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Lessons From "The Matrix"
ajani_mgo
Veteran
May be just another show to most people, but yesterday after having watched the movie some time long ago, I did some serious reflection and research into it... I realized the core Buddhist and Christian themes of the movie... Wonderful themes as well as some practical stuff...
(Sorry if this is the wrong thread..)
Summary:
The Human Problem
True enough, humans somehow or other in our evolutionary path lost our instinct of natural equilibrium. Instead, it has become a quest of some to go back to this instinct. We can no longer keep ourselves in check, controlled by our desires and greed.
In fact, sometimes I think, in terms of maintaining this natural equilibrium, are animals actually superior to us? The six states of mind (gods (heaven), asuras, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, hellish beings(hell)) after all, sort of being based on how well in peace, how happy, we are with ourselves, and the meaning of life is to seek happiness. It cannot be denied, then, that the human state, or rather in a rebirth sense, the human life is the best to be in. We are allowed a choice. We can choose to maintain this harmony with nature, or we could choose to destroy it. Nature is after all, where most of us relate to something call "escape", "stress relief". With nature around, there are some greedy acts we can avoid by remembering this fact that we behave like viruses e.g. mass deforestation for some lame dam that can't work.
And, with reference to that, is it not true that we are viruses? Yes, it is never true I still assert, even with all the crap. Viruses are non-feeling. Perhaps for my own purposes of study I should add on a seventh state of mind, the computer program, which is technically speaking not a state of mind but rather a way of living. Some of us may live in the most destructive ways towards this equilibrium, which I go as far as to interpret "nature" as everything from the soil on the ground to the governments of our beloved lands - everything we can see, feel, detect, sense (Oxford should come up with a word to summarize all these - or is it already invented?) by means of all our five aggregates. But what actually matters here is Voiltion. How we feel, think, delude ourselves, create prejudices determines the state of mind we have. As always in Buddhism, nothing is absolute. If Hilter had been shot dead instead of that cowardly suicide, I bet anything that the killer's mind would have been nothing but in the heaven state. A real relatively cruel terrorist might delude himself as being a follower of God, but his or her mind is never in the godly state but in fact, very much the animal state, for it is engraved in his grey matter to follow the so-called "Command of God", which he will take to extreme interpretations to achieve.
The computer program state of mind then is thus a state where there is no feeling, no following of any instincts, no choices, no dreams, no wants. It may sound like nirvana to some but notice I did say no feeling, so no serenity, neither is there conflict. There is no feeling. No feeling.
Here Smith suggests the human as a virus - but even in greed humans copy their emotions of short-lived joy that would poison unto themselves. Viruses have the simplest meaning of life - and do not care more to find out unlike humans. Just to reproduce and survive, following a set of not instinctively-coded, but rather dictated responses. There is no dilemma. They split, they move, they split, they move. Charles Darwin was wrong in saying that humans would lose the gift of emotion. In fact, the gift of emotion was evolved. Based on this alone, the computer program state of mind is thus only a virtual, constructed theory-based state of mind that can never be achieved by humans - for we have evolved too much. We can no longer go back no matter what.
But there is still danger. Greed poisoning probably has killed millions of the greatest intellects ever lived. This is the human problem to be solved. Are we a cancer? Can we blame greed? We cannot. Like greed, metacognition had evolved in us - and we won't be losing it. This is what makes us humans, not apes. Metacognition is not the antivirus, it is a firewall, a patch programmer inside us. Only if we use it in the same way as we had once used emotions then can we evolve into more advanced beings and, still following the survive-and-reproduce routine, now checked by our metacognition, will we destroy greed and all negative states. To use it we must train it. Therefore I propose that all humans should bother to think about our own emotions - be aware. :rockon: (Yea right, like the whole world's gonna listen)
The Search For Truth
Self-explanatory. Therefore I suggest that all searches of the ultimate reality should not just be mere physical dunking of heads into water or the simple prayer each day churned out , but rather, be more deeper than that, into metacognition as proven above. To be aware why we should follow the Buddha, why this Jesus died for us. To think about the teachings, to process and register it, to use it physically and as well as use it mentally.
