But if that's your interests, and it sounds like they are, you are doing yourself a dis-service by only reading philosophical commentary on the matrix. If you have real interests, you should go beyond Hollywood to the source and read some of the classics, try Plato (Socratic Dialogs) or Descartes or Nietzsche.
make world, not war
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,
Well, here's the way I see it. The explanation for humans as given in the movie was extrememly weak. Therefore, in order to "stay" in the world of the movie, I say to myself, "The computers need humans for some reason that is not clearly explained." I don't need to know what that is exactly, I'm willing to accept that it's not adequately explained, or the explanation doesn't make any sense.
Just repeat to yourself, "It's just a show, I should really just relax."
At the end of the day it's "robots vs. kung fu". What could be cooler?
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Obviously you've never worked on a big storytelling project.
There are a lot of things within the story world that the creators spend a lot of time thinking about. When it's well done, that thinking goes well beyond "wouldn't red or blue pills be cool?" to actual thought about how the people in the real world could track down people in an immense simulation. Obviously the science won't be perfect, but don't think for a second that the creators of the Matrix of lots of other scifi films don't have a good idea how their world operates.
Projects like The Matrix start out with "woah man, what if the world were just a simulation?" and from there evolve into functional worlds. Machines took over and wired up humans. Why wire them up instead of killing them all? For power. Why not use solar energy or some other source? Sky was darkened. Why not give them a perfect world they wouldn't want to escape from? Their brains won't accept it. This kind of question and answer is what leads to stories.
Storytelling is important. It has been for years. The people who stop to look at how good stories are told are the ones who will be able to tell stories of their own.
What Future?
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
I'm posting anonymously, for obvious reasons. Posting pro-Microsoft can often get modded up around here as insightful, but I don't dare say anything against the Matrix.
It's not that I hate it, but I have never seen what all the fuss is about. I saw it as pretty good special effects, but the flaws that the article is trying to explain away are enough to ever keep me from really thinking much of it.
The worst flaw of all is the need to go to the telephone to get out. That just reminds me of the worst aspects of Star Trek. Oh no, the holodeck's safety systems are off! Oh no, Q has given this fantasy a life of its own! Oh no, the transporter won't work to get us out of this!
As with Trek, and many other stories, it would be very boring if Neo and his pals could get out of any dangerous situation at any time. THAT is the reason for the phone booth requirement.
But hell, I don't know. Even JMS (of Babylon 5 fame) thinks that the Matrix is the greatest thing ever. I guess I'm just missing something. It's my loss.
...how such a terrible film like The Matrix can be such a big thing to so many people? The plot is terrible (on top of cliche and overdone), the acting is sub-par, the exposition is awkward ("EMP? What's that?" - "AI? You mean Artificial Intelligence") and the whole concept just stinks.
i can't agree with you here. i'm going to try to pick apart your argument with the intention of determining whether the movie really is terrible, or whether you just didn't like it (a perfectly valid opinion, but an opinion nonetheless.)
first point, plot. you call it terrible and cliche, and i've got to tell you, *every* plot is cliche. there are only two basic story formats in the world, as far as i've seen. "a man goes on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town." think about it. citizen kane: a man goes on a (psychological) journey. star wars: a stranger (luke) comes to town (to the rescue). mary poppins is the best example of a stranger comes to town that i can think of. so in terms of originality, i'd say the concept of the whole world being a simulation is pretty good, and certainly original in the context of mainstream cinema. star wars was entirely based (deliberately) on a plethora of old world myths, many greek and roman, and many chinese and japanese. the power of a story re-told is no lesser thatn the power of a story told.
second point, acting. you're right. the acting is sub par. so is the acting in a great deal of the films we know and love. the important thing is to consider the conext. mark hamill was awful in star wars, but he was genuine and that's what mattered. none of the kids in goonies are any good as actors, but they were so much fun that it didn't matter. keanu was hired to stand there and look cool, and let's be honest, he did that pretty well.
