Matrix question

Cafe Society
1

A couple of days ago I was flipping through channels and on one of them “The Matrix” was playing. Thinking about the movie something occurred to me.

The Matrix is a virtual world your mind plugs into. In the Matrix “you” are a projection of your mind. Also, if your virtual self dies, your real body dies too. If your brain is dead, then shouldn’t your projection into the Matrix stop?

In other words, if you die in the Matrix shouldn’t your Matrix body disappear since your brain is no longer projecting you into the Matrix?

2

Fanwank: your matrix-body is no longer animated, but serves as a placeholder of where you were when you died. The Architect is nothing if not anal, and I doubt he’d like to have bodies just popping in and out of existence if it could be avoided.

3

Your body is a physical object in the Matrix just like a car, a wall or a spoon. When you’re alive, it’s under your control, but when you die it’s just another piece of data.

4

Not going to say it not going to say it not going to say it…

5

What happens to it when a person is freed from the Matrix? When Neo, Morpheus, or anybody else hacked into the Matrix they had bodies there, and when they used a telephone to go back to their physical bodies their Matrix bodies disappeared.

6

Rubber spoon

7

I’ll see that and raise you…

8

…spooning?

9

That’s because the death program didn’t activate. Remember, they are hacking the system to pull this off. They aren’t even in the real pods.

I do wonder, though, if Neo’s body was present when they were getting him out. The death program does run then: you see the pod dumping the real body to be recycled. And we see everything after he takes the pill that “interrupts the signal” from his point of view, if I remember correctly, so we don’t know what everyone else saw.

10

I’ll try using my imagination. Maybe it’s like this:

If you die in the Matrix the Matrix takes over your, for lack of a better word, avatar and runs a corpse program. But if you “log out” of the Matrix then you simply vanish unless and until you hack back in.

11

They show us. When your consciousness leaves the matrix, your matrix avatar disapears. When you reenter the Matrix, a new avatar is created. We see several times where Trinity or whoever logs out and an empty telephone just falls to the floor.

But if you are killed, you don’t get to log out properly and your brain is trapped in a corpse body (and presumably disposed of).

It’s not explained, but I wonder if the same thing happens to “red pills” who are properly connected to the Matrix. Or because they are not hacked in, does the Matrix just respawn them?

12

My question was somewhat rhetorical.

You unplug from the Matrix, your mind is no longer projecting you into it, your avatar disappears.

You die in the Matrix, your mind is no longer projecting you into it, your avatar does not disappear. You leave behind a corpse.

I’m wondering why. My only guess is what I posted in post #10.

13

I can only speculate, but it seems to me that unlike the technology in Avatar, Surrogates or Inception, your mind isn’t projecting into the Matrix. Your brain becomes sort of like an external hard drive connected to the Matrix network where information is written back and forth. If the connection is suddenly broken or either the user or their avatar in the Matrix is killed, the data gets all corupted and you die.

14

That’s a much better way of describing my fanwank. Perhaps the corpse program is also run as failsafe for when someone is disconnected via redpill, but perhaps not.

15

I still want to know how Cipher jacked in on his own.

16

That is, to get to the Steak scene?

The excuse answer : The _______ Allows it. [Oracle, Merovingian, Agent Smith]

The answer I think we are going to get : Smith Allows it. How Cypher logistically gets the cables into his body, that’s something else.

Alternate : If Mouse [IIRC] can spend the day dating The Lady In Red, I would assume Cypher gets just as much “free” time in the matrix. How Tank and Dozer miss this, that’s something else.

Random thoughts :

To the OP: I’m going to go a few steps beyond FinnAgain : If bodies popped out as fast as people die, the pill scene would have left something to be desired. [I think someone up-thread got the colors mixed up.]

Neo obviously has a tough choice on his hands as he meets Morpheous. If he could simply recall a body popping out of existence the choice would be fall of a log simple. ““Sure, I’ll Go””. But, I think the viewer is forced to accept that bodies stay in. The entire idea of the desert of the real would fall flat otherwise. The “Epicness” of the choice wouldn’t be there.
Also, Morpheous explains that we are living in a dream world, as we knew it at the peak of our civilization. I believe he uses “End of the 20th Century” or some such. Using 1999 as our guide [for the given reason, and the obvious reason]** I think we can conclude that as 1999 had cold bodies**, morgues, cadavers, and lifeless bodies found in a bathtub, bedroom, in the woods, etc, **so too would The Matrix. **Bodies stay put. Until the funeral. And yes, there would be a full funeral. Again, nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to suggest it wasn’t 1999.

–

After Neo Takes the pill, Cypher looks into a goggle apparatus [He delivers the Kansas is going bye bye line] I would assume that Neo ““dies””, as a normal person would see it. Neo takes the pill. He essentially shorts out his pod. He gets ejected. The Neb then comes around and plays the claw game with him.

After you log out, I think the Avatar drops out. We wouldn’t have the need for the Residual Self Image speech in the construct.

17

Yeah, it’s actually “red” leaves, “blue” stays.

To reiterate what Meeko said, the Matrix is a detailed simulation of our world. Each object or creature in the Matrix is an object oriented program. The programs interact with each other in the confines of The Matrix, but at their permissions level, they are restricted to procedures that are within the realm of real world physical properties. For example, most people don’t have permission to execute Neo.fly() or Neo.setbulletspeedon(CONST_Y).

If a program is “killed” in the Matrix, think of it like a character getting killed in a videogame. It’s “status bar” goes to zero and Chump213.kill() is executed. It’s “brain” is deleted so its processing and storage capacity can be freed up and you are left with what is basically an innert ragdoll object.

That is how the Matrix sumulation runs. Since it is a computer sumulation, there is no reason it has to run like that. Indeed, the Agents, Architect, Oracle, Trainman, Keymaker, Merovingian and other higher programs have permissions for running or even writing entirely new procedures that could not happen in the real world. Doors that respawn you somewhere else in the Matrix, moving or replacing objects, moving in ways that would appear superhuman. The Oracle, for example, can’t really see the future. She can just see all the objects in The Matrix, run a faster than realtime simulation as to how they are most likely to act and identify points in the near future where wildly different results will be dependent on someone’s specific choice.

And the Morovingian’s girlfriend explains how some programs that are screwed up appear as “supernatural” creatures.

Indeed Neo’s “resurrecting” of Trinity is hardly extraordinary as if you can hack the Matrix so that you can fly, smash buildings, fall great distances and move faster than bullets, why should rewriting the code that makes your avatar die from gunshot wounds be any different?
Basically the short answer is everything in the Matrix runs as you would expect it to run in the real world of 1999. Unless, the programs that run the Matrix want it to do something else. Then anything goes.
Also, as a nitpcik, the Matrix is just the human habitat simulation part. The Mainframe is the larger machine world of which the Matrix is a part of.

18

What happens to you if an agent takes over your Avatar and gets killed?

What happens if you don’t get killed, but the agent leaves you again? Is it like a 30 minute memory lapse or do you remember what the agent did?

19

Actually on that note, I’ve always wondered if an agent takes over your avatar and gets killed, does the agent die with you?

20

A computer wizard did it.