18 KiB
[RT][The Matrix] "You think that's air you're breathing?" (short)
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2r50cf/rtthe_matrix_you_think_thats_air_youre_breathing/
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Score: 41
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Created: 2015-01-02T21:31:57
Post:
"Do you believe that my being stronger or faster has anything to do with my muscles in this place?" asked Morpheus. He had a wry smile. "Do you think that's air you're breathing now?"
Neo rested on the floor of the dojo, one step above being sprawled out on the floor. His muscles ached, sweat was running down to form a pool in the small of his back, and he was practically gasping for breath.
“Yes?” he asked, more to keep from having to move than because he was following the conversation.
“None of this is real,” said Morpheus. “None of it exists. It’s code, ones and zeroes.”
“I know,” said Neo. “I was a computer programmer. But there’s still air in the program, right?” He waved his hand back and forth in front of him, and felt the resistance of it. “It’s not really air, it’s ones and zeros, but there are ones and zeroes. There’s a representation of air in the code, somewhere.” He touched the back of his hand, which was slick with sweat. “And there’s some representation of me.” He touched the back of his head, where, in the real world, was a hole designed to fit a long spike.
“This isn’t the real world,” said Morpheus.
“I know,” said Neo. “But …” He touched his forearm, and felt the tendons there. “The muscles aren’t real, but they have a representation in the Matrix, or in the local version of it that we’re running. I don’t believe that it’s real, but there’s virtual air, and it gets taken into my virtual lungs, and … in the real world, my brain interacts with the world by transmitting electrochemical signals. That’s true, right? Not just a lie fed to me by the machines?”
Morpheus nodded.
“But then how does it work in the Matrix?” asked Neo. He’d mostly regained his breath, and now just rested on the floor as he tried to puzzle it out. “There’s a spike going into my brain right now. The electrical signals are being interpreted, just like they would be in the real world. There’s some data/process representation of my body, which gets taken as input, and that gets used to actually move my arms and legs. I mean, we use MRI machines and electrodes all the time in the Matrix, and those return expected results, and my virtual body is pumping virtual blood, because I can feel my pulse. The virtual body breathes virtual air, and that virtual air must contain something like virtual oxygen, because people in the Matrix still die from suffocation and drowning. When you hold your breath in the Matrix, the hypercapnic reflex sets in, and you start to panic. But that doesn’t happen because of any conscious or subconscious mental process. It happens because there’s too much carbon dioxide. Which means that it must be happening in the real world in order to affect people in the Matrix.”
“And what does that mean?” asked Morpheus calmly.
“It means … there’s a link between the physical body and the virtual body. When the virtual body has an excess of carbon dioxide, I’d guess that a signal gets sent from the Matrix to the pod, and the pod responds by regulating carbon dioxide in the bloodstream.” He touched the back of his neck, where the spike was in the real world. “But my body isn’t in the pod here, it’s in the chair, so my breathing in the virtual world and in the real world are disconnected. There’s some code somewhere that sends a message to the pod, which is unreachable, so nothing happens. It doesn’t matter to my physical body what happens in the virtual world. All that makes intuitive sense to me. But why does my virtual body not need virtual air? Your virtual muscles absolutely should determine how strong you are in the virtual world, since the muscles have some model that follows its own rules.” Neo made a fist and watched the tendons in his forearm. “It shouldn’t matter what I think about those rules.”
Morpheus watched him intently, then broke into a wide, gap-toothed smile. “Congratulations Neo. You’ve passed the first test.”
Comments:
u/scruiser [+17] CYOA (3 hours later)
A small continuation of sorts, to make the end result still fit with canonical Matrix.
"It wouldn't matter Neo... if the Matrix simply directly implemented its rules as if they were laws of physics." Morpheus continued "For some reason, the Matrix is designed to conserves processing power by utilizing the expectations and mental processes of those connected to it. By training in our simulations, where we can make the rules more flexible, we adjust our subconscious expectations to the point where we can bend the rules within the Matrix."
Neo sat for a moment longer, as he realized he would have to relearn what he thought was a fundamental rule. The map is not the territory. Under his old assumptions the goal was to make the map accurate to the territory. Now he would have to figure out how act when the territory was copying sections of his map. Neo thought for a moment longer. One thing was certain, he wouldn't figure it out just sitting on the ground. He exhaled as he stood up. As he let the air from his lungs, he tried to let go of his knowledge and intuition about movement about gravity. He would have to worry latter about the tradeoff between epistemic and instrumental rationality, after he beat Morpheus.
u/None [+4] (17 hours later)
Yes, and that also fits with the original script/fanon idea that the machines are using humans brains for processing power rather than for energy.
u/Pluvialis [+8] Second Age Sauron (15 minutes later)
I'm confused.
