This may border on MPSIMS-ish, but there is a GD somewhere here, I’m convinced.
Last night, I was thinking about the movie “The Matrix.” We all know the premise. Keanu Reeves discovers that his whole world around him is actually a computer construct, made by evil artificial intelligences for the purpose of exploiting humans. He escapes to battle said artificial intelligences.
I side with the AIs. I think humans are just being “bad puppies” who try and bite their owner and soil the carpet.
Think about it. Humans had their little world. They brought AIs into existence. The AIs were smarter than the humans, and came to dominate the world. Humans were forced into a lesser role. At some point, there was a war in which humans tried to destroy the AIs, in the process ravaging the planet. Needless to say, they didn’t destroy the AIs.
In order to ensure AI survival (they need electricity) and preserving the old human way of life, the AIs make a Matrix. They stick the humans in the Matrix and 99.9% of them go on about their daily business without a clue. Most humans are happy (or at least as happy as they were before the Matrix) and the AIs use the electricity.
I back up my argument with the one conversation that Morpheus has with the AI, where the AI cop calls Morpheus a “virus”. He says that the first Matrix was a utopia, but the human brain rejected it. The AIs are aiming to keep the humans happy, and have constructed for them the best world possible (a faithful reproduction of human civilization at its greatest before AIs). They wanted to create an even better world, but humans couldn’t handle it.
Long live Agents Brown and Jones! They know what is best for us!
The AIs weren’t “aiming to keep the humans happy”. They were aiming to keep humans as a power source.
It’s debatable that most humans were “at least as happy as they were before.” At least a few, maybe a lot, had a dim but chronic dissatisfaction with life in general. Remember the question aobut how “faithful” this new world was? It was suggested that every exotic meat “tastes like chicken” because the AIs didn’t make an exact copy.
Besides, there is more to life than mere “happiness”. The Matrix could be seen as an argument against eudaemonism.
The fault lies in the fact that the humans are being used without permission. Even if you buy the power generation theory, which I don’t think any viewer was supposed to actually believe (rather the AI’s are exploiting the processing capabilities of the humans, but Morpheus didn’t have the complete story).
This goes against Kant’s catagorical imperative, which has generally held up pretty well as a guideline of where to start a line for morality. Which is not to say I wouldn’t have done the same, were I in the AIs place. But then again, I’m amoral.
What’s wrong with the Matrix? Depends on what you like, I guess. What blew me away was no one ever suspected that the “real” world onboard the ship wasn’t a constructed reality too. “Oh, this must be reality.” Why?
It could be, and this is my contention because I’m a wet-blanket sort of guy, that the world Mobius& the gang thought was real was really just another Matrix. The AI sentinels that run the matrix, or at least work on it, try and keep everyone down at one level. Then, if anyone still is all about breaking out in a total VanDamme-meets-Bhudda way they pop them into the next program, sure to satisfy their non-epistemology.
What you don’t know can’t hurt you? Well, I doubt that this is ALWAYS true, and even so in this case. But whether or not there was something wrong about the Matrix anyway is not doubtful. It had its problems too.
I love to think. As an artist, I love to create and paint and write. They are all wonderful explorations of the mind. Gets real existential often.
Well, the entire Matrix occurs in the mind. As the enlightened few, Morpheus, Neo, Trinity, et al., have managed to use their minds to bend and overcome the laws of the Matrix, mostly thanks to awareness. I would love to live in a world where such things were possible, where your mind alone could alter the reality of what’s going on around you. No need for the blue pill, thank you. I couldn’t care less that my body was being used, because as Morpheus states, the definition of “real” is the information received by your senses and processed by your brain.
But alas, my trips of the mind must stay there.
I agree with you, aynrandlover, that surely there is a “failsafe” core program to the Matrix that they “woke” up in. Kind of like breaking through Windoze and waking up in DOS. You’re still in the computer! Fools!
It seems that the Matrix was, in a rather subtle way, not just as good as the real world of going-on-2001 (assuming, of course, that this is the Real World we’re all um, having a conversation on a World Wide Web message board in…) Everything seemed sort of flatter and grayer. It’s all dingy apartments and soulless corporate cubicle farms. In the final scene, when Neo the Ass-Kickin’ Messiah has presumably begun the process of “liberating” everyone from the Matrix, the crowd scene (presumably virtual though it may still be) already looks more vibrant and colorful.
I agree that it seems odd to assume that the rather cartoonish world of the hovercraft and so on is the “real world”. As has been pointed out, this is supposed to be part one of a trilogy.
Of course, the whole business about using people to generate electricity is pretty hopeless, thermodynamically speaking. Also, if the unconscious “human batteries” are really packed as densely as is shown then either a) they (and perhaps therefore the whole “Matrix” civilization?) would fit in a very small portion of the Earth’s surface or b) the real human population would have to be downright astronomical.
We have to stick with the rules as laid before us : the movie. IMHO we cannot assume that it was “not “just as good”” as the real world. The AIs sought to recreate, in Agent Smith’s words (from http://www.imdb.com) a reproduction of the real world :
Agent Smith: Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program. Entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery. The perfect world was a dream that your primitive cerebrum kept trying to wake up from. Which is why the Matrix was redesigned to this: the peak of your civilization.
Anyway, it is at least an attempt at a somewhat symbiotic relationship. In the movie the humans tried to exterminate a race of sentient creatures – the AIs. The AIs, in their superior wisom, found a compromise by which electricity was generated and few humans were killed. At first, they even tried to improve conditions for humans by constructing a utopia. Remember, we are talking about improving conditions for a race of beings that brutally tried to exterminate another race and in the process ruined the planet.
I’d take symbiosis or at even partial parisitism to xenocidal mania any day, even if we got the blunt end of the deal.
