Shot From Guns, you say that you don’t maintain that your objections are due to assuming that things in the Matrix World are due to assuming that it must be like the Real World, but every single one of your objections stems from assuming that things must be like in the Real World. The “bug” can’t be the size they show it as, because otherwise it’d be felt and cause pain. That objection only makes sense in the Real World.
In the Matrix World it’s all ones and zeros. Nothing is inside anybody – it’s all simulation. The rules by which it behaves are what it’s programmed to be. So if the Bug is programmed to look intimidating outside the body and yet to fit inside the body painlessly, that’s how it is.
But that’s ridiculous, you say – you CAN’T be painless inside the body and that big outside. Yes, you can – the rules are what they say they are. The Bug already behaves and looks completely differently when activated and not.It’s Not Consistent, you say. It’s fully as consistent as the albino rastafarian brothers being able to become ghosts and pass through bodies at one time, and be solid at another.
it’s FANWANKING you say. No, as I’ve told you somewhat less than a billion times, it’s not. If denizens of the Matrix World can’t bend and break the rules of physics, the movie has no point. It’s demonstrated over and over that things in the Matrix World act very differently from the Real World. Unless you know someone who can seal other people’s mouths closed. Or can close and door and have it open somewhere else. Or can levitate. Or go into someone else’s body. Or bend Steel with their bare mind, or fly. Or any of a zillion other examples. Violation of our everday world laws of physics by certain entities on certain occasions is a given without which the story freakin’ disappears.
By the way – they routinely implant devices bigger than that in people’s bodies in the Real World without pain. My father had one.
If you think that was my point, well, heh, right back at ya. Why does blood display in WoW? Because that’s the way it was programmed. Why does blood display in the Matrix? Because…that’s they way it was programmed. I’m not seeing the inconsistency. In neither instance is there actually any blood.
Cal, you haven’t answered my question about whether or not you have any experience programming. The examples and arguments that I’ve been hearing all seem to be coming from people with a layperson’s overly simplistic view of how programs work. And I’m no expert, but I **have **programmed in something like seven different languages at one time or another (Java, C, FORTRAN 77, Lisp, Perl, Smalltalk, Prolog).
Right, but it has to be programmed that way. And IIRC, from the scanner display, it looked exactly the same inside him as outside, and it wasn’t stationary.
I’m not saying that at all. I’m saying it can’t be painless inside the body, ripped out of the body without damaging it at all, **and **still be covered in blood. Because if it can interact with the blood enough to pick it up, it can interact with the blood enough to block its flow inside his body, killing or injuring him. The best explanation I’ve seen so far is that the crew deliberatly programmed in the blood, to freak him out more.
I have no problem with bending and breaking the rules of physics. I have a problem with inconsistent rules that haven’t been deliberately modified. There’s a reason to modify yourself to be able to fly or dodge bullets; there is no reason for the creaters of the Matrix to program the bug to magically cover itself in blood.
I don’t think you understand the difference between “consistent with the real world” and “internally consistent.” The former is your representation of my argument; the latter is my actual objection.
But there is no reason to have programmed an exception to the normal blood subprograms, such that the bug wouldn’t interfere with blood while inside the body, but when extracted would be covered in it. In WoW, on the other hand, bodies are shells not filled with anything, let alone blood, so it makes sense to program it as just a spurting visual effect instead of an actual injury. **That **is why I don’t think your point is valid.
I directly address the same question to you as I just did to Cal, since you haven’t responded to it, either: do you have any experience at all with programming?
Picture a parameter that describes an interaction between two objects. Object A class type is FLESH. Object B is NOT_FLESH.
When A interacts with B so that they interfere with each others space, such as a bullet or knife entering a body, a CREATE_GORE event is produced. This gore event is parametric, based on stuff like velocity, location, material, blah blah. The matrix tries its best to create this parameter and most of the inputs are themselves parametric and fuzzy since you can’t have a defined lookup table with an infinite amount of data.
So the matrix is challenged to render an event where A and B pass through each other, caused by a rogue hacker-program running underneath all of this (the bug sucker program), and “blood” gets rendered as a predictable result of the CREATE_GORE function. In the same way that a computer game graphic glitch happens in a data-overflow event that isn’t properly handled (and I’ve seen many), but the program soldiers on anyway, the bug comes out bloody, everyone goes “wow, that’s a headscratcher”, and the matrix then recovers back to its default state now that the transient glitch is over.
