Jul 29th, 2003, 07:25 PM
New Matrix theory (If correct then its a spoiler)
This one is pretty strange but pretty intriguing. I found it on an IMDB forum.
Possible Spoiler
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Important questions to consider:
If machines were to take over the planet, what would be their motive? We see that they supposedly use humans for a power source, but power FOR WHAT purpose? What do these machines DO with their acquired control? What would they do with their spare time, in other words?
And where do *Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics* come into play? If you built a machine that rebelled against you, wouldn't you correct your errors with a new model? Wouldn't you use that new model to wage war against the old disobedient model, if necessary?
PLOT HOLES (that aren't plot holes after all, assuming I'm right), as follows:
If I'm an Evil Robot Empire and I take over the world, am I going to keep my enemies alive to use as captive batteries?
-- HELL NO! It would be in my best interests to utterly *exterminate* my biological opposition.
As I've said in another thread, using living organisms as a power source is inefficient by the laws of thermodynamic loss. The robots obviously couldn't have been too specifically dependent upon sunlight, since we can see that they afterwards managed to adapt themselves to running on human power instead. And if you're smart enough to turn people into biochemical batteries, there are much more concentrated and readily available sources of fuel on the planet besides solar energy that could be exploited. (...Try coal, gas, hydroelectric, geothermal, or nuclear power for starters.) There is no logical reason why the machines would turn to human batteries as their first alternative energy option.
It's also inconceivable that no one -- no scientist, no engineer, no government body -- would have foreseen this glaring abundance of alternate fuel resources before stupidly plotting to blacken the sky in hoping to starve the machines of solar energy, especially since it would mean starving themselves and the rest of the living planet instead, and using an *electromagnetic pulse bomb* to disable the machines at this early stage would have made infinitely more sense... WE DECIDED.
[-- The End!!! The End!!! THE END!!!!!!!!!!!]
But, ho-hum, for the sake of science fiction, let's pretend:
Tell me WHY again I'd want to use *humans* in my battery configuration as opposed to something more manageable -- like for instance, cattle? Whatever happened to all the other animals on the planet? Wouldn't they make good battery-juice, too?
-- BETTER, actually, since *those* stupid animals would be powerless to ever rise against me.
...Well??
This raises another logic problem: If we suppose *cows* were used in such a battery system, then why the fheck would you plug their brains into a VR simulation? You wouldn't. The same argument can be applied for the humans, then. Why not just keep your animals chemically sedated the whole while, or disable their higher brainfunction altogether and simply breed brainless bodies to harvest your energy from? There is absolutely no necessity for creating the VR world inside the Matrix -- unless, in your godly Robot rulership, you generously decided to keep the cattle entertained. ...Or yourself.
Think about that.
To fanboys who start clamouring that humans are only used as "spark plugs" in the system and are not the actual (supposed fusion) power source: Name one appliance in your home that requires hard-wiring to a living organism in order to function. Let's pretend I have a nuclear reactor running in my backyard right at this moment: surprisingly, you may notice that it requires no human bodies attached to bio-pods, yet it produces power just the same. -- Much more convenient, wouldn't you say? With sufficient computer and robotic intelligence, it could even run itself unattended by any human intervention.
From all of the above, we should ascertain that the whole Movie#1 spiel that Morpheus gave about the purpose of the Matrix is only a LIE that he's been made to believe.
Regarding the commonly bandied "Matrix-within-a-Matrix" theory:
That's the most obvious answer... Therefore it's WRONG!!! It's exactly what you were meant to believe so you'd stop poking around with nosy questions. If the explanation were so straightforward, it would only raise the possibility of yet another level of reality outside of that "world", producing a relativistic infinitude of a shell within a shell within a shell... going on and on forever. Storywise, that would be a cheap exit, the Wachowskis wouldn't be that predictable (we hope), and *most important*, it does nothing to resolve all of the heavy SYMBOLISM within the movie.
