Matrix Reloaded and Revolutions Explained...

Parenthood is a lot of work....plus you wonder where all the time went.

I know this has been on the back of my mind and have been wanting to finish up the Matrix movies before the year's up so I'm going to hit all the big topics with my perspective on things and will end up hopping around between the two movies as well as some of the Animatrix vignettes.

So when the first movie ends, Neo is able to see the Matrix at the code level.  In other words, he can not only experience the effects of the code, as everyone else connected to the Matrix (e.g. perception) but HOW the effects are created because of the code that generates the experience.  This is equivalent to a scientist trying to explain the natural world.  I'm making this distinction on HOW things are experienced instead of WHY they are experienced in the first place.  WHY is the carrot dangling in front of Neo the entire time.  It is what ultimately brings him to the Architect at the end of Reloaded (e.g. "Why am I here?").

The second thing to realize at the end of the first movie is he destroys Smith by jumping into him, or his program, perhaps.  Smith's shell is destroyed and Neo does his flexing, blah blah blah.  One thing to keep in mind is this pattern of Smith being reborn after he is destroyed.  Remember that Neo successfully destroyed Smith in the train station in their first fight scene at the end of the first movie.  Smith gets run over by the subway train and then he gets reloaded again.  Thus, there is no reason to believe that after Neo destroys Smith at the very end by "jumping in him" that Smith comes back again.  But this time a little different, most likely due to some part of Neo's code gets imprinted onto Smith's code.  This starts off a chain reaction of Smith's virus-like behavior.  More on this later.

So now we can start looking at some interesting points in Reloaded.  The first thing to address is his conversation with Councillor Hamann about the interdependency between machines and humans and the concept of control.  Neo initially said that control is having the ability to destroy the machines to which Hamann responds with "..who will provide the water and provide electricity?'  Hamann raises an interesting point that certain machines are trying to kill the humans while other machines assist humans (e.g. the power to give life or to end it).  Hamann's point is interesting but ultimately not relevant mainly because he confuses control with dependency to a large degree.  A machine, for example a water heater, provides hot water and having hot water is essential to supporting life outside the Matrix.  However, the hot water heater does not control anything, much less the consumer of the hot water it provides.  Yes, the consumer may depend on the water heater for hot water but even then, the consumer is no more dependent on the water heater than he is with a campfire and a pot of water.  Obviously, you can take this down all the way to the molecular level on which how water molecules behave with heat and the steel molecules of the pot and all the electrical forces that keeps all the water in one place.  The point is, the machines exist to improve the standard of living of the humans.  Even the Architect mentioned how destroying the human race would lower their standard of living.  I think his exact words were "There are levels of survival we are willing to accept."  And so it becomes obvious that during that confrontation between the Architect and Neo, there was this struggle for control.  The reason for this is the assumption that the AI in the machine world is both self-aware and capable of making choices in its self-interest.  That's the difference between a water heater that Hamann refers to and the AI in control of the machine world.  A water heater is a piece of capital that humans use.  Humans connected to the Matrix are a piece of capital for the machine AI.

This brings up a very important concept of self-awareness.  A human, largely not self-aware, is arguably no different than a piece of capital or some kind of mindless machine that can be manipulated with some input parameters.  It's a very important concept in the Matrix trilogy as well - Know Thyself.

So I want to go back to this concept of Control.  For most of the trilogy, our heroes are not in control at all.  Consider how every key Matrix machine character greets them... "We've been expecting you..."  The Merovingian's maitre d greeted the three, "He has been expecting you..."  The KeyMaker also greeted Neo, "I've been expecting you..."  And so, the Matrix is designed to catch this program error.  The Merovingian tries to further confuse the three with his speech regarding Causality and that there are no real choices.  He says, "Choice is an illusion created by those with power and those without."  He goes on to saying that understanding WHY gives one power.  Now, I agree with a lot of things he says.  Understanding WHY does give one power (this all ties in with self-knowledge) because once you understand who you are, you understand what motivates you and motivation generates action which is the very definition of power.  Additionally, without self-knowledge as I had noted earlier, humans are virtually indistinguishable to machines and therefore are incapable of making choices.  They are merely reacting to inputted parameters.  What the Merovingian is unable to see is self-knowledge not only gives one power of understanding the WHY in life but it also gives one power to change and adopt different values.  Different values can then change the course of our actions.  So while the Merovingian is like 99% right, he is ultimately wrong because everything does begin with Choice.  Unfortunately, Morpheus is only right by accident because he's unaware of being controlled by the machines in finding the KeyMaker.