The above two quotes mirror the desire of some of us here, particularly in the forum (alright, me, alright?) to find the meaning of life. While Neo finds an absolute meaning of life, that as the Saviour, most of us never do. So what matters? It's all to do wth Choices, which I will mention somewhere below.
Unconditional Love
Herein lies the spirit of Jesus. Unconditional love to die for humans as exhibited by Neo. Again choices center this point of reflection. To die for nothing for something.
Neo has lost Trinity in the collision. Here he is no longer attached to love - he is doing something bigger, more impersonal - for the free human spirit, which Smith dismisses as "vagaries of perception", "temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose.
Think. If life ever needed a purpose.
Programs always, proven by computer science, move based on a step-by-step approach. Don't get me started on parallel programming, that's not my point. My point is that a program ends once its code all executes to completion.
We are all like programmers. We program ourselves and compile these algorithms so that we become programs - trying to fulfil purpose. But finding purpose itself makes us already like a program. (Dammed circular logic.)
Humans have one thing called success - and it is what drives us towards our purpose. Unlike programs designed to end upon meeting a purpose, we are designed to find another purpose, because of this addictive quality known as success. If we are to be algorithmized, then I think what occurs after every time is a Loop Until Death=1 or something.
But we are not programs. We cannot be. Based on my argument above, it is actually quite impossible for us to be living in a Matrix itself. It is again impossible in terms of computer science to create something like us, something like the Oracle in real-life computers. Computer design may be an unpredictable field, but computers work on logic and maths, this is certain. You cannot create things like intuitive choice. It is rather a product of continual analomies and coincidences of evolution - manipulating brain parts and stuff.
We all are not designed to behave like programs. We should find purpose, but we should not keep finding it. Settle on a non-circular purpose, and work on that.
(So you may ask, why am I creating AI then? I believe alot of things in life aren't intuitive. Do you need intuition for the perfect spring clean? I hope you don't. I can go as far as to create a level of "predictable choice" and "free will", but I can never create true intuition. :rockon: Fat hope to them slackers! For intuition they shall have to evolve it like us! MUAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!!! :crazy:)
High-AI in Technocracies
On a more political note, I think this show highlights the use of high-AI applications in the future as components of the technocractic ideology.
Machines would make our everyday choices - calculating endlessly the best decision to take on to ensure human happiness.
Happiness? It is inevitable that the Matrix would one day be our future. Rule-based systems can never give us our level of human happiness. Would they understand us not based on a system of rules but rather via a similar cause or encounter? (It's ironic now that I am typing to a machine).
(Should we thus then reject all AI? Of course not. Our descendants must understand that we should not miss out on AI, and neither we should compromise on our human gift of choice. Even as machines one day may have some form of intelligent choicemaking, it is still really dumb to give up yours to its. If we combine forces however, I believe that humans will benefit alot much better - for we still have something machines can never have - willpower.)
Role of Women
The Oracle, while technically not a "she" but an "it".
Trinity.
Do I need to elaborate? If all this was in real life, I think men would do the same.
Choices
The most interesting thing of the Matrix.... Choice, which is what differentiates human and machine.
Machines work on logic and maths. What they call choice is in fact a mathematical solution.
It will be choice that creates and destroy all of us. Choice has caused entire militaries to fail in war, and still potentially does. In wargames, even with the best technologies, the best computers, the best programming, Blue Team USA still loses to Red Team devious generals who make use of rapid cognition to great efficiency.
Yet choice has created. The Buddha walked out to teach, and we see happier faces on ourselves. Choice includes, but is not limited to, just the effects of such.
Human choice is an interesting thing to study. Based on experience, do you think you have ever made a potentially life-changing decision just in a snap? Never. Why? Because it was all in the conscious mind.
