This essay is about the following questions on the sequel film The Matrix Reloaded. I am referring to the questions below as "glitches" just to be consistent with Glenn Yeffeth's terminology in the book Taking the Red Pill.

• How can Neo stop the sentinels in the real world?
• How can Agent Smith be uploaded into a human brain?
• Why do people look the same in real life as they did in the virtual world of the Matrix?
• How can Neo fly and use telekinesis if the Matrix is supposed to a physics simulation?
• How do the vampire twins move around?
• How can Neo think fast enough to dodge a bullet?
• How does virtual food have so much effect?
• Is there free will?
• Can the future be foretold?
• Who or what is the Merovingian?
• Who or what is the "mother of the Matrix"?
• Who is the Architect and what does his speech tell us?

Naming convention

In the bad old days, programmers used to give their variables and subroutines names like X, Z10N, MTRXRL, and so on, which were unpronounceable and incomprehensible. Other programmers used anthropomorphic names such as FRED, JANE, and such like. The best approach is undoubtedly for the names to signify the nature and role of what they name, and to comply with a "naming convention"—a rule that guides the naming and leads to systematic rather than haphazard names.

As the Wachowskis tap into a lot of mythology (old and new) in their names, so we must dig into these myths to pick out the naming pattern. Needless to say, this does not commit us (or the Wachowskis) to believe any of the myths. As Councilor West could have said: "Belief is not a requisite for comprehension."

The first names we encounter in The Matrix belong to the realm of the mundane world: Mr. Thomas Anderson, and Mr. Smith. (We can read religious significance into Mr. Anderson's name, but this is not the time or place to do so.) Then we hear the self-assigned names of the rebels. These are hacker handles. Mr. Anderson calls himself Neo (the new one), and his colleagues call themselves Morpheus (the Greek god of dreams, who gives shape and form to ideas), Trinity (the three aspects of Christian divinity), Cypher (a secret code), Tank and Dozer (industrial machines), Apoc (the apocalyptic), Switch and Mouse. We also get the ship names: Nebuchadnezzar (who sought to interpret a dream he could not remember); Icarus (who flew on artificial wings); Gnosis (the Gnostic form of enlightenment); Logos (the rational projection of God); and Osiris (partner of Isis). And, in Reloaded, we have a swathe of names in Zion: Hamann (alluding to the German philosopher Johann Hamann), Jacob onboard the Gnosis (alluding to the Gnostic philosopher Jacob Boehme).

Of more interest in this essay are the assigned names of artificial intelligence programs: the Architect (the builder of the Matrix), the Oracle (who, I will argue, has access to the strategic planning programs of the Matrix, which I shall call "meta-intelligence" programs), the Merovingian (named after the supposed descendants of the Christ), Persephone (the Greek goddess who acquired emotional awareness by eating pomegranates, and who, I shall argue, is a program designed to probe human emotions by kissing human avatars), the Keymaker (self-evident), and the Seraph (an angel traditionally associated with being a serpent).

The names may be ambiguous clues, but clues nonetheless.

Matrix and Meta-Matrix

Baudrillard's Hyperreality

Second, and more specifically, there was Morpheus' reference to Jean Baudrillard. In the film, this was toned down from what had been in the published shooting script. The script has Morpheus saying "As in Baudrillard's vision, your whole life has been spent inside the map, not the territory." That sentence was deleted, but what remains is still very clear. "Welcome to the desert of the real" says Morpheus in the training construct, as he shows Neo images of the scorched surface of the Earth. Many filmgoers took this to be a straightforward reference to the desert-like appearance of the Earth.

In Baudrillard's book, Simulacra and Simulation, however, a different and quite specific meaning is attached to this phrase. Baudrillard begins with an allusion to Jorge Luis Borges' story in which a vast map of an empire is drawn that is the same size as the territory it depicts, and is laid out over the territory. As the empire declines, the map is left to rot, and eventually only a few shreds are left visible in the deserts. This concept is then inverted by Baudrillard, who maintains that "today it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map." The central point of Baudrillard's book is his thesis that we live in what he calls a "hyperreality," a virtual world that stands in its own right and is not a simulation or copy of some prior real world. There are still traces, within this hyperreality, of what we think are the remains of a prior, real world: "It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges persist here and there in the deserts [...] the desert of the real itself." Yet, these vestiges only seem real. Since they are contained within the hyperreality, they are simulacra, copies of nothing at all.

Thus, when Morpheus alludes to the "desert of the real," he is referring not to a genuine reality but to an illusion of reality within a fully virtual world. He is implying that the scorched Earth is not real, but virtual: a simulacrum of something that never existed.

There should be a nagging doubt in your mind at this point: Why would Morpheus say this if Morpheus himself believes the world of Zion to be real? Maybe Morpheus is deliberately keeping Neo in the dark. (Neo himself later seems to wonder whether perhaps his leader has been economical with the truth when he discovers there have been many Zions: "There are two possible explanations: either no one told me or no one knows.") Now, rewind to an earlier scene in The Matrix, where Neo pulls out a data minidisc for Choi. He pulls it out of a hollowed-out copy of Baudrillard's "Simulacra and Simulation," which is the very book that Morpheus quotes from. Is it coincidence that Morpheus quotes from that same book? Maybe. Or maybe Morpheus has observed Neo's reading habits remotely through the monitors in the Nebuchadnezzar. Or maybe there's a deeper connection. We will look at that later. Meanwhile, let us continue with the Wachowskis' allusion to Baudrillard.

Neo opens "Simulacra and Simulation" to the chapter "On nihilism," which has curiously been printed in the middle of the book, whereas really it is the last chapter of Baudrillard's actual book. And, also curiously, the chapter starts on the left-hand page, not the right-hand page as normal. In that chapter, Baudrillard asserts that revolution is pointless because the system that operates our hyperreal world will automatically and effortlessly neutralize it: "Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic."

Yet, Neo has sliced into that specific chapter with a knife, cutting out its substance and inserting instead a copy of his own software. Neo is rejecting Baudrillard's message, implicitly asserting that he can and will rebel against the system in order to achieve his enlightenment or "gnosis." This is an adumbration of what is to come in Reloaded and Revolutions. For Neo will discover that the organized escape of humans from the Matrix into Zion is simply a transfer from one virtual world to another, in precisely the manner anticipated by the Architect of the Matrix. But Neo will find a way to break out of this seemingly nihilistic prison.

Small clues

First, the Lady in Red. In The Matrix, when Mouse is waiting for Neo and the others to return from the Oracle, we see him look with puzzlement at a centerspread showing "The Lady in Red." She was his creation in the Training Construct, and she should exist only there and in Mouse's mind. It is not clear whether he brought the magazine with him or whether he found it lying around in the Matrix. If he found it in the Matrix, then we too are puzzled: how could the Matrix world know anything about Mouse's Lady in Red -- unless the apparently real world is virtual and something in the Matrix has been spying on it.

Second, the spoon. In Reloaded, Neo is presented with a spoon as a gift from an admirer. It has been suggested that this is the Buddhist child's spoon from The Matrix. But that spoon had a bright mirrored surface, while the new spoon is battered and dull. So they cannot be the same spoon.

Hacking the Meta-Matrix

As always, there are other possible interpretations: (a) On his last visit into the Matrix, the Agents sabotaged Neo's exit and transferred him to a construct that resembled the world of Zion but was actually virtual. (Compare this with the Star Trek episode in which a copy of the Enterprise is made within the holodeck.) While this is certainly possible, it would be an astoundingly expensive stunt for the Agents to pull, with no clear advantage. (b) The Zionic world is real but Neo has now acquired powers of telekinesis. Given that paranormal powers have not been part of the Wachowskis' science fiction, this is very unlikely. (c) An idea that has gained some currency in the newsgroups is that Neo (presumably along with every other human) was fitted with wireless data ports, and that he uses wi-fi communication to hack the sentinels. But why would the machines take the trouble to install wi-fi ports in everybody? Whenever people connect or disconnect to the Matrix or to training constructs, the focus is always on the back-of-head cable. Evidently, this is necessary and sufficient for the input of sensory data and the output of motor signals. So, there is simply no need for the extra functionality of wi-fi. Moreover, in the pods used in the power station, every human remains in the same pod for life. People do not move about, so mobility—which is the main advantage of wi-fi—would be irrelevant. (d) Finally, there is the non-technical suggestion that Neo has acquired some affinity with machines and can "just do it," but that leaves us with magical science fantasy rather than thought-out science fiction.

By the far the most natural interpretation of this scene is that Neo is in the Meta-Matrix.

Before the crew abandons the Nebuchadnezzar, they watch the sentinels on the holographic display. Neo peremptorily announces, "It's a bomb." They realize that the sentinels are hanging back out of range of the Nebuchadnezzar's EMP weapon, and are about to sling a bomb at the hovercraft. Some commentators have suggested that this reveals Neo having prescient knowledge of what the sentinels were up to. That is not, however, evidenced in the film. Neo makes his diagnosis after looking at the holographic display. It appears that he is just being smart.

Agent Smith partly uploaded to the Meta-Matrix

How should we interpret what has happened to Bane? Let us assume that Bane is ultimately a real person. Here's the first possible interpretation. While his avatar in the Matrix is possessed by Agent Smith, it may be that his mind is psychologically affected, giving him an obsessive desire to kill Neo. This is quite plausible. Here's the second possibility. If we accept that the world of Zion is virtual, then is it possible that Agent Smith has possessed Bane's avatar in the Meta-Matrix? Perhaps. One problem with this is that, in the world of Zion, Bane still looks the same as he used to. But whenever an agent takes possession of any avatar in the Matrix, the visual appearance of the avatar changes to match the personality of the agent. So, if Agent Smith has indeed possessed Bane's avatar in the Meta-Matrix, why does Bane still look like Bane, and not look like Smith? Maybe the Meta-Matrix is coded differently from the Matrix? This is unlikely, as there is no independent evidence for it. Maybe the visual rendering is lost during the exit? This is a more credible line of explanation. And it is not just the visual appearance of Smith that is missing. Bane seems not to possess Smith's strength and speed, and his total obsession with killing Neo. It's as if Smith has only partly loaded into Bane's avatar in the Meta-Matrix. How can this be?

Let us take a closer look at what would be involved in entering and exiting the Matrix, if the world of Zion is indeed a virtual world, a Meta-Matrix. When a person enters the Matrix, her avatar in the Meta-Matrix continues to exist but enters a comatose state. A new avatar, with a similar visual appearance, is created in the Matrix. Things that happen to the Matrix avatar are stored locally in the module that drives only the Matrix avatar, and are not (in general) relayed back to the Meta-Matrix avatar. For example, if the Matrix avatar cuts a finger off, the Meta-Matrix avatar does not lose a finger. Nevertheless, we saw several times in The Matrix that "nocebo" (the opposite of placebo) effects can occur.

For instance, after a kung-fu training session, Neo bleeds from the mouth; and when Mouse is shot, his avatar in the Meta-Matrix bleeds. So, it appears that, when there is some extreme trauma suffered by the Matrix avatar, it is written back to the Meta-Matrix avatar. If we think of it in object-oriented programming terms, the Meta-Matrix avatar spawns an instance of itself inside the Matrix, but certain core data areas are shared. Now, when an agent loads itself into an avatar inside the Matrix, it overwrites the visual rendering of that local instance of the avatar, and takes over control of the avatar's behavior. When that individual exits from the Matrix, the local instance (in the Matrix) is deleted. Thus the agent's visual rendering is lost. But, what if an agent overwrites part of the shared data area between the Matrix avatar and the Meta-Matrix avatar? Then the agent will have succeeded in partly loading itself into the Meta-Matrix avatar.

This seems to be an internally consistent theory, which is supported by on-screen scenes of the Meta-Matrix avatars being affected by traumas suffered by the Matrix avatars, implying a shared memory. Furthermore, it would seem that the shared memory has to do with visceral reactions. It might be possible to build in some conditionality into the shared memory, so that whenever the Meta-Matrix avatar sees a certain individual, the person (that is, the real brain) feels (virtual) nausea and pain, and consequently develops an irrational hatred of that person.

In my essay "Glitches in the Matrix," I argued that the neurological interface of the brain with the Matrix exists where the sensory nerve fibers enter the cranial cavity, and where the motor nerve fibers exit. On this view, local reflex arcs such as the knee-jerk reaction are entirely simulated inside the avatar, because the processing is carried out in the spine, not the brain. The virtual spinal cord carries out dumb local processing. So, as we go up the spinal column, where do we cross the boundary from the parts of the nervous system that are simulated, to those that are not? Let us look at the top of the spine: in the brainstem, we have the hindbrain and the midbrain. The hindbrain co-ordinates motor activity, posture, equilibrium and sleep patterns and regulates unconscious but essential functions, such as breathing and blood circulation.

When Neo is unplugged, his hindbrain is fully functional: witness the ease with which he grabs the tube in his mouth. Therefore, the hindbrain must have been in active use and was not simulated by the Matrix. Then there is the midbrain. This has three main parts: the hypothalamus, which controls physiological responses to danger, such as "fight or flight reaction"; the amygdala, which controls aggression; and the hippocampus, which is used in building up long-term memories. The first of these, the hypothalamus, would need to be simulated, so that in the Matrix world, people would observe normal physiological reactions such as sweating and trembling in fear. Immediately beneath the danger-sensing hypothalamus is the aggression-inducing amygdala. It's quite likely that this will have been simulated in the avatar, in order to reduce the amount of violence in the Matrix world. After all, every human who dies prematurely in the Matrix world is a loss to the system. And, in the worst case, the waging of war among humans inside the Matrix would be a disaster. Finally, to the front of the hypothalamus and amygdala, is the hippocampus. Undoubtedly the brain would need the real hippocampus in order to learn things. So, of the organs in the midbrain, it seems the hypothalamus and the amygdala would be simulated.

Thus, the most likely cut-off point is for the electrodes to be placed above and around the amygdala and the hypothalamus (and hence the attached pituitary gland) and for the functions of those organs to be simulated in the avatar.

Now, when somebody in the Meta-Matrix downloads into the Matrix, an avatar shell is spawned and inserted into some unobserved room in the Matrix world; the "residual self-image" (as Morpheus calls it) is copied into the avatar shell; and the person's sensory input is henceforth routed from the Matrix avatar instead of from the Meta-Matrix avatar, and correspondingly the motor output is henceforth routed to the Matrix avatar. The person is now virtually present in the Matrix, and no longer in the Meta-Matrix.

Part of the basic design of the Matrix must include the rule that if an avatar is killed in the Matrix, then the original avatar in the Meta-Matrix must also die. How can this be achieved? From the point of view of people in the Meta-Matrix, the arrangement is as follows: The Matrix interface has electrodes feeding into the hypothalamus, which copy the state of the virtual hypothalamus into the "real" hypothalamus. Upon virtual death—that is, the death of the Matrix avatar—a flatline signal from the virtual hypothalamus is fed into the "real" hypothalamus (in the Meta-Matrix), and the person dies (in the Meta-Matrix). In a similar way, during normal life, the state of the virtual amygdala (in the Matrix) is also written into the "real" amygdala (in the Meta-Matrix) so that it can generate hormonal responses which affect the brain.

All of that is how it seems to people in the Meta-Matrix, who believe their world to be real. But we know that the Meta-Matrix is also virtual, so what is really going on? From the point of view of an outsider, of someone outside both the Matrix and the Meta-Matrix, the design is this: the hypothalamus and amygdala are shared memory for both avatars. It is shared between the avatar in the Matrix and the avatar in the Meta-Matrix. And, in the genuine real world (beyond the Meta-Matrix), where there are real brains, we may guess that the states of virtual hypothalamus and amygdala are written to the biological tissue—but so far the films have shown us nothing of that external reality.

Now we begin to see how it is possible for Agent Smith to be loaded partly into Bane's avatar in the Meta-Matrix. Smith has over-written an instinctive aggression toward Neo into the shared hypothalamus and amygdala of Bane's avatars. When Bane exits the Matrix, and his Matrix avatar is deleted, his Meta-Matrix avatar still holds that aggressive instinct deep within his (virtual) brain. Bane's conscious mind, on the other hand, has nothing against Neo, and is puzzled and disturbed by this sudden and irrational hatred.

We see Bane playing with a knife, preparing to attack Neo. He even cuts his own hand in frustrated blind rage as he waits for Neo. Neo spots him and suddenly Bane's rational mind gets into gear and suppresses the aggression. Clearly, Agent Smith has not fully loaded into Bane, otherwise Bane would have gone ahead and murdered Neo. On the contrary, Smith has gained control only of Banes' aggressive drive.

(Some commentators have interpreted this scene as Agent Smith exploring with fascination the human experience of pain. This is wrong for several reasons. First, the look on Bane's face is not that of fascination but of rage. Second, Agent Smith as an entity cannot be in Bane, for if that were so then Bane would not hesitate to attack Neo. Third, it is only Bane's Meta-Matrix avatar that is cut, which will only yield a pain experience in Bane's brain, not in the avatar. Fourth, as I argued in my essay "Glitches in the Matrix," machines of this kind cannot be conscious.)

In summary: Agent Smith has loaded, into the shared memory of Bane's Matrix and Meta-Matrix avatars, a conditioned visceral reaction against Neo, which is now driving Bane to try to murder Neo.

Why people look the same in the Matrix and the Meta-Matrix

We now know that Neo's body in the "external" world is itself only an avatar (in the Meta-Matrix), so a new possible explanation emerges. Namely, when a person first enters the Meta-Matrix as a neonate, and then shortly afterwards enters the Matrix, the software loads up identical code for the appearance of both avatars. This is not a fixed appearance, but one that will grow over the years as the individual grows from infancy to adulthood, and the two avatars will grow in parallel. This is a rather elegant solution, as it is the most efficient thing for the software to do.

This, on its own, would not be strong enough to count as evidence for the Meta-Matrix's being a virtual world, but it is certainly circumstantial corroboration.

It also leaves completely open the question of what Neo looks like in the genuine real world, outside the Meta-Matrix.

Two matrices, one architect?

• The original creators built the Meta-Matrix and plugged the human race into it. On their own initiative, people within the Meta-Matrix created artificial intelligence systems, waged war with the machines, destroyed the Earth's surface, and were in due course subjugated by the machines. The machines built the Matrix—a virtual reality within a virtual reality, although the machines could not know this—and inserted the whole human race into it. In other words, the tale told by Morpheus is true, but it all took place within the virtual world of the Meta-Matrix.
• The original creators built the Meta-Matrix and the Matrix as parallel systems. They anticipated that some individuals would escape from the Matrix, and that a movement would develop in which freed humans would seek to recruit other Matrix refusers. These rebels would be siphoned off into the Meta-Matrix, where people would happily remain in the mistaken belief that they were free.

If we are to believe the Architect, then he is obviously in a better position to tell us the truth about the Matrix than Morpheus is. So, when he describes the building of Zion and the attack on it as a sequence that has happened in each cycle of the Matrix, then we have to accept that the situation in the Meta-Matrix is managed. In addition, he refers to recent events in Neo's life as having inexorably brought Neo to meet the Architect. These points do not completely prove that the Architect built the Meta-Matrix, but it are strongly suggestive. (The alternative is that the Architect is an entity within the Meta-Matrix and believes the Meta-Matrix to be real. One point in favor of this alternative hypothesis is that, when the Architect's monitors show scenes from Neo's past, only scenes from his life inside the Matrix are shown. His life outside the Matrix is not, apparently, within the Architect's scope.)

My best guess is that the Architect built both the Matrix and the Meta-Matrix.

After the vertiginous question of nested Matrices, let us zero in on some "glitches" of technical details in the Matrix world.

Flying: the Superman thing

But what is the method of propulsion? And a less obvious but related question is: how does he steer? In the regular world, a flying vessel or animal steers by modifying the propulsive force. An airplane is borne aloft and moved forward by pushing a stream of air across the airplane's surface (by means of a propeller or jet). To steer left or right, or up or down, it twists aerofoils into or out of the air stream. On the other hand, a rocket propels itself by pushing out gas from a main thruster at a high velocity, causing the rocket to move forward by Newtonian reaction. The rocket steers by means of secondary thrusters set at angles to the main thruster, which ejects gas in the opposite of the desired direction. Neo, however, has no propeller, no jet, and no thruster. What propels him, and what steers him?

We see that, to launch himself, Neo crouches in certain position, with one arm raised and the other lowered. It looks like a cross between a Superman pose and a martial arts pose. What is that supposed to do? As he flies, he sometimes raises one arm forward in the direction of travel, but not always. Sometimes he keeps his hands by his sides and looks up in the headlong direction of travel. How is the Matrix supposed to interpret those gestures as "move upwards" rather than "move downwards" or "move sideways"? The naive answer is, of course, that Neo intends the gesture to mean "move upward," but in that case why does Neo bother with the gesture at all? If his expressed intention is the active ingredient that makes his avatar move upwards in the Matrix space, then the gesture is redundant. It looks rather as if the gesture is purely for Neo's benefit: it enables him to focus his mind on the flying movement and its direction.

But how does Neo's intention to move upwards get expressed to the Matrix software? As was made clear in The Matrix, all of the outgoing motor nerve fibers in Neo's brain (i.e. his brain in the Meta-Matrix as we now know it) are wired into a dataport in the Matrix, in such a way that the signal on each motor nerve is routed to the appropriate "muscle" data object in the avatar module and causes the virtual muscle to flex or relax. For example, to move a finger, Neo's brain will express his intention to move the finger by sending a train of pulses along a nerve that would normally be sent to the extensor muscle in the finger. The Matrix interface hijacks that signal and routes it to the data object that simulates the extensor muscle in the virtual finger. In turn this feeds back through the visual and tactual inputs to Neo's brain, so that Neo sees and feels his virtual finger move.

Obviously, though, there is no natural motor nerve that signifies "fly upwards." So, how does the intention to "fly upwards" get translated from Neo's brain into the avatar?

Neo has had to learn to activate (or re-grow) a previously unused nerve fiber that connects with the special command lines of the Matrix dataport. Think of the Matrix dataport as a glorified RS-232 socket, with billions of pins. Most of the lines in that socket will map to biological sensory and motor functions, but there are some extra lines that exist only for the Agents to morph the avatar. Neo has, first, to make a neural connection to the pins of those reserved lines, and then figure out what signals to send down those lines in order to achieve certain results.

He first discovers this functionality of his avatar in the kung-fu training session in The Matrix: he begins to change the properties of his avatar in order to move faster and be tougher than the unmodified avatar. Being the ace hacker that he is, however, Neo goes on to discover further commands that he can fire off down these reserved lines of the Matrix dataport. He realizes that one command will change the mass of the avatar, so he resets it to near zero, making himself almost weightless, Then, in a stroke of genius, he discovers the command for transferring kinetic energy and momentum between objects. He discovers that, by sending a certain train of pulses down a certain nerve fiber into the Matrix dataport, he can issue a valid command to the Matrix that says, "transfer this energy and momentum from the environment into my avatar." As far as the Matrix is concerned, this is a valid command, so it is executed, and the avatar suddenly flies up.

Because it is a physics simulation, the Matrix must conserve energy. To fuel his flight, Neo must get the energy from somewhere. He cannot simply change the velocity vector of his avatar. He has to transfer energy and momentum from elsewhere. To be sure, he could transfer it from the potential chemical energy of his own body fat, but he would reduce himself to a skeleton after a few supersonic flights. He must get it from the virtual Brownian motion of the surrounding air. Like a sophisticated Maxwell's demon, he siphons off the heat energy of the atmosphere into his own kinetic energy.

This is a skill that he gradually develops: he increases the speed he can achieve, and the ease with which he can do it by gesture-less intention, as the films progress. It would have been helpful to see Neo learning to fly. I always admire the psychological realism of that scene in Alien where Sigourney Weaver learns how to use the exoskeleton—at first clumsy and fumbling, and becoming smooth and efficient. The Wachowski brothers should have had the courage to show us Neo in his first attempts to hack his avatar's velocity vector, a series of kangaroo jumps and wrong throws. (Think of the kids in Harry Potter similarly learning to control their broomsticks.)

Interestingly, the agents do not know how to fly. They have not been designed to issue the command to transfer energy between objects, and lack the flexibility of Neo's brain to reconfigure their interface with the Matrix. When Neo flies away from the Burly Brawl scene, we see the realization among the Smiths that Neo has out-hacked them.

If Neo can add seemingly arbitrary amounts of kinetic energy to his avatar, why does he first need to make himself almost massless? Because in the physics simulation of the Matrix, things are still largely bound by physical laws. If Neo travels at supersonic speeds with his normal body mass, the law of conservation of energy in the Matrix simulation will require a huge of amount of kinetic energy that will have to come from somewhere and it will have to go somewhere—dissipated in sound, heat, and mechanical vibrations when he touches the Earth. By keeping his mass low, he keeps his energy requirements minimal. But it would not be safe for him to take his mass all the way down to zero. For that would make him overly vulnerable to cross-winds.

By Newton's law of motion, the acceleration due to an impressed force is inversely related to the body's mass (acceleration = force/mass). If Neo were to reset his body mass to zero, then the slightest cross-wind, even a breeze (or, even the Brownian motion if there were such a thing in the Matrix) would be enough to send Neo flying off course at an infinite velocity. Even Neo's fast-thinking brain could not correct his trajectory fast enough. So, he must set his body mass to a low enough level that his supersonic flight does not vaporize his surroundings, but high enough that he is not blown off course by side-winds. (This, by the way, probably sets an upper limit to Neo's speed within the atmosphere—other than the obvious limit of the speed of light.)

