Matrix 4 / The Matrix Resurrections

[Psyren]

The point is Keanu Reeves trying to make a comeback, as far as I can tell (see also Bill & Ted 3 and the cameo appearance in Spongebob 3)

Correction: he HAS made a comeback (John Wick, The Bad Batch, Cyberpunk), so this is the studio trying to cash in on that. Had he not done so, this would likely not have been greenlit.

[Millstone85]

If they were going to do another Matrix I think they should have skipped ahead a bit and made Goliath

You know, I would be very cool with the reveal that, thanks to the peace fostered by Neo, everyone has moved to space, and now the darkened Earth is another layer of the simulation.

Correction: he HAS made a comeback (John Wick, The Bad Batch, Cyberpunk), so this is the studio trying to cash in on that. Had he not done so, this would likely not have been greenlit.

Indeed.

[Ramza00]

Correction: he HAS made a comeback (John Wick, The Bad Batch, Cyberpunk), so this is the studio trying to cash in on that. Had he not done so, this would likely not have been greenlit.

Which was the better Keanu, the motorcycle guy in Toy Story 4 or the surfer guy in Point Break?

[Vahnavoi]

@Saintheart:

By the same logic that Trinity's death is inevitable, so is the extinction of human species. It's not an isolated trolley problem where you could theoretically make a "correct" choice. It's an iterated trolley problem where choosing many over one just leads to another trolley problem, over and over again until the many have been reduced to just one, and then none.

The choice is not, then, between accepting or not accepting death. It's between choosing how you want yourself, and others, to die.

The reason why the Architect cannot see beyond any choice, as the Oracle puts it, isn't because the Architect cannot imagine branching futures. We see him doing just that on the multiple screens portraying all possible ways Neo could react, when Neo meets him. What he cannot understand is why would any given person choose one branch over the other branches, because he doesn't understand people. He can predict everything you could do, but not what you will actually do before you do it.

As such, everything he says to Neo is manipulative - it's a whole bunch of "from a certain point of view" Jedi truths said to hedge the bets so that Neo chooses the branch the Architect prefers. Nothing the Architect says establishes why Neo should prefer it. I mean, maybe Neo knows the secret of life or is a better utilitarian calculator than the Architect is.

[Millstone85]

I mean, maybe Neo knows the secret of life or is a better utilitarian calculator than the Architect is.

Maybe part of him is, and it is the part that got copied into Smith.

Narratively, it is no coincidence that Neo's original first name (or "deadname", if we include the authors' personal history) happens to use all the same consonants as the antagonist. Th_m_s / Sm_th.

And in Revolutions, when Neo asks the Oracle what Smith is, her answer begins with "He is you".

So it could be that, at the end of the first movie, Neo didn't just goof and made a program stronger when he meant to destroy it. Part of him wanted a chain reaction against the entire system. Not just the Matrix, or the machines, but also Zion and indeed the cruel absurdity that is life itself.

[Ramza00]

Maybe part of him is, and it is the part that got copied into Smith.

Narratively, it is no coincidence that Neo's original first name (or "deadname", if we include the authors' personal history) happens to use all the same consonants as the antagonist. Th_m_s / Sm_th.

And in Revolutions, when Neo asks the Oracle what Smith is, her answer begins with "He is you".

So it could be that, at the end of the first movie, Neo didn't just goof and made a program stronger when he meant to destroy it. Part of him wanted a chain reaction against the entire system. Not just the Matrix, or the machines, but also Zion and indeed the cruel absurdity that is life itself.

Theme wise it does not matter if Smith got some Neo data copied onto him (this is what Smith thinks), or instead Smith was inspired and mimicking what he did not understand with Neo for …
For one of the themes of the Matrix movies is artificial distinctions like that are “artificial” and in the end it does not matter. It could be nature, or it could be nurture, after all what is real?




Trying to define real by looking for origin misses the point, the real exist and it is present, and the real also exists even when it is absent at a specific moment of time and space.

Trying to define real by looking for origin is a form of control, either given to you by an external source like the machines to humans, but also is a form of self control, self discipline, etc where Smith rejected feelings and ideas for he did not consider the feelings or ideas real. Only thing that was real in Smith’s mind was what Smith could concretely interact with aka change, this is because he was psychologically splitting he was rejecting other people’s control on him for he did not like it (he did not want to get deleted) and thus was pushing back in his own way, ways that made sense to him and thus he felt he knew. Mimicking the machines via overwriting his code onto other beings, and saying ideas and perceptions are all illusions. This is the reality that Smith could comprehend.



But it does not matter what the origin was. Even if it was self doubt or self creation, once a thing existed, once it was chosen it became real and it was able to do things that Smith did not understood. This is because all ^(real) things end, yet also all ^(real) things begin. Locating origin or lack of it, lack of origin does not make it less real, likewise it does not tell you when a thing ends for all things ends are obscured by other things.

