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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.
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
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
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...
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.
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.