The next interesting scenes involve Neo's conversation with the Oracle and then following fight scene with Agent Smith.  The scene with the Oracle seems like a conversation out of 'Alice in Wonderland' because it seems like all the explanations appear circular in nature.  Ultimately, Neo is faced with a choice whether to believe in the Oracle or not.  As of that point, Neo hasn't achieved the level of self-knowledge to realize that his choices aren't really his choices yet.  He is being pushed around by the forces of the Matrix.  So far, according to the Oracle and the Architect, Neo is nothing more than a predetermined set of choices ready for execution based on certain buttons yet to be pushed.  So the Oracle keeps telling him "But you've already made the choice.  You're here to understand WHY you made the choice."  She's pushing him down the road of self-knowledge.  Her ability to see the future in Revolutions is quite different once he's aware of both himself and the Architect's plan to keep rebooting the Matrix.  She is unable to tell how the future will play out (either in Smith's hands or Neo's).  Part of that is what she had said earlier, "You can never see past the choices you don't understand."  She doesn't understand why she chooses to help Neo.  That seems to indicate the limitations of the AI programming to also achieve self-knowledge.  More on this later.

The next interesting scene is the subsequent fight scene between Neo and Smith.  Smith talks about the concept of Purpose and Life.  His character is focused on inevitability and the end of things.  You could see part of this personality in the first movie where he wants the whole conflict with Zion to end and that he needs to fulfill his purpose and get to Zion.  He is a program designed to reach some destination.  Unfortunately, the machine AI designed the Matrix it so it never ends because it knows it will reboot and continue the cycle again and again.  However, the interesting thing in Reloaded was how Smith got infected with Neo's code.  It gave him powers to replicate like a virus.

I'm going to dedicate this paragraph to illustrate the relationship between the new Smith, the virus, and Neo.  I like to think of Neo as an irrational number in Mathematics.  Two common expressions in Mathematics that are irrational numbers are pi and 'e'.  The characteristics of an irrational number is that the numbers run off infinitely and when expressed numerically, there is no pattern to the digits.  However, when expressed algebraically, the expression is very elegant and concise.  If you consider for a moment that if Neo is like the algebraic expression for pi, Smith, being his opposite and negative, is to balance out that equation in the Matrix.  His only method for doing so is through brute-force in order to keep calculating the value of pi to higher and higher levels of precision.  Therefore, Smith constantly needs to keep spawning more processes in the Matrix to counteract only one instance of Neo.  This sort of fits with how the Oracle talks about Smith in Revolutions; trying to balance out the equation.

As Smith grows strong because as more Smiths get replicated the closer he becomes to being equal to Neo.  In the end of Revolutions, Neo realizes they are truly equal and the fight will ultimately end in stalemate.  Since Smith is the embodiment of an infinite loop endangering both the humans and the machines, Neo realizes that he is the only one capable of neutralizing Smith by allowing the machines to directly copy his code and destroy Smith with it, much like an anti-virus.  Neo realizes the only bargaining chip he has is offering himself to kill Smith in exchange for peace between the machines and the humans.

The rest of Reloaded isn't very interesting from a philosophical basis.  You learn more about the previous 'Ones' before Neo and that the whole Matrix control thing is also an infinite loop because the machine AI wrote a big massive program called the Matrix and the whole thing with Neo is just a big Try..Catch statement.  In other words, it is just called 'error handling.'

The big question is where did this 'error' originate from within the programming?  I would submit to you, the reader, that it originated from one of the Animatrix movies where the AI started to build the Matrix and tested on human brains.  The main thing here is that the AI also had to make a leap of faith that what they where programming in order to control the humans was in fact consistent with how humans perceived reality.  This goes back to Mouse's discussion with Neo about how everything tasted like chicken.  He posited that "maybe the Machines got it wrong."  Maybe chicken was supposed to taste like something else.  So this leap of faith could be the source of all inconsistency or that there are finite levels of precision to which the AI can create the Matrix.  Either way, ultimately Neo is the embodiment of this delta programming the AI cannot account for in both the real world and in the Matrix.  This could explain how Neo has powers in the real world as well.  But they only seem to apply to things created by the AI such as Sentinels and not real flesh-and-blood individuals.

The rest of Revolutions just sort of plays out to this climax where Neo finally realizes his purpose.  This ties back into Hamann's point of our use of technology.  He tells Neo that there are things that he doesn't understand how they operate but more importantly he understands why they need to operate.  He tells Neo, "I have no idea how you do the things you do but I also believe there's a reason for that as well."  Throughout the whole trilogy, Neo had a purpose...for the machines.  It was to start another iteration of the Matrix and keep the whole thing going.  The point is, Neo's purpose was never his own until he made the decision not to save Zion and instead save Trinity.  Once he understood WHY he chose Trinity he was on the path to a higher self-knowledge than the previous 'Ones' before him.  Remember, the Oracle had told him that his dream of Trinity doesn't include her dying because he can't see past the choice he doesn't understand.  After that, he was in control of his own destiny and even the Oracle couldn't see who would emerge (Smith winning or Neo winning) victorious.  In the end, Neo realizes he could fight Smith to all eternity or allow Smith to copy himself onto Neo, allowing the Machines, connected to Neo, the anti-virus to kill all the other copies of Smith.  In exchange for neutralizing this threat, he realized his purpose was to bring about peace.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed my take on the movies!