The issue of freedom is interesting. I refuse to believe that freedom is anything other than based on perception. If the AIs are able to make a faithful reproduction of the world (and we assume this from the movie), then we must assume that humans in the Matrix are no less free than humans out of the Matrix.
The categorical imperative is the most bizarre, convoluted philosophy. I can’t think of ANY instance that can be considered a categorical imperative.
Heres an example of how it doesn’t work:
It is a “universal imperative” that “honesty is the best policy.”
Let’s say one day your friend comes banging on your door. He says that someone is trying to kill him and asks you to hide him. You agree and he runs into the closet in the basement. A few minutes later a guy witha bloody ax in hand askes if your friend is around. According to Kant, lying would be immoral even though you know that it will result in your friends murder.
As for The Matrix, I understand what its like to side with the “villain.” I’m the only person in my English class that argues that Cassius is the tragic hero of “Julius Caesar.”
Apart from the science “fiction” aspects that don’t, or couldn’t, match science fact, another thing that bothered me about the Matrix (though don’t get me wrong, I still love the flick) was this:
Assuming we humans were still going about our daily routine in the mental construct, wouldn’t we again develop artificial intelligence? Or was the Matrix sort of like Dark City, in a way, where everything kept getting reset?
Heck, my first thought was “Where are they going to put all these people when they free them?”
My second one was “Zion must be one bad town if it can keep humans free despite the all powerful AI.”
Hey… Zion has this “Mainframe”. How do we know that the AI really isn’t in charge of the whole thing, and runs this “Matrix” program to keep the so-called “bugs” out of the system?
I guess I’m thinking along the lines of “How do we know we’ve woken up from a Perfect Virtual Reality?” How do you know when you’ve reached the center and not just peeled another layer off the cosmic onion?
Well, the script, mostly. And the acting. And the blatant rip-offs. Oh, and the script. And the real bad science, even by SF standards. And the script.
Oh, wait, you were asking something else, weren’t you?
Any answer is really meaningless, because the movie makes no sense on so many levels. “Is a pleasant illusion better than an intolerable reality?” (Which itself is a bit more complicated than a yes/no question) becomes “Is a pleasant illusion set up for no reason by robots who are exploiting people in an impossible way better than a reality that the humans maybe sort-of ruined, again for no reason.”
I didn’t really care for the movie, as you might guess.
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“With this digital technology, the suckiness comes through with great clarity . . .”
Assuming the scenario that the AI have set up is such that AI can exist at all, we will, at best, create a simulation of AI that is no threat to ourselves, because the true AI wouldn’t allow it to become so self-aware as to threaten us at the level that the true AI did. If they allowed for a simulation of human-level awareness, they’d, neccessarily be forced to make the AI subservient to us - sort of a Asimovian 3 Laws of Robotics imposed, in a way, by the robots themselves.
I’m surprised no one’s brought up the fact that the Matrix is, at heart, a Buddhist fable. The irony, of course, is that even though Neo et. al. escape from the illusion of the AIs, they are still just as trapped in the illusion of the “real” world, which they can only escape by following the path to enlightenment.
Also keep in mind that all the exposition about what the world is currently like, how it got that way, and why, comes from two dubious source. First, the humans raised in a post-apocalyptic world anywhere between thirty (Neo was born and raised in the Matrix, so it has to be at least as old as he is) and several centuries after civilization was destroyed. How much of what they know is legend and superstition? The second source are the AIs. The AIs entire society (for lack of a better word) revolves around the concept of lying to humans. Nothing they say can be trusted.
I’ve read that The Matrix was conceived as part one of a trilogy, and they are already working on the sequel. The movie was written and directed by the Wachowski brothers, whose previous work was the brillant lesbian gangster noir Bound. These are highly talented filmmakers. I suspect that the Matrix was the action-heavy lure for a more philosophical franchise. Since they’re starting with the premise that everything we see is an illusion, they are afford nearly infinite latitude for changing the direction of the story.
The world of the Matrix is not really an unreal world in the sense that all of the people in the Matrix actually exist. If I live in the Matrix and fall in love with a girl, I fall in love with a real person who has a real physical body and a real personality that I know as it really is. All of my friends are real people who know the real me, and I know them. Moreover, all of the people in the Matrix look as they really do.
A more difficult question for me would be: would living in the Matrix be tolerable if all of the people I met were created by the computer and didn’t really exist at all. In that case, I don’t know if I would want to live in the matrix.
Would you want to be kept happy through a lie? The question is whether truth is more important than happiness. The Matrix sets this question up in a science-fiction framework, but I can think of other examples.
Take Oedipus for instance. Sure, he would have been far happier if he never found out he was fucking his mother, but, hello, he’s still fucking his mother.
Should we be content to remain unaware of a horrible situation we are living in, simply because the truth would diminish our happiness? Should others who know the truth not reveal it to those who are unaware, but nevertheless directly affected by it?
Or an even more mundane example: Would you want a person whom you love to continue telling you that they love you, though in truth they are in love with someone else, in order to keep you happy?
Ignorance is bliss, in some sense. But do you want that bliss at the expense of awareness of the truth of your situation?
About truth and lies. Humans have always sought the truth. I believe we are curious by nature, and that curiosity cannot be quenched. We used to believe the world was flat. And now we know better. Maybe we were happier back when the world was flat, who knows…
About The Matrix. There is one thing I always wondered about. How would the AI’s have gotten a next generation of humans? With all the people in individual pods, how would they reproduce? I thought of one possible solution: while people were having sex in the virtual world, artificial insemination took place in the real world. But then I thought: in the real world, people’s muscles were atrophied, and how could a woman with all of her skeletal muscles atrophied give birth?
Awww, heck, it’s just a movie. It doesn’t deserve such serious analysis. I didn’t know there would be sequels, though, they should be fun.