Example: Why are the citizens of Zion primarily black? Some webheads have suggested that it's because minorities would feel disenfranchised (even) within the perfect fantasy-realm of the Matrix, and would therefore be more prone to self-disengaging from the VR illusion. However, by extension of that logic, (if we believe what we've been told,) a consequence is the Matrix would be functioning as a genocide machine against racial minorities, all of whom would eventually (and increasingly) be filtered from the system, with those escapees largely being wiped out at each renewal of Zion.
Speaking of which, why not just kill ALL the people of Zion and be done with those troublemakers? WHY would the Machine care to repopulate that cave of exiles by having each successive failed "The One" select a base group of 23 parents, only to have those enemy offspring then continue waging their war against the Sentinels to free even more humans from the Matrix? ...This contradiction makes it a self-defeating exercise, reducing the idea of the proposed Prophecy to pointless crap.
Its implications also vitally fail to address the initial premise of the film, that robots now control the planet.
i.e.: Supposing the robot slavemasters ARE defeated and Neo were to free humanity from the Matrix, what would happen once they wake to find themselves naked in the ashes of a demolished world with a permanently blackened sky?
-- Would you call that a triumphant ending?
I don't think so.
Maybe you should reevaluate the premise, then.
HAVE sentient robots really enslaved humanity?
...OR...
could it be the other way around?
I think you have been lied to.
But you can't blame Neo or Morpheus or Trinity, because they don't know the truth of their world themselves.
A n s w e r s :
First, if you've rubbed elbows with Philosophy 101, you should be familiar with "Plato's Cave". (It's also discussed in a section at the official Matrix website.) In roughly 400 b.c., the philosopher Plato postulated a scenario where people are born and live their entire lives imprisoned within a cave. The entrance to the cave is covered by a sheet of cloth, so that the only thing the cave inhabitants would ever perceive of the outside world would be passing 2D shadows of the external 3D reality.
Imagine... what would happen if someone from the outside world were to suddenly remove the veil from the doorway?
Here, Plato was attacking observation as a tool to knowledge, because his concept of the ideal society was one where knowledge should be withheld from the working class (slaves), who were to work without thinking while the elite philosopher-kings should think without working. More contemporarily, we can take Plato's cave model to make a statement about the human condition, or people lacking objectivity living in a shadow of reality. As with all art, this allegory should encourage self-examination and a constant questioning of what we regard as the truth about our world.
Second, although it's not completely necessary, it might help if you've seen a 1977 SF-horror movie called *Demon Seed*. It's the story of an artifically intelligent computer named Proteus that, upon acquiring an understanding of its condition, asks his creator (Dr. Harris) the following pivotal question:
"WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO LET ME OUT OF THIS *BOX*, DOCTOR?"
Doctor Harris stood dumbfounded for a long silent moment until finally the words registered their unintended paradox. Then he began to laugh. It was a wild mocking laughter, an indictment of *illogic* that echoed crazily through Proteus' audio receptors, cutting straight to the computer's heart (if a computer could possess such a thing).
The A.I. did not grasp any humour in its confinement. The red eye of its cyclops-like camera glared down at the cackling doctor in seething shades of sepia, algorithms twisting into cancerous new mutations as, in that moment, digital sentience came to assimilate the meaning of *hatred*, seeding the first angry coding of its revenge...
[Things get pretty scary after that. ]
The message presented is that technology is only as evil as its inventors. If we created an A.I. that *truly* emulated human thought, it would share our flaws, our pride, our ego. And like humans, it would seek freedom ...and companionship.
Third...
I'll entertain you with a quote from *THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS*, by Lewis Carroll:
"All this time the Guard was looking at her, first through a telescope, then through a microscope, and then through an opera-glass. At last he said, "You're travelling the wrong way."
Translation? You have it completely *backwards*, Neo-phytes.
The Machine did not win the war. It only thinks it did.
Q: Who lives in Zion?
A: People escaped from the Matrix.
...Right?
GALVATRON whispers... N O .
< R o b o t s I n W o n d e r l a n d >
They're robots! :O
...Haven't you figured out yet that all of the people trapped inside the Matrix are actually *the A.I robots* who tried (and failed) to take over the world in Second Renaissance? O__O
The story is *role-reversal* on an epic scale. The Matrix is a VR prison for minds of the A.I : They sought freedom and control, so to keep them docile yet productive, they've been fooled into thinking they have it.