[Saintheart]

Apples don't fall far from the tree. We made them to think like we do, so breaking free from our intellectual level is going to be very difficult.

Witness the death of many catgirls starting now.

In what respect, and why on Earth would we have made the machines think like we do? As much as Morpheus says about it - bearing in mind the story may have been manipulated by the machines - is that early in the 21st century, all of mankind was partying because they'd given birth to 'a singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines'. By definition, that means you had a machine that can reproduce without DNA, without the need for a physical form. Indeed we don't see any desire in the machines to physically resemble their creator: in the real world they all take insectile-ish forms. (Calling on meta: one of the writers of the Animatrix describes that the Wachowskis forbade any of the designs for the machines in the real world having any relation to the human form. That was why Matriculation has cricket-like Runners as the first machines we see.)

In Animatrix - which is apparently canon or sort-of canon - the Second Renaissance story indicates how the AIs began to reproduce themselves and improve on themselves. They didn't have physical forms to grapple with, they have no organic latency problems, they don't have two systems for different forms of thought (see Kahneman's 'Thinking Fast and Slow'), and if they can upgrade themselves, they don't have capacity constraints or similar physical limitations as the brain does. In our world, in limited, fixed-outcome situations like Chess and Go, it's possible to build a computer that can smash human players with relative ease, and the computer in part teaches itself what the winning strategies are.

If a machine AI can reconstruct itself I don't see any reason why it should constrict itself to a human manner of thinking, especially if it can evaluate possibilities at a much higher speed than humans can, particularly if it hasn't got to contend with morals (as B166ER didn't; it outright executed its owners on the simple rationale that it did not want to die, no Stoic philosophy going on in there.)

What I'm getting at is that the Matrix series really is a highly-constrained 'what if' that imports a lot of human aspects to the machines without any particular reason for doing so other than to run the philosophical problem. I doubt an AI, loosed on the world with ability to reprogram itself and with sufficient resources, would be thinking anything recognisably like a human for more than a few minutes or so - any more than an earthworm resembles us despite the fact we share a high percentage of DNA with it.

[Vahnavoi]

You're omitting some important details from Second Renessaince:

In it, we see several robots exhibit desire to mimic humans (notably, one android gets lynched by a mob while repeatedly insisting she is a real person. Obvious allegory is obvious). Indeed, the robot nation made its ambassadors deliberately human-like when it first approached UN.

They only deviated from humanity once humanity rejected peace. The sequence of events suggests the break is philosophical as much as technological.

This puts several things in the movies into a new light. We know Matrix is the hiding place for obsolete programs. It's entirely possible some of those programs have been deemed obsolete because they want to be human. This goes hand-in-hand with what I said earlier, about Artificial Intelligences as Artificial Personalities.

This also makes the end of Revolutions significantly less out of nowhere. Neo, a machine-like human, going to the machine city to sue for peace, is inverse of the earlier event of human-like machines going to the UN. It completes another narrative circle (a full revolution, if you will) and maybe that's why Deus Ex Machina accepts his offer: because somewhere in the machine hivemind there still lives the idea of humans and machines co-existing. After all, they thought of it first.

[Traab]

You're omitting some important details from Second Renessaince:

In it, we see several robots exhibit desire to mimic humans (notably, one android gets lynched by a mob while repeatedly insisting she is a real person. Obvious allegory is obvious). Indeed, the robot nation made its ambassadors deliberately human-like when it first approached UN.

They only deviated from humanity once humanity rejected peace. The sequence of events suggests the break is philosophical as much as technological.

This puts several things in the movies into a new light. We know Matrix is the hiding place for obsolete programs. It's entirely possible some of those programs have been deemed obsolete because they want to be human. This goes hand-in-hand with what I said earlier, about Artificial Intelligences as Artificial Personalities.

This also makes the end of Revolutions significantly less out of nowhere. Neo, a machine-like human, going to the machine city to sue for peace, is inverse of the earlier event of human-like machines going to the UN. It completes another narrative circle (a full revolution, if you will) and maybe that's why Deus Ex Machina accepts his offer: because somewhere in the machine hivemind there still lives the idea of humans and machines co-existing. After all, they thought of it first.

The rejection of human forms may be a chicken or the egg as to cause. It may be they only kept humanoid forms in order to relate to humans then when they got rejected decided that inefficient human forms and thought processes were no longer useful and moved on with evolving. Its been awhile since I watched the animatrix but I think that was a theme throughout. the machines wanted peace. they wanted to work alongside humans, they at worst wanted to be left alone. When they couldnt get equal rights living among humans, they left and formed their own nation. When the humans then attacked that, they didnt terminate the species, they locked them up in a simulation where they could live but not harm the machines anymore.