The virtual body breathes virtual air, and that virtual air must contain something like virtual oxygen, because people in the Matrix still die from suffocation and drowning.
Right. But...
When you hold your breath in the Matrix, the hypercapnic reflex sets in, and you start to panic. But that doesn’t happen because of any conscious or subconscious mental process. It happens because there’s too much carbon dioxide. Which means that it must be happening in the real world in order to affect people in the Matrix.”
I don't follow this bit. Why shouldn't the Matrix simulate the excess of CO2 and send a signal to the brain that becomes the sensation of suffocation, just like every other sense you're being fed?
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (36 minutes later)
It's not necessarily how you'd control the mechanism. You have chemoreceptors that might be activated directly. But that raises questions of how the human-machine interface deals with all of the subconscious stuff - the humans have a tube down their throat, and are still breathing, so if you trigger the hypercapnic reflex they would start breathing harder, which gets them more oxygen, and which should be measurable from within the Matrix (through interaction with the virtual person, not through their virtual body, which presumably gives different readings).
But if you're just fudging with things in the brain, then you get weird questions like what alcohol does - in the real world, it crosses the blood-brain barrier, but there's no good way to fake a chemical reaction like that unless you're taking complete control of every aspect of consciousness.
It makes more sense to me that the pods would have to have some kind of chemical component anyway.
u/Pluvialis [+3] Second Age Sauron (an hour later)
Well that's opening a can of worms. Are you confident that chemical manipulation is all you'd need to add to the existing brain-plug scenario?
u/alexanderwales [+5] Time flies like an arrow (an hour later)
No, I'm not confident at all - but I do think a chemical pump of some sort would be needed if you want to achieve a passable level of fidelity. And people in the Matrix do get drunk, and takes drugs, and presumably those are causing some actual change in cognition instead of just sensory input.
Edit: As cool as a line like "I know kung fu" is, I have some really big questions about how something like that is possible. How is the interface set up that they can just edit in memories at will? What's happening in the brain to make that possible?
u/None [+7] (9 hours later)
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u/alexanderwales [+2] Time flies like an arrow (11 hours later)
I've always prefered the "harvesting humans for their brainpower" angle, in part because it makes so much more sense than using people as batteries. It does raise a whole host of questions about the machines motivations, but I think that a lot of the time you can get away with having an AI's goals be a bit alien.
I was trying to solve the brain-computer interface problem for a story I was working on a long time back, but I just don't have enough of an education to come up with something that would plausibly work how I wanted it to.
u/Chronophilia [+1] sci-fi ≠ futurology (15 hours later)
I was trying to solve the brain-computer interface problem for a story I was working on a long time back, but I just don't have enough of an education to come up with something that would plausibly work how I wanted it to.
The more I learn about computers and brains, the more insurmountable the differences between them seem.
I like the Matrix's humans-as-CPUs headcanon, but it raises an awful lot of questions about how such a system could possibly be designed and what kind of software the machines are running on their little grey matter processors.
u/None [+2] (16 hours later)
The machines put part of their minds into human brains, expanding who they can be through addition of meat.
There's nothing about meat that makes it truly more able to hold a person. It's just better adjusted for doing neural-network learning and stochastic processing in hardware rather than spending large sums of software cycles to simulate stochasticity on a deterministic processor.
u/TimeLoopedPowerGamer [+5] Utopian Smut Peddler (3 hours later)
Reddit has long been a hot spot for conversation on the internet. About 57 million people visit the site every day to chat about topics as varied as makeup, video games and pointers for power washing driveways.
In recent years, Reddit’s array of chats also have been a free teaching aid for companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft. Those companies are using Reddit’s conversations in the development of giant artificial intelligence systems that many in Silicon Valley think are on their way to becoming the tech industry’s next big thing.
Now Reddit wants to be paid for it. The company said on Tuesday that it planned to begin charging companies for access to its application programming interface, or A.P.I., the method through which outside entities can download and process the social network’s vast selection of person-to-person conversations.
“The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Steve Huffman, founder and chief executive of Reddit, said in an interview. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.”
The move is one of the first significant examples of a social network’s charging for access to the conversations it hosts for the purpose of developing A.I. systems like ChatGPT, OpenAI’s popular program. Those new A.I. systems could one day lead to big businesses, but they aren’t likely to help companies like Reddit very much. In fact, they could be used to create competitors — automated duplicates to Reddit’s conversations.