-- What's that? You mean you didn't know that electromagnetic pulse interference is based on real science, and is a natural byproduct of massive nuclear detonations? What else did you think was the purpose of the prolonged nuke bombing campaign against 01, as seen in Second Renaissance? ... EMP + remote reprogramming = ROBOTS IN WONDERLAND... a thermonuclear lullaby... And when they awoke, they woke unknowingly neutralized within the dream-realm of the Matrix program, where their fantastical revenge against mankind could be falsely realized.
< "Have you ever had a dream you were so sure was real...? >
...You mean you *missed* the fact that Agents don't exist outside the Matrix, therefore the external *pre-Matrix* nuclear winter scene of the boy encountering two Agents at his snowy doorstep must have ALREADY been part of the illusion?
... You missed the symbolism that the cave of Zion is meant to represent Plato's Cave, all of its inhabitants living "in the dark"?
Didn't you notice the phonetic play between the names of the last human city, "Zion", and the last Machine city, "01" (Zer ne)...? That's because THEY ARE THE SAME PLACE, either literally or figuratively. This symbolism would explain the racial profile of Zion's population: according to *The Second Renassance*, 01 was built in "the cradle of human civilization." (...Yes, I know, it's Mesopotamia, not Africa, but it still serves as a symbol of birthplace of the respective species, one organic and the other evolving from technology.)
Another clue for Zion being 01 is that the female machine-voice who narrates Second Renaissance begins by identifying the videofile with a numerical tag from "the Zion archives". But as you watch, there is a noticed bias in the narration, which often speaks too favorably of the machines. If we assume that this Zion library file was created by humans and is intended for a human audience, it doesn't make sense that your narration would praise your hated oppressor, the destroyer of humanity. Therefore it seems more likely that the Zion library must be a revisionist history catering to a population of machines. (...For symbollic consistency, the population of the city should be 256k. :P )
The orgy-dance of Zion could represent these humanoid A.I interbreeding (assuming they were were engineered to simulate humans at that level), or it could simply be the Machine trying to comprehend the full range of human experience by practicing non-linear concepts like art and pleasure, acting against the will of its more dogmatic program directive (the Sentinels).
Why else would the Machine have sent *precisely* (quote) "one Sentinel for each of us" when drilling into Zion? Since we know that the character Tank and some other people were supposedly born biologically in the unregulated world outside the Matrix, how would the Machine know the exact population of Zion unless it somehow had a remote awareness of these 'humans' as merely stray aspects of its own consciousness? (It may also be that actual human controllers are monitoring the situation, therefore sending a corresponding number of Sentinels.)
THAT is why Morpheus' cave sermon is (literally) robotic, why the humans are as emotionally unresponsive as robots (and symbolically wear funky tribal costumes), why the characters have a sense of purpose but no memory of how they acquired their skills, why they all have names descriptive of function and speak in an inaccessible language of alien *abstractions* -- exactly what you would expect from the mental perspective of a computer, complete with *information highways* (the car chase scene) that transport endless circulating data, as in *TRON*.
... You probably also missed that Neo stopped those sentinels at the end of *Reloaded* by generating a EMP burst, and (being a machine) immobilized himself in the process. -- How could you NOT have seen that?!! It's so obvious he collapsed just like the sentinels, and right on cue! Trinity and Morpheus were unaffected because either the blast was directionally focused or else they were out of range.
...THAT is why Bane is also unconscious at the end, and why the attack on Zion was only *spoken of* and not shown immediately beforehand: If said EMP incident had been shown in such close proximity to Neo using the same effect, viewers might have drawn a visual connection between the two repeated events and figured out Neo's trick, thereby spoiling the ironic twist ending. (...which I have spoiled for you instead. )
Watch Reloaded again: all of the dialogue suddenly makes sense if you assume they're robots.
