The in-film evidence is that he's human: the Architect says so, the Merovingian says so, Councillor Hannan says so, and one of the Agents says so.
It goes without saying that *anybody* might turn out to be a machine in the end. But if we're forming hypotheses based on what the Wachowski brothers have put on the screen so far, the inference must be that Neo is human.
Since the normal conditions of play for a human in the Matrix is that s/he must comply with a standard physics simulation, Neo must have hacked into the Matrix to some degree. Otherwise he wouldn't have superhuman powers.
On the other hand, he is not omnipotent. If he were, he could annihiliate arbitrarily many Agents with a single thought; he could teleport; he could vaporise the power station and disable the back-up system with another thought. Since he doesn't exercise omnipotence when he has good reason to do so, the filmic evidence is that he is not omnipotent.
In fact, the powers that he does have are consistent with the hypothesis that he has hacked into the Matrix network and he is issuing commands within the repertoire that the Matrix normally uses.
This is not proof, but it is the least implausible hypothesis consistent with the in-film evidence.
The Wachowskis haven't showed us real life yet. The blue world is another matrix (ie a Meta-Matrix). (This is proved by the fact that Neo stops the sentinels by raising his hand.) So we have been shown only two virtual worlds, the Matrix and the Meta-Matrix. There are good (albeit subtle) reasons to believe that the two worlds have the same architect. Therefore it is very likely that neonates enter both matrices at the same time, and are assigned the same avatar code. Hence they look the same in both virtual worlds.
What Neo looks like in real life (beyond the Meta-Matrix aka the Blue Matrix), we have no idea. He might be a Martian, even.
Or, there might not be a real physical world. Beyond the Meta-Matrix there might be pure consciousness (as Berkeley said).
My bet is on infinite recursion. When Neo pops out of the Meta-Matrix, he finds himself back in the Matrix.
(The somewhat ciruitous argument for why the Matrix and Meta-Matrix almost certainly have the same architect can be found in the link below.)
If the Architect were so keen to get Neo through the correct door, he simply wouldn't have told him of the other door.
Obviously it is crucial that Neo chooses.
So: My guess is that the Matrix was built by humans, not machines. They left in place a safety mechanism so that, if anything as drastic as a reboot is need, a human must authorise it. Neo is that human. But he messes it up by going AWOL to rescue Trinity.
Architect:... though the process has altered your
consciousness, you remain irrevocably human.
Curiously, some people expect Neo to stop being human. At the beginning of Reloaded:
Agent 3: He is still Agent 1: Only human.
Midnight chat:
Hamman: That's a good sign. Neo: Of what? Hamman: That you are in fact, still human.
The Merovingian, who might once have been a One, is no longer human. My guess is that the Merovingian is the exiled avatar of a dead human One. People expect Neo to die as a human but his avatar to continue as an exile. But the Architect says Neo is "irrevocably" human, which suggests Neo is following a different evolutionary path.
Nine screens, not three. Arranged in a 3 x 3 grid.
The Wachowskis have a liking for a small number of numbers, such 0, 1, and 3. Eg the power station powers 27 (=3x3x3) blocks of the City, which is a bit odd as city blocks are normally in grid, so you'd exect a square number of blocks, not a cubed number.
*If* (big if) the Wachowskis wanted to introduce reincarnation (yuk!), then Neo could be remembering his past lives. After all, in 'The Matrix', Morpheus specifically says that the original One will come back in person:
When the Matrix was first built, there was a man born inside who had the ability to change whatever he wanted, to remake the Matrix as he saw fit. It was he who freed the first of us, taught us the truth.... After he died the Oracle
prophesied his return and that his coming would hail the destruction of the Matrix and the war, bring freedom to our people.
Note: Morpheus does not say that somebody else with similar abilities will come along, but specifically that the original bloke, who died, will come back.
If that isn't reincarnation (or reinavataration), then what is?
So, the only idea that makes at least some sense of the available information is that Neo is a reincarnation who is recalling his previous lives when he says "2? 3?".
As I've said elsewhere, the screens cannot be showing recordings of past One's because (a) they all look and dress like Neo, and (b) we dive into one screen and continue the story from that point.
Neo is not omnipotent. The Matrix is a physics simulation, so he is limited to working within that framework. Evidently he has hacked into the network, so he can issue commands in the Matrix command language, but he can't make arbitrary changes to the simulation. (If he *could* do so, then surely he *would* have done so by now.)