Yet in war, quick choices have meant the conquerance of entire empires. Why? Because of again we have emotions. We have the subconscious mind which the mysteries of which we can only fathom. Machines on the other hand, even if they can make sentient choices, do not have such factors involved.
We all try at times to be heroes, revolutionaries, leaders and stars. But how many times do we actually succeed?
Look at Neo - I shall discuss this further under Fate and Prophecy. But throughout the trilogy, do you realize that he was doing what he thought he ought to be doing? When he wasn't seen as The One, he was as good as Trinity only. When he saw himself as One, he was.
Even when the Architect told him of his actual duty, Neo still had the choice. He chose himself to continue as the One. He would not hear of anything else. He would defy his duty - his free will allowed for it, his freedom of choice.
Into the Real World he returned, as he stopped the Sentinels in their tracks. In the Real World!!! A place he should never have had any superhuman power!!! Do you not realize? He had chosen to fight for all humanity instead - the choice powered him. His willpower provided him the means.
Neo chose in the end to die for choice. He preserved the human spirit, the human connection when he knows exactly too well that choice, like what Smith and Merovingian described, is an illusion in the Matrix. But these programs do not understand, as a matter of fact. Like String Theory, you cannot feel an upper dimension unless you happen to exist in it. Again the Matrix was rule-based. Smith was being stupid. He had seen Neo's Fall through the Oracle, but yet, he would not have had understood Neo's Choice.
Reverse Engineering Life
To do a Yoda here, you must unlearn what you have already learned.
But how could Smith, a program, actually break free from the CPU (sort of)? Smith in reality existed as code. But now he was independent of the Machines' control. What has happened I cannot explain, for it is too much a computer science thing for me to understand now.
But he had developed emotions - a human quality. It was possible that he was partially overwritten by Neo's code. But he could never develop choice, for it was not something represented at all in the Matrix. But he would not need choice. With emotions he would be able to tap into some form of willpower. It was this he termed his Purpose. He attempted to copy himself onto the Real World via a Red Pill, suggesting some form of mind control. If he had been able to survive in the Real World, he would have succeeded, for then it would be possible for him to survive outside the Matrix, his mind intact.
If that had happened, would Smith be considered as being Life?
Everything exists for a purpose, he claims. But unfortunately that is true only in the Matrix.
Using our example of ourselves, we shall attempt to reverse engineer ourselves into the Matrix as a ruled-based being.
That leaves Smith with a choice, unusable in the Matrix world. But somehow or other, the Oracle had discovered choice, knew how it was coded in the Matrix, and played with it. And like I explained earlier, choice, is what makes us powerful.
Smith wishes to escape from everything. Why? In his attempt to get powerful he has developed human qualities, making him detest his own existence. He would hope to destroy everything. He has grown physically stronger, but mentally weaker. Does this not remind you of people who do not care about Life in general? So while you do not unerstand what is life still (no one can), do you now understand what not is life?
Are you the Oracle, or are you Smith?
The Human Suicide
What not is Life I have explained above. Being physically satisfied, but never mentally. Cypher here, I do not deny, feels mentally weak even in the Real World.
But yet he is happy with living in delusion. Here I do not argue, but I say that he is way to suicide.
He knows well, as Morpheus had put, if he was not one of them then he was one of the enemy. Cypher allowed his individuality to be robbed. Ignorance is bliss.
Cypher is thus what is called in the animal state of mind. In ignorance he is happy to just feel things, even if he knows it does not exist. Yet in our world we can never use this, for such, will be an ignorance in bliss.
Does Cypher also not parallel the many people of today who regret their choices, then push everything to other people - and relying on yet another to relieve them of their misery? This attitude of looking outside for help is not conducive for Dharma Practice. He does not realize, that perhaps, he was in fact giving up a Chance to Save.
If I were to give you the Chance to Save today, to instantly deliver people into Nirvana/Heaven, to instantly allow them to realize the Dharma/Truth, would you?