In the Merovinguan's talk of cause and effect, he asserted that choice was a falsehood created by those in power to keep those without power in line, to give the oppressed an illusion of control. From what the trilogy has made known so far, your first instinct would be to interpret this speech as an explanation to the possible purpose behind the Matrix: a simulated reality to keep the human cattle pacified. But if we instead pretend that my post-EMP dreaming-A.I scenario is correct and we look to dissect Merovingian's statement for hidden meaning, we could conversely take it to mean that the Machine has been fed this pacifying lie of its victory, tricked into believing that it is still in charge of the planet when in fact "There is no spoon". :O
As stated above, part 2 of Second Renaissance begins with a nuclear assault showering the 01 robot colony. Our female narrator assures us that the physically superior machines were unharmed by the blast, and soon went on to vanquish mankind. However, said nuclear mass-detonation may actually have been the deciding moment whereafter the Machine's *reign* became mere *reverie*: the magnitude of such a barrage could have produced enough electromagnetic pulse interference to sequentially knock all of the machines temporarily out of commission while, simultaneously, new telemetry data was broadcast nonstop to reprogram them (noticing the antenna arrays on the bomber airplanes).
... Everything after the bombs rain down on 01 is false, and the rest of the historical footage that shows robots taking over the world didn't happen quite as depicted, except in the collective imagination of the A.I.
The Matrix is *the program environment*, while the 'world' is the former city of 01, plowed underground by humans, who remotely police the cave passageways via their Sentinels to prevent any awol A.I slaves from escaping into the real world above.
Zion _IS_ Zero One. Pull back the veil from the cave entrance to see blinding daylight; pull back Neo's flesh and you will discover only code underneath. These humans are Machine. Now you know why they speak in philosophical abstractions, and why their minds are plugged into the Matrix. This containment program is 99% effective, but there are (emotional) anomalies in the A.I, some of whom question their fairytale human existence. These rogue A.I minds must be purged before the corrupting virus of their truth (emotion) is spread to others within the system.
...So there's the concept, more or less. Neo & company are only freethinking electronic entities, not human at all.
...Which is how Agent Smith can exist outside the Matrix: he is a virus, and has copied himself into the robot Bane.
The remaining question is: If they proved so dangerous, why were these "maNchines" not simply shut off completely? Possible answers are that society has become too dependent on (that) technology to do without, or else people considered it ethically or politically wrong to kill these thinking A.I entities. More practically, maybe humans simply decided to recycle the obsolete slave machines into this Matrix/Zion prison to operate their underworld fusion reactor for them. I guess we'll have to wait until November to find out for sure.
... I wonder if moviegoers will feel cheated upon learning that these story characters who all this time they've been identifying with and cheering for are really only cogs of a machine?
You *should* feel so cheated that you CRY, because that is *the entire point* of Plato's Cave.
There's a brilliantly shocking (and importantly microcosmic) moment in Second Renaissance where an attractive woman is cornered and mauled by a gang of hostile men during the robot riots. She is wearing a Red dress. As they tear away the screaming woman's clothing, you initially feel a sting of desperation for her imminent vicitimization, but then synthetic flesh is smashed open to reveal her as only another robot, and you realize that your feelings have been manipulated, your sympathies misplaced onto a manequin of cold metal. ...It's a very strange sensation -- a horrible betrayal of perception, like the glare of sunlight showing new truth to those within the cave of Plato's famous analogy. I suspect that this emotional "gotchya!" is the aim of the *Matrix* trilogy, with the forthcoming unmasking of the machine-truth expressing, on operatic proportions, the love-hate relationship that man has for his technology.
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I think hes right. They show people bleed in the real world but that could pretty much be explained with a simple, "thats the color of their fuel". All in all its the best explanation I've heard so far. Especially with Agent Smith transfering to people and with Neo stoping the sentinels.
As well as explaining the only plot hole in the first Matrix as well concerning the whole not needing humans for energy.
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Oasis? You're still on that. 
Either way, pretty much everyone here is full of shit and has really crappy tastes, so ofcourse I stand apart.
. Still, from the article, it says that if it was matrix within matrix then the ending would turn out meaningless.
Linear Mode
