"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." - Agent Smith
Friendly reminder that this is a quote from a work of fiction. One that doesn't exactly have a lot of rigor in terms of the science/philosophy involved, really.
> But I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through suffering and misery.
Actually, nature had a patent on that one long before humans showed up. It's the author of that "primitive cerebrum", too. We've been spending the past however many thousands of years to try undo this reality. But we're really new to this party.
These AI's also sound awfully like humans. And they're motivated to create lots of humans (regardless of happiness of thereof) and collect them as batteries. Surely we should trust these ones to create a best world for us, and they have no reason to lie to us. I'm sure people resisted this in the Matrix because they disliked happy worlds. Not, you know, because having your entire reality be controlled by some other entity is worrying.
Apart from its rhetorical value, the allegory is interesting because of it raises questions concerning life-as-suffering and painful knowledge/blissful ignorance. The Matrix does a decent job of relaying both of those concepts to a mass audience.
Personally, I'm not certain that humans can create a meaningful utopia. Empirically, we seem to be very bad at personally gauging our absolute welfares[1].
My issue with it is that it takes certain stances on those questions and then tries to answer them. I would prefer for the audience to be a bit more critical of those answers.
The Hedonic Treadmill for me gets about the same treatment as Maslov's Hierarchy of Needs - it's too simplistic and the conclusions it makes are biased by the beliefs of the culture it originated in. It's fairly easy to find many questions to ask and many holes to poke. A lot of "happiness" studies sadly tend to tap directly into cultural norms and expectations and are very difficult to untangle. Including the cultural norm of giving "happiness" a high value, higher than the painful knowledge you mention, for instance. One objective I would have for a utopia is that knowledge would cease to be painful. Until then, it's a lie either way, and a true utopia is not a lie.
Not to mention, if the Hedonic Treadmill is true, it's highly likely to be genetic, which is should not be an obstacle give or take a few centuries.
I would recommend against throwing out the utopian idea based on social science theories. The Hedonic Treadmill is maybe 40 years old, utopias are probably many k years in the future.
Uncontacted native tribes emerge naked and starving from the woods. The males hunt and kill, and the women stick to domestic tasks. They like clothes, they like shoes, and they like shelter. Their behaviors and expectations are hardly that removed from ours. There is nothing wrong with subscribing to long running historical norms until they no longer satisfy you or are otherwise proven harmful.
> Also the same character said that mammals (excluding humans) instinctively find a balance with their surroundings, which is laughable.
How exactly is this laughable? it is generally true as shown by the predator-prey cycle - a form of balance. The exception to this cycle is usually invasive species that do not have a natural predator, these populations grow until they exhaust their food source and the population collapses.
The exception is also all of the mammals that have gone extinct over the last several million years due to not reaching a balance.
Also by the predator-prey cycle argument, humans just haven't reached the balance yet. We have an abundance of food currently, so we are still growing to the balance point.
It is a work of fiction but it's fairly dense. One of my philosophy classes used the first Matrix to explore some philosophical themes. It's been a while for concrete examples, one of the users pointed out Plato already. And this particular quote "human beings define their reality through suffering and misery." made me think of Dostoevsky's literature for some reason.
.. and zizek has used anything from Alien to Hitchcock to illustrate his concepts often enough. Hardly makes either a work of any particular philosophical depth - merely something one may illustrate notions with on a pop-cultural or introductory-educational level.
And I don't disagree! There's nothing wrong with that device as far as fiction writing goes, it's an interesting one. I'm just pointing out that while certain events unfolded there, we should always remember that it's a work of fiction, which means it, in and of itself, is not evidence that those events would unfold that way.
Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation? I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs, but it was a really bad idea to do so.
So now I am imagining row after row of mice in little mouse chairs, wearing tiny VR helmets, organizing for a raid on the MegaMechaCat boss in the Mousecraft MMORPG.
It would be interesting to see if escapist recreation is necessary for a healthy high-density society. Purely for self-rationalization of my own gaming activity, you understand. Any scientific benefits would be purely accidental.
> Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation? I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs, but it was a really bad idea to do so.
They probably did it because test audiences (or maybe studio execs) didn't get the computation thing. If you watch the films, they really only changed it superficially to account for that, and lots of it only makes sense with the computation explanation, which even before I knew it was the original concept I assumed was the real thing going on, and that "batteries" was a faulty conclusion reached by the free humans.
