H E L L O o o o ? ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION? As indicated in
the title, this ENTIRE THREAD is a SPOILER !!
Therefore, if you don't want to ruin the surprise, LEAVE NOW.
Alright, to be honest, it will be ruined for you anyway, because these
rumours will have percolated all across the internet and down to street
level conversation before November. XD
Special thanks go the ready2rumbleX, who checked out a couple of movie
facts for me, since I was too lazy to go rent the first DVD again. And
in
the unlikely event that my theory turns out to wrong, he can share half
the blame too. ...LOL
I'm going to split my answer here into several posts to visually break
things up, otherwise you would fall asleep reading all of this.
. . . Wake
up . . . Wake up, Neo . . .
If you don't want a HUGE spoiler (assuming this guy is correct) TURN
BACK NOW AND DELETE!
LOAD
PROGRAM
Hello, I'll be your SPOILER for today.
Before we even bother investigating psychologically complex Matrix
theories, the FIRST and LAST question you should have asked yourself
is: "How would robots have managed to take over the world?"
... Are you satisfied with the summarized history provided in Second
Renaissance? ... really? .... hmm.
That's exactly the trouble with machines: you're so naive, so easy easy
to lie to... so easy to *reprogram* with whatever truth we want you to
believe... especially when we drop a thousand megatons of flaming EMP
down on your scrambled A.I head. ...hahaha... The Machine is a fool who
dreams of world rule. I know the truth... And now
you'll know it too. z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01
z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01
z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01 z10n=01
RED_PILLS_4_U
"If you want to keep a secret, Tell it, for none will believe. If you
want to hide something, put it where all can see, and none will see."
I already posted spoiler hints at the "Reloaded review" AICN Talkbalk
forum about a month ago, but apart from a couple of e-mails, no one
seemed to pick up on my meaning. [See my entries there titled
"readme.now": I was speaking from the perspective of the Machines.
...Some people just can't appreciate good psychopoetry. XD ]
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 thetruth of their world themselves.
Let's go spelunking...
Answers
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 thhat 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" (Zerne)...? 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.
I'm sorry
we lied to you. Neo.
..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.
...Boy, all you haters sure will be surprised come November!!! ;D
..."B-but -- but then...???" .....Yes, I'm afraid so. The Wachowskis
have mindfvcked you so royally that you didn't even realize you were
being d!cked with. Everything you know is a LIE, cave-dweller.
Soylent Green is people, the Matrix is not. ;P
You can start crying now. You're welcome. XD