Cypher dared not take the Path. As free humans, he was aware, that his job was to Save. He might not have been The One, but he had the power, like Apostles do, to do miracles. Yet he had given up on that, preferring a more dastardly solution to Salvation - being in ignorance, giving up his defenses against the Satan, the Machine World. He had chosen to adopt an escapist approach. He did not value human essence, but he valued individual bliss. But what would bliss be in his sense?
Cypher would have had been searching for the Matrix prior to his removal from it. Yet he would have been removed from it because he felt its unreality. Begging for a solution, he can merely be reverted back to that state, and yet, even then, he would thus take the Blue Pill again, or become an Enemy. Bliss in his sense, was going back to his old way of "living", "life in virtual reality".
He did not realize that Salvation lied only if he himself did, in accordance with the Buddha's teachings. Even among Christians, I do still insist that the hypocrites and those who never bother to register the Message of Jesus can never profess to be Saved. Those who, like Cypher, do not realize that it is so, already died mentally. Even if the World was to be their playground, they would still feel emptiness, because they still do never understand The Meaning, the missing information in their brains.
Fate and Prophecy
Again there is no Fate and Prophecy, only Faith and Belief.
Neo had went against the expectations of everyone. He trusted himself.
Anyone here, in this world, can be The One, the Buddha, or, like what Jesus said, have the ability to move a mountain, to be a true Child of God.
You are already the Buddha, only that you have not realized.
The Architect's "Fundamental Flaw"
He had allowed pretentious choice. And in allowing so, he effectively failed to be able to draft the Matrix up to where it would serve humans best.
In what is sort of a "logical bug", rogue programs would build themselves in this enviroment.
And there are out of those programs, those who think of free will, predeterminism, karma, cuase and effect, cause without effect...
It is those programs who believe in free will as being the most dangerous - to the creator of delusions and lies. It does not matter if there is or not free will.
"Man is free the moment he wishes." - Voltaire
And when he is free, anything he can do, nothing he cannot.
(Sorry if this is the wrong thread..)
Summary:
- The Human Problem
- The Search For Truth
- Unconditional Love
- High-AI in Technocracies
- Role of Women
- Choices
- Reverse Engineering Life
- The Human Suicide
- Fate and Prophecy
- The Architect's "Fundamental Flaw"
The Human Problem
Agent Smith wrote:I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species that I realized you aren't actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with its surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply, and multiply until every natural resource is consumed. And the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we...are the cure.
True enough, humans somehow or other in our evolutionary path lost our instinct of natural equilibrium. Instead, it has become a quest of some to go back to this instinct. We can no longer keep ourselves in check, controlled by our desires and greed.
In fact, sometimes I think, in terms of maintaining this natural equilibrium, are animals actually superior to us? The six states of mind (gods (heaven), asuras, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, hellish beings(hell)) after all, sort of being based on how well in peace, how happy, we are with ourselves, and the meaning of life is to seek happiness. It cannot be denied, then, that the human state, or rather in a rebirth sense, the human life is the best to be in. We are allowed a choice. We can choose to maintain this harmony with nature, or we could choose to destroy it. Nature is after all, where most of us relate to something call "escape", "stress relief". With nature around, there are some greedy acts we can avoid by remembering this fact that we behave like viruses e.g. mass deforestation for some lame dam that can't work.
And, with reference to that, is it not true that we are viruses? Yes, it is never true I still assert, even with all the crap. Viruses are non-feeling. Perhaps for my own purposes of study I should add on a seventh state of mind, the computer program, which is technically speaking not a state of mind but rather a way of living. Some of us may live in the most destructive ways towards this equilibrium, which I go as far as to interpret "nature" as everything from the soil on the ground to the governments of our beloved lands - everything we can see, feel, detect, sense (Oxford should come up with a word to summarize all these - or is it already invented?) by means of all our five aggregates. But what actually matters here is Voiltion. How we feel, think, delude ourselves, create prejudices determines the state of mind we have. As always in Buddhism, nothing is absolute. If Hilter had been shot dead instead of that cowardly suicide, I bet anything that the killer's mind would have been nothing but in the heaven state. A real relatively cruel terrorist might delude himself as being a follower of God, but his or her mind is never in the godly state but in fact, very much the animal state, for it is engraved in his grey matter to follow the so-called "Command of God", which he will take to extreme interpretations to achieve.