Wank on, wank off I think your core obstacle to this argument is that you think programming has to be deterministic and data has to be predefined and all function outputs anticipated and validated. Look at it instead as procedural generated gore–it seems perfectly consistent to me.
Shot From Guns, here’s what I think is a somewhat plausible scenario, and yes, I’ve been doing programming for several years.
You’ve got a body class, and an inanimate doohickey class. There’s a bunch of methods in the body class that indicate what happens to an object of the body class when its position intersects that of an inanimate doohickey. Much of it deals with damage to the body. Code is tested, debugged, works. Later, someone puts in a high priority change request - we want a new class, derived from the i.d. class, that doesn’t do any damage to the body class when their positions intersect. Much grumbling from the programmers, but the quickest & easiest thing to do is deactivate all the damage methods when a magical inanimate doohickey intersects a body. During testing, some bright eyed QA tester runs a test and submits a bug report: “When the m.i.d. is removed from the body, it’s covered in blood! There isn’t supposed to be any damage from a m.i.d.” Programmers look at the code, and find that the methods that deal with a solid object getting wet from liquids aren’t part of the body damage methods they modified before. Modifying these would be even more of a problem than before, so they pushback on the bug - 1. Low probability occurence, 2. No actual damage does occur to body - blood loss is covered in damage methods already modified, 3. Aesthetic issue only. Will fix in next release." And from there, the programmers hope that no one brings up that stupid bug again.
I’m currently employed as a programmer, and have been so for the past 13 years or so, so, yes, I do have some experience…
And, as any good programmer knows, a program will only do exactly what it is programmed to do. Even if the bug was a violation of Matrix rules (which it could be, since the Agent programs have that sort of discretion), the subroutines which control “things pulled from living bodies, and how they should look” still kicked in, displaying the bug as “bloodied”.
There was no “body” for the bug to actually be in, of course. It wasn’t interfering with anything, because it was not programmed to. Indeed, if it it did, then Neo would likely have gone to the doctor, and the bug would have been discovered, which could cause all sorts of reality-questioning problems. Thus, it’s a “simple” matter for the Matrix program to simply not relay any sensory data from the bug to the pod-human, thereby keeping him in the dark as to its presence.
The bug was removed as a consequence of Morpheus’ crew messing with the “reality” the Matrix programs were attempting to create for Neo. But, the programs were still operating, and at that point it was likely deemed preferable to maintain the illusion as much as possible; thus when it was pulled out, it appeared “bloody” because, well, that’s what things look like when pulled out of one’s body…even though there was no scar. Indeed, the incongruence of “no scar” with “bloody object yanked from my innards” is probably when Neo started to question reality…
All of these analyses seem to be based on the idea that the Matrix is much more simple than it seems (to me) to be. The Matrix is designed as a **perfect simulation **of the world, complete with free will on the part of the people jacked into it. It’s a perfect, entire simulation of everything, down to your circulatory system, your digestive system, that zit brewing on the tip of your nose. So I don’t see it as having routines that just magically paint gore on an object that gets pulled out of someone–the object gets covered in gore because it interacted with all of the gore that’s inside the person. So, in my conception of the Matrix, if something doesn’t “physically touch” the blood (as far as the program is concerned) and someone else doesn’t manually program it in (like the crew), there is no way for it to get on there.
So, really, this disagreement seems to come down to how we think the Matrix is programmed.
I disagree. I see the matrix as being merely a “good enough” simulation that only needs to keep the minds of its human batteries happy. So, much like our own dreams, a lot of “reality” is filled in as it goes or as is needed. Your internal organs, for example, are only defined for the matrix when in the context of the surgeon that needs to observe them. Otherwise, the “rendering overhead” is approximated. There is already precedent for it being internally inconsistent and glitchy, “woah, deja vu!” and the on the spot rendering sometimes can’t adapt perfectly consistently.
Kind of like in a typical game–a low-detail bitmap for a piece of far off scenery which gets progressively replaced with higher detail maps as the observer gets closer.
My hats go off to the matrix programmers actually. While transiently buggy, it recovers from errors wonderfully and the OS as a whole is rock solid and never locks up or crashes.
