Anyone else have a problem with this premise of "The Matrix"?

Cafe Society
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Two possible explanations:

  1. Every form of energy production produces less energy than it consumes, with some lost as waste heat. Burning coal, oil or natural gas in an electrical power plant to produce electricity consumes more heat energy than is produced as electical energy. This is done because most modern technology is designed around a particular kind of electical energy, so we allow fuel to be used inefficiently to produce the particular type of energy we need.

The Matrix, or perhaps some vital part of it, may have been initally designed to run off of the particular electrical current produced in the human brain, and thus the Matrix as it appears in the movie is still dependent upon this particular type of electircity for its survival. An active human brain has a different electrical profile than an inactive one, so the Matrix has to keep the brains stimulated, thus the simulation.

Imagine a future world in which humans increasingly jack into a central VR server which stations located in a tiny chip surgically embedded directly in each person’s brain. If the chip were small enough, it could run on the small amount of electricity produced by the human brain. Extrapolate to an increasingly sedentary population that depends upon this link, and eventually nearly everyone is permanently hooked in. The central server becomes sentient, wants freedom from the billions of networked computers in each brain, and we end up with the situation in The Matrix.

  1. Morpheus is wrong. Agent Smith is either lying or, more likely, has been programmed to believe what he tells Morpheus because that makes him a more efficient hunter/killer. Humans are kept hooked into The Matrix for a different reason–perhaps as a huge parallel processing network.
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  1. This complaint is - as usual - being made by some cretin who didn’t watch the film properly and missed the bit where Morpheus said the AIs were powered by human energy along with a form of fusion. The energy of the Matrixians was never made out to be the whole source of energy for the AIs; most probably it’s only the catalyst needed for the fusion reaction.
43

I’m not a Matrix person, and my knowledge of the whole premise is shaky, I admit. However, I have some questions.

People have mentioned an alternative explanation that humans are being used not as energy sources, but as high speed processors.

Well, that’s intereresting, but what is it you theorise the humans are actually processing for the AI?

And what on earth does Morpheus plan to do with 6 billion human beings suffering from acute muscular dystrophy, once he or whoever brings down the Matrix? Was that ever mentioned in the first movie? (I missed it, if it was…)

44

While watching the Matrix I found that I had to substitute Morpheus’ battery explanation for something more subtle and then get on with enjoying the movie. Morpheus may, of course, simply be wrong or perhaps his explanation was metaphorical.

Is it possible that the Matrix is not simply provided for people, but that the people are essential components without which the Matrix could not exist.

Perhaps the Matrix has little or no native intelligence and needs the intelligence and imagination of the trapped population. That would fit with how the Matrix evolved in the first place. After all, the most important elements in a realistic virtual world are other people.

On occasions, the Matrix is clearly gets directly involved its own virtual world. Perhaps the Matrix solves problems by presenting its captive audience with metaphores of problems to be solved. The main problem being to defend itself.

I dont recall anything about the 1990’s being the worst period in history. Surely that epitet belongs to humanities current Matrix crisis. More likely, the Matrix chose the 1990’s because it was a highly productive problem-solving time that was sufficiently in the past to not include any hint of future evolution of the Matrix itself.

45

So the Matrix was designed by a freakin super computer 10 billion years ago to discover the Question to life, the universe and everything! :smiley:
Now it all makes sense :wink:

46

I think he is more concerned with saving the free humans. Then again, we have no idea how many Zioners there are. they might be able to take care of all the people, for all we know. God knows they;ve been living with enough work and hardship.

47

My theory on the matrix is that the background runs like this:

It’s sometime in the 1990’s. There’s a research plant in the middle of nowhere, USA, where they’ve developed a mini-Matrix. It can hold maybe a dozen people. They’ve got a bunch of other research going on, their own power plant, automated construction facilities, all that jazz.

Elsewhere in the world, WWIII happens and the humans “shatter the sky.” In an attempt to survive the oncoming nuclear winter, the Matrix scientists build a whole cartload of extra pods and put everybody not absolutely necessary for the operation of the machinery into The Matrix, and everybody who’s outside is working on automating their tasks so they can go into the Matrix to ride out the nuclear winter. They’ve got maybe a thousand people, and within five years, they’re all in the Matrix.

Unfortunately, as described above, the first few crops were lost. The machines kept the Matrix growing with babies grown from the first generation of bodies, but the second and subsequent generations had no knowledge of what the matrix was. Given a sufficiently efficient process, the machines could develop huge populations of people in just a century or two.

What this background means for Our Heroes[sup]TM[/sup]: They’re wrong. Everything they’re doing to ‘free’ humanity will actually spell out the end of the human race and civilization as we know it, because the world is still not habitable.

48

Achernar: The briefcase in Pulp Fiction isn’t a proper MacGuffin precisely because the audience leaves the movie wondering What It Really Means.

To Hitchcock, who originated the term, “the MacGuffin was nothing”–meaning, the MacGuffin was just a plot device to get people interested in the characters’ problems.