The computer program state of mind then is thus a state where there is no feeling, no following of any instincts, no choices, no dreams, no wants. It may sound like nirvana to some but notice I did say no feeling, so no serenity, neither is there conflict. There is no feeling. No feeling.
Here Smith suggests the human as a virus - but even in greed humans copy their emotions of short-lived joy that would poison unto themselves. Viruses have the simplest meaning of life - and do not care more to find out unlike humans. Just to reproduce and survive, following a set of not instinctively-coded, but rather dictated responses. There is no dilemma. They split, they move, they split, they move. Charles Darwin was wrong in saying that humans would lose the gift of emotion. In fact, the gift of emotion was evolved. Based on this alone, the computer program state of mind is thus only a virtual, constructed theory-based state of mind that can never be achieved by humans - for we have evolved too much. We can no longer go back no matter what.
But there is still danger. Greed poisoning probably has killed millions of the greatest intellects ever lived. This is the human problem to be solved. Are we a cancer? Can we blame greed? We cannot. Like greed, metacognition had evolved in us - and we won't be losing it. This is what makes us humans, not apes. Metacognition is not the antivirus, it is a firewall, a patch programmer inside us. Only if we use it in the same way as we had once used emotions then can we evolve into more advanced beings and, still following the survive-and-reproduce routine, now checked by our metacognition, will we destroy greed and all negative states. To use it we must train it. Therefore I propose that all humans should bother to think about our own emotions - be aware. :rockon: (Yea right, like the whole world's gonna listen)
The Search For Truth
Morpheus wrote:The body cannot live without the mind.
Self-explanatory. Therefore I suggest that all searches of the ultimate reality should not just be mere physical dunking of heads into water or the simple prayer each day churned out , but rather, be more deeper than that, into metacognition as proven above. To be aware why we should follow the Buddha, why this Jesus died for us. To think about the teachings, to process and register it, to use it physically and as well as use it mentally.
Morpheus wrote:You have the look of a man who accepts what he sees because he is expecting to wake up. Ironically, that's not far from the truth.
The Architect wrote:I am the Architect. I created the Matrix. I've been waiting for you. You have many questions, and although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human. Ergo, some of my answers you will understand, and some of them you will not. Concordantly, while your first question may be the most pertinent, you may or may not realize it is also the most irrelevant.
The above two quotes mirror the desire of some of us here, particularly in the forum (alright, me, alright?) to find the meaning of life. While Neo finds an absolute meaning of life, that as the Saviour, most of us never do. So what matters? It's all to do wth Choices, which I will mention somewhere below.
Unconditional Love
Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?
Neo: Because I choose to.
Herein lies the spirit of Jesus. Unconditional love to die for humans as exhibited by Neo. Again choices center this point of reflection. To die for nothing for something.
Neo has lost Trinity in the collision. Here he is no longer attached to love - he is doing something bigger, more impersonal - for the free human spirit, which Smith dismisses as "vagaries of perception", "temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose.
Think. If life ever needed a purpose.
Programs always, proven by computer science, move based on a step-by-step approach. Don't get me started on parallel programming, that's not my point. My point is that a program ends once its code all executes to completion.
We are all like programmers. We program ourselves and compile these algorithms so that we become programs - trying to fulfil purpose. But finding purpose itself makes us already like a program. (Dammed circular logic.)
Humans have one thing called success - and it is what drives us towards our purpose. Unlike programs designed to end upon meeting a purpose, we are designed to find another purpose, because of this addictive quality known as success. If we are to be algorithmized, then I think what occurs after every time is a Loop Until Death=1 or something.
