Pointless rambling, with backache

So here I am, sprawling half crippled in what passes for my easy chair because a bout of seasonal cleaning and decorating has put my lower back into continual spasms. Did my Creator design my spine badly, or is it an appropriate punishment for the lack of religious motivation in my decorations, or did evil enter my sacral vertebrae when some ancestor nicked an apple, or am I just an ape not totally evolved for the postures involved in mopping floors? I have my suspicions that it's the latter, so rather than begging for forgiveness or whatever I'm just carefully lying as comfortably as possible and slurping down rum and eggnog while I watch Matrix Revolutions.

Could the best question of all be why am I watching that particular waste of celluloid? Doubtful, but it's probably the best one I currently have the concentration to answer with anything approaching coherence. That's amusing, in a small way, since a certain lack of coherence is one of the primary defining characteristics of this category of film. That, in turn, is because I'm the one who is categorizing the films, and I chose that as a defining characteristic of Fetish SF (tm) films.

The reason I'm watching this turd third Matrix movie is more or less the same reason I forced myself through the sickened second one: I need the references. My primary cultural milieu is techno-geek, and for better or worse this trash is a primary source; I don't have to like it, but not having seen it is a bit like being a cultured upper-class Englishman of the Great War era who didn't know his Ovid or Homer. (Those guys wouldn't have had to look up the meaning of the "Temet Nosce" sign in the Oracle's house for example, and I'm glad my old Latin master wasn't anywhere near my ear just now.)

Ow ow ow ow... that's it, it's Mr. Cousins tormenting me from beyond the grave because I never could translate my Cicero, non gradus anus rodentum .

The rot set in right from the farced first one in the series. The initial concept, that all we see is a computer simulation and we're actually slaves to a machine civilization, was cool. It's a schtick that in its roots goes back millennia (with illusionist gods like Mara or Lucifer providing the simulation rather than machines, obviously). Philip K. Dick based his entire oeuvre on the question "How do you know what's real?"

It's a great question and can lead to all kinds of wonderful plot devices, plus it lets you pull iin the echoes from all the similar stories where heroes discover strange worlds behind the everyday one - down the rabbit hole we go, you're not in Kansas any more. Young man aided by an older Mentor travels to a strange world outside the known, braves dangers, comes back to save his home from the previously unseen danger. Classic Joseph Campell stuff, like much good science fiction, and giving it a plausible mechanism makes it compelling.

So why, oh why, oh why, did they have to give the machines such an utterly boneheadedly wrong motivation? Humans are being used as batteries, power supplies for the machines? What retarded dipstick somewhere in the process failed to understand basic physics? The damn people are consuming food, organic fuel administered via tubes; it would have been much more efficient for the machines just to burn the fuel to generate electricity. Besides, it fails even to provide a motivation for what the machines essentially do; why would they have to provide the elaborate artificial environment of the Matrix if that's all the humans are supplying?

What would have made more sense, and been just as ironic, would be if the machines were using the people in the vats as information processing units, taking advantage of our brains having evolved to recognize patterns even in incomplete data. That's a difficult thing to simulate in a computer, it would explain why the machines needed to maintain (and constantly modify) such a computationally expensive illusion, and there could be endless fun building analogies between what is happening in the real war and how the machines represent it in the Matrix.

Machine vulnerabilities could be mapped to problems facing the vat people in their eternal dreams. Hackers messing with the Matrix model could subvert the machine strategies, perhaps by making the machines overlook their own vulnerabilities by taking the pain out of the vat people's simulated backaches...

Ah, but that would have involved trusting the audience to understand a subtlety or two; I'd almost be willing to bet that something along those lines was in the original plot, but when it got Hollywood-ized some producer lost the nerve to do it that way. Maybe the same one who got all excited when the idea of tapping universal mythic structures partially penetrated, and felt compelled to throw in the utterly unnecessary and deeply boring prophecy subplot.

I should give style points, I suppose, for the powerful oracle being portrayed as a frumpy middle-aged housewife, but hell, style is the one thing these movies do have in abundance. In the Matrix everybody's obliged to wear designer sunglasses and fetishistic leather coats, and there's always a lovely shine on the rain of brass casings that fall from the guns which can't actually hit anyone if their choreography skilz are strong enough to overpower the local physics simulation. Be sure to pinwheel across the open space, and don't forget to hover for a second before that big kick! Fashions are pretty sizzlin' in Zion too, and great care is taken with the presentation of the huge variety of tasty treats our heroes are presented with there. It's downright odd how it's only on board the ships everyone wears threadbare rags and eats undifferentiated gruel.

I suppose in the end that's what so deeply disappoints me about this series of movies, and about the love my fellow technogeeks shower on it; it's the unworthy veneration of style over substance, and of emotion over reason, and the way my techie brothers and sisters eat that sad and threadbare techno-woo crap up as avidly as they do, just as long as you dress it up a bit. I always hope for a bit more skepticism; I don't know why, I so rarely get it. I just want the fanboys to wonder for a moment why the software program Agent Smith has such intense emotions. (Is it a simulation routine gone bad?)

At least they mostly do know it's fiction, unlike the morons who read that "Left Behind" shite.

And there goes the end of the movie, with the Oracle responding to the the Last Exile Child:

"Did you always know?"
"No, no I didn't. But I believed."