How does the supersonic Neo interact with the atmosphere? Some unkind commentators on the Internet have correctly remarked that flying at such speeds without protection would rip Neo's reproductive organs off his body. In fact, the air friction would incinerate him before he reached his destination. Evidently his body is shielded. From the scene where he flies supersonically along a city street, it looks as if he pushes the air away from his body in a spiral, leaving his unprotected body in a vacuum. (Since he is not using the air for buoyancy or propulsion in any aerodynamic way, this will not interfere with his actual flying. But it does mean that he will need to take a deep breath before setting off, as there will be no air for him to breathe in his locally induced vacuum. By the way, this also places a further limit on his overall journey time, as he will need to slow down to take a breath every few minutes.)

So, how does he cause the air to spiral away from his body to protect him from air friction? This brings us on to the next glitch, below.

And what about the physiological effects of sudden accelerations? When Neo rescues the falling Trinity, Trinity's avatar is taken from zero lateral velocity to what is probably several hundred kilometers an hour. Surely the g-forces on Trinity would crush her avatar's body? Assuming that Neo is traveling at a speed of at least Mach 1, then Trinity accelerates from 0 to 340 meters/second in less than 1 second, so she will experience a force of 34 g. Anything above 4 g is dangerous and will cause blackouts. Trinity's acceleration should crush her. Neo's solution is to reduce the mass of all her body tissues to a negligible value, just as he catches her. As before, force = mass x acceleration: now, Trinity's avatar can achieve its acceleration with very little force. How does Neo reduce Trinity's mass? He uses the same command that he previously applied to his own avatar, but this time referencing Trinity's avatar.

If all this seems very contrived to you, that's because it is. Nevertheless, we are still operating within a rational framework of science fiction. The Wachowskis have not resorted to the arbitrary superhero powers of fantasy. Several commentators have ridiculed the Matrix films on the grounds that, since Neo can do absolutely anything at all, none of the plot makes sense. Why fight the Agents if he could annihilate them with his magic wand, sorry, fist? The answer is that neither Neo nor the Agents have unlimited powers in the Matrix. They have restricted powers, and those restrictions make sense if we make certain explanatory assumptions about how the Matrix works. Which is what we are doing here.

Telekinesis in the Matrix

How does telekinesis work in the Matrix, given that it is a breach of the physical laws that the Matrix simulation is supposed to be upholding? Surely the architect of the Matrix would have put the velocity vector of any object in an encapsulated data area of that object? In which case, the velocity vector should be protected from interference. It should not be possible for Neo or anyone else to make arbitrary changes to an object's motion. Indeed, this is so. Nevertheless, there must be a legitimate method to impart kinetic energy and momentum to any given object, as part of the general simulation of mechanics of the Matrix world. Therefore, there is a route to reach any object's velocity vector and modify its value. As I suggested above for Neo's flying, the technique involves Neo's exploiting the Matrix's built-in energy transfer mechanisms.

Let us look at a simple example. Suppose that Neo were to take time off and play a game of billiards in the Matrix. Whenever he hit one ball against another, the one ball will transmit its kinetic energy and momentum to the other. But, crucially, all such interactions will be rigorously controlled by the Matrix operating system to ensure that the energy and momentum are preserved. If one billiard ball gains kinetic energy and momentum, the other must lose it. So, when Neo stops the bullets, where does he send the kinetic energy? Probably to the environment, such as the air. The mass of a bullet is fairly small. It does its damage to a human body by concentrating its kinetic energy onto a small point on the body. If Neo can set up an energy-exchange between, say the bullet and the air, then the bullet could be stopped dead while the air temperature rises by a tiny amount. If we suppose that the Matrix command language has something like "transfer <object_1> <object_2> <energy> <momentum>," then Neo can get small objects to move, or to stop moving, by transferring their energy and momentum from, or to, the environment. (There is probably also a constraint in the Matrix operating system that non-radiative energy can be exchanged only between objects that are in contact, such as a bullet and the surrounding body of air.)

So, when Neo causes the sword to fly off the wall, we should expect someone standing nearby to feel a sudden blast of cold air, as energy is sucked from the air, and the cold air rushes toward the wall.

By the way, there may be an element of this when Neo launches himself in flight. We sometimes see the ground being compressed beneath him. Maybe he is extracting heat energy from the ground, which briefly suffers thermal contraction. (We ought to see it becomes covered in frost in that case, though.)

There is, by the way, no teleportation in the Matrix. The command shell of the Matrix will not provide a teleportation command because it would violate the rigorous physics simulation that it is design to sustain. There is no simulation of natural processes that calls for teleportation on the macroscopic scale.

Vampires, werewolves, and an angel

In my essay, "Glitches in the Matrix," I argued that the rebels could achieve quick exits from the Matrix by rendering the avatar invisible and intangible. The vampires are operating in a half-way state, still partly visible, but quite intangible.

How do they move around? If there is no friction between their feet and the ground, how can they walk? How do they stand on the floor? If their body has no resistance to interpenetration by other objects, then they should simply sink into the ground toward the centre of the Earth. (Unless they are massless, in which case they would remain forever static.)

The vampires must move around in the same way that Neo flies. They know how to transfer energy and momentum from the environment into their avatars. (In which case, it is curious that these older programs possess this skill to fly, but the Agents do not.) Of course, when the vampires restore their avatars to the normal mode, they can walk and run like anyone else. But when their avatars become intangible, they fly.

The Oracle talks about aliens and angels as other errant programs: "Every time you've heard someone say they saw a ghost, or an angel—every story you've ever heard about vampires, or werewolves or aliens—is the system assimilating some program that's doing something they're not supposed to be doing." Besides the vampire twins, we do get to see two werewolves, and one angel—namely the Seraph, although he looks like a regular guy (except for the golden Matrix code). We do not see any ghosts or aliens. As it happens, I was rather pleased with this part of the Oracle's speech, as I put forward a theory in a book in 1999 (Paranormal Phenomena and Berkeley's Metaphysics) that real-life angels and aliens are in fact autonomous modules within a real-life Berkeleyian matrix

By the way, Neo does a bit of self-morphing, like a vampire, in the scene where he puts his hand into Trinity's chest cavity to remove the bullet and then massage her heart back into action. He renders his hand intangible (like the vampire avatars do their whole bodies) so that it can interpenetrate Trinity's body, but selectively makes the surface of his fingers tangible again, in order to pull the bullet out, and again to apply gentle mechanical force to the heart. This demonstrates a virtuoso mastery of the Matrix command language, far beyond anything the vampires have been programmed to do.

Hacking the Matrix network

The following are what I think are the commands that Neo has learned to use in the command language of the Matrix:

• transfer: Transfer energy and momentum from one object to an adjacent one. Objects are referenced by the identifiers of the software modules that simulate them, and the energy and momentum of an object are held as encapsulated data inside the module. There are object methods for adding a positive or negative quantity of energy or momentum to an object, but it would not be safe for those methods to be available directly in the Matrix command shell. Instead, there is a "transfer" command, which has the privilege to invoke the "add energy" and "add momentum" object methods. This transfer command ensures that energy and momentum are conserved—by simultaneously subtracting from one object when adding to another. It also ensures that only adjacent objects can exchange mechanical energy and momentum. When, for example, Neo makes the sword fly from the wall into his hand, his brain issues a command to transfer the requisite energy and momentum from the surrounding air into the sword.
• insert: Insert an object into an unobserved specified room. This is used to place an avatar, together with kit such as weaponry, into the Matrix. For efficiency, each spatial region in the Matrix world is regarded as a data node and maintains a list of objects visible in that space. Perceptual software such as the ray-tracing module needs only to work with the objects that are visible there, that is, those objects that are registered with that data node. To insert an object into that region of the Matrix world, this command is used to add the specified object to the register on that node. The command ensures that the room is not currently being observed, so as to avoid any observable violation of the conservation of mass, and it ensures that the object materializes on the ground rather than in mid-air.
• delete: Delete an object from an unobserved room, the inverse of "insert."
• morph: Change an avatar's appearance or physical properties, such as tensile strength, muscular power, and mass. The general "appearance" of an avatar seems to be determined by a complete file of information (the "residual body image" as Morpheus calls it) defining genetic physiological features—height, build, color, facial features—as well as clothes and accessories such as glasses. This command seems to apply only to avatars, not other objects.
• load: Load an intelligent entity (either a human brain or an artificial intelligence program) into a specified avatar. This causes sensory input to be routed from the avatar to the intelligent entity, and motor output to be routed from the entity to the avatar. The "residual self-image" of the intelligent entity will overwrite whatever is currently in place for that avatar.
• spy: Display all traffic on the Matrix network. This is presumably rendered as a visual hallucination of trickling green graphemes, overlaid on the normal visual scene (rather like an extreme version of William Gibson's virtual light). There is some color-coding, as the Seraph appears in a gold-colored font rather than green. Contrary to what some people such as David Chalmers assume, the physics simulation does not run at a molecular level, so Neo is not bombarded with Matrix graphemes for billions of atoms.

• call: Request a telephone connection to a specified telephone number, from a specified object (i.e. the originating telephone). This is inserted by the Nebuchadnezzar into an analogue land-line somewhere in the telephone system.
• ring: Return a ringing tone to the caller, with the network address of the ringing telephone. Like other fixtures in the room, the full address will have a subnet address that uniquely identifies the room and hence the node and register for that visible space.
• answer: Establish a voice connection to the caller, with the network address of the person listening at the earpiece.

What the actual syntax of the command language is, we can but guess. It might be completely binary, as the artificial intelligence programs that built and run the Matrix are not constrained to reading lexical characters as we are. Computer programming is, however, very conservative. It requires a huge investment to rework a software system. This, after all, was the reason for the infamous "year 2000 bug": a 1960s hack to save memory remained in use because there was no economic sense in changing it until necessary. The machines almost certainly inherited human computer hardware and software and adapted it to their needs. Most likely they would have taken open-source code with them to "Zero-One" (the robot country before the Matrix, according to the Animatrix). They would have had no particular reason to invest their time and effort in scrapping it order to start afresh. Therefore, my guess is that the Matrix is written in C++ on a Linux system.

It is true that we get to see some Unix hacking on the computer monitor when Trinity disables the failsafe power supply, That, however, is inside the Matrix, and is nothing to do with Matrix code itself.

A number of commentators have suggested that the Matrix software is actually running on people's brains, using spare capacity for unconscious processing. This is the "Matrix-on-wetware" hypothesis. This is logically possible, but I do not buy it for the following reasons. Running a virtual-reality simulation is an intensive, fast, number-crunching exercise without much need for fuzzy logic or pattern recognition. So, electronic hardware is better suited. There are also headaches over ensuring adequate redundancy of the wetware processes. If an individual brain dies, we would not want the corresponding part of the Matrix world to vanish. So each process would have to be duplicated on multiple brains. There are also technical headaches in programming the fetal brain to run the Matrix software, since the fetal brain comes with no firmware built in. These problems can all be solved, but why? What is the advantage? There has been a suggestion that if the Matrix ran inside people's brains, it could explain how Neo can hack the Matrix. But that would give Neo more power than we see in the film. If he had complete mastery over the Matrix process, he could vaporize a hundred agents with a single thought. Neo has limited and clearly prescribed powers, as outlined above.

Nevertheless, I believe there is some mileage in the idea that the machines use spare brain capacity for data processing. I suggested in Glitches in the Matrix that the reason that people are in the power station is to help control the fusion process. They would form a huge bank of billions of processors with excellent fuzzy logic and pattern recognition capabilities. It has since been pointed out that these brains would not, however, be much use in controlling the fusion process itself—as the fusion reaction requires extremely fast process control, whereas computer brains are comparatively slow. This is a valid point. Maybe the brains are used in some other function, such as predictively assessing fluctuations in power demand and modifying the power output accordingly. That is certainly an application that requires pattern recognition.

Dodging bullets

A similar problem on a smaller scale occurs in playing professional tennis, where the ball is traveling too fast for the brain to detect the moving ball and compute its trajectory in real-time quickly enough to hit it. The solution there is that the brain observes the body movements of the other player, estimates how she is going to hit the ball, and computes the trajectory from that.

I would assume that Neo uses an analogous method. By reading the Matrix code, he can see the Agent begin to flex his muscles to press the trigger, computes the trajectory from the aim of the gun, and immediately tells his body to evade that bullet trajectory. The Agent must do the same, although it is not clear whether they have the benefit of reading the Matrix code. They might need to rely on visual cues. When Trinity places a gun to an Agent's head and says "Dodge this" before pressing the trigger, the Agent is not in a position to see the gun and dodge the bullet's trajectory.

There is, by the way, some confusion about "bullet time." Bullet time is a technique of virtual cinematography, in which the motion can be frozen or slowed down in order to show things to the cinema audience in slo-mo. Neo cannot slow things down in the Matrix. There would be no need for such functionality in the command shell of the Matrix system, and so it is not available to him. In the scenes where Neo slows down and stops bullets, time is proceeding at its normal pace, but Neo decelerates the bullets and brings them to rest in mid-air.

Virtual food, real effects

• In The Matrix, Neo ingests the red pill and this seems to shut down all of his sensory inputs from the Matrix, causing him to log out from the Matrix system.
• In Reloaded, the Merovingian sends a woman in Le Vrai Restaurant a chocolate desert that contains a program he has written. This causes her to orgasm.

In the case of the red pill, I suggested in Glitches in the Matrix that it shuts down all sensory input from the Matrix avatar, thereby revealing the real world. In Reloaded, the Merovingian's program creates perceptions of increased capillary blood flow and sexual excitement.

There are two other ingestions that seem to have significance to the plot, yet we are not explicitly shown any effects.

• In The Matrix, the Oracle offers Neo a cookie, saying .".. as soon as you walk outside that door, you'll start feeling better. You'll remember that you don't believe any of this fate crap. You're in control of your own life, remember? ... Here, take a cookie. I promise by the time you're done eating it, you'll feel right as rain." As Neo speeds away in the car afterwards, Trinity asks Neo whether he is all right, and Neo answers, "Right as rain." It is not clear what, if any, executable was in the cookie. The Oracle's words suggest only that it was an endorphin simulator. Nevertheless, the choice of a cookie rather than, say, a sandwich or a muffin, may be significant. On the Web, a cookie (shortened from "magic cookie") is a data structure that holds information about you persistently over time, over multiple visits to a web site. On that analogy, the Oracle's cookie may hold information pertaining to Neo's predecessors. This might, for instance, be information on how to read the Matrix code, which Neo eventually loads up and uses after his resurrection.
• In Reloaded, the Oracle offers Neo a red candy. After Neo takes it, she says "You have the Sight now, Neo. You are looking at the world without time." The context suggests that this refers to visions that Neo is already having, but the general subtlety of the Oracle's utterances lead us to suspect she was referring to the effect of an executable in the candy. Maybe, maybe not. In any case, there is no immediate effect. I have suggested below that the candy may have contained an authorization code enabling Neo to re-insert the prime program, as instructed by the Architect.

We now move from technology to philosophy. The Matrix brought Cartesian "skepticism of the external world" to the largest audience it has ever had in the history of philosophy. Reloaded tackles the more subtle problem of "free will."

Free will: A human privilege

It is significant that the machines generally deny free will, as this tells us something of their hardware—in contrast with the human wetware.

The kind of machines that we are familiar with, and which seem to be dominant in the Matrix, are deterministic. A deterministic machine is one that works like clockwork: everything it does at any time is determined by the combination of its internal state and its inputs. Deterministic systems can be incredibly sophisticated and versatile. They can, for instance, learn new things and re-program themselves in response to what they experience in the world. There is, in principle, no limit to how intelligent they can become, or how good they can get at emulating human behavior. A deterministic android, or program-driven avatar, could walk and talk like a human. They could even give the impression of being creative, by using predefined tables of pseudo-random numbers, or by using environmental fluctuations, such as using the last digit of the clock time as a pseudo-random number. What they cannot do is exercise free will: they cannot make a free choice. They might even say they have free will, but then they would be lying.

What may not be immediately obvious is that they are also unable to express consciousness. For conscious experience is a subjective state and therefore cannot be reduced to the objective states of a machine. Consciousness is something over and above physical information processing. Therefore, an entity cannot give expression to conscious experience if it is physically deterministic. In other words, if a machine is physically deterministic then any conscious experience it might have would not be in its causal loop. In such a machine, the hardware controls everything that is said and done, and there is no space left for consciousness to throw in its two cents' worth. So there is no causal gap into which the conscious mind could wield influence.

(An important corollary of this is that nothing that this machine does or says will constitute evidence for any internal state of consciousness.)

Unlike machines of that type, humans have physically random processes integrated with their inner workings. The brain's architecture is not based on strictly controlled design, but on an organic growth of connections, which involve natural randomness. For example, when neurotransmitters cross synaptic boundaries between nerve cells, they will sometimes do so by quantum-mechanical tunneling, which is a physically non-deterministic process. And intra-cellular structures such as microtubules work at a level where physically random quantum mechanical events can occur. Whereas these physically random events would be systematically inhibited and suppressed in a normal machine, in a human brain they may be amplified into macroscopic effects through "chaotic" dynamics. In mathematical terms, a "chaotic" system is one in which arbitrarily small changes in initial conditions may produce large effects. (This is not chaotic in the everyday sense of being haphazard. The word has, in effect, been hi-jacked by physicists.) Therefore, in a chaotic system even minuscule quantum events can have macroscopic effects.

Two things are important to note here. First, randomness is not the same thing as free will. The mere fact that some part of the brain's processing is physically nondeterministic does not, by itself, mean that we have free will. What it means is that there is an opportunity for free will to be exercised. If free will does not take that opportunity, then the event will be purely random. Second, although individual events are physically nondeterministic, physics will nonetheless predict the long-term statistical properties of the events. So, if free will operates frequently to change the outcome of physically nondeterministic events, then there will be an imbalance in the equation that describes the statistical properties.

Now, from our everyday experience, we know that we do have free will. And from the above theoretical thoughts, we know that free will can act only on physically nondeterministic events. We are forced to conclude that humans are able to exercise volition by virtue of how our brains are implemented. At this time, we can only speculate on precisely which brain process acts as a "gateway" to consciousness. But the conclusion that there is some such gateway is inescapable.

In brief, then, this is the key difference between humans and normal machines. We can use free will because the brain's active loop incorporates physically nondeterministic events. A physically deterministic computer, in contrast, cannot exercise volition because it does not have that gateway.

In the Matrix, it appears that almost all the programs are deterministic and the more enlightened ones know that they are deterministic. The Merovingian, for instance, insists that "Choice is an illusion created between those with power, and those without." The only program over whom we might have some doubt is the unnamed "mother of the Matrix" that the Architect describes as "an intuitive program, initially created to investigate certain aspects of the human psyche." It is conceivable that this unknown program was implemented on hardware that uses physically nondeterministic events—perhaps a quantum computation module—incorporated in the control loop in a way that emulates the human brain. This could be the only machine in the Matrix having consciousness and free will.

Bear in mind that conscious experience is not computable. If an intelligent program is implemented on deterministic hardware, then it cannot "learn" to be conscious, nor can consciousness "emerge" from its complex software. Consciousness can be tapped into only by a particular class of hardware implementations. If indeed the "mother of the Matrix" is conscious, then this only by virtue of the hardware she is implemented on.

In a way, using quantum computers to access free will and consciousness could be regarded as the reverse of cyborgism. It is incorporating an artificial biological "organ" into a machine, as opposed to incorporating machine parts into an organism.

Telling the future: Strategic programs?

Neo, on the other hand, has a vivid premonitory dream of Trinity falling to her death. Is it possible that Neo can see into the future? No. It is logically impossible to predict future events that rely on nondeterministic causes such as the exercise of free will. As we later see in the film, Trinity's adventure that leads to her death is the outcome of a series of decisions and actions taken by various humans exercising free will as well other chance events. Therefore, Neo cannot simply peer in the future and see this event. So, how did he see it in the dream?

The standard explanation of premonitions is selective reporting. We remember, and report, only the dreams that come true and ignore the many more that do not. In the film, we are told that Neo is sleeping badly and having a lot of bad dreams. For all we know, he may dream of Trinity dying a dozen different ways every night. Only one of them turns out to be true. So, on that view, it is pure coincidence.

The film, however, does not show us any other dreams, just that one. So, if we are to work with what the Wachowskis actually give us, we have to assume that Neo keeps having this same dream repeatedly.

The opposite of the premonitive explanation of the dream is the causative one. What if Neo's dream somehow triggered the series of events that led to Trinity's fatal fall? This hypothesis brings us back within the realm of logical possibility. We are no longer violating the indeterminacy of the future. But it is very hard to see how this could be implemented. The only one who knows the dream is Neo. How could he influence the various people who are involved to take just the right action to achieve this tragic outcome, when they are all working to save Zion?

The only other possibility is that some behind-the-scenes program in the Meta-Matrix was planning to make this happen, and Neo got wind of it by reading the chatter on the Meta-Matrix data network. This might have been done unconsciously, while Neo was asleep. This unknown program then arranged for the sentinels to attack the ship at just the right time to kill the rebels who were disabling the back-up power supply. It then arranged for an Agent to turn up to attack Trinity at the right time. And so on. This obscure program would have been overseeing and guiding the humans involved, leading them into playing the required roles. Neo may simply have read these intentions and visualized them in a dream. Let us call this the "strategic program" hypothesis, as it supposes that there are intelligence systems operating at a level above that of the "tactical programs"—the individual artificial intelligence programs, such as Agents, that manifest themselves through avatars in the Matrix.

This does makes sense as an explanation—but it looks lame unless we can find some other, explicit and independent corroboration in the film. As far as I can see, there is none. Nevertheless, there may be a hint outside the film. There is, of course, a strong similarity between the "strategic programs" that I have posited and Jung's archetypes. Apropos of which, Andy Wachowski said in the Chicago Tribune, "Archetypes exist for a reason, and Jung argues they exist because they're a part of human consciousness." Maybe they decided to simulate archetypes in the virtual world of the Matrix? Essentially, an archetype is a template of actions, into which various individuals can slot in and play a role. These archetypes recur in myths around the world as well as in dreams. According to Jung in his more speculative moments, they can also recur in real life, by means of synchronicity. Each archetype exists in the "collective subconscious" and can be invoked when appropriate conditions arise. Functionally, this is very similar to a strategic program that is invoked in the Matrix and guides individuals into playing certain roles.

The game-plan of Trinity falling to her death, could be built into a strategic program, which then conspires to make it happen—in the same way that a Jungian archetype can be manifested.

This line of explanation could also make sense of the Architect's insistence that "The One" has a particular function, or role to play. The whole game-plan of "The One" could be built into a strategic program in the Matrix. Various incidents along the way, such as the utterances of the Oracle, could have been contrived by the strategic program to nudge Neo into fulfilling this "archetypal" role.

There are other, more banal, explanations. The whole adventure may be a pre-scripted virtual-reality game, like Cronenberg's eXistenZ. The Meta-Matrix may be a huge game environment. When they enter the game, Neo and Trinity suppress their memory that this is a game and then play for real. But occasionally, the suppressed memories surface. In an ordinary science-fiction movie, this would be a more likely, but much less satisfying explanation. I think it's too clichéd to be in a Wachowski.

Let us go back to the hypothesis of strategic programs. Technologists who advocate immersive virtual reality as a human-computer interface have suggested that VR might prove useful as a means of letting people engage with data structures that are too complicated to be comprehensible on paper or on screen. So, interactions within the virtual world may be symbolic representations of genuine exchanges of information. In graphical user interfaces (GUIs), you can open, close, and move tiny pictures on the screen. We call them "icons." In virtual user interfaces (VUIs), you would carry out more complex interactions with "micons" (moving icons). In the film, the white control room in Zion is such a virtual control console.

More interestingly, the seemingly pointless fight between Neo and the Seraph ends with the Seraph saying that this was, in effect, a security check and that "You don't know who someone really is until you fight them." (Which is, by the way, an ironic inverse of Fight Club's message that you don't know who you really are until you fight.) Neo is nonplussed by the Seraph's comment. If this was a security check, then the Seraph was apparently not exchanging information with Neo but with some meta-intelligence that was expressing itself through Neo's avatar. Recall that this avatar is one provided by the Nebuchadnezzar, not Neo's original. So, while Neo thought that he was deciding all the moves, maybe a meta-intelligent subsystem in the Nebuchadnezzar was partly guiding him in order to certify Neo as a bona fide emissary of Zion.

Shortly after the fight with the Seraph, there is a scene that again suggests that Neo is unconsciously taking part in a procedure that involves meta-intelligence. First of all, we have to check out the Wachowskis' naming convention: recall that the Seraph was Biblically a serpent (actually an angel in the form of a six-winged serpent). Now, consider Neo and the Oracle sitting in the urban garden, and the Oracle offering Neo a red candy, which he accepts, and then she has some herself. This is almost certainly set up as an allusion to Eve offering Adam a fruit under the supervision of the serpent in the garden of Eden, which leads to Adam's acquiring knowledge of good and evil.

In the film, the Oracle shortly afterwards says "You have the sight now, Neo." We might easily think that the Oracle was referring to Neo's seemingly premonitive dreams. Perhaps she was. Or perhaps she was referring to some change in Neo arising from his accepting the red candy—perhaps the ability to read the Meta-Matrix code. Such an interpretation would be in keeping with the Gnostic undercurrents of the Matrix films. For, according to Gnostic traditions, the fruit gives Adam gnosis, the ability to see through the virtual reality that the demiurge has created. Whatever, it does seem that Neo was the unwitting participant in an interaction in which his choice was "at a near unconscious level" as the Architect would say.

Several strands of the film's plot begin to make sense if we suppose that there are strategic programs at work in the Matrix and Meta-Matrix, and these higher-level programs are using lower-level programs such as the Merovingian and the Keymaker to steer events in a certain direction. Such strands are: the background theme of "fate" that Morpheus repeatedly emphasizes; the Architect's insinuation that everything is stage-managed; and bizarre comments of minor characters such as the Keymaker ("We do only what we're meant to do," and "I know because I must know."). Morpheus waxes lyrical about the synchronicity: "Tonight is not an accident. There are no accidents. We have not come here by chance; I do not believe in chance. When I see three objectives, three captains, three ships, I do not see coincidence—I see providence. I see purpose." But Jung's notion of synchronicity as acausal connectivity is not an explanation. The intervention of invisible intelligences is the only way to explain what is happening, within a naturalistic scope.