But we are not programs. We cannot be. Based on my argument above, it is actually quite impossible for us to be living in a Matrix itself. It is again impossible in terms of computer science to create something like us, something like the Oracle in real-life computers. Computer design may be an unpredictable field, but computers work on logic and maths, this is certain. You cannot create things like intuitive choice. It is rather a product of continual analomies and coincidences of evolution - manipulating brain parts and stuff.
We all are not designed to behave like programs. We should find purpose, but we should not keep finding it. Settle on a non-circular purpose, and work on that.
(So you may ask, why am I creating AI then? I believe alot of things in life aren't intuitive. Do you need intuition for the perfect spring clean? I hope you don't. I can go as far as to create a level of "predictable choice" and "free will", but I can never create true intuition. :rockon: Fat hope to them slackers! For intuition they shall have to evolve it like us! MUAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!!! :crazy:)
High-AI in Technocracies
On a more political note, I think this show highlights the use of high-AI applications in the future as components of the technocractic ideology.
Machines would make our everyday choices - calculating endlessly the best decision to take on to ensure human happiness.
Happiness? It is inevitable that the Matrix would one day be our future. Rule-based systems can never give us our level of human happiness. Would they understand us not based on a system of rules but rather via a similar cause or encounter? (It's ironic now that I am typing to a machine).
(Should we thus then reject all AI? Of course not. Our descendants must understand that we should not miss out on AI, and neither we should compromise on our human gift of choice. Even as machines one day may have some form of intelligent choicemaking, it is still really dumb to give up yours to its. If we combine forces however, I believe that humans will benefit alot much better - for we still have something machines can never have - willpower.)
Role of Women
The Oracle, while technically not a "she" but an "it".
Trinity.
Do I need to elaborate? If all this was in real life, I think men would do the same.
Choices
Merovingian wrote:Choice is an illusion created between those with power and those without.
The most interesting thing of the Matrix.... Choice, which is what differentiates human and machine.
Machines work on logic and maths. What they call choice is in fact a mathematical solution.
It will be choice that creates and destroy all of us. Choice has caused entire militaries to fail in war, and still potentially does. In wargames, even with the best technologies, the best computers, the best programming, Blue Team USA still loses to Red Team devious generals who make use of rapid cognition to great efficiency.
Yet choice has created. The Buddha walked out to teach, and we see happier faces on ourselves. Choice includes, but is not limited to, just the effects of such.
Human choice is an interesting thing to study. Based on experience, do you think you have ever made a potentially life-changing decision just in a snap? Never. Why? Because it was all in the conscious mind.
Yet in war, quick choices have meant the conquerance of entire empires. Why? Because of again we have emotions. We have the subconscious mind which the mysteries of which we can only fathom. Machines on the other hand, even if they can make sentient choices, do not have such factors involved.
We all try at times to be heroes, revolutionaries, leaders and stars. But how many times do we actually succeed?
Look at Neo - I shall discuss this further under Fate and Prophecy. But throughout the trilogy, do you realize that he was doing what he thought he ought to be doing? When he wasn't seen as The One, he was as good as Trinity only. When he saw himself as One, he was.
Even when the Architect told him of his actual duty, Neo still had the choice. He chose himself to continue as the One. He would not hear of anything else. He would defy his duty - his free will allowed for it, his freedom of choice.
Into the Real World he returned, as he stopped the Sentinels in their tracks. In the Real World!!! A place he should never have had any superhuman power!!! Do you not realize? He had chosen to fight for all humanity instead - the choice powered him. His willpower provided him the means.
Neo chose in the end to die for choice. He preserved the human spirit, the human connection when he knows exactly too well that choice, like what Smith and Merovingian described, is an illusion in the Matrix. But these programs do not understand, as a matter of fact. Like String Theory, you cannot feel an upper dimension unless you happen to exist in it. Again the Matrix was rule-based. Smith was being stupid. He had seen Neo's Fall through the Oracle, but yet, he would not have had understood Neo's Choice.