Oh, yeah, chalk one up for foundationless belief, that's a good moral for the story. Much better than "No, but great ends require taking great risks" or something like that. Ow.

Great, now I have a backache and a headache. I definitely require a reboot, if I can get my futon unfurled without deeper injury.

Age Of The Answer

Yes, I've reached the Age of the Answer - 42!

For those who haven't the faintest idea what that means, there's two parts to it. One - the rather more banal part is that today is my 42nd birthday. Yay! (I guess... ;) No, seriously, I'm fine with that, and have had a really pleasant day. No big party, but I have treated myself nicely and been treated nicely by the people I love, and am now winding down with my boy.

Why the Answer, though? Well, that's a lot more amusing. If you haven't read Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" series, you are really missing out; they are some of the funniest books out there, and Adams also manages to slip in some deep observations as part of the humor. The story of the Answer is one such.

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A group of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings decide that they're fed up with all the bickering about the meaning of it all, so they construct a computer called Deep Thought to tell them the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything. Deep Thought is so brilliant that when it is accidentally switched on early, even without any data banks hooked up it begins with "I think therefore I am" and gets as far as deducing the existence of income tax and rice pudding before anyone manages to switch it off again.

(Note the cute philosophical point Adams has slipped in here; Descartes made a brilliant observation about the subjective nature of the human experience when he noted that the mere fact of being able to think proves to an individual that he she or it exists - but how can one go from there to proving that anything else exists? All the rest of it, income tax and rice pudding included, could be the ravings of a disordered mind. It may seem unlikely, and no doubt is, but such a theory cannot ultimately be proved incorrect.)

When the day of the Great On-Turning finally arrives, Deep Thought asks the programmers to state why they have created it, the second greatest computer in all time and space (even though it transparently already knows why). They ask for the Answer to Life the Universe and Everything, but they're a bit perplexed at the self-description since they were pretty sure they'd built the greatest. Before they can get to the bottom of it, though, they're interrupted by two professional philosophers, who object to the idea on the grounds that a definitive Answer would put them out of business! They demand rigidly defined and precisely demarcated areas of doubt and uncertainty in preference to absolute certainty.

(Doesn't this sound exactly like the whittering of any number of modern-day theologians, amateur and professional, who object so strongly to the temerity of those who would examine questions of religion with the tools of science and critical thinking? It's all very fine for making the technology and the medecine, but to critically examine religious ideas is just not on.)

Deep Thought informs them that, while its circuits are now irrevocably committed to finding the Answer, it's going to have to think about it for a bit - seven and a half million years to be exact! In the meantime they can make fortunes for themselves by speculating on what form the Answer will ultimately take. The philosophers are duly impressed - "Now that's what I call thinking! Why don't we ever think of things like that?" "Dunno, reckon our brains must be too highly trained."

(Adams is slyly pointing out that ultimate Answers don't necessarily have much to do with the business of living from day to day, and that we don't really think in spans at all appropriate to the Universe at large; seven and a half million years is an eyeblink to the Universe, but to us it's a span of time we can't really concieve of, far too long for any reasonable project.)

As well as being hyperintelligent, these particular pan-dimensional beings are able to maintain focus on a project. Seven and a half million years later they are ready and waiting. Deep thought confirms that it does have the Answer, that it is simple, and that it will indeed give it to them. But it warns them, "You're not going to like it." The answer, as you've doubtless figured out, is 42. Deep Thought points out that they've never really known what the Question was, and that's why the Answer doesn't make much sense to them. Naturally they ask it if it can tell them what the Question is, but Deep Thought says no, that's too tricky even for it!

(Daniel Dennet is very fond of pointing out that most of philosophy is a matter of finding good questions, rather than definitive answers. That's why his focus is less on whether gods exist, and more on why we humans are generally so enamored of the notion that they do.)

However, Deep Thought is able and willing to help them build an even bigger and better computer to calculate the Question. This computer will be so large and complex it will resemble a planet, and they themselves will go onto it and help guide its program. This new computer is named by Deep Thought: the Earth! "What a dull name." Sadly, after running for four and a half billion years, the Earth is destroyed five minutes before it is due to output the Question, to make room for a hyperspatial bypass just as a new type of ship makes hyperspatial bypasses obsolete.

(Even if the world has a purpose, there's no guarantee that it's a good one, or that it will be fulfilled; stupidity, randomness and chaos are forces too, and may be as strong as intelligence, purpose and order, whether we like the idea or not.)

As it happens, one Earthman, Arthur Dent, does escape the catastrophe (by hitching a ride on the prototype of the aforementioned new type of ship) with the Question embedded in his brain. After many adventures in time and space, he does figure a way to output the Question, which turns out to be "What do you get when you multiply six by nine?" As Arthur comments, "I always thought there was something fundamentally wrong with the Universe."

Actually, the process was messed up from the beginning, as the program was corrupted by the accidental inclusion of the most useless types of human beings into the program - the Neanderthals, it turns out, are not our ancestors; we are descended from hairdressers and telephone sanitizers. The rest of humanity, incidentally, was wiped out by a disease contracted by a dirty telephone.

(So who's really useless, after all?)

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Well, perhaps I am, and perhaps not; certainly I'm unlikely ever to know the Question. I've reached the Answer, though, and I'm finishing out this day a pretty contented guy! :)