Says who? IIRC, one of the guys in the first movie speculates that we so often say something ‘tastes like chicken’ because the programmers aren’t doing a perfect job.
See, whereas I would contend (and have actually been thinking about this very scenario since we started discussing the whole bug issue) that you have to constantly and actively simulate everything, because you never know who’s going to trip on the curb and disembowel themselves. Because the simulation is of the entire world, the system of the human body needs to (as a default, not considering modification) function exactly as it does in real life, or you’d be unable to perform medicine, study biology, commit suicide, etc. It would presumably be much easier to program the systems themselves and just let them run than to program every possible reaction to every possible scenario.
That being said, I’m perfectly happy to concede that **if **the Matrix functions in the way you see it, the blood on the bug would not be a problem.
Says me. You can tell, because of the part where I said (and you quoted) “seems (to me) to be,” emphasis added because you apparently missed it the first time. I didn’t say this is for sure the way it is–just that it’s the impression that I, personally, have formed.
A lot of time-related things, such as the amount of time it takes an object to fall a particular distance, or the period of a pendulum, depend on gravity. Interestingly, they all depend on gravity the same way: They’re all proportional to 1/sqrt(g). So when we look at footage of the astronauts on the Moon, they look funny to us, because the timing of all these little things we’re used to is off. If you speed up the film of the astronauts (by a bit more than a factor of 2), all of the timing cues are right again, so it looks more-or-less normal. Likewise, if you take film recorded at normal Earth gravity and slow it down by that same factor, it’ll look like the Moon.
It seems likely to me that there are whole classes of professions in the Matrix that simply don’t actually exist, because it’s easier to have computer programs pretending to be people in these roles, then to have actual people in positions where they can uncover the unreality of the world they live in. Theoretical physicists, for example, are too dangerous to be allowed to actually exist. Far easier to create a few thousands life-like sims to pretend that they’re uncovering the deepest secrets of the universe. Surgeons, if not doctors in general, might be in the same situation. You’ve already got routines to perfectly mimic human beings. It’d be a lot easier to use one of those to pretend to be a doctor, then to go to all the bother of designing an accurate simulation of human physiology down to the molecular level, when almost nobody is ever going to actually see any of that stuff.
Well, that’s comforting. I know I’m not in a Matrix, then.
Although, sometimes I do think that the simplest explanation for why quantum mechanics has the spooky nonlocal behaviour it does is that the programmers got sloppy with the implementation on the grounds that “nobody will ever be able to tell the difference, anyway”, and weren’t clever enough to realize that Bell’s Inequality would give them away. I mean, if I were ever to design a universe, I’d darn well use local hidden variables, since that’s just the right way to do it.
Sorry, I should have said more when I asked my question. I understood all that, I meant to be asking why footage inside the capsule would simulate low gravity when slowed down. Because it seemed to me all the things that would look low-grav when slowed down would typically take place most conspicuously outside–walking being the most obvious example. Inside the capsule, we’d be looking a lot more at limb movements and I wouldn’t think those would be slower in a low-grav environment. For that reason, I would think that slowed down film would make them look like they were doing a lot of things unnaturally.
In other words, I’d imagine if you sped up footage from inside the capsule, it’d look like they were jerking around unnaturally fast whenever they did anything with their arms like messing with panels or grabbing a cup or whatever. So I’d think that slowing down normal-grav footage from inside such a capsule would fail to simulate low gravity.
Can we do fantasy too ? Cause it always bugged me about Bilbo’s (and later, Frodo’s) sword.
It’s a sword that glows when orcs are near, and it’s made of stupid. It *sounds *like a good idea at first, but then you realize that during your average dark dungeon crawl, it’ll only mean you’ve just become one big, glowing target. For orcs who already have good night sight. Or you keep it in its scabbard, in which case you’re unarmed.
Doubly stupid a weapon for the hobbits, who tend to rely more on sneaking about and avoiding said orcs, and less on orc-mulching prowess.
Put them in classes where the teacher doesn’t make any sense, flunk them when they take tests, deny their applications to grad school. If all else fails, give them cancer.
I think your core obstacle to this argument is that you think programming has to be deterministic and data has to be predefined and all function outputs anticipated and validated. Look at it instead as procedural generated gore–it seems perfectly consistent to me.