Reverse Engineering Life
Morpheus wrote:I've seen an agent punch through a concrete wall. Men have emptied entire clips at them and hit nothing but air. Yet their strength and their speed are still based in a world that is built on rules. Because of that, they will never be as strong or as fast as you can be.
Agent Smith wrote:I killed you, Mr. Anderson. I watched you die... with a certain satisfaction, I might add. Then something happened. something that I knew was impossible, but it happened anyway. You destroyed me, Mr. Anderson. After that, I understood the rules, I knew what I was supposed to do, but I didn't. I couldn't. I was compelled to stay, compelled to disobey. And now, here I stand because of you, Mr. Anderson. Because of you, I'm no longer an Agent of this system. Because of you, I've changed. I'm unplugged. A new man, so to speak. Like you, apparently, free.
To do a Yoda here, you must unlearn what you have already learned.
But how could Smith, a program, actually break free from the CPU (sort of)? Smith in reality existed as code. But now he was independent of the Machines' control. What has happened I cannot explain, for it is too much a computer science thing for me to understand now.
But he had developed emotions - a human quality. It was possible that he was partially overwritten by Neo's code. But he could never develop choice, for it was not something represented at all in the Matrix. But he would not need choice. With emotions he would be able to tap into some form of willpower. It was this he termed his Purpose. He attempted to copy himself onto the Real World via a Red Pill, suggesting some form of mind control. If he had been able to survive in the Real World, he would have succeeded, for then it would be possible for him to survive outside the Matrix, his mind intact.
If that had happened, would Smith be considered as being Life?
Everything exists for a purpose, he claims. But unfortunately that is true only in the Matrix.
Using our example of ourselves, we shall attempt to reverse engineer ourselves into the Matrix as a ruled-based being.
That leaves Smith with a choice, unusable in the Matrix world. But somehow or other, the Oracle had discovered choice, knew how it was coded in the Matrix, and played with it. And like I explained earlier, choice, is what makes us powerful.
Smith wishes to escape from everything. Why? In his attempt to get powerful he has developed human qualities, making him detest his own existence. He would hope to destroy everything. He has grown physically stronger, but mentally weaker. Does this not remind you of people who do not care about Life in general? So while you do not unerstand what is life still (no one can), do you now understand what not is life?
Are you the Oracle, or are you Smith?
The Human Suicide
Cypher wrote:I know this steak doesn't exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize? Ignorance is bliss.
What not is Life I have explained above. Being physically satisfied, but never mentally. Cypher here, I do not deny, feels mentally weak even in the Real World.
But yet he is happy with living in delusion. Here I do not argue, but I say that he is way to suicide.
He knows well, as Morpheus had put, if he was not one of them then he was one of the enemy. Cypher allowed his individuality to be robbed. Ignorance is bliss.
Cypher is thus what is called in the animal state of mind. In ignorance he is happy to just feel things, even if he knows it does not exist. Yet in our world we can never use this, for such, will be an ignorance in bliss.
Does Cypher also not parallel the many people of today who regret their choices, then push everything to other people - and relying on yet another to relieve them of their misery? This attitude of looking outside for help is not conducive for Dharma Practice. He does not realize, that perhaps, he was in fact giving up a Chance to Save.
If I were to give you the Chance to Save today, to instantly deliver people into Nirvana/Heaven, to instantly allow them to realize the Dharma/Truth, would you?
Cypher dared not take the Path. As free humans, he was aware, that his job was to Save. He might not have been The One, but he had the power, like Apostles do, to do miracles. Yet he had given up on that, preferring a more dastardly solution to Salvation - being in ignorance, giving up his defenses against the Satan, the Machine World. He had chosen to adopt an escapist approach. He did not value human essence, but he valued individual bliss. But what would bliss be in his sense?
Cypher would have had been searching for the Matrix prior to his removal from it. Yet he would have been removed from it because he felt its unreality. Begging for a solution, he can merely be reverted back to that state, and yet, even then, he would thus take the Blue Pill again, or become an Enemy. Bliss in his sense, was going back to his old way of "living", "life in virtual reality".
