RE: Reloaded with plastic pea pellets; a rant for Jim

Interesting Jim. I wasn't thinking along those specific paths but we are in
the same world. The alleged dichotomy is between natural and spiritual.
There is a real dichotomy between the two but they have been reconciled,
there is continuity. The false dichotomy makes one real and the other the
illusion, one is center and the other is marginalized. True, if you can't
tell the difference between design and chance or rather decay (chance is not
choice). You cannot have equations without equal signs and you can not
cross bottomless gorges without bridges, and I don't recommend leaping.
Nature, the world is not my prison it is my home, broken but repairable.
See? engineering is a trade of hope. I am not merely a ghost in a machine
just like a computer is software it is also hardware, together they make a
computer. Some may think that Neo is a self healing program but of course
he is more like an agent of self evolution but the myth of evolution is that
it goes in the up direction. When I buy a machine I look for the one that
does the job with the least moving parts, you know breakdown frequency and
all that, like bacteria and genomes. A program may be able to alter its own
programming but in which direction and does direction matter? That is the
whole Morovingian thing and Utopian camelots and such, they are someone's
vision of paradise but who's? Determinism implies a determiner or
instrumental reason. Reason is good but like everything else in this world
it can not rule alone else it too becomes a tyrant but without it we are
flotsam and jetsam and will becomes the wild gestures of a free falling man.
Unlike the Gnostic, I do not discard the natural and unlike the modern I do
not discard the spiritual. Look at my feet I have a left one and a right
one and they are not the same, I know because if I reverse shoe them it
hurts. They are not at war either they alternate and I go, now where I go
is a whole 'nother topic. Nietzsche saw art as some sort of vehicle for
will and some see criticism as a vehicle for reason and both seen
exclusively hop about and fall. We are thinkers and artificers but that is
not surprising since I am just like my parents and my neighbors and so I
stoop what else can a thinker and artificer do? Yes Jim I don't create by
fiat but by re-organizing what is at hand and as an image or reflection I
know my place and revel in it because it is with all of you. Maybe Seymour
knew some of this but couldn't't bear it, some can't I suppose, now that is
absurd.
Daniel

You were thinking of two passages from the Bible: the first describes
Satan as a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour (James? Not sure),
the second warns along the lines that "if we bite and devour one
another, be careful that we do not consume one another" (I think this is
Paul warning against divisions in the church).

You have some pretty interesting ideas about the film and there does
seems to be a weird connection between Neo and the machines at the end
-- he was able to short circuit the sentinels and he wasn't even in the
Matrix. There's no question that this world is a big matrix to the W.
Brothers: everything you describe along with grocery stores and utility
companies and everything else forms a large system that needs us to
survive, and upon which we are dependent for our survival. It dictates
how we see the world and determines our desires, expectations, beliefs,
etc.

Now, the critical theory tradition informing the social criticism behind
the Matrix (which I identify with Baudrillard) argues that "instrumental
reason" is behind all this -- instrumental reason is reason employed
with the goal of dominating nature and other people. Now, if we use
reason to critique reason, we're still caught in the system, because
reason always manages to turn itself to instrumental purposes. So we
need to escape from reason somehow to escape the system, and I think
this is where the gnostic/mystical/religious imagery behind the films
come into play.

Some of the reading I've been doing lately (Habermas: _The Philosophical
Discourse of Modernity_) describes this whole problem with reason as
being circumvented one of two ways. The first is Nietzche's way, which
subverts reason with sheer will, with power. Reason is ultimately a
leech draining the efficacy of power, so reason is something to be used
and disposed of at will. The second way is to maintain a "performative
contradiction" -- critique reason using reason even though you know
you're undermining the very basis of your critique. Habermas suggests
that the dissemination of information into highly specialized fields
creates a bunch of independent logics, so that reason can't be looked at
as just one thing any more. While I think this may be true, I still
think all these independent logics can still serve, and do still serve,
instrumental purposes, even if they often disagree with one another.

The film seems to wind up offering two alternatives -- either we all
live dependent upon a machine that dominates everyone which is
controlled by human beings, or we are dependent upon a machine that
dominates everyone controlled by an independently thinking machine
(which I suspect represents instrumental reason acting independently --
isn't that what our system will wind up doing if it gets big and strong
enough?). Cipher, in the first film, saw this as the only available
options and chose to betray humanity for the sake of a nice comfy pod
and a pleasant simulated reality. I suspect Neo will come to see this
and will find a way out of the mess. It'll be interesting to see how
this gordian knot is untied. I very much suspect you're right -- Neo
and the machine will be very closely identified at some point. If he's
really a Christ figure I think he'll have another sacrifice to make,
maybe involving his human identity for the machine, which he then shuts
down.

Jim

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Received on Wed May 21 12:20:12 2003