Matrix... Unloaded

I have always wanted to write something about Matrix. One of my all-time favs. Not often we come across such a cult movie. I think the first part is the best of all and i think most of you would agree. This post does not have much to do with the film per se. But it takes on from the theme of Matrix... Are you in control or not? Determinism or free will?

With so many of its dialogues, especially those between Neo and Morpheus, borrowed from hundreds of years of zen tradition, it might seem to talk all about Order and unbreakable rules. In my opinion, the whole movie is about the triumph of a few souls with free will over a decaying deterministic system. And there are some who don't think so. Enough, now, lets get down to business...

You take the blue pill, the story ends, you close this page and believe whatever you want to believe.
You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.... Remember, all I'm offering is the truth, nothing more....

The question is quite simple: do you do what you want to do? If you do what you want to, is the very act of choosing true or is it just an illusion? Are you just having an illusion of choice - choosing only what is already determined?

Life is what we experience. Remember the words of that German scientist with a weird hair-do. Everything is relative. What we feel depends a lot on what we are. Essentially, we choose, most often unconsciously, what we feel. And then choose what we do about what we feel - the action we choose in reaction to our perception of the stimuli. More often than not, we make the choices out of either laziness or just fear. Mind you, Newton's famous third law is only for things with lesser intelligence. (and the pity is that many in the human race too are among them!!!) It fails when it comes to describing human reaction - which almost never is equal and opposite. So life is all about the sequence of choices we make from moment to moment. And the question is whether we make these choices or somebody else makes them?

A deterministic system essentially implies a lot of rules and relationships set by a central body and many restrictive assumptions that go with it. To restrict the paths available to an individual in a system, first of all, all the possible paths have to be mapped and then somebody got to devise a mechanism to make the individual take only those predetermined sequence of choices. If you think the whole process of choice is an illusion, just try to calculate the number of alternative paths available to any individual in the system at a given moment. The choices are limited only by the imagination of the individual. And given that it changes from moment to moment, even the calculation of the number of alternative paths is beyond our arithmetic. And leave alone manipulating the individual to take a predetermined path, just mapping all these paths is not within the reach of man or all the computing power he has created till now. So a deterministic system essentially requires a super being who sits somewhere high above (it also could be a bunch of funny looking aliens floating in a planet with some unpronounceable name, thousands of light years from our dear mother earth) with the ability to put the thoughts that we think we have into our brains and plays with our lives just for his own fun. Sounds too complex to be true, huh?

Is it then just free will? I think a lot of confusion has been due to the lexical grandeur of the very word "free will". Free will is not about infinite choices or getting your way all through. It does not imply omnipotency. But it is about the control of your choices. It is just the ability to choose. It is just enough if there is atleast one alternative. Mind you, it takes a lot of intelligence AND courage to be 'free will'ed: Intelligence - to create the choices and expand the possibilities (if you dont create your own, somebody else is going to force theirs on you) and Courage - to make the choice and stick to it.

You think your choices are too limited. Think again. The problem is not much about the absence of choices as it is about the ignorance of choices.

On the face of it, there are three choices before you when you finished reading this post (probobality of which is quite low): hate me, like me or just be indifferent and forget the whole episode (which has quite high probability given that you had the patience to read on till the end). Thats it? NO, there are too many possibilities in the continuum between these choices. I will just list a few.

• You might want to discuss more of this with me and mail/meet me
  
• You might just wonder at my genius and start a fan club for me
• You might even become my disciple and leave your estate to me so that I never have to work anymore and can start an ashram to make a "Better World"
  
• Or probably, you might dislike me and start a "I hate SK" community in Orkut
• Or even worse, you might just kill me

Extreme choices you might say. Do you really think there needs to be a reason for every choice in the sequence. You are free to choose whatever you want. You might just go on and create so much love for me that you can leave your estate to me. Or in a similar vein, you can create so much hate towards me that you can kill me without any guilt. But the most easy choice available is to forget it. That is again for the laziest of us.

Again, free will is not about results. The results of our choices are very much dependent on the characterisitics of the system in which we exercise our choices. And the choice we make now need not be dependent on the results of our past choices. An intellect is always limited just as his tools of existence are. But, throughout his life, he tries creating new tools and sharpening his old ones: to expand his choices. Meanwhile, the lazy go on and on in predetermined patterns as they have nothing else to choose from. Freewill is for the thinker while fate is for the lazy. That helps us understand the stories about vastly different reactions of people put to similar conditions.

To control man is easy. Just dont let him create choices, make him lazy and dont let him think. And to think we are not in control is absolute laziness to think and cowardice to choose. Only fools resign themselves to fate out of fear or laziness. Those who choose are condemned to be free.

Now it is your turn to choose: determinism or free will. Quite ironical, huh?

I'm trying to free your mind, Neo, but I can only show you the door, you're the one that has to walk through it.

Tailpiece:
No amount of such intellectual masturbation and the online exhibition of it is going to help anyone reach anywhere. At least, it will help us to realize the futility of talking about life instead of just going ahead and living it.