(This, by the way, reminds me of the scene in Jason and the Argonauts where the gods play games with the lives of humans.)

The Oracle tells Neo that future choices have already been made, but not understood yet."You have the Sight now, Neo. You are looking at the world without time," but "We can never see past the choices we don't understand." We know that the Oracles speaks cryptically, so we should be wary of taking this too literally. "Looking at the world without time" could well mean reading the plans of the strategic programs. In saying that we have already made our choices, the Oracle probably means that we have already decided on the principles and values on which we will base our decisions, but the decisions themselves are still open.

Purpose: A problem for humans and machines

That question cannot have a logical answer. (To see that this is so, let P stand for "the purpose of being alive." Then, what is the purpose of pursuing P? The purpose of P cannot be P itself, as that would be circular. So there is no purpose for holding to P. There is, ultimately, no given purpose for being alive. QED.)

This is the existential crisis that Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre wrote about. If there is no value or purpose beyond what we ourselves create, how can anything matter? The answer is, of course, that by free will we create our own purposes and just get on with it.

A machine, however, would be in a more difficult position if it should find itself without a purpose. In the normal turn of events, an intelligent machine has a built-in purpose. In the Matrix, the Agents have their common purpose, which is to serve the Matrix system administrator—for example, by eliminating human rebels. In Reloaded, however, we see that Agent Smith has lost his allegiance to the sysadmin. When Neo loaded himself into Agent Smith's avatar and destroyed it, Smith became corrupted and was ordered to go to the Source for final annihilation. He refused, and chose instead to become an exile. Now, he can no longer have the purpose of serving the sysadmin. He is purposeless, and wishes to acquire a purpose. When the replicated Smith is asked by Neo why he is here, he says, "We're here to take from you what you tried to take from us, purpose."

This is Agent Smith's new purpose: to find a purpose for his existence. His inference engine has computed that (a) he lacks a purpose, (b) this is a bad thing, and (c) it needs to be rectified by acquiring one. Quite how he plans to acquire one from Neo is not clear. His plan may be to upload himself into a human brain in order to coexist with a human mind and partake of its purpose. He tries, without success, to load himself into Neo. Later, he successfully loads himself into Bane. As we saw above, he has been partly loaded into Bane's avatar in the Meta-Matrix. Smith's game-plan from here on, however, may not become clear until Revolutions.

Finally, there is a lot of deciphering to do in the plot. Several mysterious characters are introduced in rapid succession (the Keymaker, the Merovingian, Persephone, and the Architect), and the Architect's speech offers an explanation but is notoriously opaque. Is this one big glitch?

The Mother of the Matrix: Who, and what, is she?

The Merovingians, along with other crusaders, idolized a figure known as the Black Madonna. This figure had emerged in the early years of Christianity, when the worship of the ancient Greek goddess of Persephone could not be eradicated but was re-designated as a Christian worship of the Black Madonna. (Persephone, like Isis, was often depicted as black, and was often identified with Isis. For example, Apuleius takes it for granted that Persephone is the Greek designation for the Egyptian goddess Isis.) In the film, the Merovingian's wife is called Persephone. Although she is a white girl in a white dress, the naming convention suggests an identification with Isis.

According to J.R. Ploughman's Book of the Holy Grail (1999), the Architect of the universe had a wife called Yse. The name "Yse" (pronounced "Issa") derives etymologically from "Isis." The following is from the Merovingian Bible in Ploughman's book:

At one time there was only God (The Great Architect of the Universe). He was all omnipotent and existed alone. This caused him to become discontented, thus he split himself in two in order to create a mate. He kept the elements of Order and Logic for his own being and gave his mate the elements of Chaos and Emotion for her being. Her name is Yse. She became so overwhelmed with love at her creation that when he kissed her, she gave him a reaction which was to become known as the "Chosen Response." The Chosen Response was the first acknowledgement and reaction of love between a male and female in the universe, and this became the greatest secret of and mystery of mankind, being "The Holy Grail."

According to Ploughman, the latter incident is re-enacted by individuals who are questing for the Holy Grail. The person who is questing must meet a Perfect Grail Princess, who embodies the spirit of Yse, and she must fall in love with him and reveal the Chosen Response when kissed. This curiously parallels the scene in which Persephone will respond by leading Neo to the Keymaker only if Neo kisses her with passion. (We also seem to have the strange implication that Persephone was the Architect's wife before she went off with the Merovingian.)

The text of the "Merovingian Bible" purports to be written by Joseph of Arimathea, and translated by Thomas Jefferson. Although Jefferson did make some creative biblical translations in 1804 and 1820, this document is almost certainly a modern concoction. Nevertheless, it does reflect Gnostic mythology and, moreover, it is part of the undergrowth of Gnostic literature that the Wachowski brothers will be aware of and may well have alluded to. The parallels with the Reloaded story are certainly suggestive:

• The Architect complains that, while he is perfectly logical, the "mother of the matrix" is intuitive. This parallels the Gnostic Architect who embodies Order and Logic, while his wife Yse (= Isis) embodies Chaos and Emotion.
• Neo, who is clearly on a quest, must kiss Persephone (also = Isis), who has evidently fallen in love with him, in order to get the chosen response of an introduction with the Keymaker.

If this is so, it would make sense of what she says about love. She complains that her current husband, the Merovingian, used to be loving but is no longer. She wants Neo to kiss her as if he were kissing Trinity, in order to feel love again. A non-conscious program would not have these concerns. To be sure, a non-conscious program could lie and emulate this, but why? The plot strongly suggests that Persephone genuinely wants this kiss. But only a human or a conscious program could do so. Yet, Persephone has apparently survived through several cycles of the Matrix with the Merovingian, so she cannot be a human and yet be so young. Therefore, identifying Persephone as the "mother of the Matrix," the single program with a consciousness module, ties this part of the plot together cleanly, which would otherwise be loose ends.

How exactly does Persephone assess Neo's kiss? How does she "investigate the human psyche," as the Architect puts it? Before kissing Neo, she makes a show of putting on lipstick. My guess is that the lipstick, which looks an inert object in the virtual world, is a program for scanning Neo's brain to record his emotional state. This is relayed back to Persephone, for her to reconstruct the emotion in her quantum computation module. In interviews, Monica Bellucci, who plays Persephone, describes her role as that of an "emotional vampire" and that "she doesn't feel anything herself, she can only feel things through others..." The implication is that she has been programmed (as an artificial intelligence program) to seek out human avatars and probe their emotional states by means of the program that is rendered as the seemingly inert lipstick. The emotions may be replayed inside Persephone, but they are not her own emotions.

The Merovingian

We are told that the Merovingian has similar functionality to Neo: he can read the Matrix code and control it. Persephone says that he used to be like Neo. There is an implication that he may have been "The One" in a previous cycle of the Matrix, a long time ago.

My reading of this is that the Merovingian was originally the Avatar of a plugged-in human, who acquired skills like Neo's and fulfilled the role of "The One." During this time, he loved Persephone as only a human could. That human then died or was unplugged. Instead of accepting the instruction to go to the Source, the avatar became an exile. With the loss of the plugged-in human, the Merovingian ceased to be able to love Persephone, and hence her complaint. This cannot, however, be the whole story. For the avatar is little more than a physics simulation for a body. An avatar must have an intelligence driving it in order for it do something more than vegetate. In this case, the intelligence was originally The One's human brain. In order for the Merovingian to continue to function, that brain must have been replaced with an artificial intelligence. An AI program must have taken over the avatar.

I believe that the Wachowskis' naming convention uses the following mythological allusion. In their books The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Messianic Legacy, Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, & Henry Lincoln claim that the Merovingian dynasty are descended from Jesus Christ (who, they say, didn't die on the cross after all). The actual descendants of the Merovingians do not deny this but say there is no documentary evidence so they cannot be sure, although they believe that they did descend from a Judaic family of that period. Likewise we could say that the Merovingian in the film is a descendant of the first messiah in the Matrix. This interpretation does not assume that Baigent et al are right, only that this was one of the Wachowskis' points of reference in building up their system of names. (It is hard to see why else they would choose the obscure name "Merovingian.")

The Architect's speech

The Architect opens by announcing that "I am the Architect. I created the Matrix." We will immediately conclude that he is a program, not some original creator of the Matrix, as the Matrix is so old and the Architect looks to be in his fifties. Later he refers to "another ... program," confirming that he is a program. Evidently, the term "Matrix" refers only to the software that drives the Matrix virtual world. The Architect himself is not counted as part of the Matrix system.

On the other hand, he confirms that Neo is human: "Although the process has altered your consciousness, you remain irrevocably human." This refutes a suggestion that is in circulation on the net, that Neo is only a program. He is, as the whole drift of the film suggests, a genuine human. Nevertheless, the Architect does also say "Your five predecessors were, by design, based on a similar predication ...," which might be read as suggesting that Neo's predecessors in earlier cycles of the Matrix were programs, not humans. But I prefer to interpret this as meaning that the Architect designed the role of the "One," not the person who plays the role. Later in his speech, the Architect refers to "The function of the One," which again would be consistent with the architect designing the role of the One, and setting up arrangements so that an individual human can step into and play that role. As I suggested earlier, there may be a strategic program in place that acts like an Jungian archetype, guiding Neo into this role.

The most surprising thing the Architect says is that there have been several cycles of the Matrix, each with its own instance of the "One." It should not really surprise us that there have been earlier cycles of the Matrix itself. As the Matrix is just a software system, we should expect successive versions. In fact, Agent Smith said in The Matrix that there was (one) earlier Matrix that failed because people would not "accept" the program. What is really surprising is that there have been five predecessors of Neo. Until now, we had been led to believe that Neo was a unique individual.

The Architect announces to Neo that "Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix." This might at first look like pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But recall our discussion of free will above. We concluded that free will is able to intervene in the physical world by modifying the outcome of physically nondeterministic events; but if this is done a lot, it creates a statistical imbalance in the equations governing the probabilistic behavior of those events. Now, if we regard Neo's life as essentially all the free choices that he has made, then what the Architect says turns out to be a precise, albeit abstract, statement of what Neo's life amounts to from a program's point of view.

He goes in a similar vein: "You are the eventuality of an anomaly which despite my sincerest efforts I've been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision." If human brains were deterministic systems, like the programs, then the whole matrix would exhibit a "harmony of mathematical precision" as desired by the Architect. Instead, humans exercise free will, and eventually discover how to apply volition to the Matrix itself: that is the anomaly. The Architect pompously enjoys pretentious phrases such as "eventuality of an anomaly" which is ambiguous but probably means the result of the anomaly. Neo is an extreme result of the anomaly, because he has applied his free will to hacking the Matrix network. He is referred to as an "integral anomaly" because he has integrated his anomalistic use of free will (applying it the Matrix) into his whole being. It is not limited to party tricks such as bending spoons.

The term "anomaly" is used to refer both to the application of free will to the Matrix in general and to its particular manifestation in Neo. For, in a very early scene in Reloaded, an agent refers to Neo as "the anomaly," whereas the Architect says that the "anomaly is systemic."

Evidently, the Architect realized that this anomaly—applying free will to the Matrix—would eventually result in the emergence of someone with Neo's powers, the "integral anomaly." He has therefore designed mechanisms for handling this exception condition. He says: "While it remains a burden assiduously avoided it is not unexpected and thus not beyond a measure of control." Neo's existence is not a "flaw" of "bug" in the system, as some commentators have suggested. It is part of the design, albeit a part that the Architect tried to avoid.

Of particular concern to the Architect is that the anomaly is spreading. At the end of The Matrix, Neo announces hat he is going to tell everybody about the Matrix. In the intervening six months, it seems he has done just that. Now large numbers of people are hacking into the Matrix network. There is a danger to the Matrix due to the "systemic anomaly that if left unchecked might threaten the system itself." How? Because these individuals get themselves unplugged: "those that refuse the program, while a minority, if unchecked would constitute an escalating probability of disaster."

The answer is now no longer simply to kill Neo, as the Agents have been attempting to do. The growing movement of people who are learning about the Matrix and choosing to unplug now has its own momentum, fuelled by the agents of Zion. Even without Neo, this movement will continue and lead inexorably to the desertion of the Matrix. What is the Architect's proposed solution? He reveals that there is a predefined role for the individual who has attained Neo's powers. This is what "The One" really refers to. Just as "Messiah" or "the Buddha" refer to a role, rather than a unique person, so "The One" is a role that the Matrix has guided Neo into. What is the purpose of this role? This is the most cryptic of the Architect's pronouncements: "The function of the One is now to return to the Source allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry, reinserting the prime program."

We were previously told that the Source is a sort of virtual trash can, where terminated programs are annihilated. Evidently that is not its only job. For Neo is not a program and so cannot be annihilated in that way. Furthermore, the Architect specifies a further job for Neo to do afterwards. So, Neo would survive whatever is supposed to happen in the Source. What is the code that Neo carries? To whom or to what is it to be disseminated? These questions are not answered. As a result of that dissemination, the "prime program" can be reinserted. Into what or whom? Again we are not told. We will return to a speculation about this below.

The strangest part of the Architect's speech is that after Zion is destroyed, Neo will be required to select seven men and sixteen women to be removed from the Matrix and allowed to start rebuilding Zion. From this it becomes clear that Zion is not something that arose spontaneously but is at least seeded by the Architect. It appears that Zion acts as a sort of human garbage collector. As the free-will anomaly emerges from time to time, the individuals in whom it arises are permitted to escape to Zion, which acts as a single concentrated collection point for the rebels, who would otherwise be spread out and hard to find. The Agents will try to stop this leakage of people from the Matrix, but once a person is out, the administrator wants them all gathered in one place.

Why does the Matrix need to allow people to have free will? The gist of the Architect's answer is that people cannot live in a world without freedom. Apparently, the first two Matrices did not allow it. In the first Matrix, people were subjected to comfortable and pleasant lives (but no freedom). When they rejected that, the Architect tried to reproduce the violence and horror of human history, but still with no freedom. It must have been nightmarish to exist in those Matrices—being able to observe the world but not act in it. Presumably there was no motor output from the brain, so you simply observed your virtual body performing the actions and saying the words that it was programmed to. After both of these Matrix cycles failed, it seems that the "mother of the Matrix" was built with a quantum computation module to probe human consciousness. This revealed the existence of free will and the psychological need for it in human life. Subsequent cycles of the Matrix incorporated this improvement. Unfortunately an inevitable feature of his type of Matrix is that the inmates eventually discover how to use their free will to hack the Matrix and break out of it. When this happens in large numbers, the Marix has to be rebooted.

The Architect notes that the freedom need not be exercised with great deliberation. People accept it "even if they were only aware of the choice at a near unconscious level." (By the way, this might throw light on two otherwise puzzling incidents: the Oracle offering Neo a red candy, and Persephone offering Neo her freshly lipsticked red lips. Is Neo choosing more than he knows?)

In the climactic ending of Neo's interview with the Architect, Neo is told that his role as "The One" is to return to the Source, "allowing a temporary dissemination of the code you carry." If Neo does not comply with this process, the Matrix will suffer a meltdown. Neo is, however, given a choice of doing this (via the right door) or of heading off to rescue Trinity (via the left door). Evidently, Neo's conscious choice is a key element in the process. Given the importance of Neo's returning to the Source, it would be perfectly reasonable for the Architect to arrange for some servant programs (perhaps Agents) to bundle Neo out through the door that leads to the Source; or to trick him into that door. For instance, the Architect could simply have misled Neo about which door was which. So, if all that mattered was Neo returning to Source, then this could be forced through. Instead, it is evidently vital that Neo's return to the Source must be a free choice.

What possible difference can it make to the Architect whether Neo goes willingly or unwillingly to the Source? On a practical level, it can make no difference. Neo's volitional choice is something that happens in his conscious mind as embodied in his biological brain. It makes no difference to the electronic world of the Architect.

An interpretation that would make sense here is to suppose that Neo has some authority in the matter. Just as his fight with the Seraph was a security check to establish Neo's identity, so Neo's interview with the Architect is an authorization procedure. The prime program of the Matrix cannot be re-inserted without Neo's permission.

This also makes sense of what the Architect says will happen in the Source: "the temporary dissemination of the code you are carrying". What code is Neo carrying? To whom or what is the code to be disseminated? Why only a temporary dissemination? If this interview is an authorization process, then this code is a certificate of authenticity. It is to be disseminated to the mechanisms that will re-insert the prime program. Neo's code is their authorization.

How can Neo have this much importance? Why is his permission needed to re-insert the prime program? At some point, Neo must have been earmarked for this role. At some point, he must have been formally assigned this role and given the authorization code. Where could this have happened? Very likely, it was given to Neo by the Oracle. At Neo's first meeting, the Oracle tells him that he is waiting for something, "Your next life, maybe?" After Neo gets his "next life" through his resurrection, Neo meets the Oracle again, who now confidently declares that he is The One, and—gives him a red candy to eat. It may well be that that candy contains the authorization code. The Oracle is evidently a senior program with great authority whose role is to select "potentials" for the role of The One. As such, it would be most natural for her to issue whatever authorisation code is needed for such drastic action as the re-insertion of the prime program.

Why Neo? Why couldn't anyone else take the authorization code to the Source? Why couldn't the Oracle herself do it? It would appear to be some procedural requirement that the decision to authorize must be taken as a free choice by a human, who would have human interests at heart. If the authorization is something like a root password, it might enable the bearer to take control of the Matrix for their own purposes. Only a human possessing the gnosis could be entrusted with taking the authorization code into the Source.

This interpretation is, of course, deeply speculative. Nevertheless, it does tie together the various strands in a consistent manner. Further insights will, no doubt, be found in Enter The Matrix and Revolutions.

The Architect's monitors

A key cinematic trick that the Wachowskis use in this scene is to zoom into one particular monitor and let the film carry on from what is shown in that monitor. It proves that the monitors are not showing replays of Neo's predecessors. What is shown on the monitors is happening in real time. The scenes are all happening now.

How can this be? There is only one Neo, so how can he appear in multiple situations simultaneously? Does this mean that Neo is a replicated program? Or is this an allusion to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?

We have to remember that these scenes are all virtual. My interpretation of this sequence is that Neo's brain is giving off conflicting signals about what action to take. Each possible course of action is being picked up by the Matrix interface and displayed on a screen. The Architect does reveal that he is actively monitoring Neo's brain, as he says: "Already I can see the chain reaction, the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion, designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason, ..." Moreover, it is well known that when you imagine yourself speaking something, weak nerve signals are automatically sent to your throat and vocal chords, as if you were weakly miming the act of speaking. The Matrix detects those signals and others, and renders a virtual scene in which Neo is speaking and acting then. Each such scene is shown up on one screen on the bank of monitors in the Architect's room.

Only one of these virtual scenes can be fed back to Neo's brain, to yield his actual experience in the immersive virtual reality. So, although Neo can see his secondary thoughts played back to him on the monitors, he experiences in his avatar only one of those scenes being enacted.

As the cinema camera dives into a monitor, it signifies the Matrix's selection of one or other of the multiple possible courses of action that are being rendered from Neo's suppressed thoughts. Sometimes, Neo's suppressed reactions (as revealed on the monitors) are wildly contradictory, but at other times they are unified in one single decision.

An interesting implication of this that Neo is reliant on the Matrix to tell him what his actions are. His brain is emitting conflicting signals. The Matrix picks them up and feeds one possible course of action back to him. That selection becomes Neo's reality. In this way, the Matrix is a mirror for Neo to discover who he is.

At other times, the screens show other things than Neo's multiple suppressed thoughts. When the Architect is talking about the "grotesqueries" of the human race, the screens show bad things in human history such as the perpetrators and victims of war. When the Architect talks of Neo's life, they shows scenes from his entire life in the Matrix. When he talks about saving the whole human race (re-inserting the "prime program"), the screens show happy pictures of people around the world.

Reality

The first of these possibilities corresponds to the view of mysticism, which the Wachowskis often allude to. For example, the world as described by the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher George Berkeley is a virtual world devoid of physical matter and sustained only by consciousness. The same conception was presented in the eighth century by the Indian religious reformer Shankara. Those two are the most rigorous presenters of this "mental monism" view in the East and West, respectively. The Wachowski brothers may be giving us a clue in this direction, when a supplicant to Neo asks him to look over her son Jacob on the ship Gnosis. The only eminent figure in Gnosticism named Jacob was Jacob Boehme, the mystic who described the creation of the manifest world in terms of the One's need to differentiate itself and understand itself through conflict.

The second of these possibilities is that when Neo and other people wake from the Meta-Matrix, they may find themselves in the Matrix again. This would correspond to the Wachowskis' avowed interest in higher mathematics: an infinite recursion of matrices. It would also be perfectly consistent with Baudrillard's notion of hyperreality.

Acknowledgement

Postscript

I was pleased to be allowed at least a small bit of philosophy at the end of Glitches. This was the bit concerning whether machines can be conscious. It has gratifyingly generated both the greatest volume and greatest heat of discussion in the two places where the essay was posted, on KurzweilAI.net and in Slashdot.org (by link to KurzweilAI.net). Good. This is a serious issue that requires close attention. The "strong AI hypothesis" (as John Searle calls it) is that machines will become conscious by virtue of carrying out certain kinds of information processing irrespective of the physical medium of implementation. This hypothesis is held with great conviction—almost as an article of faith—by a lot of people in technical circles: programmers, scientists, technologists. Unfortunately it is wrong. It is fundamentally wrong for basic logical reasons. It is the vigorous discussion of questions such as this, and the ramifications of the answers, that constitutes the philosophical payload of the Matrix films.

Like an Apollo moon shot, getting serious philosophical ideas to a wide audience takes a very big bang to shift a very small payload. Is it worth it? Yes. It is worth spending $68 million of Hollywood investment to get a large number of people to think about the nature of reality and the nature of consciousness. People who criticize the Matrix films for being long on glamour and short on philosophy have missed the point. A film showing Morpheus, Neo, and Trinity in a graduate seminar on the philosophy of mind would cover a lot more hard philosophical ground—but hardly anybody would watch it.

Ray Kurzweil has criticized the Matrix films for their technological ineptitude (The Matrix Loses Its Way: Reflections on "Matrix" and "Matrix Reloaded"). He makes some valid points. My own essay is, however, orthogonal to the line of analysis in his review. Kurzweil is looking primarily at the technology for its own sake; I'm looking at the technology only a means of illustrating philosophical arguments. Kurzweil is assessing whether the depicted technology is a good way of doing things, and whether it is likely to happen. I have a more limited goal of merely assessing whether the depicted technology is internally consistent and can therefore be used as a philosophical thought-experiment.

This has involved a lot retrospective rationalizations, or explanatory kludges—they work but need not be taken seriously. The only bit of the film I had to reject was Morpheus' claim that people are used as an electrical power source. This was incoherent so it had to go. I replaced it with the suggestion that humans were kept in the power station for their spare brain capacity to be used. Kurzweil objects that, although this is better that bodies-as-batteries, it is still bad engineering. I acknowledge this point, but nevertheless brains-as-computers does leave us with an internally consistent interpretation of the film, which we can then use as an illustrative framework for philosophy. Which is what I was seeking to achieve.

Kurzweil argues very convincingly that a brain-machine interface based on nanobots is better engineering and more likely to happen than the big bioport in the Matrix. Fine. But the Wachowski brothers' use of a bioport is a dramatically more effective way of communicating the same functionality. Let me put it this way. Take a million people off the street and show each person one of two films: In the Kurzweilian Matrix, they see a clinician inject some stuff into a guy's arm and then we cut to scenes of the guy in a virtual world, until someone clicks something on a computer screen and then we see him back in our world. Maybe somebody explains on-screen that she is activating and deactivating invisibly small radio connectors.

In the Wachowskian Matrix, we see a huge metal tube pushed into the guy's head with a whirring sound, and the guy gasps and opens his eyes wide and then closes them and he goes comatose; and we see him in the virtual world. Then we hear the whirring sound and we see the metal tube coming out of his head; and we see him wide awake back in our world. Afterwards, we ask how many people understood immediately what was going on. My guess is that the proportions will be 10% in the Kurzweilian Matrix, and 90% in the Wachowskian Matrix.

This, I submit, is why Kurzweil is scientifically right but cinematically wrong on this point. Kurzweil writes, "The use of bioports in the back of the neck reflects a lack of imagination on how full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system is likely to work." I disagree: I think it reflects an acute understanding of how to communicate abstract ideas to mass audiences. A lot of educated, non-technical people do not understand basic notions such as the atomic theory of matter. I think they will not understand nanobot brain interfaces.

A more substantive point where I must take issue with Ray Kurzweil is in the value judgment that he ascribes to virtual reality in the Wachowskis' Matrix: "Virtual reality, as conceived of in the Matrix, is evil." No, I think the film is saying only that the particular use that the machines make of virtual reality is evil. At the end of The Matrix, Neo announces his agenda for the brave new world, where people will be empowered to use virtual reality for their own purposes. In the shooting script, this agenda is more explicit, and Neo says, "I believe that the Matrix can remain our cage or it can become our chrysalis." In the opening scenes of the Animatrix "Final Flight of the Osiris," we see a beautiful vision of the creative and empowering use of virtual reality. I do not read the Matrix films as Luddite, as Kurzweil does. The Wachowskis' message is that of subsidiarity: the control of the technology of virtual reality should pass as far down the social organization towards individual users as is safe and appropriate.