Obviously the Matrix command language will have instructions such 'transfer energy and momentum from object 1 to adjacent object 2'. Neo issues these commands directly from his brain onto the Matrix LAN, and hence manages to fly and make swords jump into his hands. But he cannot e.g. teleport himself because the Matrix command languages would have no requirement for such a function.
It would be a very boring film if Neo were omnipotent. Which is why the Wachowskis didn't write it that way.
There's a very useful clue in the fact that the camera zooms into one of the screens, and the story continues from within the scene depicted in that screen.
This tells us that the screens are *not* showing past incarnations of The One as some people have suggested (which was improbably anyway given that they all look and dress like Neo). *Nor* are they merely predictions of what Neo might do.
My interpretation is this: the Matrix is monitoring all of the signals being emitted by Neo's brain, which inveitably reflect his conflicting thoughts. For example, when you imagine yourself saying something, weak motor signals are sent to your vocal chords. The Matrix is picking up all these conflicting signals and rendering multiple versions of Neo's avatar. Each such version is displayed on one screen.
Only one version -- one rendering of what Neo's brain is telling his body to do -- can actually be played back to Neo's brain as immersive VR.
What is happening when the camera zooms into one screen is that the Matrix is selecting a different version of Neo's actions and choosing to play *that one* back to Neo's brain.
As everyone else has noticed: when Neo is has no conflicting internal thoughts, there are no conflicting signals for the Matrix to detect, and so all the monitors show the same rendering.
The Architect does say, toward the end, that he is monitoring Neo's brain.
Peter B Lloyd
http://www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
What the Egyptian censors might not have picked up is the Wachowski brothers' subtle use of 'inverted allusion' (or 'ironic allsuion' if you're a lit.crit. rather than a techie). Censors are notoriously slow on following non-straightforward scripting.
For example, in the historical event (which is also retold in the Bible), King Nebcuhadnezzar II abducts people from Zion (aka Jerusalem) and ships them back home to Babylon. In the movie, the ship Nebuchadnezzar takes people from the Matrix and brings them *to* Zion.
So, the movie's Nebuchadnezzar performs the opposite role of the historical Nebuchadnezzar.
[BTW There are numerous other inverted or twisted allusions. E.g. Trinity is a girl, and Neo (the Jesus allusion) murders people.]
So, as regards Zion. This is not a direct allusion to Jerusalem at all. There are clues to this, such as the fact that it is deep underground (like hell), not on a hill (as the historical Zion was).
Moreover, the whole idea that Neo and his colleagues are the heroes is undermined by the evil that they are doing. This is clear at the level of collateral damage -- starting with Neo murdering the security guards in the government building, anc continuing with blowing up the power station and flying down the street at supersonic speed. It is even clearer in respect of their mission, which is to destroy the stable and prosperous society of the Matrix and reduce the human race to troglodytes.
Evidently, the people of Zion are, in fact, fundamentalist terrorists.
The movie Zion represents Babylon, which is the modern-day Iraq (which, in modern American mythology, is a veritable nest of fundamentalist terrorist so canny that they can hide even from an occupying force of the world's most powerful army).
If only censors could *read* films...
Peter B Lloyd
http://www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
Slashdot Mirror
It goes without saying that *anybody* might turn out to be a machine in the end. But if we're forming hypotheses based on what the Wachowski brothers have put on the screen so far, the inference must be that Neo is human.
Since the normal conditions of play for a human in the Matrix is that s/he must comply with a standard physics simulation, Neo must have hacked into the Matrix to some degree. Otherwise he wouldn't have superhuman powers.
On the other hand, he is not omnipotent. If he were, he could annihiliate arbitrarily many Agents with a single thought; he could teleport; he could vaporise the power station and disable the back-up system with another thought. Since he doesn't exercise omnipotence when he has good reason to do so, the filmic evidence is that he is not omnipotent.
In fact, the powers that he does have are consistent with the hypothesis that he has hacked into the Matrix network and he is issuing commands within the repertoire that the Matrix normally uses.
This is not proof, but it is the least implausible hypothesis consistent with the in-film evidence.
Peter B Lloyd
www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
What Neo looks like in real life (beyond the Meta-Matrix aka the Blue Matrix), we have no idea. He might be a Martian, even.
Or, there might not be a real physical world. Beyond the Meta-Matrix there might be pure consciousness (as Berkeley said).
My bet is on infinite recursion. When Neo pops out of the Meta-Matrix, he finds himself back in the Matrix.
(The somewhat ciruitous argument for why the Matrix and Meta-Matrix almost certainly have the same architect can be found in the link below.)