Reddit is also acting as it prepares for a possible initial public offering on Wall Street this year. The company, which was founded in 2005, makes most of its money through advertising and e-commerce transactions on its platform. Reddit said it was still ironing out the details of what it would charge for A.P.I. access and would announce prices in the coming weeks.
Reddit’s conversation forums have become valuable commodities as large language models, or L.L.M.s, have become an essential part of creating new A.I. technology.
L.L.M.s are essentially sophisticated algorithms developed by companies like Google and OpenAI, which is a close partner of Microsoft. To the algorithms, the Reddit conversations are data, and they are among the vast pool of material being fed into the L.L.M.s. to develop them.
u/dokh [+2] that which can be destroyed by the truth should be (3 hours later)
Knowing a skill isn't about memory, particularly a physical skill. You can lose the ability to make long-term declarative and episodic memories and still gain new skills, resulting in the famous case study of the guy who was taught to play Pong after brain surgery broke his memory, and any time he sat down at a machine had no idea what it was or that he'd ever seen one before, but was still predictably about to school your ass at it.
Of course this implies their interface is capable of physically myelinating neural pathways while you're plugged in, because your peripheral nervous system isn't capable of being good at kung fu without that process, which usually happens slowly through training. (It produces a lot of what we colloquially call "muscle memory.")
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Do you think that Trinity learned how to fly a helicopter entirely through muscle memory hacks? o_O
u/dokh [+3] that which can be destroyed by the truth should be (4 hours later)
No, but they'd have to be part of it.
To me what that implies is that this singularity brought a greater understanding and control over the human nervous system than merely the parts required to simulate experience outside of a pod.
u/Pluvialis [+2] Second Age Sauron (3 hours later)
I know one of the fun points of rational fanfiction is to explore what might scientifically explain premises presented in the original, but I feel like there's just too much in this film that is completely fantastical (read: nonsensical) that it doesn't work :P
u/alexanderwales [+1] Time flies like an arrow (3 hours later)
Yeah, pretty much - I like the film a lot, but there are just a ton of questions that would have to be answered. Enough that you'd almost be better off writing original fiction. Rule of Cool, I guess.
u/kaukamieli [+1] (10 hours later)
Chemical pump? Why not just have a filter to make your thoughts foggier? :)
u/Psy-Kosh [+7] (an hour later)
What is relevant is because Neo is on the ship, lack of virtual oxygen/build up of virtual CO2 isn't going to actually cause him to faint from lack of actual oxygen. So he can push himself in ways he otherwise couldn't because at the very least, he's not going to actually pass out.
(Admittedly, if your alt version of the matrix still has "dying in the matrix = dying in the real world even when you're logged in via the ship rather than in the pod", then... that spike/interface has more going on there.)
u/None [+6] (6 hours later)
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u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (6 hours later)
Where did you hear about the laws of rationality, Neo?
u/None [+1] (16 hours later)
If the "real world" outside the Matrix implements a logical contradiction inside its physics, then the laws of computation and uncertainty stop working. Not otherwise.
u/JackStargazer [+2] Primordial Apologist (17 hours later)
So, for example, if harvesting body heat from trapped human beings actually was more efficient then nuclear or geothermal power, or even harvesting body heat from larger animals?
u/None [+2] (18 hours later)
Yeah, something like that. I mean, I see your point, but the thing about physics containing a logical contradiction (as opposed to a really bizarre "if-then" clause) is that everything happens.
u/JackStargazer [+2] Primordial Apologist (23 hours later)
You could probably postulate some kind of 'life energy' or 'soul energy' which would make that logically viable. Perhaps it also requires 'will to live' or something similar, such that the Matrix is a necessity, as just keeping the bodies around and unconscious would not generate energy.
None of that is of course ever explained.
u/scruiser [+1] CYOA (18 hours later)
See my example for an example of laws of rationality not working (although mine refers to the rules within the matrix). "Rationality" in general may still work, but common heuristics used to try to be rational may not. If the real laws of physics allow stable time loops, then ordinary intuitions about causation may be wrong. If the real laws allow a form of magic that causes reality to bend and conform to sapient beings epistemic states, then "the map is not the territory" heuristic stops working (see Old World of Darkness for an extreme example of this). If the real laws of physics cause high level events to run in patterns, then probability does not work as expected.
u/None [+2] (7 years later)
>“And what does that mean?” asked Morpheus calmly.
did he ask him as calmly as dumbledore did?
u/totes_meta_bot [+1] (21 hours later)
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