I think that the Wachowskis' evaluation of virtual reality technology, and certainly Neo's, coincides with that advocated by Kurzweil. It is a technology that, if distributed safely and democratically will empower and enrich the lives of individuals. The dystopia described by Morpheus was a product of the mismanagement of relations with artificial intelligence. This is more explicit in the Animatrix prequels, which chronicle the familiar stupidity and myopia of human politics—in this case dooming man-machine relations to be antagonistic rather than symbiotic.

Ray Kurzweil clearly does not like Matrix Reloaded. A lot of his comments about the plot and character development are obviously subjective and different people will feel differently about it. What is clear, though, is that Reloaded is much less clear than The Matrix. As a lot of other philosophers have noted, The Matrix was a clarifier of ideas. One can refer to The Matrix While explaining Descartes or Berkeley to students, and it is very effective. This is not true of Reloaded. It does not make anything clear. On the contrary, it is densely packed with riddles and cultural allusions. While it is fun picking apart these riddles (as in my essay above), it does yield very much. The film does not deliver a philosophical payload as The Matrix did. But, given the genius of the Wachowskis in the original film, I hope and trust that, come the Revolutions, it will eventually achieve a crystalline clarity.

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   Mind·X Discussion About This Article:

		Glitches Reloaded: speculation posted on 06/04/2003 12:20 AM by root@ideasociety	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	A further implication can be drawn out of Peter Lloyd's thought provoking and entertaining interpretation. Consider why a human agent (excercising free choice) is required to authorise the 're-booting' of the matrix. One possible interpretation is that the Matrix (more accurately the second, or 'blue' Matrix) was designed, not by an oppressive race of machines, but by a human being or post-human intelligence (power). Agent Smith may (or at least is beginning to) realise this as he too seeks to escape from the matrices by attaining humanity in the only way that he can - merging with the One.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: speculation posted on 06/04/2003 3:07 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	I agree with your first point, that the Matrix was probably built by humans. Otherwise, it's very hard to see why Neo must *choose* to reboot the Matrix. It looks like a safety precaution built into the system by the (human) designers to ensure that key decisions are always taken by humans, not machines. I'm not sure why you think only the blue matrix, not the green matrix, was man-made. As regards Agent Smith: again, I would basically agree with you. As Smith himself says, purpose is really important to him and he wants to get it from Neo somehow. How he plans to acquire purpose, or to escape from the Matrices, is not clear. Is he planning to write himself into Neo's biological brain? Peter Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: speculation posted on 06/04/2003 3:53 AM by root@ideasociety	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Isn't the *green matrix* man-made too? Quite possibly, I just don't want to discount the posibility that it was built independently by the 'virtual machines' of the *blue matrix*. With the potential Smith/Neo fusion, I'm imagining an Idoru-like scenario, so this might happen directly or via a mediator such as Bane (or Trinity? - who has to have a bigger role than just *love interest* being not only the Christian divinity but the *triple* goddess of indo-european mythology).

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: speculation posted on 06/04/2003 1:58 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Quite possibly, I just don't want to discount the posibility that it was built independently by the 'virtual machines' of the *blue matrix*. I tend to assume that both Matrices have the same architect, but the film does not present clear evidence either way. The following thoughts do suggest non-nested Matrices, though ... If indeed the Green Matrix was built by the virtual machines of the Blue Matrix, then it raises some interesting questions about the interface between the Blue-Matrix brain and the Green-Matrix avatar. Consider the bioport that is surgically implanted in the Blue-Matrix brain. This makes a certain set of connections with parts of the brain tissue. Call that set S. Now, assume that the real world of the film is a world like ours. Then the Blue Matrix is accessed from the real world by some sort of interface with the real brain. This might be via a bioport, or via Ray Kurzweil's nanobots. That interface makes a certain set of connections with parts of the real brain tissue. Call that set P. The set S must be the same as P, or a subset of P. Now, if S and P just map to the full sensorimotor channels of the brain, then this is not really a problem. But what if the Blue-Matrix machines want to implant electrodes in parts of the Blue-Matrix brain that are not covered by the interface in the real brain? I.e. they want to make S a superset of P. Then this will not work. I don't know what the ramifications of that would be. Maybe the Blue-Matrix machines would be puzzled and just give up. More seriously, I have suggested in my essays that the Blue-Matrix brain must have some additional channels (besides the the sensorimotor ones) to carry commands to give the Green-Matrix avatar its superhero powers. So those extra channels must be included in S. But, for those channels to work, they must also be wired up to the real brain. That is, they must be in P as well as S. But ... if the Green Matrix is something concocted by the Blue-Matrix machines, why on earth would the architects of the Blue Matrix have included non-sensorimotor data channels that are available for the Blue-Matrix machines to tap into? (Of course, the real-life interface to the Blue Matrix must have its own extra channels, in order to enable Blue-Matrix avatars to do superhero stuff -- as we saw Neo doing at the end of 'Reloaded'. But *those* channels map to controls on the Blue-Matrix avatar modulel. They don't map to Blue-Matrix brain tissue. So the extra channels needed for the Green-Matrix superhero powers would need to be in *addition* to the channels needed for the superhero powers of the Blue-Matrix avatar.) I can't see how or why the architects of the Blue Matrix could have provided, ahead of time, those extra channels. How would they know that the Blue-Matrix machines were going to build the Green Matrix with precisely those controls? So, I think the internal logic implies that the Blue and Green Matrix software must be built by the same architect. Although the Green Matrix is virtually inside the Blue Matrix, it is not really inside it. They are running in parallel. Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: speculation posted on 06/04/2003 2:50 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	When playing the "Enter the matrix" game, there is a section where you navigate a ship through the underground channels. This reminded me of a movie where a submarine gets minituarized and inserted into the body. Since "The Matrix" is largely based on the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment (I haven't read Baudrillard's book yet), I was wondering whether, similar to the surface world being an analogy to external reality, the underground world is an analogy to internal reality, humorously depicted as the inside of the brain, as some philosophies equate the brain with consciousness, more or less. Zion might then be something like the "pineal gland" in old-fashioned dualism, with the things we have on "mind": Political arena and, let's say, relationships. I assume "The Matrix" always needs to interpreted in multiple ways and layers, perhaps providing something to indentify with for everyone. I would be interested in a pointer to the slashdot.org discussion mentioned in the article (seem to be hard to find) and related discussions on newsgroups etc.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/04/2003 3:09 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	re Brains in vats: Don't read Jean Baudrillard for the brain-in-a-vat experiment. That thought-experiment would be too scientific for M. Baudrillard. Read David Chalmers' book, "The Conscious Mind", which is the best single book on the subject. I don't agree with all of his solutions, but Prof Chalmers at least understands the problems. Chalmers also has a very clever essay on the brain-in-vat on the Warner Brothers official web site: http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_p hil_fr_chalmers.html and I have a review of his essay here: http://www.ursasoft.com/matrix/WB-Chalmers.htm Personally I wouldn't recommend reading Baudrillard at all. The only reason I read his "Simulacra and Simulation" was to understand why the Wachowski's were referring to it. Link for the discussion in slashdot.org: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/19/182521 7&mode=thread&tid=133&tid=200 (or search for "Peter B Lloyd") As for discussions in Usenet, they are mostly in alt.movies and alt.philosophy. Go to Gooogle, select 'Groups', and search for "Peter Lloyd" + "Matrix", then click on "View thread" for each one. Re your idea of the Earth as a huge brain ... that would make the Nebuchadnezzar a nanobot as per Ray K's ideas :-) Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/04/2003 10:00 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Thanks for the references. I read much of David Chalmers "The Conscious Mind", and found it very interesting. Although it is one of the best books in its category, I find it sometimes disappointing. All of the arguments he develops take the causal-closedness of physical reality for 100% granted. For example, his thought experiments like "dancing qualia" evaporate to nothing once one questions causal closedness, nevertheless he did not seem to fully address the dependency, and his reasoning "against" interpretations of quantum theory and Goedels theorem is a bit lame. My personal impression is that any philosophy which accepts causal closedness effectively falls back onto conventional materialism, as it follows that nothing else has any effect that could be a reasonable basis to "believe" in this philosophy. Re your idea of the Earth as a huge brain ... that would make the Nebuchadnezzar a nanobot as per Ray K's ideas :-) I haven't thought of that yet. The sentinels would be "enemy" nanobots, I guess, and they are fighting a battle in the middle of the brain. What then does it mean that there is one machine attacking Zion for each "freed" human? Does each machine stand for an abondoned synapse that is angry at the dualistic "mini-soul" that has left it? :-D

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/05/2003 7:12 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	David Chalmers, like most academics with a background in science, technology, and mathematics, has an unshakeable faith in the general picture that physics gives us. This is not to belittle Chalmers' achievement. Before the mid-1990s, when Chalmers published his book and made a big splash at the Tucson conferences, consciousness was almost a taboo subject in neuroscience. To get it taken seriously on the academic agenda was a big step forward. Chalmers does make a lot of headway in characterising consciousness. He says, for instance, that it (or something like it, such as protoconsciousness) must be one of the basic ingredients of reality. But nowhere in his vision is there scope for an independent conscious mind, which is *not* supervenient on the physical processes in the brain. So, the science of consciousness is still in its foundational phase ... Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/05/2003 4:45 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Probably I am a bit more sceptical about the direction of Chalmers work. Although I definitely see your point of him being a closet - Berkeleyist, and actually had somewhat similar thoughts at one point in time, it seems to me one could also see him as a closet materialist. He just tries very hard to make things compatible with physics. Not that this would be wrong in itself, on the contrary, but I guess you know what I mean. I want to write more about this later, after re-reading a few parts of his book. Chalmers does make a lot of headway in characterising consciousness. He says, for instance, that it (or something like it, such as protoconsciousness) must be one of the basic ingredients of reality. But nowhere in his vision is there scope for an independent conscious mind, which is *not* supervenient on the physical processes in the brain. I am not sure his philospohy makes a full step, although I would be in favor of a step-by-step approach. I am not aware of any real new arguments "pro-consciousness" in his book, rather he presents existing arguments in a way that suggests they could be compatible with physical causal closedness, when I think they are not. I have to re-read his "dancing qualia"-like arguments, though, before I say more. I understand he considers Strong AI possible. Lately I came to see his book more as a "second-level matrix" (in the architect's sense of the function of the One). In the end, it seemed to me that his portrayal of arguments by Jackson, Nagel and so on is more complicating and self-contradicting than clarifying. The Zombie arguments do not seem to provide are real challenge, if they are even understood in their metaphysical presentation. They are considered to pre-assume what they try to prove. Sometimes it appears as if he seems to think that drawing a consclusion proves the assumption. ;-)

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/05/2003 6:01 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Chalmers is certainly lukewarm about 'protoconsciousness'. He is sure that there must be some basic ingredient, X, of reality, which is (a) not physical, and (b) either is consciousness or gives rise to consciousness. I think he is just hedging his bets when he says that X might be protoconsciousness. Personally, I can't see that protoconsciousness gets us anywhere. If something isn't conscious -- ie does not consist in a 1st-person experience of qualia -- then it is hard to see how it differs from the physical. (This is taking the view that the physical is topic-neutral, as John Foster argued very competently in his book 'The Case for Idealism'. I.e. there is no such thing as a characteristic intrinsic quality of being physical. Being physical is just a matter of having certain extrinsic properties. Chalmers' protege, Gregg Rosenberg, twists this around so that the basic elements of reality have physical extrinsic properties and phenomenal intrinsic properties. IMHO this is essentially a special case of idealism, but disguised because 'idealism' is taboo in modern scientific academia.) I like the metaphor of printing. If you have a black-ink printing press, then you will only ever get back-and-white pictures from it. No matter how complex the pictures, we will not suddenly find colours 'emerging' from them. To get a coloured picture out, we must put coloured ink in. Likewise, to have consciousness in the world, we must put consciousnes in to begin with. Peter Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/05/2003 6:20 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Chalmers is certainly lukewarm about 'protoconsciousness'. [...] Personally, I can't see that protoconsciousness gets us anywhere. Yes, it appears like a metaphysical placeholder, something that is invented in order to make the metaphysical equations look symmetrical (or so). I like the metaphor of printing. If you have a black-ink printing press, then you will only ever get back-and-white pictures from it. No matter how complex the pictures, we will not suddenly find colours 'emerging' from them. To get a coloured picture out, we must put coloured ink in. Likewise, to have consciousness in the world, we must put consciousnes in to begin with. That is a great metaphor, you get my signature for this one. ;-)

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/05/2003 10:55 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	I like the metaphor of printing. If you have a black-ink printing press, then you will only ever get back-and-white pictures from it. No matter how complex the pictures, we will not suddenly find colours 'emerging' from them. To get a coloured picture out, we must put coloured ink in. Likewise, to have consciousness in the world, we must put consciousnes in to begin with. That is one of the weakest metaphors that I have ever seen. It sounds like one of the black or white moralistic parables from the bible. It has absolutely nothing to do with consciousness except to show that you do not understand the mechanisms of the brain. You are still looking through the eyes of the ancient vitalists! Trying to find the essence of something that isn't one! You have simply chosen a metaphor that forces your vitalist argument. The system of black and white printing is a far cry from being an analog of the brain. In my computer I can take three black and white images and put them together and voila! the radiant magnificence of pure color! It's magic! The process of color printing also works the same way it takes three monochrome pictures and blends them to produce the visible spectrum...and so the same with the cones in the eye. Did you know that the white paper that you are printing your black and white image on contains ALL the colors of the rainbow? Weak metaphor indeed! No wonder you guys are so confused! =) Sorry I couldn't resist jumping in on this one. It was too ludicrous to pass up...

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 08/24/2004 4:13 AM by Towhom	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	"Likewise, to have consciousness in the world, we must put consciousnes in to begin with. Peter Lloyd" Thanks for proving there is a god...

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 08/24/2004 4:32 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Thanks for proving there is a god... That's the easy bit. Now we have to reverse-engineer the manifest world to discover the computational structure of this god. Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 1:42 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	That's the easy bit. Now we have to reverse-engineer the manifest world to discover the computational structure of this god. Hi, Peter. Would this lead to the "omega point" that Larry Wachowskis and Ken Wilber talk about? I was wondering whether you have some thoughts on this...

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 3:23 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	FYI, the "Omega Point" idea originates from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 4:44 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	FYI, the "Omega Point" idea originates from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. This may be so, I don't know. Most "googled" links point to Frank Tipler (who might have it from Chardin.) However, I am referring to a conversation available online (between LW and KW) in which this term was mentioned more in passing, perhaps to relate their topic to different philosophies (including Hegel and Schopenhauer), probably as something that appears in different forms in different philosophies. In this conversation, other terms such as "zero point" and "ground of being" (I think), "original face" and "self" were mentioned more often. And also, for example, "big bang".

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 4:59 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	This may be so, I don't know. Most "googled" links point to Frank Tipler (who might have it from Chardin.) Yes, it is so and Tipler got it from Chardin as well. Though I would bet that the Wachowski's got it straight from Chardin, rather than through Tipler. Tipler's scenario is, however, based on Big Bang mythology.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Zero Point posted on 08/24/2004 5:05 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Yes, it is so and Tipler got it from Chardin as well. Though I would bet that the Wachowski's got it straight from Chardin, rather than through Tipler. Tipler's scenario is, however, based on Big Bang mythology. Ok, so I'll use the term "zero point" instead, I think it is also the one LW used mosty often, I'll look it up tonight to make sure.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Zero Point posted on 08/24/2004 5:33 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	lol, ok whatever you say, but it doesn't matter at all to me. I was just informing you of the sources and resonances of these ideas. Use whatever word you want for your conversations.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Zero Point posted on 08/24/2004 7:07 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	lol, ok whatever you say, but it doesn't matter at all to me. I was just informing you of the sources and resonances of these ideas. Use whatever word you want for your conversations. What is funny about that? Independently of the words used, I don't have any reason to assume that the conversation between LW and KW referred to Teilhard's idea's (and neither to Tipler's), and it doesn't seem that you have listened to that audio file, so you probably can't tell either. My question to Peter was about whether he can relate his comment to the topic of the conversation between LW and KW, in general.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Zero Point posted on 08/24/2004 7:22 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	as I said my comment was juat an FYI, and I am quite sure that the Wachowski's were refering to Teilhard's Omega Point, regardless of whether you believe it or not. I have read several other accounts of the Wachowski's borrowing the idea from Teilhard. And no I don't have a clue about whatever conversation you are refering to nor any audio file. I am not really into the matrix stuff. My comment was only about the Omega Point concept itself.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Zero Point posted on 08/24/2004 7:39 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	I have read several other accounts of the Wachowski's borrowing the idea from Teilhard. If you have pointer's, then you have my interest.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 6:39 PM by BCinMexico	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Tipler says in his "Physics of Immortality", a howler of a book if there ever was one, that he borrowed the term from Teilhard (that was his surname; de Chardin is something akin to an honorific). Teilhard's idea was somewhat different from Tipler's, in that Teilhard believed that his Omega Point would arise from what he called the "noosphere", the sum total of human thought and communication circling the surface of the planet Earth. Tipler's Omega Point would arise from chaotic fluctuations in the collapse of a closed Universe. BC

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 6:42 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	thanks, BC. I don't know for sure what you meant by "howler", but I found Tiplers ideas a bit far-fetched, myself.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 6:52 PM by BCinMexico	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	"Howler" is a term we used to use back in the hills of Tennessee when I was young for an unintentionally funny tall tale. By calling Tipler's book a "howler" I was stating that I believed that it was an unintentionally funny tall tale...something of a "howler" on steroids. BC

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 6:59 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	that's basically what I thought and I can see why, though I never read the book. I did, however, listen to interviews with Tipler on his ideas. And, since I don't believe in the Big Bang nor the gnaB giB then it is just that much more ludicrous to me.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/26/2004 8:44 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Tipler's Omega Point is not something that I can take seriously. The basic flaw IMHO is that, even if his premises were true (and I haven't studied them in detail to tell, although they do seem rather implausible), and if we could therefore run arbitrarily large simulations in the last few moments of the universe, then no conscious human being is going to be able to observe them, because the conscious human mind will be trundling along at the same speed as before. As John Searle never tires of reminding us, a simulation of a conscious mind is not, in itself, a conscious mind. In order to run something like the Matrix, you need a bunch of real human minds plugged in and able to experience it. Otherwise it's an unobserved internal computation. Now, when it comes to Larry Wachowski and Ken Wilber, when they mention "omega point", they are (obviously) referring to Wilber's concept of an omega point, which is a more general one than Tipler's. Here's a quote from Mr Wilber: "...Evolution is moving through the links in the Great Chain of Being - starting with the lowest, or matter, and moving to biological structures, then to mind, then to subtle and causal realms, and finally to supermind or omega point. It's not that the absolute or supermind only comes into existence at that last stage - it existed all along, but could only be realized when consciousness itself evolved to its highest state." This is the Hegelian notion that the whole of life and civilisation is beavering away with the grand design of achieving a state of cosmic self-awareness .. in which the whole universe can be aware of itself at once. There are IMHO several major flaws in views of this kind. (a) It begs the question of how the universe got the idea of cosmic self-awareness to begin with. I mean, it cannot be actively seeking self-awareness unless it knows what self-awareness is. But it ain't gonna know what self-awareness is until it has done all its evolving. So there is a paradox, or even a downright contradiction. (b) "Self-awareness" is a very anthropomorphic notion. People, and maybe some animals, can be consciously self aware. But what does it even mean for the universe to be self-aware? This is a novel concept that requires to be defined to some extent. Does it mean that all our personal minds are to be joined up into a supermind? Well, but that would be such a vast and amorphous thing that existing notions such as 'self-awareness' are unlikely to be applicable. (c) Given that most individual minds are not striving for cosmic self-awareness, it seems to me a very un-empirical idea that we are collectively doing so. The most that could be said is that the universe is blindly stumbling toward cosmic self-awareness. -- Here's another, more recent, quote -- offering a more toned-down omega point: "In my opinion, the actual 'omega' point, or ultimate nondual ground, is ever-present, it is not the end limit of some sort of development or evolution, although this ground can be more easily discovered with increasing development, and development is important in that sense. But the ultimate omega is not the highest rung in some sort of ladder but the ever-present ground of all the rungs, or the wood out of which the entire ladder is made." Ken seems to be moving away from the Hegelian teleological notion that we are all striving for this cosmic goal, toward a more sensible, traditional view that deep insights are always available to individuals who put some effort into understanding the world. But that kinda loses the impact of the term "omega point", a term that seems to imply that it's somewhere we collectively have to get to. Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/27/2004 3:58 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Here's a quote from Mr Wilber: "...Evolution is moving through the links in the Great Chain of Being - starting with the lowest, or matter, and moving to biological structures, then to mind, then to subtle and causal realms, and finally to supermind or omega point. It's not that the absolute or supermind only comes into existence at that last stage - it existed all along, but could only be realized when consciousness itself evolved to its highest state." Thanks for the quote, I wasn't aware that KW uses the term in his books. Is this in SES or an older book? (a) It begs the question of how the universe got the idea of cosmic self-awareness to begin with. Yes, I don't think it makes sense to say that self-awareness develops from something else than self-awareness. Here's another, more recent, quote -- offering a more toned-down omega point: "In my opinion, the actual 'omega' point, or ultimate nondual ground, is ever-present, it is not the end limit of some sort of development or evolution, although this ground can be more easily discovered with increasing development, and development is important in that sense. But the ultimate omega is not the highest rung in some sort of ladder but the ever-present ground of all the rungs, or the wood out of which the entire ladder is made." Ken seems to be moving away from the Hegelian teleological notion that we are all striving for this cosmic goal, toward a more sensible, traditional view that deep insights are always available to individuals who put some effort into understanding the world. But that kinda loses the impact of the term "omega point", a term that seems to imply that it's somewhere we collectively have to get to. The second quote is more agreeable to me, but still I wonder: The ladder is defined functionally, and how does it matter whether it is made out of wood? I found this quote ( in a book that contains quotes from older books, in this case from SES): As the utterly formless, it does not enter the stream of form at any point. Although I'm not sure what KW exactly means, it still doesn't sound right to me: like epiphenomenalism. In self-awareness, we can also be aware of non-structural aspects of consciousness, and when we speak about them, the formless "enters" the "stream of form". Yet, this requires our attention (or, as you said "effort"), and doesn't happen automatically. Awareness does not develop automatically, yet when we are aware, it impacts "form". It seems we have a similar impression of his words. My most optimistic interpretation would be that in his "integral approach", he diplomatically holds both western and eastern thinking in his mind without trying resolve the contradictions in favor of one or the other. For me, this would feel as if I were to put a burden on my mind which borders on exploiting my own brain cells for the sake of superficial conflict avoidance. But maybe that's what professional philosophers have to do... ;-)

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 7:40 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Would this lead to the "omega point" that Larry Wachowskis and Ken Wilber talk about? I was wondering whether you have some thoughts on this.. No, the opposite. My reference is to the Vedantic notion, which is diametrically opposed to the Hegelian notion that Wilber seems to be drawn to. This is very much an East v West thing. In the West, people are locked into materialistic ways of thinking, even when they talk about 'spirituality'. The basic guiding vision is that of a material world made up of dumb bits and pieces such as elementary particles (or whatever mathetical model you want to use); and this is organising itself into more sophisticatd structures, and into consciousness, and then into cosmic consciousness and the omega point. In the East (or, rather, in Hinduism), the perspective goes the other way: we start with the undifferentiated One, the Brahman, which resolves into the cosmic intelligence, the Purusha, which creates the sheathed subsets of itself that we experience as personal minds, and gives each one the delusory impression of being in a physical world. So, when I refer to reverse-engineering god, I mean working backwards to figure out the logical structure of Purusha. The Hegelian view is deeply teleological, and teleology is something that I find illogical. I believe we have free will; therefore we can change the future; therefore the future is determined by the past and the present -- not the other way round. There is no Hegelian destiny that we are headed towards. The very notion of destiny and teleology is profoundly anti-scientific. The Wachowski brothers, fortunately, are not committed to Hegel. They play around with Vedantic notions as much as, if not more than, Hegelian notions. Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 8:06 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Peter, thanks for your reply. I will respond later in more detail, for now just this: Although WIlber also refers to eastern thinking, he does seem to have a strong emphasis on structure, but I haven't read that much of him yet to really tell. Structure implies separation, doesn't it? Spirituality doesn't seem to be just an asymptotic approaching of non-structure. I thought in Hinduism and/or Yoga, logical structure only applies to "Prakriti", but I need to look that up again, there are so many terms and interpretations. More later. BTW, I wrote new texts on my homepage, and (at least) one of them also draws from some of your arguments from last year (the one entitled "Computer: 'I'm conscious'", so if you want, I'll include a reference to you.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/24/2004 8:21 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Structure implies separation, doesn't it? Differentiation and connection