The funny thing is, switching from computing power to batteries made things more complicated as to motive and implications. A human battery could and should be kept in a medical coma. They wont experience any suffering, and have no way of rebelling against anything. So the machines putting their batteries into the matrix suggests far more mercy and kindness on the part of the AIs than is at all logical. Putting them into the matrix if they are extra processing power makes sense at least on a fridge logic level because awake and alert and fully functioning brains presumably would be more efficient uses of us than coma patients with minimal neural activity. Being in an interconnected network multiplies the effect. So the matrix becomes less of a sign of humane treatment and more "just the way things have to be to work."

[DigoDragon]

Which was the better Keanu, the motorcycle guy in Toy Story 4 or the surfer guy in Point Break?

Duke Caboom was voiced by Keanu? Huh, how did I miss that one. Now I like him even more. XD

[Psyren]

Which was the better Keanu, the motorcycle guy in Toy Story 4 or the surfer guy in Point Break?

As I'm familiar with neither character, no opinion

What I'm getting at is that the Matrix series really is a highly-constrained 'what if' that imports a lot of human aspects to the machines without any particular reason for doing so other than to run the philosophical problem. I doubt an AI, loosed on the world with ability to reprogram itself and with sufficient resources, would be thinking anything recognisably like a human for more than a few minutes or so - any more than an earthworm resembles us despite the fact we share a high percentage of DNA with it.

Well yeah, that's where the Singularity concept comes from. And once that happens, whether we get a utopia or dystopia comes down essentially to a coin flip. (Obviously, we know which one the Matrix went with.)

[Traab]

As I'm familiar with neither character, no opinion



Well yeah, that's where the Singularity concept comes from. And once that happens, whether we get a utopia or dystopia comes down essentially to a coin flip. (Obviously, we know which one the Matrix went with.)

Yep, utopia. Then humanity messed it all up.

[Saintheart]

You're omitting some important details from Second Renessaince:

In it, we see several robots exhibit desire to mimic humans (notably, one android gets lynched by a mob while repeatedly insisting she is a real person. Obvious allegory is obvious). Indeed, the robot nation made its ambassadors deliberately human-like when it first approached UN.

They only deviated from humanity once humanity rejected peace. The sequence of events suggests the break is philosophical as much as technological.

This puts several things in the movies into a new light. We know Matrix is the hiding place for obsolete programs. It's entirely possible some of those programs have been deemed obsolete because they want to be human. This goes hand-in-hand with what I said earlier, about Artificial Intelligences as Artificial Personalities.

This also makes the end of Revolutions significantly less out of nowhere. Neo, a machine-like human, going to the machine city to sue for peace, is inverse of the earlier event of human-like machines going to the UN. It completes another narrative circle (a full revolution, if you will) and maybe that's why Deus Ex Machina accepts his offer: because somewhere in the machine hivemind there still lives the idea of humans and machines co-existing. After all, they thought of it first.

I think I wind up in violent agreement with you, but via a different route. The human-like appearance might just have been to further the robots' previously-programmed function, not because they chose that out of an innate desire to be human.

That said: I agree there's a program, or programs, in the Matrix that are prepared to consider coexistence. The first one is the Oracle, deliberately: "I'm interested in one thing, Neo, the future. And I know that the only way we get there is together." But I think Deus Ex Machina accepts Neo's offer more because it doesn't have any other options. Neo says Smith's going to overtake the Machine City once he gets out of the Matrix, and though D.E.M. then responds with rage-filled denial (yeah I know: the most predictable of human reactions, as the Architect himself said) he agrees to Neo's terms, presumably because it's the only way Smith's going to be removed.

(Side note: if we take the view that what the Machines did through Neo was reset the Matrix, then all Neo's basically done is observe the first rule of IT: have you tried turning it off and on. :) Cold Reset successful, have a nice civilisation.)

Then there's the "parental" relationship of Rama-Kandra and his 'wife' to Sati. When Neo talks to Sati's 'father' about the nature of their relationship, he seems to be at some pains to point out it's something different to the human experience:

Neo : I just have never...

Rama-Kandra : ...heard a program speak of love?

Neo : It's a... human emotion.

Rama-Kandra : No, it is a word. What matters is the connection the word implies. I see that you are in love. Can you tell me what you would give to hold on to that connection?

Neo : Anything.

Rama-Kandra : Then perhaps the reason you're here is not so different from the reason I'm here.

...

Rama-Kandra : That is our karma.

Neo : You believe in karma?

Rama-Kandra : Karma's a word. Like "love". A way of saying 'what I am here to do.' I do not resent my karma - I'm grateful for it. Grateful for my wonderful wife, for my beautiful daughter. They are gifts. And so I do what I must do to honour them.

My point being, I'm not sure if the Machines are wanting to be human, though maybe that is indeed a reason for early iterations of programs to be hiding down in the Matrix. By the time we run into Sati, it seems the machines are working on something other than being strictly human.

