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Bugmaster comments on Rationality Quotes September 2011 - Less Wrong
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Your essay fails to account for the deep philosophical metaphors of guns, leather, gratuitous exaggerated action and nerds doing kung fu because of their non-comformist magic.
With apologies to Freud, sometimes a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu is just a leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu :-)
That's kind of the point. A leather-clad femme fatale doing kung fu probably isn't a costar in an 'inferior execution of a Gnostic parable'. She's probably a costar in a entertaining nerd targeted action flick.
In general it is a mistake to ascribe motives or purpose (Gnostic parable) to something and judge it according to how well it achieves that purpose (inferior execution) when it could be considered more successful by other plausible purposes.
Another thing the Matrix wouldn't be a good execution of, if that is what it were, is a vaguely internally coherent counterfactual reality even at the scene level. FFS Trinity, if you pointed a gun at my head and said 'Dodge This!' then I'd be able to dodge it without any Agent powers. Yes, this paragraph is a rather loosely related tangent but damn. The 'batteries' thing gets a bad rap but I can suspend my disbelief on that if I try. Two second head start on your 'surprise attack' to people who can already dodge bullets is inexcusable.
I did not mean to give the impression that I judged The Truman Show or The Matrix solely based on how well they managed to convey the key principles of Gnosticism. I don't even know if their respective creators intended to convey anything about Gnosticism at all (not that it matters, really).
Still, Gnostic themes (as well Christian ones, obviously) do feature strongly in these movies; more so in The Truman Show than The Matrix. What I find interesting about The Truman Show is not merely the fact that it has some religious theme or other, but the fact that it portrays a person's intellectual and emotional journey of discovery and self-discovery, and does so (IMO) well. Sure, you could achieve this using some other setting, but the whole Gnostic set up works well because it maximizes Truman's cognitive dissonance. There's almost nothing that he can rely on -- not his senses, not his friends, and not even his own mind in some cases -- and he doesn't even have any convenient superpowers to fall back on. He isn't some Chosen One foretold in prophecy, he's just an ordinary guy. This creates a very real struggle which The Matrix lacks, especially toward the end.
AFAIK, in the original script the AIs were exploiting humans not for energy, but for the computing capacity in their brains. This was changed by the producers because viewers are morons .
This is why I'm so glad the creators realized they had pushed their premise as far as they were capable and quit while they were ahead, never making a sequel.
I have many times heard fans say this. Not once have any produced any evidence. Can you do so?
The only evidence I have is that it's so obviously the way the story should be. That's good enough for me. It does not matter precisely what fallen demiurge corrupted the parable away from its original perfection.
ETA: Just to clarify, I mean that as far as I'm concerned, brains used as computing substrate is the real story, even if it never crossed the Wachowskis' minds. Just like some people say there was never a sequel (although personally I didn't have a problem with it).
And like any urban legend, that is why this explanation spreads so easily.
Is not the alternative plot as faulted as the original plot, insofar as if the brainy computing substrate is used for something other than to run the originial software (humans) there is are no need to actually simulate a matrix?
Not only that, but I'm pretty sure building an interface that'd let you run arbitrary software on a human brain would be at least as hard and resource-intensive as building an artificial brain. We reach the useful limits of this kind of speculation pretty quickly, though; the films aren't supposed to be hard sci-fi.
You just need to stipulate that the brain can't stay healthy enough to do that without running a person.
But I'm not much interested in retconning a parable into hard science.
According to IMDB,
So, I guess the answer is "probably not". Sorry.
But... but... TVTropes says it!
Damnit, I've been saying that too, and now I realize I'm not sure why I believe it. Ah well, updating is good.
I'm pretty sure that one of the Wachowski brothers talked about the deliberate Gnostic themes of The Matrix in an interview, but as for The Truman Show I have no idea.
Inexcusable? :cracks knuckles:
Try to see it from the perspective of the agent. With how close that gun was to his head, and assuming that Trinity was not in fact completely stupid and had the training and hacker-enhanced reflexes to fire as soon as she saw the merest twitch of movement, there was really no realistic scenario where that agent could survive. A human might try to dodge anyway, and die, but for an agent, two seconds spent taunting him was two seconds delay. A miniscule difference in outcome, but still - U(let trinity taunt) > U(try to dodge and die immediately).
Yes, where the meaning of 'inexcusable' is not 'someone can say words attempting to get out of it' but instead 'no excuse can be presented that the speaker or, by insinuation, any informed and reasonable person would accept'.
No, no realistic scenario. But in the scenario that assumes the particular science fiction question premises that define 'agent' in this context all reasonable scenarios result in trinity dead if she attempts that showmanship. The speed and reaction time demonstrated by the agents is such that they dodge, easily. Trinity still operates on human hardware.
I remind you that these agents were designed to let the One win, else they should have gone gnome-with-a-wand-of-death on all these people.