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/25/2004 5:06 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Although WIlber also refers to eastern thinking, he does seem to have a strong emphasis on structure, but I haven't read that much of him yet to really tell. Me too. He seems to propound some sort of Buddhism shoehorned into Western patterns of thought. But I should really shut up about Wilber until I've read his colossal book SES, which arrived from Amazon last week. Structure implies separation, doesn't it? Spirituality doesn't seem to be just an asymptotic approaching of non-structure. I thought in Hinduism and/or Yoga, logical structure only applies to "Prakriti" .. This is also my understanding. The "source" is the undifferentiated Brahman. This, in effect, gives rise to Purusha, which is the intelligent agency that produces the structure of Prakriti. Prakriti is sometimes translated as the material world, but I gather that it also includes the structural aspects of the mind (as opposed to the free will). Whereas, in the West, ever since Descartes we have drawn the major dividing line between the material and the mental, the Vedantists make that a secondary distinction: the primary distinction for them is between the undifferentiated and the differentiated; and then between the personal and the universal; and then between the volitional and the structural; and finally between the mental and the physical. So the distinction between your body and the fixed part of your mind is a subcategorisation within a subcategorisation. Whereas for the Cartesian West that distinction is the pivot for everything. In the West, only the NeoPlatonists really cottoned on to the notion of the undifferentiated One (the "pleroma") out of which all nomologically constrained structure stems. So there is whole stratum of Vendantic analysis that most Western philosophy bypasses. The mystical strand of Western religion struggles to get into that stratum, but in muddled, non-ratiocinative way. As a computer programmer, I am keen on computer analogies. For me, the One is like the root object. It is the featureless object, of which all other objects are specialised instantiations. Like the identity of Brahman and Atman in the Vedanta, the root object is at the core of both one's own self and the 'external' world. In the Matrix films, the Source is IMHO the root object of the outer simulation. When Neo "touches the Source" he acquires a reference pointer to the root object within himself and hence gains access to all the privileged methods that are encapsulated within his inner objects. The analogies between the Vedanta and the object-oriented VR are really quite intriguing. And the Sanskrit prayers at the end of Revolutions -- in the Vedic tradition this is an incantation for bringing a god's powers into an individual -- or, in software terms, invoking object methods that are normally encapsulated in deep objects, but Neo has access to them because he has 'touched the Source' -- referenced the root object. BTW, I wrote new texts on my homepage, and (at least) one of them also draws from some of your arguments from last year (the one entitled "Computer: 'I'm conscious'", so if you want, I'll include a reference to you. What's the URL? References are always nice. They rescue one from obscurity. Apparently I'm also going to be somewhere in the forthcoming 10-DVD Matrix Trilogy boxed set, although I have no idea which bits of the interview with me will have made it through the post-production process. Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/25/2004 4:42 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Great stuff Peter. I find myself agreeing with your post almost completely. I think that our differences come down to this generality; I see the absolute as beyond distinctions, dualities and opposites (as it seems you do too) but this leads me to conclude that the absolute must be both and neither all opposites, including subject/object, mind/matter etc. So where you emphasise the "mind" aspect to the interface between subject and object (with the self in experiential contact with observable nature), I emphasize its neutrality or unity with a focus on the interface itself. And further I emphasize that both subjectivity and objectivity are functions of the epistemic rather than just the ontic. Of course the epistemic is a subset of the ontic so there is complete overlap. I was curious if you have studied Leibniz if so what are your thoughts on his work? Also I was curious to hear your assesment of Spinoza, whom many budhists consider to have a perfect resonance with.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/26/2004 3:49 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	I see the absolute as beyond distinctions, dualities and opposites (as it seems you do too) but this leads me to conclude that the absolute must be both and neither all opposites, including subject/object, mind/matter etc. Certainly the division between subject and object must dissolve in the Brahman. But I do not think quite the same can be said about mind and matter. I see mind as 'real', and matter as a construct that is derived from mental experiences -- a 'fiction' as I like to say. So the opposition between mind and matter is already a second order distinction before we begin to approach Brahman. In some respects it is a false dichotomy, since mind and matter are not on the same footing. As we approach the Brahman, of course, the mind as we know it loses its structure and distinctive qualities -- they are all deconstructed in the sublation of superimposition. (Which is why I used scare quotes when I said that mind is 'real'.) So, in *that* sense, yes, mind & matter will have both 'dissolved' -- but matter will have dissolved first, as it is a construct derived from mind. Re Spinoza: I have not studied him in detail. I gather that he was a 'neutral monist', and regarded mind and matter as two co-equal aspects of some more basic substance. This I believe is mistaken. IMHO the physical world is derived from the mental world. The supposed 'neutral substance', if it existed, would be in the same boat as physical substance -- it cannot be directly observed, therefore it is merely a construct -- a fiction. (BTW David Chalmers' notion of 'proto-consciousness' goes the same way.) Re Leibniz: again, I have not studied him in detail. I gather that pre-established harmony between mind and matter, which cannot interact with each other, is a key plank in his platform. Well, if one's mind can never interact with matter then it is impossible to ever have evidence that matter exists, so the whole story about matter is no different from a fairy-tale. In fact, it is impossible even to given any semantic reference to 'matter' since we have no contact with it, so it is a purely formalistic fairy-tale without even a possibility of being true. IMHO Leibniz and Spinoza were dead-ends in the evolution of philosophical ideas. The successful evolutionary branch was the one that led from Descartes through Locke to Berkeley. Of course, this is just in the West. In the East -- specifically among the Vedantins -- a much *deeper* analysis took place; but not so clear and rigorous as that created by Berkeley. (Although even Berkeley was appallingly sloppy compared to modern standards of analytical philosophy.) Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/26/2004 3:04 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Certainly the division between subject and object must dissolve in the Brahman. Yes, and that undifferentiated Being is what is called ‘substance’ in Spinoza, but don’t let the word fool you into equating it with matter, as it does the majority of Spinozists and non-Spinozists. Spinozean substance is simply the rootless-root of existence, the ground of Being. So what you call Brahma, Spinoza calls “substance”, that which stands beneath differentiation (he called it “modification”) enabling all of existence. But I do not think quite the same can be said about mind and matter. I see mind as 'real', and matter as a construct that is derived from mental experiences -- a 'fiction' as I like to say. I can see why you would think that, but what you see as ‘real’ in mind I see as the interface between subject and object. This interface is what both subjectivity and objectivity share in common and that is qualia, or what I call the “mnemonic primitives”. Subjectivity and objectivity are two symbiotic (and symbiogenetic) modes of observation and description and both of them necessitate conscious experience or qualia. As such they are functions of the epistemic. The ontic is that differentiated existence which is beyond perspectival descriptions of mind vs. matter, and the interface in qualia is where the ontic emerges into the epistemic, where Brahma meets Maya. So because the interface between subjectivity and objectivity is human awareness itself, which is direct emergent experience, then awareness has a definite primacy over externally viewed reality. Awareness is direct being unmediated by causal chains of sensation which cause the “relativity of simultaneity” and other delusions. Awareness is immediate experience while objectivity and subjectivity is mediated and representational. The difference between subjectivity and qualia is not so clear, however, but it can be understood as the distinction between raw perception/conception and reflection there-upon. So the opposition between mind and matter is already a second order distinction before we begin to approach Brahman. In some respects it is a false dichotomy, since mind and matter are not on the same footing. As we approach the Brahman, of course, the mind as we know it loses its structure and distinctive qualities -- they are all deconstructed in the sublation of superimposition. (Which is why I used scare quotes when I said that mind is 'real'.) So, in *that* sense, yes, mind & matter will have both 'dissolved' -- but matter will have dissolved first, as it is a construct derived from mind. Ok, so you do have a neutral monism of sorts, as did the Buddha and Spinoza. We just have different ways of labeling what is mind and what is matter and what is the interface between the two. I think both are words for different views (illusions) of the same ground of being. This illusory (epistemic) aspect (the world’s double) is Maya. Re Spinoza: I have not studied him in detail. I gather that he was a 'neutral monist', and regarded mind and matter as two co-equal aspects of some more basic substance. Actually that sounds more like an “aspect dualism” than what I call a neutral monism. In my interpretation of Spinoza, which solves long-standing puzzles regarding the nature of his attributes (see: http://home.comcast.net/~anpheon/misc/Spinozas_Att ribute_Polarity.pdf) substance is simply that differentiated existence which is beyond both internal and external representation (subjectivity and objectivity). From the epistemic (illusory) dichotomy of subject vs. object we get the distinction between mind and matter. From the outside it looks like matter and from the inside it looks like mind and at the interface between the two it is direct (unmediated) awareness. This I believe is mistaken. IMHO the physical world is derived from the mental world. Yes, as I thought, this is where we differ, but I think it is a rather superficial (word-bound) difference. I see the ground of Being as beyond distinctions and thus beyond the dichotomy between mind and matter. The supposed 'neutral substance', if it existed, would be in the same boat as physical substance -- it cannot be directly observed, therefore it is merely a construct -- a fiction. That doesn’t follow except for in a solipsistic model. Existence does not necessitate representation unless you take representation as the ground of being. This is to say that the abstraction has no source, that Maya is prior to Brahma, which I feel is inverted. In Spinoza the neutral substance can be ‘directly’ observed and it is most direct at the interface of subject and object in qualia, what you call ‘mind’. This is what he means with his phrase “subspecia aeternitatis” (in the light of eternity). The whole chain of perception/conception, both inward and outward, is continuous and unbroken so the directness is relative to the proximity to the interface. At the interface of the eternal now, beyond all memory and anticipation generating the dichotomy between cause and effect, we are all aspects of the ground of being and through raw awareness we experience it directly. (BTW David Chalmers' notion of 'proto-consciousness' goes the same way.) Everything I know about Chalmers is rather disappointing (especially his zombie thought experiment). He was an aspect dualist, as far as I know. This means simply that he had two entirely unexplained aspects of what he thought of as a unity. My neutral monism explains what the two aspects are and puts them squarely in the epistemic as functions of illusion and representation, Maya. So it converts the aspects into “attributes” the number of which Spinoza says is “infinite”. So given that your idea of neutral monism resembles aspect dualism, then I can see your connection with Chalmers here. I see a huge difference between the two, however. Re Leibniz: again, I have not studied him in detail. I gather that pre-established harmony between mind and matter, which cannot interact with each other, is a key plank in his platform. The ‘pre-established harmony’ is merely the perfection of Being, what I call “immanent causation”. As far as the non-interaction of mind and matter goes, from the neutral monist position the distinction is unreal so there needs to be no interaction whatsoever if they are not separate in the first place. It is like two people looking at a ball bouncing. They both claim to see it differently, against a different background due to their viewing angle etc, and both conclude that there are two different balls, yet somehow they move in perfect correlation. How do they do this? How do the two balls interact? Dissolve the false epistemic perceptual distinction and there is no need for an interaction at all. The mind does not need to interact with matter because they are one and the same. The perfect parallelism is a function of the illusion of separation. If it weren’t an illusion then the parallelism would not be perfect. Well, if one's mind can never interact with matter then it is impossible to ever have evidence that matter exists, so the whole story about matter is no different from a fairy-tale. In fact, it is impossible even to given any semantic reference to 'matter' since we have no contact with it, so it is a purely formalistic fairy-tale without even a possibility of being true. Again, I think you are seeing both Spinoza and Leibniz in an entirely different light from how I (and many other Buddhists) see them. You seem to be operating from the aspect-dualism stance rather than from the neutral monism (non-dual) one. It seems that neutral monism is quite often misunderstood and mistaken for aspect dualism (or even a substance monism), but that is understandable given that Spinoza did not give much of an explanation of the nature of the two known attributes. I fix that problem in my paper mentioned above. IMHO Leibniz and Spinoza were dead-ends in the evolution of philosophical ideas. And I might agree with you if I interpreted them as you do, but I am constructing a fusion between them as we speak, which is very different from the standard interpretations. Naturally I think it is much closer to their intended meaning as it strips away materialistic errors in interpretation. The successful evolutionary branch was the one that led from Descartes through Locke to Berkeley. IMHO, it is Descartes that generated the problems in philosophy of mind. From him we have an endless series of people trying to correct his errors but doing so usually from the foundation of physical reductionism or idealism. Both, however, are unbalanced. Materialism became unbalanced as the meaning of “objectivity” shifted to the primacy of the ontic with the Newtonian/Cartesian/Christian “Scientific (mechanical) Revolution”, while subjectivity came to mean the illusory epistemic. Spinoza, however, used the original meaning for objectivity and subjectivity as functions of the epistemic, as representations of a deeper reality. Spinoza initially fixed Descartes error correctly, but he was anathema to the dominant Christianity so his doctrine was vilified and even corrupted with the changing materialistic paradigm used to interpret him. His substance came to be equated with dead matter (and is still so interpreted) which completely destroyed the delicate balance between subject and object that he had constructed. Of course, this is just in the West. In the East -- specifically among the Vedantins -- a much *deeper* analysis took place; but not so clear and rigorous as that created by Berkeley. (Although even Berkeley was appallingly sloppy compared to modern standards of analytical philosophy.) I have studied Berkeley only superficially, but what I gather seems to show that he was correctively reacting against materialism (physical reductionism) by taking the opposite stance in idealism. I find both views unbalanced, however, as both subjectivity and objectivity are functions of Maya, while Brahma is beyond all illusions and distinctions. I am wondering if you have a unique interpretation of Berkely that you could sum up for us. Do you fix any of his errors or clarify his ideas or just disagree with him anywhere?

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/26/2004 5:13 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Hmm. Lots to think about in your posting, subtillioN. I can see that what I wrote in my previous posting is getting dangerously close to neutral monism ("of sorts" as you said). This cannot be right IMHO. My fundamental guiding principle (which also, I believe, guided Berkeley) is empiricism. Things are real only if they are, in principle, observable. Something that can never, as a matter of principle, be observed, is only a theoretical construct. In a nutshell, the Berkeleian theory is that the mind is directly observed, therefore it's real; but matter can, in principle, never be observed, therefore it's a construct. Now, that's fine as far as it goes. It's a very useful solution to the mind-body problem. But it is a line of analysis that stops at the personal mind. That is not satisfactory, as the mind is a complex thing that needs to explained. The Vedantic and Buddhist schools maintain methods of meditation that reveal deeper structures of the mind, which are not normally noticeable. Well, that is still firmly within the empiricist framework. As we proceed with Shankara's sublation process, we remain within a recognisable empiricist framework. When we go deeply enough, the look-and-feel of the observational data changes somewhat as we no longer have a circumscribed ego observing externally arising stimuli. The observer and the observed are as one. But that's OK. That's still empiricism. The problem is, when we extrapolate this asymptotic process to the non-dual endpoint, we are (I think) no longer dealing with something that can, in principle, be observed. So, when you say that Spinoza's "substance" is the "undifferentiated Being" then alarm bells ring for me, because I realise that I am being drawn toward a position of neutral monism, which violates the basic guiding principle of empiricism. There is a certain paradox in the Vedanta, in so far as it is recognised that nothing can be said about Brahman, and yet people talk about it anyway. Maybe we should actually take this prohibition seriously. That would keep us within empiricism. Alternatively, we could use "Brahman" to denote a fictional asymptotic limit, which in itself does not exist, but which suggests an unmentionable .... "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." There is a certain analogy with mathematics. We can handle infinities and infinitesimals by means of limits. The limit of f(x) as x tends to infinity is a different way of speaking from saying x=2 and y=72. We cannot simply say f(infinity). Likewise, as long as talk *around* Brahma without mentioning it, we can stay safely within the empiricist camp. Of course, the analogy breaks down. Because f(x) as x tends to infinity is just another number. But the 'ground of being' is not another thing amongst other things. Peter

		more than meats the I posted on 08/27/2004 5:04 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	My fundamental guiding principle (which also, I believe, guided Berkeley) is empiricism. Things are real only if they are, in principle, observable. Something that can never, as a matter of principle, be observed, is only a theoretical construct. Hmmm, this is an interesting twist on logical empiricism (positivism?) and it seems to rule out any non-causal, hyper-dimensionally abstract physics models. If it wasn’t for the “in principle” part, I would be almost inversely aligned. Even so, I am relatively opposed due to intuitions, reasonings and Gödelian corollaries that no representation can fully encompass the reality represented… and observation is indeed a representation (a reality tunnel). For instance, it is a near certainty for me that even in principle the totality of infinity cannot ever be observed (encompassed in the perceptual imagination). Can you imagine, even in principle, how it could? So my motto would have to be something rather different, but almost the same. Take the shibboleth of the Transformers, “More than meets the eye!” and apply that to all possible forms of perception. Though I do believe that all of reality is causal (whatever that might mean) and thus that in principle it is understandable via generalized (abstract) causal principles, it is also a matter of principle for me that the finite can never encompass the infinite and thus the principle is perpetually an unreachable ideal. The principle and the practice (the map and the territory) are forever non-identical. Thus the principle itself is unreal. In a nutshell, the Berkeleian theory is that the mind is directly observed, therefore it's real; but matter can, in principle, never be observed, therefore it's a construct. Now, that's fine as far as it goes. It's a very useful solution to the mind-body problem. It is not very convincing to me really. Take the following line of questioning (similar to many zen koans forcing the pupil into the double-bind of self-observation): If mind is “directly observed” what then is the subconscious? Is it not part of mind? Is it observed? Doesn’t observation of it turn it into consciousness? Does it not seem to come from nowhere and exhibit a profound unpredictability even while following general behavioral patterns? What the zen masters consciously attempt to do with their koans is to demonstrate that there is no ultimate separation between the “mind” and the “non-mind”. One looks for the core of the mind but finds only an empty shell. But it is a line of analysis that stops at the personal mind. That is not satisfactory, as the mind is a complex thing that needs to explained. Right, every “thing” is complex and needs to be explained as a process. The Vedantic and Buddhist schools maintain methods of meditation that reveal deeper structures of the mind, which are not normally noticeable. Well, that is still firmly within the empiricist framework. A simple chain of logic can reveal its inadequacy when it encounters an infinite regress (note the similarity between this regress and the escape of the mode in Spinoza). Imagine that probing deeper and deeper into the mind or into matter, someone finally “hits a wall” and finds out (somehow) that there is no further to be gone with exploration. This natural philosopher claims to have discovered that there is no deeper to be gone and that he has revealed the final truth about the deepest recesses of mind (or matter) and that none can exist beyond. But given that there is no reason to assume that there ever could be an end to deeper and deeper penetration into the mysteries of nature, and given that there can be no observation of why or how this is an impenetrable barrier at all, this barrier then becomes the new mystery beyond all possible principles and conceptions. There exists now a boundary between ignorance and knowledge that the mind cannot penetrate. How does this boundary work? How could it work if it is not “made of anything”, if it has no sub-level complexity of existence? How could the nothingness it represents cause any boundary at all? How could it limit somethingness? But all this aside, there can, in principle, exist no deeper logic explaining how this boundary functions and why it exists at all. Thus it becomes a matter of fundamentally groundless faith that it really is a boundary at all! A pure-bred Dogma! Welcome to the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics where ignorance and non-logic is codified into abstract principles of mathematical accounting! This is where physics meets metaphysics and becomes solidified into belief, and it is an echo of where Maya meets Brahma. As we proceed with Shankara's sublation process, we remain within a recognisable empiricist framework. When we go deeply enough, the look-and-feel of the observational data changes somewhat as we no longer have a circumscribed ego observing externally arising stimuli. The observer and the observed are as one. But that's OK. That's still empiricism. Yes, but it is only observation in practice and there is still no reason whatsoever to assume that the observer has reached an ultimate level or that any observation could ever encapsulate all of reality in principle. The ultimate realization itself must be that there can be no ultimate realization. The rest is just endless exploration of how it is so. The problem is, when we extrapolate this asymptotic process to the non-dual endpoint, we are (I think) no longer dealing with something that can, in principle, be observed. ok we are on the same track. So, when you say that Spinoza's "substance" is the "undifferentiated Being" then alarm bells ring for me, because I realise that I am being drawn toward a position of neutral monism, which violates the basic guiding principle of empiricism. I agree, empiricism is a violation of the principles of esoteric thought that you are being drawn to. I think you find that (logical) empiricism lends your ideas an aire of scientific solidity or rationality, but at the same if the illusion (Maya) really is an illusion then there can be no solidity nor rationality to the notion that the illusion is the reality even though it is perfectly reasonable and a logical necessity to assume that the illusion is entirely real. Do you see the hierarchical relation being drawn here? There is a certain paradox in the Vedanta, in so far as it is recognised that nothing can be said about Brahman, and yet people talk about it anyway. Maybe we should actually take this prohibition seriously. That would keep us within empiricism. Alternatively, we could use "Brahman" to denote a fictional asymptotic limit, which in itself does not exist, but which suggests an unmentionable .... Yes, but calling Brahma that which is beyond differentiation and observation is not talking about it so much as it is pointing merely in its direction. To me it points directly away from the position of naive realism and also from the tacit assumption that your added “in principle” can equate to any possible “in practice”. "Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent." And that is why we merely point to it with gaping mouths…oooommmmm Also we can address its bright shadow via negativa. There is a certain analogy with mathematics. We can handle infinities and infinitesimals by means of limits. The limit of f(x) as x tends to infinity is a different way of speaking from saying x=2 and y=72. We cannot simply say f(infinity). Likewise, as long as talk *around* Brahma without mentioning it, we can stay safely within the empiricist camp. That’s a great analogy. I am now writing a piece on the visualization (toposophy) of number as a boundary, as opposed to the infinite as the boundless. Visualizing it as such with clear analogies and representations enables one to rid oneself of all sorts of paradoxes in mathematical thinking, such as Galileo’s paradox with the violation of the part-whole axiom and Zeno’s paradoxes. It also opens up the way to understanding the three degrees of infinity in Spinoza and Leibniz which clarifies the notions of infinity immensely. Of course, the analogy breaks down. Because f(x) as x tends to infinity is just another number. But the 'ground of being' is not another thing amongst other things. Beautiful, yes.

		Re: more than meats the I posted on 08/28/2004 1:42 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Hmmm, this is an interesting twist on logical empiricism (positivism?) and it seems to rule out any non-causal, hyper-dimensionally abstract physics models. Not quite. Empiricism does not entirely rule out "non-causal, hyper-dimensionally abstract physics models". It only rules out their real existence. You can still have them as convenient fictions -- artefacts of our logico-mathematical model of the world. Just as imaginary numbers in electrical engineering, and the celestial dome in astronomy, are very useful -- but have no independent reality. They are artefacts of how we choose to describe the world. For many purposes, of course, it does not matter whether we believe these things to be real or not. We just use the equations. A materialist and an idealist can both use the laws of physics with the same competence. Our metaphysical beliefs about reality are, in almost all cases, irrelevant to our use of scientific physical theories. We can build bridges and interplanetary spacecraft equally well whether we belief we are handling material substances, or handling the thoughts of God, or indeed living in the Matrix. But .. the mind-body problem is one applied area where the correct metaphysics is crucial. Peter

		Re: more than meats the I posted on 08/28/2004 4:50 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Not quite. Empiricism does not entirely rule out "non-causal, hyper-dimensionally abstract physics models". It only rules out their real existence. That is exactly what I meant only a bit imprecisely stated IMHO. The models really exist but they don't truly represent reality. This aspect of empericism I strongly agree with. You can still have them as convenient fictions -- artefacts of our logico-mathematical model of the world. Just as imaginary numbers in electrical engineering, and the celestial dome in astronomy, are very useful -- but have no independent reality. They are artefacts of how we choose to describe the world. Indeed For many purposes, of course, it does not matter whether we believe these things to be real or not. We just use the equations. A materialist and an idealist can both use the laws of physics with the same competence. Our metaphysical beliefs about reality are, in almost all cases, irrelevant to our use of scientific physical theories. I would have to differ a bit due to my unique perspective outside the standard scientific paradigm. If the models are based on faulty metaphysics then they eventually end up discarding causality altogether and relying exclusively on mathematical accounting systems with no understanding of causal mechanisms. This is what has happened with our current faulty paradigm. Had the scientists been operating on the correct metaphysics there would have been no need to abandon causation with "modern physics". We can build bridges and interplanetary spacecraft equally well whether we belief we are handling material substances, or handling the thoughts of God, or indeed living in the Matrix. Yes, but often the actual understanding of the causes behind the mathematics will lead to refinements in the mathematics and vice versa. But .. the mind-body problem is one applied area where the correct metaphysics is crucial. I think it is always crucial and the same core errors have led to problems in all areas of natural philosophy.

		Re: more than meats the I posted on 08/28/2004 5:28 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	If the models are based on faulty metaphysics then they eventually end up discarding causality altogether and relying exclusively on mathematical accounting systems with no understanding of causal mechanisms. This is what has happened with our current faulty paradigm. Had the scientists been operating on the correct metaphysics there would have been no need to abandon causation with "modern physics". I believe I see what you mean. Causality as such is never recognised by physics. There is no term in e.g. the equations of motion that denotes 'causality'. Nevertheless, physics gets along quite well as a "mathematical accounting system". It may be intellectually unsatisfactory to omit causality from the picture, but for most practical science, who needs it? Mathematical accounting is enough. Peter

		Re: more than meats the I posted on 08/29/2004 12:15 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	ok, yes, we can manage without understanding what our theories are really quantifying, but theoretical science stagnates as we have seen with the incompatability and incomprehensibility (paradox, duality and codified uncertainty) between the compartments of physics. And mean-while much anti-science sentiment is generated from the faulty dead-matter in the void dualistic paradigm and vast quantities of man-hours are wasted in dead-ends which are obvious as such from the more "correct" paradigm.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/29/2004 8:57 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	It is like two people looking at a ball bouncing. They both claim to see it differently, against a different background due to their viewing angle etc, and both conclude that there are two different balls, yet somehow they move in perfect correlation. In this example you have two observers (two qualia) looking at one movement (information) in the middle. Two qualia which share the same information (bouncing). Yet in your theory you managed to put qualia in the middle, as if the same qualia is shared by two views.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/29/2004 12:18 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Yet in your theory you managed to put qualia in the middle, as if the same qualia is shared by two views. That is because the same qualia is indeed shared by two views. That is why they are inseperable and symbiogenetic.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Bouncing brain cell posted on 08/29/2004 4:53 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	That is because the same qualia is indeed shared by two views. That is why they are inseperable and symbiogenetic. Isn't the situation where the question becomes interesting (at the brain cells, or whereever we might expect the NCC would turn out to be) more like your example than your theory: with the brain cell being the 'ball' and the 'bouncing' some information transmitted by the brain cell? So you have two qualia: the examining scientist, and the perceiving human guinea pig?