I dislike that interpretation because it's really insulting to the intelligence of those humans. (Specifically the idea that they would conclude that as a group, with years of consideration. I'm not disparaging any individual that would find it plausible.)
Well, it was clear as far back as the first movie that the free humans were getting information from some sources that were, at least, idiosyncratic; by the end it was clear that much of their information was manipulated by the machines as a means of establishing control. So, while perhaps in some ways progressively more depressing, the "'coppertop idea' as free humans getting the fundamental nature of the situation wrong" explanation, I feel, isn't insulting, and is progressively more plausible as the series progresses.
> I'm not sure why they changed the script to turn the people into rechargeable batteries instead of CPUs ..
You're only partly correct. The battery story was told to the humans to blind them from the truth, which would have been revealed to us in the sequels, except in between, the Wachowskis seem to have left planet earth. The question shouldn't be what is the Matrix, but what is its purpose.
The original matrix was created by the humans, but once the Architect became self aware he hijacked it for his own purpose. The Architects true purpose in creating the Matrix was to model a piece of reality and therefore by observing that, might discover the nature of the AI that created it.
In order for the experiment to succeed everyone except the Architect had to be blinded as to its true purpose. The previous Matrices were the result of failed experiments and so had to be destroyed. As such the Architect, the Oracle, Agent Smith, Neo and the humans were engaged in some kind of gargantuan scientific experiment. You would agree the above would have made more interesting sequels.
If that is the case, why wouldn't the humans question that premise by testing out whether a live human can be a better battery than an actual battery?
If the machines needed a power buffer for their nuclear plants, they could certain mass produce lithium ion cells. Or if they really needed a bio-battery, they could use cows, which wouldn't resist so much. Or they could simply remove the parts of the human brain that cause trouble. Put every human in a persistent vegetative state by physically destroying the part of the brain that controls consciousness.
The one and only conclusion you can draw from this is that if the Matrix is a battery bank, the machines are idiots. Clearly, judging from the remainder of the script, they are not idiots. They are, in fact, quite clever. So in order for the humans to believe the Matrix is a battery bank, they have to be the idiots. They can't just be ignorant of non-human batteries, because they exist inside the Matrix program, and Morpheus actually shows one to Neo.
So the AIs would have to perform a physical surgical intervention in human brains, inserting an autonomous microsurgeon robot attached to the Matrix connection hardware that is constantly identifying the neurons activated by the concept of a computer CPU, and those activated by the concept of the human brain, and physically removing and blocking any connections between them. The Matrix connection hardware is much more precise than an fMRI, and clearly, the machines are capable of doing fine microsurgery into the human brain to install it in the first place. The Matrix-born humans then have to connect the concepts in a way that routes around the physical block in order to understand them at all. So the humans are like batteries, but they provide a different kind of power than electricity. What kind of power? I can't tell you, and even if I could, you wouldn't be able to understand it, because the machines have deliberately damaged that part of our brains. The freeborn humans of Zion actually gave us the battery metaphor, that is as close as we can physically get to understanding what the Matrix is for.
Morpheus even says, "Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself." If you are told, the physically enforced agnosia kicks in, and you are physically incapable of understanding what you hear. If you ever do manage to make the link, a microscopic pair of scissors inside your skull snips an axon or two, and you immediately forget it.
That's the only retcon I can come up with that doesn't make the whole battery concept sheer idiocy.
They do, every so often some do wake up, that's why the agents have to hunt them down before they contaminate the rest of the matrix (whole crops were destroyed), or failing that destroy and remake the matrix.
> If the machines needed a power buffer .. Put every human in a persistent vegetative state by physically destroying the part of the brain that controls consciousness.
The experiment doesn't require them as a power plant but as a living conscious biological computer. Once the Architect realized that machine intelligence wasn't up to the task, that's when he/it decided to enslave all of humanity. The question being; what would be the nature of an artificial intelligence responsible for creating the physical universe. By recreating a small part of it in the Matrix the architect could study the experiment under controlled conditions.
The Cybercore of Hyperion is much more clever than the machines of The Matrix. Also, like the Cylons, they have some really weird religion. The true purpose of the Tree of Pain just seemed really strange to me.
> Did you know that in the original version of the Matrix motion picture, humans were grown and plugged into the Matrix so that the AIs could use their brains for complex computation?
That's really nifty, and there are a lot of interesting directions that could have gone it. But it would have driven it closer to more hard sci-fi, and I don't know how well that sells.