as i've said, context. was the matrix the next casablanca? no, of course not. but everything has its place. it took a giant step forward in the realm of visual film production, and not just with the bullet time effects. the costuming style, the modern film noir references... it was a huge contributor. it also filled a niche, imho, that star wars filled in the seventies, which was a well known film with a story about truth versus lies, right versus wrong, and a good solid non-denominational look at opression of the little people by the ruling class. that is a universal set of issues which every generation needs to have a version of, and many people feel like the matrix is ours. surely, there isn't a better example in the last five years.
in the end, you might not like it, but there's no denying that the matrix was a well made film. the fact that so many people feel so passionately about it means that there's something there which speaks to people on a fairly broad level. so before trashing it, consider whether you're just having a reaction to its popularity (like me with forrest gump: never seen it, don't want to.), or whether you just don't like it yourself. but to call it a terrible film is just unfair. especially considering that there are movies out there (like ballistic) that really deserve to be alone in the terrible film category...
there can be hours between the so and the what of the so.
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...
Uh, it's not unique -- atleast the idea isn't. Ever read Plato? It's in The Republic -- The Allegory of the Cave. That's the Matrix preloaded.
Actually, a movie that is much closer to "The Allegory of the Cave" is "The Truman Show."
True-man show, get it? I don't think The Matrix really fits with Plato's allegory very well, Neo doesn't realize he's a prisoner on his own, he gets a lot of help. In the Truman Show everyone is trying to prevent Truman from find out the truth, which is much closer to Plato's allegory.
Life is too short to proofread.
Actually, it's more of a Gnostic theme than a Orthodox Christianity theme. He's not Yeshua per say, but a normal human who have achieved gnosis via death and then rebirth (when he realizes he didn't really die, because it wasn't real in the first place). Jesus didn't really achieve gnosis in that way, it was a pre-planned end-run around the Blind One by Sophia. He achieved it when he was baptized (i.e. the "dove" descending on him). If you notice, he didn't start his major teachings until after that.
The Matrix also closely follows Philip K. Dick's VALIS. Read that book if you find the ideas in the Matrix interesting...it has much more "source" material (like where various ideas in the book actually come from in antiquity), and it's parallels to The Matrix are rather obvious.
If you find it REALLY interesting, check out sites like The Odyssey of Gnosis and so on.
Maybe we DID take the blue pill. You wouldn't remember anyway.
When I see The Matrix, I don't think philosophy, I think mythology.
Have you ever read Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces? It treats mythology from a Jungian/Freudian psychoanalytic perspective. All of the major elements of classical mythology are present in films like Star Wars or The Matrix.
Taking the opening The Matrix as an example:
While I don't think you can discount the philosophical aspect, I don't think that this is necessarily even the point of The Matrix. There's not so much philosophy that you can present in 3600ft of film. On the other hand, as modern mythology, I think it works well.
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I think, more accurately, they reference from "Cartesian Doubt". In his Des Cartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy," he begins by doubting what we accept as fact: our perceptions. Since the Matrix modulates electrical impulses for our brains to control our perceptions, I think it would directly relate to Cartesian Doubt, not an allegory of seeing shadows on a cave wall.
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 whole thing is 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.
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.
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!!!
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 is common thematic in many cyberspace stories.
:)
;)
:)
ie. the physical body dies when the mental projection experiences something nasty.
This used to bug me sometimes while reading fiction
Best "explanation" I came up with is that advanced cyberspaces actually replicate part of the persons mind with some hardware somewhere. (This would kind of eliminate lag as we know it
Then the function of the cranial plug or whatever
is to keep the natural counterpart in sync with the simulation.
(Inaccurate or partial simulation also requires information the other way.)
Now we can explain those "body can't live without the mind" statements. The mind is actually away in some sense and the "natural" mind is not functioning normally. When the connection to the simulation is terminated without proper protocol, the natural mind is unable to resume where the simulation left off.
Amazing what you can come up with when your imagination hit's a snag. I'm slightly proud
of my self for getting this improbable idea