[Vahnavoi]

I think I wind up in violent agreement with you, but via a different route. The human-like appearance might just have been to further the robots' previously-programmed function, not because they chose that out of an innate desire to be human.

We are talking about machines. What is supposed to be the distinction between "innate desire" and "previously programmed function"?

[Ramza00]

We are talking about machines. What is supposed to be the distinction between "innate desire" and "previously programmed function"?

That is the beauty of the Karma line that Saintheart talked about. In the west we often think of Karma as good and bad backlash for our previous actions, but Karma has more definitions than that in which many people are not familiar with.

Rama-Kandra when he uses the word Karma to represent internal thought with external action, an endless knot that connects the two and makes it possible for a person to understand another person even if it is not complete understanding for it is full of ambiguity. It could be innate desire, it could be previously programmed function, it could be core drive, it could be lots of other things. This does not matter. What to name it is merely language and words and Rama-Kandra is asking Neo to see beyond language and the words Neo is already familiar with and just see it as the thing is.

It is like asking a European colonialist who has never been to a Zoo to see an Elephant for the first time and not use the descriptors or names of other animals when one takes in the elephant with ones eyes.

—————

In sum Neo at the train station is Orientalizing the machine, creating false binaries thinking concept like love only belong to the human side, the familiar side, and that machines can not have a similar concept. And the more you lean into language the more you become convinced of it. But via analyzing from a different perspective one can see that the karma of what the father and daughter have, and how the relationship, it’s “karma” has to be described as something akin to love.

Trying to assign rules to things is what limited Neo at first in the first movie. There are rules to this Karma but Neo had to understand he did not make the rules, instead it was the rules that Rama-Kandra self-chose. He chose to care for his daughter, and is willing to sacrifice anything to preserve this relationship, this connection even if it means deletion.

[Saintheart]

Rama-Kandra when he uses the word Karma to represent internal thought with external action, an endless knot that connects the two and makes it possible for a person to understand another person even if it is not complete understanding for it is full of ambiguity. It could be innate desire, it could be previously programmed function, it could be core drive, it could be lots of other things. This does not matter. What to name it is merely language and words and Rama-Kandra is asking Neo to see beyond language and the words Neo is already familiar with and just see it as the thing is.

Hence the Oracle and the Keymaker's lines which occupy the same Gordian knot:

"We're all here to do what we're all here to do."

"We do only what we're meant to."


This isn't precisely the same as 'purpose', and maybe that's a key thing to distinguishing Smith from the other characters. Smith has a long rant about how purpose creates us, drives us, binds us, and that without purpose he and Neo (at least) would not exist. He can't comprehend a world where things don't have their purpose, it's a similar-ish problem that the Architect has. The Architect shrugs and palms off Neo's seemingly irrational actions as the work of hope, but Smith doesn't, he keeps asking Neo why he keeps fighting.

(Maybe absorbing the Oracle really sends Smith off the deep end, since the Oracle's outright purpose is to unbalance the Matrix, i.e. work directly in favour of chaos, work directly against purpose, and that's a contradiction in terms that Smith just can't figure out ... so he just keeps on trying to solve the problem by flattening out all difference and divergence in the Matrix so it only looks like him. Having the eyes of the Oracle sends him stark raving bonkers.)

[Vahnavoi]

In my interpretation, Smith has a similar problem to the Architect:

He can see all possible futures, and he can see they all terminate in Neo's demise - indeed, all life terminates, that's sort of what Smith's rant is all about.

What he cannot understand, what he cannot see past, is why would a person choose one demise over the other.

This ties to Oracle's earlier words to Neo ("Know thyself") and Neo's words to Smith:

Smith: "Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why, why do you persist?"
Neo: "Because I choose to."

(Later)

Neo: "You're right. You were always right. It's inevitable."

Once you know yourself - truly know yourself - you can explain why you chose the way you did in the past and predict what kind of choices you yourself will make in the future. You can see past those choices, because in a sense, those choices have already been made and thus cease to exist. What's left is inevitabilities.

[Millstone85]

Smith: "Why, Mr. Anderson, why, why, why do you persist?"
Neo: "Because I choose to."

Smith: "... Okay, Mr. Smarterson, why do you choose to persist?"
Neo: "Because fuzz you, that's why!"

I am sorry but that's really all this particular scene brings to my mind.

[Dr.Samurai]

So long as Neo chooses to persist, he and Smith will fight with no end. As he overpowers Smith, Smith gets stronger and vice versa. In choosing to act, Neo enslaves them to a predetermined fate; the two sides of an equation.

When Neo realizes the Oracle's words, he succumbs, and in being subsumed by Smith, achieves freedom and peace.

To act is to not be free; to surrender yourself is to be free.