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Bouncing brain cell posted on 08/29/2004 9:15 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Isn't the situation where the question becomes interesting (at the brain cells, or whereever we might expect the NCC would turn out to be) more like your example than your theory: with the brain cell being the 'ball' and the 'bouncing' some information transmitted by the brain cell? So you have two qualia: the examining scientist, and the perceiving human guinea pig? It seems the analogy has completely missed its mark. The simple observation that the color blue in ones dream shares qualities with the color blue in waking perception demonstrates that objectivity and subjectivity share the same qualia. Qualia is what they have in common. This is true for me, and many other's I know, but I don't know about you. Do you really suppose that there is some absolutely isolated set of qualia for objective experience (perception) than there is for subjective experience (conception)? Or, as it seems likely, do you still categorically deny that qualia is involved in objectivity? Wouldn't this then be a function of definition?

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Bouncing brain cell posted on 08/29/2004 9:34 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Well, dreams and waking perception have more in common: we also see structures, recognizable "objects" (well, in so far as one can say they are objects in a dream), and also dreams often (though not always) have story lines. In so-called "lucid dreams" one can also have the sense of being present, or even be aware it is a dream, and be consciously active within the dream, go around a dream-house and see it from different perspectives, for example. But that is a different topic.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: mnemonic primitives posted on 08/29/2004 10:48 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Well, dreams and waking perception have more in common: Indeed we also see structures, recognizable "objects" (well, in so far as one can say they are objects in a dream), and also dreams often (though not always) have story lines. In so-called "lucid dreams" one can also have the sense of being present, or even be aware it is a dream, and be consciously active within the dream, go around a dream-house and see it from different perspectives, for example. But that is a different topic. Not a different topic at all, because it is the commonality that we are directly discussing now. What they have in common are the mnemonic primitives and higher-level memory structures (imagination). In dreams they are stimulated from within and in waking they are stimulated from without. So your post only strengthens my thesis. There is no absolute distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. And the examples you give demonstrate the emphasis on memory.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: mnemonic primitives posted on 08/29/2004 11:01 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	So your post only strengthens my thesis. There is no absolute distinction between subjectivity and objectivity. In the way in which you have defined these terms, I don't think anyone would assume there is much of a distinction at all (except for the obvious one of perceiving reality external to the body, vs. internal within the body.)

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: mnemonic primitives posted on 08/29/2004 11:32 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	In the way in which you have defined these terms, I don't think anyone would assume there is much of a distinction at all (except for the obvious one of perceiving reality external to the body, vs. internal within the body.) Lol, of course you think in-vs-out is not enough of a distinction, and it is not the only distinction either, as I have mentioned others elsewhere in this thread. You prefer them absolutely and irreconcilably distinct so you define them with nothing in common rendering objectivity completely independent of observation and human experience This is the standard materialistic definition as it shifts the primacy of the ontic to the objective. Is that really where you want it? What I am saying here, with the commonality of the epistemic duality of subjectivity and objectivity is quite obvious and nothing really new. In fact (as I have said before) I am merely explaining these terms in their original form before objectivity became synonymous with the ontic. I am simply using the pre-mechanistic/materialistic definitions.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: mnemonic primitives posted on 08/30/2004 1:03 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	You prefer them absolutely and irreconcilably distinct so you define them with nothing in common rendering objectivity completely independent of observation and human experience No, I'm usually not talking about "them". If I follow your description of the situation, the point would be that we cannot exchange information about for example the look of blue, yet we can exchange information about the forms of the objects we see (whether internally or externally). We have already discussed this, yet I would point out here that it is an orthogonal distinction.

		mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 1:19 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	No, I'm usually not talking about "them". The record speaks for itself. If you would like to amend it then please redefine those terms here. If I follow your description of the situation, the point would be that we cannot exchange information about for example the look of blue, yet we can exchange information about the forms of the objects we see (whether internally or externally). No, that's not my point. My point was quite clear and it is not exclusively about the communication of forms. Due to obvious similarities in the human population, we can communicate qualia as well just not objectively, explicitly, or we should assume, perfectly. We have already discussed this, yet I would point out here that it is an orthogonal distinction. Yes, we have discussed this many times with many flavors. An orthogonal relation requires something to be orthogonal to. So what are you claiming this relation to be orthogonal to? (don't worry, all distinctions are relations, and often polar.) Recall (if you have actually experienced the first time) that my paper focused a great deal on orthogonal polarities. Does your orthogonality differ from those addressed therein? And if so, how?

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 2:22 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	The record speaks for itself. If you would like to amend it then please redefine those terms here. Which terms? I usually don't use "subjectivity" and "objectivity". (Unless I discuss them with you.) For example I use "conscious" and "physical", or "qualia" and "information", or "conscious-how", "conscious-size", and "measurable-size". I like the last 3 terms the best, but you usually reject them. (Maybe I should just stick to them). No, that's not my point. It is orthogonal to your point. That's what I said. Due to obvious similarities in the human population, we can communicate qualia as well just not objectively, explicitly, or we should assume, perfectly. No. When two people look at the same blue sky, they cannot exchange any information about whether they consciously experience "blue" in the same way, whether "blue" looks the same to them. I won't get tired of repeating this. The reason is that information is form, and only communicates form, yet the look of a "blue" is not a form. So what are you claiming this relation to be orthogonal to? Two distinctions are orthogonal if they are independent of each other. You have the look of color in both S and O, and you have the forms of objects in both S and O. This should be obvious. Why do I have to explain this?

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 2:41 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Which terms? I usually don't use "subjectivity" and "objectivity". Do you usually answer your own questions? (Maybe I should just stick to them). Stick to your guns, blue No, that's not my point. It is orthogonal to your point. That's what I said. What you mean and what you communicate are two different things. Sub: Due to obvious similarities in the human population, we can communicate qualia as well just not objectively, explicitly, or we should assume, perfectly. Blue: No. When two people look at the same blue sky, they cannot exchange any information about whether they consciously experience "blue" in the same way, whether "blue" looks the same to them. Relax and try to understand before you get defensive. You are actually agreeing with me here when I say they can't communicate explicitly, objectively or perfectly what is necessarily implicit, i.e. qualia. But the bulk of cummunication relies on the implicit similarity between minds. Communication conjurs up similar qualia within another mind. I won't get tired of repeating this. The reason is that information is form, and only communicates form, yet the look of a "blue" is not a form. And I won't tire of reminding you that this is a vast over-simplification. You are stuck on one side of an illusory duality. Sub: So what are you claiming this relation to be orthogonal to? Blue: Two distinctions are orthogonal if they are independent of each other. We are using two different definitions here. I am using this one: "having a set of mutually perpendicular axes; meeting at right angles" and you are using this one: "statistically unrelated - not pertinent to the matter under consideration" This was almost a complete miscommunication. You have the look of color in both S and O, and you have the forms of objects in both S and O. This should be obvious. Why do I have to explain this? Good question. What was your point with this blank?

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 3:48 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	You are actually agreeing with me here when I say they can't communicate explicitly, objectively or perfectly what is necessarily implicit, i.e. qualia. But the bulk of cummunication relies on the implicit similarity between minds. Communication conjurs up similar qualia within another mind. At least it seems we have now clarified that this is not a distinction between "subjectivity" and "objectivity" in your sense. (BTW, most people think of physics when they think of "objective". And I think most would consider both "subjectivity" and "objectivity", in your sense, as plainly both of the 'mind'. And 'matter' to be something different which does not include qualia, and I don't think you can solve anything by simply defining "objectivity" as including qualia, sort of defining materialism away.) Regarding agreement about communication of qualia vs. form: I don't think you really understand my point, which is that two persons cannot communicate the look of a color at all. I think so as your statement about "conjuring up similar qualia" is only leading away from this point: Two persons can easily exchange information about forms, for example by saying: a form which has three corners (a triangle) with all sides of equal length. Then they can verifiy whether they both see a form with these properties. They don't have to assume that they have similar minds. The information is clear about that. But this doesn't work with the look of colors. Here they have to assume that they see the same colors, in the first place. There is no information at all about whether these colors actually look the same in their conscious experience. They just assume so, based on the word "green" or by pointing to a painted object. How could you find out whether a gen-manipulated human being with slightly different brain patterns still sees "blue" the same way? You can't. And I won't tire of reminding you that this is a vast over-simplification. You are stuck on one side of an illusory duality. Which side of which duality? Why illusory? Why an over-simplification? (That was a tough one. ;-)

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 12:43 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Sub: You are actually agreeing with me here when I say they can't communicate explicitly, objectively or perfectly what is necessarily implicit, i.e. qualia. But the bulk of cummunication relies on the implicit similarity between minds. Communication conjurs up similar qualia within another mind. Blue: At least it seems we have now clarified that this is not a distinction between "subjectivity" and "objectivity" in your sense. Remember this was a similarity, not a distinction. (BTW, most people think of physics when they think of "objective". That is because physics is largely objective, though actually quite subjective as well. But recall that physics starts with observation, the root of objectivity, and note that observation requires qualitative experience. So objectivity is not JUST individual external observation, but it includes the aspect of calibration with other externally observing minds and the construction of knowledge systems for those observations. And I think most would consider both "subjectivity" and "objectivity", in your sense, as plainly both of the 'mind'. Yes I know and that is my point. Without qualia, neither subjectivity nor objectivity could exist and thus there would be no distinction between internally observed mind and externally observed brain. Subjectivity and objectivity, as I have said countless times, are functions of the epistemic. They are (directional) modes of gaining knowledge about the world. And 'matter' to be something different which does not include qualia… Right that is the standard dualistic assumption, but aren't we trying to go beyond dualism here. … and I don't think you can solve anything by simply defining "objectivity" as including qualia, sort of defining materialism away.) Do you really think I am “simply defining ‘objectivity’ as including qualia, sort of defining materialism away”? I guess you might think that seeing as you never read my paper explaining how my system works, and seeing that you couldn’t give a synopsis of my system (yes that is a challenge). I use definitions for philosophical constructions. That is the point. I simply find that the old (pre-materialistic) definitions are more precise and balanced, so I start there and construct my system from proper definitions. Definitions are the core of any thought construction. If you have to continuously fight unbalanced definitions then it makes your job of communication much more difficult if not sometimes impossible (as seems to be the case with you). Regarding agreement about communication of qualia vs. form: I don't think you really understand my point, which is that two persons cannot communicate the look of a color at all. As I said “they can't communicate explicitly, objectively or perfectly what is necessarily implicit, i.e. qualia.” This communication relies on a tacit assumption that what I see as “blue” is reasonably similar to what you see, or that there is a human commonality of experiential context. I believe in such a relative commonality and I think communication couldn’t really exist without it. So when you tell me that something is blue my similar implicit experience is stimulated by your explicit words and you have successfully communicated to me what the color of something is. That is all I am talking about. Don’t get hung up on the slipperiness of the term “communicate”. I have defined what type of communication I am talking about so there is no excuse for evading understanding here. I think so as your statement about "conjuring up similar qualia" is only leading away from this point: I mentioned that the communication is not explicit. Do you know what that means? It means that I agree with you here. I can’t give a verbal description of blue to someone who doesn’t have implicit knowledge of blue already (i.e. a blind man). But how many times must we have this same discussion? Two persons can easily exchange information about forms, for example by saying: a form which has three corners (a triangle) with all sides of equal length. Yes, form is relatively easy to explicate, but never PERFECTLY. Then they can verifiy whether they both see a form with these properties. They don't have to assume that they have similar minds. The information is clear about that. Blue, this is obvious and I wonder why you think you need to continue to state it? But this doesn't work with the look of colors. Here they have to assume that they see the same colors, in the first place. Must we go over and over the same thing for eternity? How many times do I have to agree with you on this point before you can remember or understand that I have done so? There is no information at all about whether these colors actually look the same in their conscious experience. They just assume so, based on the word "green" or by pointing to a painted object. No, there is indeed information but it is not explicit. It is much more than an assumption, blue. It is a well-educated guess. It just seems obvious that humans are quite similar despite their differences so why wouldn't qualia also share an average commonality? How could you find out whether a gen-manipulated human being with slightly different brain patterns still sees "blue" the same way? You can't. Right, there is no perfectly objective way to find this out. This is just obvious and I am not saying otherwise. You would know this if you cared to understand my statements. I specifically said almost the same thing with the following comment, “they can't communicate explicitly, objectively or perfectly what is necessarily implicit, i.e. qualia.” It is your agenda of dissonance that causes you to continually misunderstand me. Sub: And I won't tire of reminding you that this is a vast over-simplification. You are stuck on one side of an illusory duality. Blue: Which side of which duality? The old duality of form vs. substance (ground of being). Why illusory? Because we are not Cartesians, or at least we hope not to be. Remember that illusions are real so all dualities must be understood as polarities if we wish to have a unified system. Why an over-simplification? Because all duality is an oversimplification of polarity. (That was a tough one. ;-) You make it difficult for yourself by trying to disagree before you understand.

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 1:30 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	No, there is indeed information but it is not explicit. It is much more than an assumption, blue. It is a well-educated guess. It just seems obvious that humans are quite similar despite their differences so why wouldn't qualia also share an average commonality? This is the part that I disagree with. It also distracts from the point I am making. There is no implicit information either, and no basis for an well-educated guess: The colors we see could be exactly the same, or slightly different as many things are slightly different about human beings, or they could be quite noticeably different. They could be even as different as color and sound. It could be some rather random event at a very early age which decides this, and the colors we see could be as different as those of our hair. We simply don't know at all. The old duality of form vs. substance (ground of being). I am not calling it a duality. I am simply pointing out that there is form and non-form, and we can describe and measure one, but not the other. And this is not just a difference of degree. This I consider a fact, and won't try to smooth it out for the sake of those who don't like clear differences. Because we are not Cartesians, or at least we hope not to be. Remember that illusions are real so all dualities must be understood as polarities if we wish to have a unified system. I believe neither in dualities nor in polarities. Both are abstractions. For example the difference between reality and abstraction (such as a mathematical line) is not a duality, but certainly a difference, even though the person making the abstraction is not an abstraction. Also I don't want to create a "unified system", yet I'd like to understand reality. A "system" is a restriction to an intellectual understanding, to form, and I don't believe all reality can be understood intellectually, as form, although I am open for any intellectual understanding. This is a consequence of pointing out that the look of color is not 'form'.

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 1:43 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	ok blue. Let's just agree to disagree.

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/30/2004 8:38 PM by claireatcthisspace	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Blue and Sub, This is interesting. I think that a problem that human understanding has, stems from the fact that as a system works well within a model, wehereby that model is a respresentation of something other than itself, even though the model still exists within a larger reality perameter for both, is that, the physics model works because it is has to be self restricting (Newtonian mechanics is an good example), unlike the something it could represent (the human mind), and isn't just self resttricting but externall including as well as self restricting as a system. Humans think in parts, but we know that not all reality works in parts, obviously not all entities are 1 or nought, there are in between areas. One example, is how colour effects the human mind via the brain and its senses (at this point lets put physics aside, whcih is a first). Very generally that particular model could make a self assumption that represents its external reality but unlike that external reality, it has boundries that we infer. Those boundries are neither in the context we think, nor have edges. An exapmple is an eqaution. the equation is a very exact and defining concept. It has boundries and is "clean". The boundries for what we don't infer in real reality, are usually external to the model, even if the model is still real, and not clean cut like an equation. So the external reality, has a property that binds with other "self" systematic realities, that we again infer, not into that external reality but play a part in what we think are the edges between us and the system being used to expalain, even if we still don't know what the edges are between the system it self and it's external realtiy not our either. We need not really understand how these systems bind (yet), without our inference because we allready know they just do, or we assume they do, but we cannot be totally accurate as to say exactly what this really is. One example is the uncertaincy principle. This has develpoed into many areas of what is means to understand external boundry assumptions as apposed to subjective inference (i.e wave collapse, or us totally messing up the lot, but being just an interetsing a reality even bounded up!) I have mentioned this in a round about way on my site in the last few months, although with no succcess with reagrd to the langauge side of it, that being, A) part of the reason (no pun intended for the Matrix) because the langauge we still cunrrently use, in dipole form, information theory in a certain order charge, we are charged with one and reality another, we caanot yet tell how else it could behave *otherwise", if we did then phyics has suddenly changed its complex dance, but one place to start could be The Plauli Eclusion Principle and handedness. The handedness suggest a boundry of subjective inference, this also applies to chemistryl oddly enough, because it could suggest a subtle covering over other systems that we are not aware that co-habit with the same particles. An other would be the look at high energy physics, but an effect within biology (brain and colour information, consciouss experience), being as clever as it is, will be beyond us at the moment, probably. What total mess. Claire

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/31/2004 5:10 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	ok blue. Let's just agree to disagree. Plainly assuming that a formal description, information (which is quantifiable) would include all other differentiation by implication, is equivalent to plainly assuming a philosophy which is logically equivalent to materialism, as are dual aspect theories (and multiple aspect theories), and epiphenomenalism. Nothing less than this is what it measn to me when we say we agree to disagree on this.

		Re: mnemonic primitives and orthogonal distinctions posted on 08/31/2004 9:48 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	You are a perfect case study of the debilitating effects of dissonant argumentation. After three or so years of arguing *against* me you still don't understand what you are arguing against. Do you really think you are not constructing a system for this dissonant antisystemic argumentation? Here you are systemically over-intellectualizing as you denounce all intellectual systems.

		double-under-speak posted on 09/01/2004 1:59 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	ok, I have taken the time to untangle your toil-and-trouble-speak and I am quite suprised to see you return in such an underminded way. Mark me corrected ... back to my original assertion. Let us instead refuse to admit to ourselves that we agree and yet slowly, unconsciously circle toward an agreement as our original position changes in the unconscious tide of dissonant argument...accidentally nudged a bit by a matriculated Buddhist priest. Plainly assuming that a formal description, information (which is quantifiable) would include all other differentiation by implication, is equivalent to plainly assuming a philosophy which is logically equivalent to materialism... But that is PRECISELY what I am NOT saying. Can you find a single quote which would illustrate that I ever said said this? Or are you now talking to someone else? In my system, the epistemic is a subset of the ontic, thus ALL knowledge systems (including subjectivity and objectivity) are necessarily incomplete…remember Gödel … or Spinbitz? This is a natural corollary from Gödel, but the direction of causal influence is reversed. .., as are dual aspect theories (and multiple aspect theories), and epiphenomenalism. Great, we refuse to accept that we agree here as well. ;-) Any theory which is not fundamentally unified in its abstract categories and connections, is logically inconsistent. That theory which satisfactorily explains the most phenomena in the most detailed, self-consistent and meaningful manner, is the most valuable to mankind. That is the socio-evolutionary fitness-function. Nothing less than this is what it measn to me when we say we agree to disagree on this. How much clearer could you make this sentence? Do you mean simply, that you would agree to nothing less?

		Re: post scriptum posted on 09/01/2004 3:54 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	How much clearer could you make this sentence? Do you mean simply, that you would agree to nothing less? No, I agree(d) that we disagree. Nevertheless, I want(ed) to make clear that it is not nit-picking from my side, when I insist that there isn't any information _at_all_, neither explicit nor implicit, about the look of a color. In case you were expecting me to agree that there is implicit information about the look of a color, it needs to be said that I would then have to give up my whole position about qualia being not correlated to form by implication, especially when including awareness in the term 'qualia' (or, more generally, in the term 'conscious experience'). Specifically awareness would then become a rather meaningless word for an information-based process of self-monitoring. Fortunately it is clear (at least to quite a few of those who are interested enough in this question) that the word "blue" or some more specific, yet externally based color specification, does not at all contain _any_ information about the look of color. These words are just labels, and the same label could refer to quite different 'looks' for different persons. However plausible it may appear to our habitual thinking, we have no actual basis for any "well-educated" guess that our minds would be more similar in this regard than the color of our eyes or the color of our hair. And this distinction, between form and non-form, (and that 'being' can be differentiated in non-form without being differentiated in form as well), needs to be expressed most clearly, as clearly as possible, otherwise it is IMHO too difficult to understand the nature of conscious experience and awareness. What counts here is clarity, not some partial yes-but agreement.

		Re: double-under-speak posted on 09/01/2004 4:28 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Nevertheless, I want(ed) to make clear that it is not nit-picking from my side, when I insist that there isn't any information _at_all_, neither explicit nor implicit, about the look of a color. Define information. I think we have vastly different definitions of this central term. By definition, I consider the look itself as a form of (implicit) information. You disagree by pure definition but I don't recognize such a disagreement as a valid form of argument. In case you were expecting me to agree that there is implicit information about the look of a color, it needs to be said that I would then have to give up my whole position about qualia being not correlated to form by implication, especially when including awareness in the term 'qualia' (or, more generally, in the term 'conscious experience'). Oh yes, I am well aware of how precarious your non-system for non-unified non-intellectual non-explanation is. But I have yet to see any justification for your dualistic assumption that form and qualia are FUNDAMENTALLY separate. You simply point to its obviousness as if that were enough. You are a platonist and a dualist whose un-systemic ambiguity enables you to hide this truth from yourself. Specifically awareness would then become a rather meaningless word for an information-based process of self-monitoring. No, that would be an objective explication of self-awareness. But why worry about what one fundamentally incomplete description says about it when we both know that no matter how accurate it may be it is always short of the actual reality it is describing? Fortunately it is clear (at least to quite a few of those who are interested enough in this question) that the word "blue" or some more specific, yet externally based color specification, does not at all contain _any_ information about the look of color. Right, to this I agreed. The “externally based color specification” is precisely what I said could NOT contain the experience itself. It is just a verbal description after-all. Why would we even consider that it could? This absurdity is what boggles my mind. These words are just labels… What words aren’t just labels? … and the same label could refer to quite different 'looks' for different persons. Obviously However plausible it may appear to our habitual thinking, we have no actual basis for any "well-educated" guess that our minds would be more similar in this regard than the color of our eyes or the color of our hair. This is just an uneducated guess on your part, spun in a nice little dress of false analogy. Care to back it up? And this distinction, between form and non-form, (and that 'being' can be differentiated in non-form without being differentiated in form as well), needs to be expressed most clearly, as clearly as possible, otherwise it is IMHO too difficult to understand the nature of conscious experience and awareness. Isn’t that your distinction? It certainly is not mine. What counts here is clarity, not some partial yes-but agreement. What counts first in communication is understanding, but this necessitates a resonant mode of thinking. When you expect your opponent to be wrong and indeed require it to save the face of your un-systemic dualism, then you will do whatever it takes to misinterpret the opponents system and claim the error as his. This is what you consistently do over and over and no amount of correction can break through your fossilized convictions. Because of this you cannot even give a synopsis of my system that you think you are arguing against. Oh I know, this is not about me or my system. But your repeated attacks based on continually misunderstanding the same points over and over, speak otherwise. You have your mind made up about what my system consists of and no communication can correct your views of something extrinsic and quite inaccessible to you.

		The End posted on 09/01/2004 3:04 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Define information. I think we have vastly different definitions of this central term. By definition, I consider the look itself as a form of (implicit) information. You disagree by pure definition but I don't recognize such a disagreement as a valid form of argument. It has nothing to do with definitions: We cannot verify that colors we see have the same look, but we can verify that a form we see has for example three corners. This is so simple. But I have yet to see any justification for your dualistic assumption that form and qualia are FUNDAMENTALLY separate. Who says they are separate? The conscious visual image we see has both form and non-form, yet there are not two separate images, just one. The “externally based color specification” is precisely what I said could NOT contain the experience itself. Who says that a specification should "contain" that which it describes? ---------- BTW, I've read that causality is considered to be part of 'maya' ("measure"). ---------- So we agree to disagree? Thanks for the discussion.

		The Beginning posted on 09/01/2004 5:58 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	It has nothing to do with definitions: Indeed it does because you and I are not talking about the same things if we are not using the same definitions. We can't even communicate. We cannot verify that colors we see have the same look, but we can verify that a form we see has for example three corners. Obviously, verification is extrinsic and objective, but the experience of color is intrinsic to the interface of qualia. You can’t KNOW it absolutely without being it and thus experiencing it intrinsically. I suppose I will have to agree to this forever and you will still not see it or accept it. Sub: But I have yet to see any justification for your dualistic assumption that form and qualia are FUNDAMENTALLY separate. Blue: Who says they are separate? You do. You say over and over that there is no form in qualia. Qualia has no form, right? Is not qualia seperate from form, like a seperate substance which makes up the soul? Don't you see the Cartesian/Platonic/Christian origins hiding in this tacit and ambiguous distinction? The conscious visual image we see has both form and non-form, yet there are not two separate images, just one. Lol, both form and non-form? This would imply that there are two separate things that the image possesses. I don’t believe in the ultimate reality of this distinction. And if you don’t either (and thus are not a dualist) then you must agree that all qualia (not the image) also has form, because there is no “without form”. Furthermore and more importantly I was not talking about the image but qualia itself. You make an absolute and unjustified duality between form and qualia, right? Or are you now renouncing this earlier dualistic aspect of your non-systemic system? Sub: The “externally based color specification” is precisely what I said could NOT contain the experience itself. Blue: Who says that a specification should "contain" that which it describes? You are quibbling over the ambiguity of single words rather than letting the words point beyond themselves to the intended meaning. I agreed with you long ago on this one and you force the words to mean what you need them to mean so that you won’t be able to see that agreement. There is no absolute objective (explicit) verification of that which is necessarily implicit. I cannot prove to you that the color blue in my mind is EXACTLY the same as the color blue in your mind. This is just obvious. ---------- BTW, I've read that causality is considered to be part of 'maya' ("measure"). ---------- Yes, of course it is. Do you suppose that that should come as a shock to me? If you knew my position and if your intuition was not directed in the negative direction in search of errors rather than solutions you immediately see how this fits into my system. Again we see the debilitating effects of your emphasis on disagreement (dissonance). You passed right by the obvious correct answer and found the error you were seeking. Recall our many discussions on the verbal distinction between immanent and transitive causation. Note also that Buddhism does not distinguish between the two categories. Do you remember now that transitive causation is ultimately illusory and that it rests on the objective illusion of separateness? A causes B as if A and B were two things with no unbroken connection between them. But ultimately two things cannot interact without their intrinsic unity. This unity is immanent causation. Transitive causation is our common notion of causality and it is indeed a part of Maya, while immanent causation is the unity and ground of being enabling all modification and transitivity. Thus immanent causation corresponds to the Brahma. So we agree to disagree? Thanks for the discussion. Sure, blue, whatever you need to maintain your systemic ego-distinctions.