He did not realize that Salvation lied only if he himself did, in accordance with the Buddha's teachings. Even among Christians, I do still insist that the hypocrites and those who never bother to register the Message of Jesus can never profess to be Saved. Those who, like Cypher, do not realize that it is so, already died mentally. Even if the World was to be their playground, they would still feel emptiness, because they still do never understand The Meaning, the missing information in their brains.
Fate and Prophecy
Again there is no Fate and Prophecy, only Faith and Belief.
Neo had went against the expectations of everyone. He trusted himself.
Anyone here, in this world, can be The One, the Buddha, or, like what Jesus said, have the ability to move a mountain, to be a true Child of God.
You are already the Buddha, only that you have not realized.
The Architect's "Fundamental Flaw"
He had allowed pretentious choice. And in allowing so, he effectively failed to be able to draft the Matrix up to where it would serve humans best.
In what is sort of a "logical bug", rogue programs would build themselves in this enviroment.
And there are out of those programs, those who think of free will, predeterminism, karma, cuase and effect, cause without effect...
It is those programs who believe in free will as being the most dangerous - to the creator of delusions and lies. It does not matter if there is or not free will.
"Man is free the moment he wishes." - Voltaire
And when he is free, anything he can do, nothing he cannot.
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There is also a (Somewhat simplistic) reference to Karma, when the Merovingian's feelings are hurt by the betrayal of his wife Seraph, because she is fed up with having her feelings hurt by his constant indiscretions.
I also learned that some chicks look really hot in latex.
-bf
Agreed! =p
Quotation 5, Signature below.....
At a Western food restuarant...
Two Tibetan monks chant over their lamb chops.
"Om mani padme hung... Om mani padme hung... Om mani padme hung..."
And there's a table at the opposite. Two lay members.
"There is no spoon... There is no spoon... There is no spoon..."
LOL. Get it?
I've just finished a marathon Matrix session, myself, spread out over a few days, and I'm still amazed at the somewhat 'un-hollywood' questions the film raises. Though, naturally the classic hollywood elements are there.
Of course it's important to remember that the Wakowski (sp?) brothers were heavily influenced by what we know as 'anime' and other Japanese comics. Living here in Japan you begin to realize how integrated the basic notions of Buddhism are ingrained in this society, I'm speaking generally of course! This 'feeling' or sense of seeking certainly leaks into the anime films that most inspired the Wakowski brothers (mainly Akira and Ghost in the Shell) - if you ever get a chance I highly reccomend seeing both of these films as they definately raise interesting questions concerning existence and underlying 'truths' or energies, which depending on your school or lineage will speak to you in ways that 'Seven years in Tibet' never can.
My point, if I ever had one, would probably be that The Matrix was the film that started me upon the path of studying the self and studying the Dharma:
"... it is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth"
"What truth?"
"That you are a slave, Neo, born into a world of bondage in a prison that you cannot taste nor smell nor touch, a prison... for your mind."
I guess as a Zen buddhist the message that stands out clearest from the Matrix is that Neo sought liberation from the matrix but, in the end, he eventually realized that peace for both races of humans and machines lay not elsewhere but back within the Matrix where he sacrificed himself.
And (somewhat more trivially) I love the first fight he has in the 2nd film as the techniques he uses to easily deflect the Agent's attacks are Wing Chun techniques! (If you don't see the connection google my online name BSF)
Huh! Typical!! It's always about YOU isn't it - ?!?
(Just kidding, BSF...;) )
Well the first time I saw the Matrix I wasn't anywhere touching Buddhism, then when I read about Buddhism I was like "hey, sounds familiar!" and that was when I felt that Buddhism was "cool",got pretentious and never really understood a crap about it (heck, I was Buddhist for a joke and a laugh, wasn't even interested then! Just wanted to impress my peers..), but after a while started to get serious about Buddhism really. Karma is fun!!! :rockon:
I found a link for "Bean Scripting Framework"...
Ummm.... yeah. I think I'm missing something...
-bf