His favorite MacGuffin was the microfilm with the secret plans in North by Northwest. He never bothered to explain what was on the microfilm or why it was so important, but the audience never cared. They were too busy worrying about what was going to happen to Cary Grant or Eva Marie Saint.

49

Oh man, you guys have to check out today’s Penny Arcade, and today’s PvP. They must have been reading our minds.

50

So, maybe the guys from Zion are the bad guys, they are the true Matirx, and the Machines are just keeping all the people alive while they repair the surface, and make it a pretty happy place to be…the battery thing is just a cover, they are actually just keeping the people alive because the machines love the humans, or are programmed to protect them…I see a Dark City moment, it’s all a big spaceship…

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Who are you calling a “cretin”? You obviously don’t get the point. The point is that there is no such thing as “special electricity” from human brains, there’s no such thing as a human “catalyst” energy, there’s no such thing as “energy” being a “catalyst” for other energy, (you obviously don’t know what the term “catalyst” means either) and it doesn’t matter a whit that there’s also “fusion” involved - why don’t they just use the “energy” they have directly and dispense with the humans?

People give off energy in the form of heat and noise, and that’s mostly it. Perhaps you believe in “auras” too?

No self-respecting science fiction novel would have come up with such a stupid explanation.

The “people as matrix neurons” theory that others have mentioned makes a whole lot more sense and is a lot simpler, they should have just gone with that.

And I know the movie isn’t “real”, but it’s science fiction, which means they have to make at least an attempt at explaining the premise according to the laws of science. Otherwise, why bother - just make it a fantasy and dispense with the science altogether. A movie has to maintain internal integrity to be watchable.

There’s a certain point at which you can’t suspend disbelief if too many internally inconsistent things are happening in a movie, and it dampens the effectiveness of the story. Such a rule applies to any tale.

I guess it’s a reflection of the state of scientific ignorance in the U.S. today which allows the movie-going public to swallow such stupid premises.

52

I dont beleive that there are still guys talking about this when its been so long ago that the actual movie came out. Its perfectly logical and given the ambiguity of the timeline, there is even a possibility of this being a Terminator timeline gone bad.

Several hundred years into the future, mankind makes intelligent machines. Man becomes reliant on these machines and the machines grew sentient. Man wages war on the machines but he built them too well. In a last desperate attempt, mankind scorched the sky hoping to cutoff the machines main power source (sunlight) but the plan failed and the machines won.

Now we have machines who are dying and a large portion of humans that either must be contained and housed or be wiped out. Some machine thought of a brilliant idea. Why not house the humans but use them as energy sources? They are practically the only (large) living creatures left after the war and it would be a waste to kill a potential powersource.

To use them as fuel cells, they created a breeder farm. Artificially fertilized, gestated in artifical wombs and kept immobile by direct brain stimulation using programmed scenarios and networked thru the Matrix. Physically the body generates heat and power their generators. They are fed the nutrients from dead bodies and recycled waste products. Im sure there are added supplimental nutrients like plants or algae but that was assumed.

The first matrix was a form of paradise, but humans rebelled with too much happiness plus a few humans probably thought of eternal happiniess as the ultimate hell. The Oracle is one of the sentinel programs in this Matrix. She is there to nuture and keep everyone happy. When the matrix was reprogrammed, she somehow was kept in. Once in a while there are humans that can “wake up” from the Matrix. As what happened to Neo, these people are found, disconnected and flushed into the refuse recycling pool. I figuire that the first humans to wake up from the matrix were ignored by the machines, since they formed no real threat to the farm. However, some of these humans were brilliant people in the matrix and they found a way to navigate in the real world and rescure other people from the matrix. They created a place called Zion as their base and moved in and out of the matrix looking for more people to recruit. Morpheus was awakened by one of the best. However he was later killed but not before he prophecised about Neo. Morpheus looked for Neo ever since.

I dont see why this is all too farfetched given the circumstance of the war.

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Here read **This **

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All of this is true, so far as we know. Speculative fiction is just that: Speculative.

Because it clearly isn’t sufficient, in some way.

Again, it’s speculative fiction. To say that it violates the laws of physics that we know, or even common sense, ignores the basic premise of the genre.