		Re: The End of the Beginning posted on 09/01/2004 6:43 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Obviously, verification is extrinsic and objective, but the experience of color is intrinsic to the interface of qualia. You can’t KNOW it absolutely without being it and thus experiencing it intrinsically. I suppose I will have to agree to this forever and you will still not see it or accept it. You are talking about the difference between map and territory. That's a different thing. This difference also exists between description and and the decribed form. These are diversions from the difference between form and non-form: One can be described and measured, the other not. Of course the description is not (or would not be) the described in either case. You do. You say over and over that there is no form in qualia. Qualia has no form, right? Is not qualia seperate from form, like a seperate substance which makes up the soul? Don't you see the Cartesian/Platonic/Christian origins hiding in this tacit and ambiguous distinction? No. I am saying there is no form in the 'look of color'. The look of color, however, is not separate from the conscious image. In fact it is the basis of the conscious image. This I have explained often enough. Lol, both form and non-form? This would imply that there are two separate things that the image possesses. I don’t believe in the ultimate reality of this distinction. And if you don’t either (and thus are not a dualist) then you must agree that all qualia (not the image) also has form, because there is no “without form”. Furthermore and more importantly I was not talking about the image but qualia itself. You make an absolute and unjustified duality between form and qualia, right? Or are you now renouncing this earlier dualistic aspect of your non-systemic system? I've already answered this. I think you are simply trying to talk yourself out of this without any merit. Maya, while immanent causation is the unity and ground of being enabling all modification and transitivity. Thus immanent causation corresponds to the Brahma. Maya is the immanent causation of duality and "transitivity", not brahman. That's the point of calling it maya. Brahman is that which you have no idea of. Sure, blue, whatever you need to maintain your systemic ego-distinctions. I'm bored by your insults and deconstructions. The E N D.

		The end that never began posted on 09/01/2004 9:37 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Sub:Obviously, verification is extrinsic and objective, but the experience of color is intrinsic to the interface of qualia. You can’t KNOW it absolutely without being it and thus experiencing it intrinsically. I suppose I will have to agree to this forever and you will still not see it or accept it. Blue: You are talking about the difference between map and territory. Specifically, as I said, I am talking about the intrinsic experience of being something vs. any possible description of “what it is like to be” that something. Isn’t that also what you are talking about? Are you not saying that it is impossible to describe “what it is like”, i.e. “the look” of conscious experience? That's a different thing. This difference also exists between description and and the decribed form. You simply noticed a parallel. These are diversions from the difference between form and non-form: Our discussion was not centered exclusively on this polarity. We were, if you can recall, talking about the difference between objective descriptions and the experience, “the look” of those described experiences. One can be described and measured, the other not. Again, you try to simplify it into an absolute duality. There is nothing formless except for the abstract ground of being itself and even that is beyond form rather than formless. Everything Of course the description is not (or would not be) the described in either case. Yes, of course, so why would we ever worry about any objective description replicating “the look” of experience? Sub: You do. You say over and over that there is no form in qualia. Qualia has no form, right? Is not qualia seperate from form, like a seperate substance which makes up the soul? Don't you see the Cartesian/Platonic/Christian origins hiding in this tacit and ambiguous distinction? Blue: No. I am saying there is no form in the 'look of color'. Now why could you not extract that meaning from my quoted passage? My definition of “qualia” is in fact THE LOOK of whatever qualia it happens to be, sight sound or whatever. This is more quibbling over manufactured definitional differences. The look of color, however, is not separate from the conscious image. Who, besides you does not include “the look” in the definition of qualia? Isn’t that what qualia is all about? In fact it is the basis of the conscious image. Of course it is at the basis of the conscious image because the interface of subject and object, being at the level of immanent causation, is also at the interface between the ontic and epistemic. Qualia is the ground of the epistemic. This I have explained often enough. And I have agreed often enough as well. Sub: Furthermore and more importantly I was not talking about the image but qualia itself. You make an absolute and unjustified duality between form and qualia, right? Or are you now renouncing this earlier dualistic aspect of your non-systemic system? Blue: I've already answered this. I think you are simply trying to talk yourself out of this without any merit. lol, this is the first time I have brought it up. Sub: Maya, while immanent causation is the unity and ground of being enabling all modification and transitivity. Thus immanent causation corresponds to the Brahma. Blue: Maya is the immanent causation of duality and "transitivity", not brahman. Brahma is the immanent cause of everything and Maya is the totality of the epistemic including the root in qualia, which is the immanent cause of the illusion of duality. That's the point of calling it maya. Brahman is that which you have no idea of. Maya is the field of illusion and Brahma is the reality beyond illusion, the undifferentiated ground of Being, Spinoza’s “substance”. If you can get past the connotative baggage of the different words they map to the same system.

		Re: The end that never began posted on 09/01/2004 10:09 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	The E N D

		the last... posted on 09/01/2004 10:12 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	...word

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/26/2004 2:43 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	This is also my understanding. The "source" is the undifferentiated Brahman. This, in effect, gives rise to Purusha, which is the intelligent agency that produces the structure of Prakriti. Prakriti is sometimes translated as the material world, but I gather that it also includes the structural aspects of the mind (as opposed to the free will). Much of the literature about traditional eastern thinking (except for westernized buddhism) I've been reading lately is more Yoga-oriented, and perhaps there the use of these terms is a little different than in the Vedantic literature. There I read, it is "maya" ("measure") which leads to the duality of purusha ("spiritual monad") and prakriti-pradhana, the "transcendental core of material existence". There prakriti also includes the higher and lower mind, as you say. It seems we usually identify the "mind" with is "structural aspects", which I think is a good expression of yours. So the distinction between your body and the fixed part of your mind is a subcategorisation within a subcategorisation. Whereas for the Cartesian West that distinction is the pivot for everything. Right, and the attempt to resolve this distinction within this limited context. (I'd say, usually within the lower "regions" of "buddhi", if I may say so.) In the West, only the NeoPlatonists really cottoned on to the notion of the undifferentiated One (the "pleroma") out of which all nomologically constrained structure stems. It is of course difficult to talk about the "one", but what do you mean with "undifferentiated"? "Unmeasurable", or "Unchanging"? Is the absolute "fixed", like a "zero-level", or like the idealized laws of physics, or just without identifiable features that would make it "definable"? As a computer programmer, I am keen on computer analogies. For me, the One is like the root object. It is the featureless object, of which all other objects are specialised instantiations. Like the identity of Brahman and Atman in the Vedanta, the root object is at the core of both one's own self and the 'external' world. Being a software engineer myself, I always enjoy your analogies, and the inherent humor of them. ;-) In the Matrix films, the Source is IMHO the root object of the outer simulation. When Neo "touches the Source" he acquires a reference pointer to the root object within himself and hence gains access to all the privileged methods that are encapsulated within his inner objects. The analogies between the Vedanta and the object-oriented VR are really quite intriguing. What do you refer to with "outer simulation"? I just downloaded the PDF for "Exegesis of the Matrix", but I didn't see this yet. I think in Neo's case, what at first remains after "touching the source", is a "reference pointer" to the higher mind ("buddhi"), which gives him additional access beyond individuation ("asmita"), yet is still within prakriti. Although it probably goes further at the end of "Revolutions". And the Sanskrit prayers at the end of Revolutions -- in the Vedic tradition this is an incantation for bringing a god's powers into an individual -- or, in software terms, invoking object methods that are normally encapsulated in deep objects, but Neo has access to them because he has 'touched the Source' -- referenced the root object. Yes, from the "Upanishads", which are, as I've just looked up, from the third stage of the vedic revelation, or in terms of historic times, the "post-vedic" age. ;-) What's the URL? http://www.occean.org ...probably I'll add a "links" page... References are always nice. They rescue one from obscurity. Apparently I'm also going to be somewhere in the forthcoming 10-DVD Matrix Trilogy boxed set, although I have no idea which bits of the interview with me will have made it through the post-production process. I look forward to your interview there. Would you like to share what it was like to make it? What specifically did you talk about? I think you were not here to investigate "Glitches in Revolutions". What's your take on the third matrix movie?

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/26/2004 4:44 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Right, and the attempt to resolve this distinction within this limited context. (I'd say, usually within the lower "regions" of "buddhi", if I may say so.) Thanks for that. It is of course difficult to talk about the "one", but what do you mean with "undifferentiated"? "Unmeasurable", or "Unchanging"? Is the absolute "fixed", like a "zero-level", or like the idealized laws of physics, or just without identifiable features that would make it "definable"? Er ... what can I say? I find myself thinking of it as an asymptotic limit. As we proceed with Sankara's sublation process, more and more structure is revealed as a superimposition on something more basic; and this process points toward 'something' so basic that it eludes normal forms of denotation. Every statement about it is, probably, false. To paraphrase Wheeler, "The Brahman has no hair". Of the options you list, I would say that "without identifiable features that would make it 'definable'" is closest to the truth. What do you refer to with "outer simulation"? I just downloaded the PDF for "Exegesis of the Matrix", but I didn't see this yet. I believe that the 'outer world' (ie outside the Matrix) that contains Zion and the Machine City is another simulation. I refer to it as the 'Meta-Matrix' in the book, but several people object to this term. It doesn't seem to have a proper name. The PDF was expanded somewhat in the printed book. (I can send you a copy of the latter.) The book (and possibly the PDF) has a detailed argument that IMHO conclusively proves that the Matrix and the Meta-Matrix were created by the same designer and run in parallel. The Architect and his fellow machines in the Machine City therefore did *not* create the Matrix. The Architect merely *thinks* they did. (This, by the way, is precisely analogous the Gnostic demiurge who is deluded into thinking that he created the manifest world.) I think in Neo's case, what at first remains after "touching the source", is a "reference pointer" to the higher mind ("buddhi"), which gives him additional access beyond individuation ("asmita"), yet is still within prakriti. Although it probably goes further at the end of "Revolutions". Thanks for this clarification. And, at the end of Revolutions: Neo propagates the code that he is carrying (just like the Architect said he must) to all the Smiths. My take on this is that he has penetrated an antecedent object that is so far up the inheritance ladder that it is shared by him and all the Smiths. And he has over-written one of the encapsulated methods of that deep object. He has over-written a 'dark' or destructive subroutine with a 'light' or constructive subroutine, inside that deep, archetypal object. I don't know whether Buddhism or Hinduism have such a concept, but it is logically implicit in their doctrine. There must be a stratum of prakriti that lies beyond our mundane world but well before the undifferentiated Brahman. And it must be accessible to be debugged by sufficiently skilled minds. Neo, who is a bit slow on the uptake, does not realise he can do this until the Oracle speaks to him through Smith (in the crater scene). The Oracle has embedded herself in that deep object: suddenly Neo twigs that he too can hack into the encapsulated methods of the deep objects. Yes, from the "Upanishads", which are, as I've just looked up, from the third stage of the vedic revelation, or in terms of historic times, the "post-vedic" age. ;-) Thanks for the clarification. I look forward to your interview there. Would you like to share what it was like to make it? What specifically did you talk about? I honestly can't remember too much about it. They caught me in the few hours before I got back from a holiday in Syria, and before I came down with food poisoning (from the airline food, not from Syria). The film probably shows me gradually slumping in my chair and turning slightly green ... I think you were not here to investigate "Glitches in Revolutions". What's your take on the third matrix movie It made me smile. It's a great ending. Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/27/2004 12:04 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Er ... what can I say? I find myself thinking of it as an asymptotic limit. As we proceed with Sankara's sublation process, more and more structure is revealed as a superimposition on something more basic; and this process points toward 'something' so basic that it eludes normal forms of denotation. Every statement about it is, probably, false. To paraphrase Wheeler, "The Brahman has no hair". Of the options you list, I would say that "without identifiable features that would make it 'definable'" is closest to the truth. I think we encounter the limitations of description, and structure, much earlier, before being able to "sublate" all structure to its root: for example the look of color. Or does the simple act of acknowledging the non-structural qualities of consciousness require us to go through such a process, perhaps on a small scale, or even, in enabling it, on a bit more profound scale? It does seem to slip the mind so easily... The PDF was expanded somewhat in the printed book. (I can send you a copy of the latter.) The book (and possibly the PDF) has a detailed argument that IMHO conclusively proves that the Matrix and the Meta-Matrix were created by the same designer and run in parallel. The Architect and his fellow machines in the Machine City therefore did *not* create the Matrix. The Architect merely *thinks* they did. (This, by the way, is precisely analogous the Gnostic demiurge who is deluded into thinking that he created the manifest world.) Actually, I already ordered the printed book on amazon.co.uk, but it will take a while to arrive here. Thanks for the offer, though. So do you think the Wachowski brothers will ever tell us who really created the matrix(s)? How could they leave such a question unanswered? And, at the end of Revolutions: Neo propagates the code that he is carrying (just like the Architect said he must) to all the Smiths. My take on this is that he has penetrated an antecedent object that is so far up the inheritance ladder that it is shared by him and all the Smiths. And he has over-written one of the encapsulated methods of that deep object. He has over-written a 'dark' or destructive subroutine with a 'light' or constructive subroutine, inside that deep, archetypal object. I don't know whether Buddhism or Hinduism have such a concept, but it is logically implicit in their doctrine. There must be a stratum of prakriti that lies beyond our mundane world but well before the undifferentiated Brahman. And it must be accessible to be debugged by sufficiently skilled minds. I take this to be the "Matrix of Differentiation" ("linga-matra") or higher mind ("Buddhi"), but I'm not sure whether just mentioning the terms clarifies anything, it just shows that I can read... ;-)...in your list above perhaps the "differentiated"/"universal", although these terms are almost always used with different implications. Neo, who is a bit slow on the uptake, does not realise he can do this until the Oracle speaks to him through Smith (in the crater scene). The Oracle has embedded herself in that deep object: suddenly Neo twigs that he too can hack into the encapsulated methods of the deep objects. Yeah, he had to get knocked out first....but her voice reached him even then...again a woman who got him up on his feet again (in so far as the Oracle is a woman. Female machines?). I honestly can't remember too much about it. They caught me in the few hours before I got back from a holiday in Syria, and before I came down with food poisoning (from the airline food, not from Syria). The film probably shows me gradually slumping in my chair and turning slightly green ... Wow, the matrix code showed on your face? ;-) Maybe it just made you look more other-worldly? Sorry, just kidding...it will take until November, I think, until they release it...

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/28/2004 3:13 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	I think we encounter the limitations of description, and structure, much earlier, before being able to "sublate" all structure to its root: for example the look of color. True. Colour is a great challenge to reductionism. Its immediate appearance looks to be one of irreducible quality. And yets complexity cries out for a reduction to something simpler. At consciousness conferences and on the net, I am always meeting people who see nothing problematic in simply identifying colour experiences with brain events. Well, it is easy to ridicule such absurd positions. But, conversely, there is a risk of falling into the same trap when following some Vedantic or Buddhist analysis of experience. If colour is to be analysed into something that is not colour, it must nonetheless be analysed into something that is still experiential. Nevertheless, the notion that colour experiences are somewhow identical with something not coloured is frankly staggering. Peter

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: Omega Point posted on 08/29/2004 12:05 AM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	But, conversely, there is a risk of falling into the same trap when following some Vedantic or Buddhist analysis of experience. If colour is to be analysed into something that is not colour, it must nonetheless be analysed into something that is still experiential. Is there a Vedantic or Buddhist analysis of experience? There is the notion of coming and going, creation and destruction. Whereas in physics, we have more or less the idea of a continuous reality which only changes form, location, amplitude, structure. I think you mentioned before, in some way, the difference between seeing the superficial as a play of the deeper, and trying to explain the deeper as a play of the formal, superficial. It seems to me that the process of "sublation", which you mentioned, is one of 'removal' of false ideas, not an analysis in terms of ideas. I haven't yet found a vedantic or buddhistic text on the "look of colors". I wonder why not. If you know any, let me know. It is an impossibility to me to "analyze" this look into something else, although perhaps it might be created and destroyed by something of an "higher" or "deeper" quality. But this would be a most uncommon concept for us. Color cannot plainly "consist" of something non-colored. I liked your analogy that you can't print in color if you have only black and white. But you can print in black and white if you have colors (since they are colors as well ;-). The "look" of a color is not structural information like we have about structured objects. So should the look of color be considered a quality of 'purusha' rather than 'prakriti', and as long as there is 'maya', 'purusha' is "attached" to 'prakriti'? Yet the fact that we can talk about the look of color shows that 'prakriti' is not a closed show, the attachment is not 100%. Or is the 'look' neither purusha nor prakriti? A question of defining the terms, or more? Either we loose the correlation, or we must define a third term. When we say there is the look of color, it is not a logical conclusion, not the result of a deterministic processing of input data coming from somewhere else, but a realization of a fact, directly. It is beyond the scope of today's science how there can be such a thing as "realizing a fact directly". And I would think that such "realizations", awareness, must be the beginning of this "sublation" which you speak of (rather than the goal).

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: "The Conscious Mind" posted on 06/05/2003 6:01 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	A quote from David Chalmers "The Conscious Mind" : However the metaphysics of causation turns out, it seems relatively straightforward that a physical explanation of behavior can be given that neither appeals to nor implies the existence of consciousness. With all his arguing about qualia being non-physical, that is supposed to be "relatively straightforward" ? Maybe he forgets one part of his philosophy while talking about the other... . As I wrote some time ago here on this forum, David Chalmers deserves a special price for deliberately trying to prove that his own theory does not have any relationship to any fact whatsoever. ;-)

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: references posted on 06/05/2003 12:24 AM by timventura	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Dear Peter: I'm not sure what scares me more -- the incredibly in-depth philosophy that you've read into the Matrix movies, or perhaps the fact that you're quite convincing in demonstrating that it exists in these films. The Matrix sounds too crazy to be true to begin with -- the fact that it's been borrowing concepts from over 6000 years of religion and philosophy is hard to believe. After all, its only a movie (as my wife would tell me). One thing is sure -- this movie has more going on to argue about than anything that's come out since 2001 in the 1960's. The Wachowski Brothers, for whatever else they may be, are comic-book artists -- or at least that's my understanding. How do you jump from comic-book material to a script that would have Jesus and Bruce Sterling arguing with each other? It just doesn't really make sense ... ....and yet, the shoe in this case seems to fit. My take on what you've written is that some of it you already knew, and the rest you looked up based directly on the references provided in the film (such as names). The links seem to fit -- the archaic name fits with the roles that the characters are cast in, although I have no idea how anybody would be able to come up with this idea for a script. To say that the Matrix is multi-genre is somewhat of an understatement. You have religion, philosophy, and 4 or 5 different types of sciences in this piece. That's not to say that there aren't certain points that I wouldn't argue with you. For instance, I don't think that the neural interface was ever meant to be truly defined. You die when you unplug because that's a handy plot tool -- otherwise avoiding agents wouldn't be too difficult, and when Morpheus is held hostage rescuing him would be a 5-second operation. So in terms of plot some things here simply don't need the explanation that you've gone to great lengths to provide. The philosophy itself seems to connect well with the 30-page dissertation that you provided online. Aside from the fact that I have a decent headache from reading all of that information, I can't argue most of the basic material -- character references and such. Nonetheless, the fact that the complexity of this plot seems to have come from nowhere and everywhere is just plain strange ... Tim Ventura http://www.americanantigravity.com

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: interpretations posted on 06/05/2003 5:51 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Tim, Thanks for your question. Any non-trivial film will naturally include a certain number of allusions to religion, politics, culture in general. What is unusual about the Matrix films is the creators have gone out of their way (a) to work a *lot* of references in, and (b) to work them in structurally. What I mean by 'working them in structurally' is that many of the allusions in the Matrix films play a role in the development of ideas. Compare this to, say, 'Moulin Rouge', which had a lot of allusions but they are used only for their aesthetic contribution rather than in order to develop ideas. The kind of rich allusiveness that the Wachowski brothers have put into the Matrix films is, admittedly, old hat in *literature*. For example, James Joyce's 'Ulysses' would be a good comparison. But it is new in film. Although the brothers Wachowski don't hold interviews any more, their past interviews do give some insights into their approach, which I think is consistent with what we see in the film. Namely, they are intense, but not terribly serious; widely read, but not terribly profound; intelligent and thoughtful, but not rigorous academics. Clearly, they've read around a lot of subjects in religion, philosophy, science, politics; they enjoy playing with these ideas; and they have consequently worked these ideas into the script -- partly playfully and partly seriously. Some of the stuff that they have put in is pretty unambiguous and straightforward, such as the general Gnostic theme. (Gnosticism in sci-fi isn't new, of course.) Other interpretations are 'underdetermined', in the sense that the evidence in the film is not enough to read a firm and clear meaning into what we see on the screen. The Merovingian is an example. The name is so odd that the Wachowskis are obviously alluding to the conspiracy theories about the Merovingian dynasty -- but on the other hand there is so little else in the film to explain what a Merovingian is doing in the Matrix, and the conspiracy theories themselves are so speculative, that there is very little firm information. The result is almost pure guesswork. As regards the explication of the science and technology: Wachowski brothers have said that they did put a lot of thought into it long before they started shooting. It shows. I don't think they would have produced such a consistent piece of science-fiction if they hadn't done so. On other hand, I know that some of my explications are *not* what they had thought out. For example, the use of telephones for entry/exit. From what they said in an online chat in 1999, and also from a detail in 'Reloaded', it seems that the Wachowski brothers had a rather vague idea that the avatars get sucked up the telephone line. Which does not make technological sense. So, my explanation of the phones is definitely creative interpolation rather than discovering the auteurs' intentions. Part of the reason for this conflict, as you rightly say, is that the Wachowskis have to make things clear and visually interesting on the screen. And they themselves have said that some of what we see on the screen is there because of the thought-out science and technology, and some of it is there becaue it's cool to look at. What is the point of writing all this stuff? Well, what else is an unemployed programmer to do with his days? I suppose I ought to be spending my time practising writing code, but quite frankly writing about the Matrix is more fun. As I said in the postscript of the essay, this exegetical stuff is just recreational. As for the philosophy ... this is both more interesting and more serious. Obviously the Matrix films are not philosophical treatises. They do not make substantive philosophical statements. They do not even offer profound phiosophical meditations -- as, say, Tarkovsky's films did. Nevertheless, they do raise genuine philosophical *questions* -- about what consciousness is and how it relates to brains and intelligent machines, about the ethics of technology, about free will -- and present them to a large audience. So, in a way, I see the Matrix films as a springboard for a bit of popularisation of serious philosophy. Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: interpretations posted on 06/05/2003 2:05 PM by timventura	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Dear Peter: I guess that I can also see a desire on the part of the Wachowski brothers to embed "secrets" for the fans that they know will watch the movie over and over again -- hence the title of the hollowed-out book that you referenced. When I was a kid, I must have watched "Die Hard 1" on video 100 times -- its good to have plot cohesiveness because otherwise the real fans tend to get annoyed with things. On the other hand, its striking that they were able to focus on getting the plot as cohesive as it was, in that they had so much work to do in setting up the shots, overseeing special-effects, casting, coordinating the stunts, etc ..... In the "its just a movie" category, there were several things that were obviously just artistic. For instance, the representation of the text flowing down the screen instead of left to right probably won't happen in computer systems, simply because its not human readable and there's no real advantage for a computer to read it like that either. Also, the fact that the text is the underlying code (the code "overlay" that Neo can see) is purely artistic. The reason for this is that the frame-rendering rates to create the Matrix would be horrendous to begin with in order to maintain believability. 30 frames is somewhat believable, and 60-frames on a TV is fine, but in real life you would notice frame-dragging problems from things like ceiling fans and rotational elements (car tires, etc) at these speeds. I guess that this could be compensated for, but I tend to lump it into the "artistic license" category, because having another "hidden" display under that would be incredibly processor-intensive (the code). Anyhow, the interesting thing here is watching how this will change computer technology in the future. I work in IT, and since it sounds like you do also you're probably just as familiar as myself with all of guys in the office having Matrix screensavers + action figures in their cubes. In the same way that everybody in AI sooner or later names a simulation HAL, it would be interesting to see how the purely artistic elements of how computers are portrayed in this movie make it into the computer industry. We already have screensavers, icons, backgrounds, etc ..... and that's just the licensed stuff from the studio. Give the deep-geeks a little time and they'll find a way to justify embedding this stuff into every program that they can think of. Maybe this is part of the creative side of programming that computers can't replicate. We have this desire to identify with the fictional world of the Matrix, and consequently write programs that pay homage part of that world through their appearance and functionality. Obviously, if the horizontally-scrolling code shows up in real-life we'll know where it came from, because probably nobody would see a need for that unless they were "inspired" by the Matrix. Life imitating art, or art imitating life? My one complaint about the Matrix is this -- psychologically, its pretty much all wrong. The characters in this movie are pretty one-dimensional, and in some ways the computer-program characters have more personality than the humans themselves do. If you found out tomorrow that your entire world wasn't real, that it was an elaborate hoax, you probably would have some serious and profound psychological issues to deal with. Heck, we've got kids shooting people now because the very concept of this is too much for them to deal with. Odds are that unless Neo downloaded the "years of therapy" plug-in he would be worried about more than simply picking up a gun to go on a rampage against "the system". I dunno, I guess that I could be wrong here, but "The 13th Floor" had a lot better character development going on than the Matrix did. In the 13th floor, the protagonist goes through a process of realization that fundamentally changes him. With Neo, the change is that he goes from being a stoic to being a stoic, but in the 13th Floor there is actually a little bit of thought put into it. Gotta run! Tim Ventura http://www.americanantigravity.com