Peter B Lloyd
www.ursasoft.com/matrix.exegesis.htm
They do have aimbots. But Neo has a dodgebot. As indeed the Agents do. Remember Trinity got her kill in Matrix 1 by firing at point-blank range.
Obviously it is crucial that Neo chooses.
So: My guess is that the Matrix was built by humans, not machines. They left in place a safety mechanism so that, if anything as drastic as a reboot is need, a human must authorise it. Neo is that human. But he messes it up by going AWOL to rescue Trinity.
Peter B Lloyd
www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
Peter B Lloyd
www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
The Wachowskis have a liking for a small number of numbers, such 0, 1, and 3. Eg the power station powers 27 (=3x3x3) blocks of the City, which is a bit odd as city blocks are normally in grid, so you'd exect a square number of blocks, not a cubed number.
Note: Morpheus does not say that somebody else with similar abilities will come along, but specifically that the original bloke, who died, will come back.
If that isn't reincarnation (or reinavataration), then what is?
So, the only idea that makes at least some sense of the available information is that Neo is a reincarnation who is recalling his previous lives when he says "2? 3?".
As I've said elsewhere, the screens cannot be showing recordings of past One's because (a) they all look and dress like Neo, and (b) we dive into one screen and continue the story from that point.
Peter B Lloyd www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
Obviously the Matrix command language will have instructions such 'transfer energy and momentum from object 1 to adjacent object 2'. Neo issues these commands directly from his brain onto the Matrix LAN, and hence manages to fly and make swords jump into his hands. But he cannot e.g. teleport himself because the Matrix command languages would have no requirement for such a function.
It would be a very boring film if Neo were omnipotent. Which is why the Wachowskis didn't write it that way.
Peter B Lloyd
www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
This tells us that the screens are *not* showing past incarnations of The One as some people have suggested (which was improbably anyway given that they all look and dress like Neo). *Nor* are they merely predictions of what Neo might do.
My interpretation is this: the Matrix is monitoring all of the signals being emitted by Neo's brain, which inveitably reflect his conflicting thoughts. For example, when you imagine yourself saying something, weak motor signals are sent to your vocal chords. The Matrix is picking up all these conflicting signals and rendering multiple versions of Neo's avatar. Each such version is displayed on one screen.
Only one version -- one rendering of what Neo's brain is telling his body to do -- can actually be played back to Neo's brain as immersive VR.
What is happening when the camera zooms into one screen is that the Matrix is selecting a different version of Neo's actions and choosing to play *that one* back to Neo's brain.
As everyone else has noticed: when Neo is has no conflicting internal thoughts, there are no conflicting signals for the Matrix to detect, and so all the monitors show the same rendering.
The Architect does say, toward the end, that he is monitoring Neo's brain.
Peter B Lloyd http://www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm
What the Egyptian censors might not have picked up is the Wachowski brothers' subtle use of 'inverted allusion' (or 'ironic allsuion' if you're a lit.crit. rather than a techie). Censors are notoriously slow on following non-straightforward scripting. For example, in the historical event (which is also retold in the Bible), King Nebcuhadnezzar II abducts people from Zion (aka Jerusalem) and ships them back home to Babylon. In the movie, the ship Nebuchadnezzar takes people from the Matrix and brings them *to* Zion. So, the movie's Nebuchadnezzar performs the opposite role of the historical Nebuchadnezzar. [BTW There are numerous other inverted or twisted allusions. E.g. Trinity is a girl, and Neo (the Jesus allusion) murders people.] So, as regards Zion. This is not a direct allusion to Jerusalem at all. There are clues to this, such as the fact that it is deep underground (like hell), not on a hill (as the historical Zion was). Moreover, the whole idea that Neo and his colleagues are the heroes is undermined by the evil that they are doing. This is clear at the level of collateral damage -- starting with Neo murdering the security guards in the government building, anc continuing with blowing up the power station and flying down the street at supersonic speed. It is even clearer in respect of their mission, which is to destroy the stable and prosperous society of the Matrix and reduce the human race to troglodytes. Evidently, the people of Zion are, in fact, fundamentalist terrorists. The movie Zion represents Babylon, which is the modern-day Iraq (which, in modern American mythology, is a veritable nest of fundamentalist terrorist so canny that they can hide even from an occupying force of the world's most powerful army). If only censors could *read* films ...
Peter B Lloyd
http://www.ursasoft.com/matrix/exegesis.htm