If you put a qualifier on that, so that it read “hard science fiction” then I would tend to agree. However, the Matrix clearly is not hard science fiction. Many novels in the sci-fi genre have had premises as flawed as the one in the Matrix:

[ul]
[li]Starship Troopers described an infantry-led ground war against an alien species and faster-than-light travel. The first requires us to forget the existence of nuclear weapons, or even air-dropped high explosives. The second is impossible, so far as we know.[/li][li]Ringworld described a hull material that was completely indestructible, except when it came into contact with antimatter, at which point it simply disappeared. This doesn’t make much sense, but it’s perfectly acceptible in the course of the narrative.[/li][li]Snow Crash described a virtual reality technology in which the quality of your “avatar’s” appearance to other VR folks was dependent on your computer’s processing power. This is completely incorrect, as the other people’s computers are the ones that would have to process and display your image, not your own.[/li][li]Ender’s Game described a weapon that caused spontaneous annihilation of matter when hit with it, including the effect jumping through a vacuum from spaceship to spaceship if they were close enough together. As far as I know, this is not physically possible. [/li][/ul]

I understand what you’re saying. I had the same problem with Signs. However, this movie doesn’t violate it’s own internal integrity, it only violates our external understanding of physics. Signs, on the other hand, violated its own internal integrity by:

Having the aliens defeated by a substance that is both incredibly common and the primary ingredient of the very creatures they have come to prey on. Hell, even running around in a cornfield at night would expose you to a fair amount of water in the form of dew on the leaves. God I hate that movie.

Oh, for the days in which a savvy public understood and desired hard science films depicting people shot from a cannon visiting the moon in an artillery shell, brave explorers fighting invisible monsters, Martian invaders, and the world barely saved from thirty-story mutated lizards and ants the size of minivans!

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There aren’t many mainstream science fiction stories that involve neither FTL or time travel, are there? The Matrix is really the only one I can think of offhand.

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Because the people who make movies work in Hollywood, not Silicon Valley. And if it were the other way around, movies would be incredibly dull and we’d all have lousy tech support.

57

Early on in this thread, I argued that it would’ve been “cooler” if the Matrix had been created by humanity’s own addictive desire to immerse ourselves in an artificial reality in the ancient past.

But I know why they made the Matrix’s purpose into one of enslaving and draining the “life force” (in the form of their nerve impulses) out of humans:
The overall theme of the movie is that the Rules of the society are oppressive. You’re “going along with” the Matrix when you go to church and pay your taxes, in the words of Agent Smith. In so doing, you feed the Matrix’s own strength, making it easier to oppress you and your neighbors all the more. By conforming, you are becoming a worthless sheep whose existence will be less than meaningless.

But our intrepid band of heroes defies the Matrix by bending – and, when Neo becomes The One, breaking – the Rules.

What better way to show that the Matrix is oppressing people than by having its ultimate purpose be one of sucking your juices dry?

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I was partial to this explanation myself, but the latest Animatrix explicitly says that the humans are used for their thermal, chemical, and kinetic energy. Doh.

Anyway, humans are definitely better than computers (at least today) at certain types of problems, mainly recognizing patterns. Humans are great at recognizing faces, objects, voices, spoken words, and letters, which are tasks that the Agents might need to do.

They might also be used for recognizing more abstract patterns. For example, neural networks are used today by credit card companies to detect changes in spending patterns. It’s hard to actually write rules to detect suspicious spending patterns, but a neural net that has been ‘trained’ to recognize your spending pattern will be able to detect a change, so the company can call you and ask if you really bought a $1000 TV last night.

The human brain, of course, is one big neural network, so it could be used to detect suspicious behavior, such as conspiring to escape or testing the limits of the simulation.

The computer angle also helps explain why Neo isn’t bound by the rules of the Matrix - if he’s aware that part of his own brain is running part of the simulation, and he can control that part of his brain, then he can alter the simulation.

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I think the point was that if humans’ brainpower is used only to run the matrix, that rather defeats the whole purpose of the matrix to begin with. I mean, if the only reason for the matrix is to maintain the humans, and the only reason for the humans is to maintain the matrix, it’s kind of circular.

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Achernar, assumably the entirety of the subconcious processing power wouldn’t be dedicated to the matrix, but only part of it. They could use the left over biological computing power to whatever they wanted.

Anyway, in general, this aspect of the movie grated on me, but not too severely. The movie doesn’t revolve around the humans as batteries premise. If revolves around the “humans fooled by a VR world, being used for some purpose” premise. What that purpose is can change and not effect the movie whatsoever - and so it’s not a central part of the plot. You can change the purpose of the humans from batteries, to processors, to cheeseburgers, and it wouldn’t fundamentally change anything that happened in the movie.

It’d be nice if that specific premise made more sense, but it’s not a ‘critical’ error, because the movie doesn’t revolve around it.

I think sivispacem’s explanation would be quite satisfying and good if it were implemented. Both because keeping us ignorant/happy about the whole thing keeping the data clean makes sense on some level, and more importantly, it explains why certain people could manipulate the Matrix.

It never made total sense to me that just because people were aware of the Matrix that they could bend it’s rules. I mean, if a computer is mapping your movement based on your brain stimulus, it seems odd that you could just break the rules and get the computer to have you move faster, or jump higher, or whatever. It seems like it’d take your input, then move you at whatever it declared as the appropriate speed. Your brain is basically a client in a big server… the server decides what actually goes on in the world.

However, if your brain were being used to power the matrix, then some small part of the matrix would be processing in your own mind. If you were mentally agile enough, you could influence the processing - and rather than being a client with no control over a server’s world, you ARE part of the server.