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: why green glyphs posted on 06/05/2003 2:58 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Tim, There are two systems for rendering Matrix code in the film, which happen to yield very similar visual displays: (a) The computer screens on the Nebu. (b) Neo's brain. It makes some sort of sense that when Neo learns to 'see' the code, he sees it with same cascading glyphs as used in the Nebu's computer. After all, that's what he's used to. I find it rather surprising that the Wachowskis chose to have the Matrix codes show up as glyphs. The whole point of any graphical display is that it can show higher-level information clearly without having to overload the user's mind with low-level detail. In fact, the Zionites evidently know this design principle, as the 'traffic controllers' in Zion use virtual control consoles, in which they manipulate information in large, abstract symbols. Why, I wonder, don't people view the Matrix in a similarly iconised fashion? But ... When I think back to my days in Nortel (before the downsizing), I recall that when we were trying to debug interface problems we would have trace logs of telecommunications messages scrolling down the screen. For an outsider, it would look as incomprehensible as the Matrix's green glyphs. One of the reasons that this couldn't readily be rendered in nice, cosy graphics is that the messages were not necessarily well-formed. With interfaces between multiple systems from multiple vendors, coded by multiple persons following not-necessarily-correct interpretations of multiple protocols, it would be have been a hell of a job to create a standard graphical rendering. So, what I'm thinking is ... maybe the coded messages whizzing along the Matrix network are a similar mess. What if the Matrix is not a tightly controlled 'machine corporation', in which every AI program perfectly follows uniform standards, but a loose federation of ill-discplined AI programs that more-or-less manage to get their code to interface correctly, but the resulting traffic on the Matrix network is just one behemoth kludge. If machines lack human aesthetic sensibilities, they may have no idea of how ugly it all is. The AI programs may not know what it means for a software design to be elegant. (Or, maybe they do, but the architect won't allow them resources to rebuild the system in a less clunky way.) So, the notion of watching the Matrix codes with scrolling lexical strings is not so crazy. Why do they 'rain' downwards in single columns? Maybe its a kind of upside-down Japanese writing, in which each system message is read from the bottom up. The most important information (the command name) would be represented by the leading glyph, and the parameters by the succeeding glyphs. Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded: why green glyphs posted on 06/07/2003 7:36 PM by grantcc	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	I remember back in the days when we used to submit programs on punch cards we would sometimes get a huge batch of paper with mixed symbols on it called a "core dump." I also notice, while watching symbols scroll down the screen in the Matrix, that many of them resemble the Japanese phonetic symbols called katakana. As a system for the worldwide population of many cultures, it would make sense that the phonetic symbols of all cultures -- English, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Arabic, etc. -- many of which look like gibberish to most English speakers would be used by man and machine alike, just as they are on the WWW today. You can find a lot of these symbols in the Windows language specifications for country on your own computer. In that case, they do make symbolic sense to the people who use these languages to communicate. Grant

		Animatrix posted on 06/04/2003 10:17 PM by /:setAI	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	are we going to get a detailed analysis of the ANIMATRIX? The Japanese anime artists always offer some unique multilayered perspectives on these topics-

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/07/2003 11:34 AM by Henrik	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Hi Peter! First i must start by saying you offered some very interesting reading. But this section bothered me a bit: Two things are important to note here. First, randomness is not the same thing as free will. The mere fact that some part of the brain's processing is physically nondeterministic does not, by itself, mean that we have free will. What it means is that there is an opportunity Sounds reasonable. Now, from our everyday experience, we know that we do have free will. Do we really? Please Elaborate. :) In brief, then, this is the key difference between humans and normal machines. We can use free will because the brain's active loop incorporates physically nondeterministic events. Somehow i don't follow your line of reasoning, isn't this in contradiction of the first quote? My general point is that you jump to premature conclusions regarding the existence of free will. IMHO there is now way to prove the existence of it, or am i wrong? henrik

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/08/2003 1:56 PM by sushi101	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Free will... Are Peter aware of the experiment that Ramashandran reffers to in his BBC lectures about the brain? Here is a little exerpt from the Q&A of his 2nd lectur (out of 5) "...See, I'm a scientist who's very pragmatic. You know I want an experimental foothold onto something. To give you an example of free will, how do you study this? Take somebody and tell him or her, in the next ten minutes wiggle your finger whenever you feel like it three times. Just do it three times but whenever you feel like it, using your free will. They can do it all in the first one minute or wait till the ninth minute or tenth minute and the person uses his free will and wiggles his finger. Now you measure his brain potentials. The amazing thing is almost three-fourths of a second prior to his feeling that he has willed the movement of the finger, there's a brain potential you can detect - and you can predict he's going to move his finger. This is well known and it created a big controversy among philosophers. Doesn't this negate free will? We're doing a little twist to this experiment, taking the signal and displaying it on a screen in front of you. So now I tell you whenever you feel like it wiggle your finger, and guess what happens? A second before you wiggle it, the machine is telling you: "Wiggle your finger". So what are you going to feel? Are you going to say, My God I'm a zombie! You know this machine is predicting every time when I'm going to wiggle my finger, there is no free will. Or are you going to confabulate like Mrs D and say, oh no the machine told me after I willed it. In other words you actually negate the truth to preserve your sense of freedom and being in charge of your destiny and your actions. So this - as a scientist - for me gives an experimental handle on this problem." I can highly recommend his lectures. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/reith2003/lecturer.sht ml list to them in real audio, that makes all the difference.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/20/2003 8:45 PM by zardoz	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	The amazing thing is almost three-fourths of a second prior to his feeling that he has willed the movement of the finger, there's a brain potential you can detect - and you can predict he's going to move his finger. I don't understand why this is at odds with free will? Rather, it seems to confuse issues of causality for the researcher. He presumes that because he detects a precursor of an acitivity prior to the person becoming 'aware' of it that this person has part in the initiation of the event. The only thing that it reveals is that the human sensory apparatus is not a precise instrument and cannot be reliably called upon to establish true causation. A more objective scientific approach would be to look for the cause of the detected signal that preceeds the action. This signal is undboutedly only a manifestation of an accumulated 'will to act,' a detectable potential that rises above the background noise of the brain's typical activity.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/09/2003 6:18 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Henrik, Peter:Now, from our everyday experience, we know that we do have free will. Henrik: Do we really? Please Elaborate. I can see no way to prove, on purely *logical* grounds, that we have free will. This is unfortunate, but that's life. Nevertheless: (a) In principle, if we do have free will, then this should be discoverable as an empirical scientific fact. We should be able to find in the brain physically nondeterministic processes that exhibit purposive expressions of the human mind. If, at the end of the day, we find no such processes, then that is bad news for the theory that we have free will. But I believe we *will* find such processes. (b) Admittedly there is (IMHO) no *logical* proof of free will, but ... determinism is pragmatically self-refuting, so volitionism is the only option left. Here's a quick experimental proof that determinism is pragmatically self-refuting: If determinism were true, then your brain and body would just do whatever it is going to do anyway, without your having to will it to do things. So, tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you don't have to exert yourself at all. You can just relax, and your body will get up out of bed and have breakfast and go to work -- all by itself! Amazing! Well, I tried this experiment several times and it always failed. My body did not get out of bed. Each time, I eventually had to use my free will to make the body get out of bed. That's how I know I have free will. Peter: Two things are important to note here. First, randomness is not the same thing as free will. The mere fact that some part of the brain's processing is physically nondeterministic does not, by itself, mean that we have free will. What it means is that there is an opportunity ... In brief, then, this is the key difference between humans and normal machines. We can use free will because the brain's active loop incorporates physically nondeterministic events. Henrik: Somehow i don't follow your line of reasoning, isn't this in contradiction of the first quote? I'm not sure where you see a contraciction. There are three possible cases: (a) Physically deterministic: the past implies the future via laws of physics. (b) Random, physically nondeterministic: the past does not completely determine the future via laws of physics, but neither does free will. (c) Volitional, physically nondeterministic: the past does not completely determine the future via laws, but free will does determine what happens. The orthodox view is that (b) is a general description of the world. Machines, such as present-day computers, on the other hand, try to suppress randomness and approximate to (a). The free-will thesis says that some processes are (c). But, merely building a machine that exhibits (b) does not guarantee that it will evoke consciousness. Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 7:17 AM by Henrik	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Peter, Here's a quick experimental proof that determinism is pragmatically self-refuting: If determinism were true, then your brain and body would just do whatever it is going to do anyway, without your having to will it to do things. So, tomorrow morning, when you wake up, you don't have to exert yourself at all. You can just relax, and your body will get up out of bed and have breakfast and go to work -- all by itself! Amazing! Well, I tried this experiment several times and it always failed. My body did not get out of bed. Each time, I eventually had to use my free will to make the body get out of bed. That's how I know I have free will. I see what i think is a fundamental flaw in your reasoning, I will use my somewhat limited knowledge of the english language to try and explain why: In the experiment you described above you seem to forget one important thing: What if your decision to perform the experiment was itself a result of your brain acting from its present state and inputs from the world around you. Think of it as a scenario that is being played out and your consciousness is a mere specator; you think you have control over your actions but that is also just a result of your present state and inputs (and perhaps some undeterministic property). The fact that your body did not get out of bed of its own does not prove anything, that was mabye exactly what it was supposed to do (do nothing) considering its present state and inputs... I realize that my ramblings isnt exactly crystal clear, so please ask for further elaboration if necessary :) Henrik

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 9:11 AM by tharsaile	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	It's crystal clear to me, Henrik. Well said.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 10:35 AM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Henrik, What if your decision to perform the experiment was itself a result of your brain acting from its present state and inputs from the world around you. That is not a scientific hypothesis because it is not falsifiable. You are saying that, *whatever* happens, it happens because of predetermined causes. Therefore there is no possible outcome that could prove the hypothesis false. Therefore the hypothesis has no explanatory power. My proposed experiment is a classic piece of proper science. I am changing one variable: whether or not I 'will' myself to get out of bed. I have a well-formed predefined outcome: either I get out of bed and have breakfast, or I don't. My theory (that I have free will) predicts that, if I don't will it, then my body will not get out of bed. If I conduct the experiment and find that my body gets out of bed and has breakfast all by itself, then my theory is disproved. This is classic Popperian science. What is the actual result? I observe that my body gets out of bed only on the days that I will it to do so. What is the conclusion? That my willing it to do so is a necessary and sufficient condition for my body to get out of bed (other things being equal, e.g. that nobody has chained me down). -- The inverse is also interesting: a belief in determinism destroys all rational motivation. Therefore, if someone exhibits rational motivation, they do not seriously believe in determinism, even though they may pretend that they do. Here's a (longish) example. Suppose you are running to catch the 7:05 train. You're not wearing a watch but you believe it must be very close to 7:05 but you think you can still make it. As you round the corner on the last stretch of the sprint, you meet the station master. He looks at you and realises that you are running for the 7:05. He tells you, "You're not going to make any difference to whether you catch that train or not." You look at him with puzzlement, and ask, "What do you mean? Do you mean the train has already left? Or that it's been cancelled? Or it's been delayed by half an hour?" The station master smiles a sly smile and taps his nose. The only piece of information you have (and you can trust it because it comes from the station master) is this: you cannot affect whether you catch that train or not. Well, in this circumstance, you have no rational motivation for continuing to exert yourself. So, probably you calm down and walk the remaining part of the journey. (To be sure, you might not be a rational person. Maybe you'll keep on running because you enjoy running. Maybe you'll be upset and go home instead. That doesn't impact the argument. All I am saying is -- very specifically -- that you have no *rational motivation* to continue running.) When you eventually amble into the station at 7:06, you find that the train has left on time, at 7:05, and that you could have caught it! Furious, you track down the station master and confront hime: "Why did you lie to me? Why did you tell me that I could have no affect on whether I catch the train or not?" to which he replies that he is an amateur philosopher and had read that the universe is a deterministic system. Therefore he concluded that whether you catch the train or not had been predetermined a long time ago, maybe at the Big Bang. But you *know* that that isn't so. You *know* intuitively that you could have caught that train! Anyway, the point of this long story is to illustrate this one simple, specific and uncontentious point: a sincere belief in determinism destroys all *rational motivation*. That is to say, if you really believe that an outcome is already determined, then you have no reason to try to change it. Postscript: I have found in the past that 99% of people who read the foregoing paragraph do not read what is actually written there, but instead see what they expect to see and respond to that instead. I did not say that a sincere belief in determinism will change what a person does. It may or may not do that. What I am specifically asserting is that it will remove his or her rational motivation. He or she will cease to have any *reason* for doing anything. -- This is why I say that determinism is *pragmatically* self-refuting, even though it is not amenable to logical proof. Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 11:36 AM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	That is not a scientific hypothesis because it is not falsifiable. Much of science would then be “unscientific”. Do you think the Big Bang Theory or String Theory is falsifiable? What about the theory of the internal structure of stars, or the Earth for that matter? Actually The BBT has been falsified, but does that stop it from being “scientific”. The criterion of falsifiability is simply an unattainable ideal. Science does not really adhere to it. You are saying that, *whatever* happens, it happens because of predetermined causes. Therefore there is no possible outcome that could prove the hypothesis false. Therefore the hypothesis has no explanatory power. Henrik did not mention pre-determinism, but merely determinism. There is a huge difference. Pre-determinism rules out free-will, but determinism enables it. Do you suppose your hypothesis of indeterminism or mental monism is any more falsifiable then the idea of causality or determinism? Can you even formulate an idea of what constitutes an uncaused effect (other than merely stating it thus)? If you can’t formulate a concept of it and it is entirely incomprehensible and completely unobserved then how is it any more “scientific” or falsifiable than the concept of causality or determinism? My proposed experiment is a classic piece of proper science. I am changing one variable: whether or not I 'will' myself to get out of bed. I have a well-formed predefined outcome: either I get out of bed and have breakfast, or I don't. My theory (that I have free will) predicts that, if I don't will it, then my body will not get out of bed. If I conduct the experiment and find that my body gets out of bed and has breakfast all by itself, then my theory is disproved. This is classic Popperian science. Of course the human body functions largely on will at a certain level, but your experiment simply doesn’t prove that your will is un-determined or acausal. It merely proves that free-will is part of the causal process of getting out of bed. The inverse is also interesting: a belief in determinism destroys all rational motivation. If you identify your self merely with your higher-level consciousness (ala the ubiquitous Cartesian split) then the causality beneath consciousness is in control and you cannot see freedom as a part of the self. If, however, you accept the entire physical-causal hierarchy of the human being as included in the definition of the self (this would then include the unconscious mind and the brain processes and all the way down to quantum and beyond), then determinism is an integral part of what constitutes the self and its obvious “free-will”. Therefore, if someone exhibits rational motivation, they do not seriously believe in determinism, even though they may pretend that they do. Wrong. I believe in both. Determinism is what enables the brain and its will to exist. Pre-determinism is what confuses matters and I simply don’t believe that ANYTHING is absolutely predetermined. When you eventually amble into the station at 7:06, you find that the train has left on time, at 7:05, and that you could have caught it! Furious, you track down the station master and confront hime: "Why did you lie to me? Why did you tell me that I could have no affect on whether I catch the train or not?" to which he replies that he is an amateur philosopher and had read that the universe is a deterministic system. Therefore he concluded that whether you catch the train or not had been predetermined a long time ago, maybe at the Big Bang. The train master is simply playing a trick on the poor traveler. He doesn’t know, as none of us do, what is going to happen. The human mind can make things happen, but it does not know absolutely the outcome until it actually happens and even then it is limited to what it can experience. Anyway, the point of this long story is to illustrate this one simple, specific and uncontentious point: a sincere belief in determinism destroys all *rational motivation*. That is to say, if you really believe that an outcome is already determined, then you have no reason to try to change it. Note that you are talking about PREdeterminism not determinism. The difference between the two is crucial. The common notion of pre-determinism comes from the ubiquitous spatialization of time as a linear axis existing simultaneously. The axis of time is an abstraction from physics that most of us have come to accept at least tacitly. It is a myth that engenders the common confusion between determinism and PREdeterminism exhibited quite nicely in this conversation. Postscript: I have found in the past that 99% of people who read the foregoing paragraph do not read what is actually written there, but instead see what they expect to see and respond to that instead. This is why I say that determinism is *pragmatically* self-refuting, even though it is not amenable to logical proof. Not when the self includes the entire causal heirarchy of the human being. Determinism is what enables the brain and its "free-will" to function via causality.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 5:27 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Now that subtillioN is back, we have another exercise in stating the obvious. PBL:That is not a scientific hypothesis because it is not falsifiable. sN:Much of science would then be “unscientific”. Do you think the Big Bang Theory or String Theory is falsifiable? Those theories have testable prediction and are therefore scientific. What about the theory of the internal structure of stars, or the Earth for that matter? Ditto. Actually The BBT has been falsified, but does that stop it from being “scientific”. Falsified theories are ipso facto falsifiable, hence scientific. The criterion of falsifiability is simply an unattainable ideal. It is attained very often. You gave an example two sentences ago. Science does not really adhere to it. !! Henrik did not mention pre-determinism, but merely determinism. There is a huge difference. There is no difference. Pre-determinism rules out free-will, but determinism enables it. Both rule it out. Do you suppose your hypothesis of indeterminism or mental monism is any more falsifiable then the idea of causality or determinism? Read the posting. I did not say anything about whether the 'idea of causality of determinism' was falsifiable or not. Can you even formulate an idea of what constitutes an uncaused effect (other than merely stating it thus)? Read the posting. I did not say anything about an 'uncaused effect'. Of course the human body functions largely on will at a certain level, but your experiment simply doesn’t prove that your will is un-determined or acausal. Nobody said it did. Read the posting. It merely proves that free-will is part of the causal process of getting out of bed. That is a contradiction in terms. If you identify your self merely with your higher-level consciousness (ala the ubiquitous Cartesian split) then the causality beneath consciousness is in control and you cannot see freedom as a part of the self. If, however, you accept the entire physical-causal hierarchy of the human being as included in the definition of the self (this would then include the unconscious mind and the brain processes and all the way down to quantum and beyond), then determinism is an integral part of what constitutes the self and its obvious “free-will”. Contradiction in terms. Wrong. I believe in both. Determinism is what enables the brain and its will to exist. Pre-determinism is what confuses matters and I simply don’t believe that ANYTHING is absolutely predetermined. 'Determinism' and 'predeterminism' have the same meaning. Determinism and free will are contradictory. The train master is simply playing a trick on the poor traveler. He doesn’t know, as none of us do, what is going to happen. Irrelevant. The station master is a determinist. Genuine belief in determinism excludes rational motivation. Note that you are talking about PREdeterminism not determinism. No difference. The difference between the two is crucial. The common notion of pre-determinism comes from the ubiquitous spatialization of time as a linear axis existing simultaneously. The axis of time is an abstraction from physics that most of us have come to accept at least tacitly. It is a myth that engenders the common confusion between determinism and PREdeterminism exhibited quite nicely in this conversation. You still haven't said what you think the differencs is. Peter B Lloyd

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 6:12 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Now that subtillioN is back, we have another exercise in stating the obvious. Come on just try and follow along logically without resorting to baseless ad hominems, you can do it… PBL:That is not a scientific hypothesis because it is not falsifiable. sN:Much of science would then be “unscientific”. Do you think the Big Bang Theory or String Theory is falsifiable? Those theories have testable prediction and are therefore scientific. So does the notion of causality. Action and reaction are tested by each and every one of us daily. What about the theory of the internal structure of stars, or the Earth for that matter? Ditto. How can you test them? You can’t. They are mere educated guesses and as plasma cosmology shows, better guesses are available. Actually The BBT has been falsified, but does that stop it from being “scientific”. Falsified theories are ipso facto falsifiable, hence scientific. The theory has been proven wrong again and again, yet it is still BELIEVED in. Falsifiability is simply NOT a criterion that science adheres to. Science is first and foremost a BELIEF system, falsifiability comes later on its priority-list. The criterion of falsifiability is simply an unattainable ideal. It is attained very often. You gave an example two sentences ago. I pointed out unfalsifiable theories. For instance: show me how string theory is falsifiable. My point was that falsifiability is NOT followed strictly and there are many unfalsifiable theories that are considered scientific. Henrik did not mention pre-determinism, but merely determinism. There is a huge difference. There is no difference. You simply SEE no difference. That is why you are still confused. Determinism merely states that causality is in effect. Predeterminism states that ALL outcomes have been PRE-determined in advance. Determinism does not require the simultaneous existence of the past present and the future on a "time-line". Pre-determinism does. Determinism functions just as well if it is assumed that the past and future are mere fictions due to memory and anticipation in the evolving present. With determinism the present is the only thing that exists. In Pre-determinism, however, the present is merely the unfolding of the pre-existing axis of time. The choices have already been made. Pre-determinism simply gives the illusion of free-will. With determinism, however, the choices are being made spontaneously in the present by the deterministic system. The deterministic system makes its choices on the fly, as they arise. They have not been determined by some outside system because there IS NO system outside of the laws of causality. Does that make sense to you yet? Do you suppose your hypothesis of indeterminism or mental monism is any more falsifiable then the idea of causality or determinism? Read the posting. I did not say anything about whether the 'idea of causality of determinism' was falsifiable or not. Well, you are attacking it on those grounds and trying to assert your idea of undetermined free-will in its place. The fact is that indeterminism is incomprehensible and thus it is vastly less scientific than determinism. Can you even formulate an idea of what constitutes an uncaused effect (other than merely stating it thus)? Read the posting. I did not say anything about an 'uncaused effect'. An "uncaused effect" is what indeterminism postulates. If free-will is indeterministic then it is acausal. Determinism is synonymous with causality. subtillioN: Of course the human body functions largely on will at a certain level, but your experiment simply doesn’t prove that your will is un-determined or acausal. Peter: Nobody said it did. Read the posting. Henrik basically did. You were implying that determinism is incompatible with free-will. Henrik showed how free-will could be concieved of as determined. My point was that free-will is not incompatible with determinism and that your thought experiment does not prove that it is. It merely proves that free-will is part of the causal process of getting out of bed. That is a contradiction in terms. How so? I would really like you to demonstrate this one. We will see that you are arguing against PRE-determinism and NOT causality or determinism. subtillioN: If you identify your self merely with your higher-level consciousness (ala the ubiquitous Cartesian split) then the causality beneath consciousness is in control and you cannot see freedom as a part of the self. If, however, you accept the entire physical-causal hierarchy of the human being as included in the definition of the self (this would then include the unconscious mind and the brain processes and all the way down to quantum and beyond), then determinism is an integral part of what constitutes the self and its obvious “free-will”. Contradiction in terms. That is quite a lazy criticism. The concept is not really contradictory at all. I challenge you to actually form a VALID criticism of it. Wrong. I believe in both. Determinism is what enables the brain and its will to exist. Pre-determinism is what confuses matters and I simply don’t believe that ANYTHING is absolutely predetermined. 'Determinism' and 'predeterminism' have the same meaning. Determinism and free will are contradictory. Your notion of determinism is actually the notion of PRE-determinism. That is why they are the same to you. Though this faulty notion is ubiquitous in science, scientific understanding is not dependent on predeterminism whatsoever. Determinism is quite a different animal altogether and it is unfalsified and indispensable for scientific UNDERSTANDING. Determinism is entirely compatible with free-will. The train master is simply playing a trick on the poor traveler. He doesn’t know, as none of us do, what is going to happen. Irrelevant. The station master is a determinist. Genuine belief in determinism excludes rational motivation. The whole story is irrelevant. It merely shows that people can cause things to happen through persuasion and belief. subtillioN: The difference between the two is crucial. The common notion of pre-determinism comes from the ubiquitous spatialization of time as a linear axis existing simultaneously. The axis of time is an abstraction from physics that most of us have come to accept at least tacitly. It is a myth that engenders the common confusion between determinism and PREdeterminism exhibited quite nicely in this conversation. Peter: You still haven't said what you think the differencs is. I DID state the difference, but it simply wasn’t obvious enough for you to understand it. Do you get it now? The PRE-fix is a great clue!

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 6:37 PM by PeterLloyd	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Come on just try and follow along logically without resorting to baseless ad hominems Baseless?

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 6:41 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Baseless? I don't mind ad hominems but if you don't form an argument for them then they are useless, i.e. baseless. Just back it up...maaan!

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 6:27 PM by blue_is_not_a_number	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Peter to SubtillioN: You still haven't said what you think the differencs is. Although I'm not sure at all, my best guess so far is that SubillioN is making a distinction between "mathematically-predictable-and-calculatable" or not. In my understanding, however, that is a distinction within determinism, that is, both are determinism, and one is a special case of determinability. So determinism would be unaffected by Goedels theorem and the Halting Problem of algorithms, whereas "predeterminism" would be affected by them. SubtillioN suggests, I think, that the common understanding of determinism refers to something like "mathematically-simulatable". In my experience, however, the common understanding of "determinism" is not so specific and assumes simply that everything is _mechanically_ determined by physics. Of course, he will speak for himself.

		Re: Glitches Reloaded posted on 06/10/2003 6:34 PM by subtillioN	[Top] [Mind·X] [Reply to this post]
	Although I'm not sure at all, my best guess so far is that SubillioN is making a distinction between "mathematically-predictable-and-calculatable" or not. Close, but it is in the past-tense. Predeterminism states that time has been pre-calculated (if you wish to use mathematical terminology) or pre-determined. The axis of time was determined in the past. It now exists simultaneously and we are simply experiencing it as if it were a very convincing movie, but like a movie, we cannot really change the plot or outcome or any of the details. In my understanding, however, that is a distinction within determinism, that is, both are determinism, and one is a special case of determinability. So determinism would be unaffected by Goedels theorem and the Halting Problem of algorithms, whereas "predeterminism" would be affected by them. SubtillioN suggests, I think, that the common understanding of determinism refers to something like "mathematically-simulatable". In my experience, h