The image translators work FOR the construct program!
There's a line in the Matrix, where Neo approaches Cypher on the ship, surprising him. "Do you always look at it code?" Neo asks, referring to the screens of green letters flowing down the screens.
"Well you have to" Cypher responds. "The image translators work FOR the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix."
It was a weird line, so I looked it up online. The consensus is that the actor flubbed the line. He was supposed to have read the line "Well you have to. The image translators WORK for the construct program: (referring to the simulator program Neo was in earlier with Morpheus) but theres..."
So, by putting emphasis on the wrong words, he changed the meaning of the sentence, from saying that
The image translators we have are sufficient for our construct program, but not the Matrix.
to something like:
There is something called a construct program, which we have a copy of but the Matrix also runs, and since the image translators always work on behalf of this program, (work for) we can't use them to see the matrix, only things in the construct program we control.
Anyway, for some reason this whole thing got caught in my head, I couldn't let it go. It said off a pretty interesting line of thought - what are the physics of a world that exists for the benefit of conscious observers? By that, I mean a universe which is simulated and feeds into the senses of conscious beings. A simulated world, with the singular goal of appearing not simulated? One thing would be for damn sure: The image translators would work FOR the construct program.
What do I mean? Well think of that fact you learned as a child: Every tiny snowflake in God's creation is unique. Now think of all the snowflakes falling over the vast uninhabited wastes of northern Greenland. Think of the vast computer resources that would be required to render each one, a uniqueness that would never be seen or appreciated by any conscious mind. Why bother? Why, when the system exists to convince conscious entities of its reality, not to actually recreate reality? There's no way it would sit around making mandalas in the sand that have no impact on the minds it exists for. So what would it do?
It would render the snowstorms. And in so doing, it would feeding satellite imagery, confirm or deny weather system models, even for years into the future, as the data sits on NCAR or NOAA servers. This would define a consensus reality that would be shared for all scientific observers, a shared construct of reality, produced by the program. But the question is, to what depth does it need to render the storms to create this? Certainly not to the level of each snowflake. Its doubtful individual snowflakes would even have locations in space or time, rather they would exist in a far more computationally efficient form. Probably something like probability density vectors or waves. But that raises the next question: What happens when a researcher is actually out there, in northern Greenland in the storm? Does he then only encounter probability density vectors instead of snowflakes? Of course not. At that point he could see individual snowflakes. But how would the Matrix know to render them? Well, what that researcher SEES is a product of where the researcher LOOKS. To look would be to query the image translators. And what happens when a researcher sees a beautiful one and points it out to his comrade? How would he be able to see the same snowflake? Because the image translator collapses the probability density patterns into a unique manifest shape on its first viewing, and then this information is feed back into the construct program, the shared reality, to be stored for other viewers as consensus reality.
In short, the image translators work FOR the construct program. Which is to say they inform it, so things observed by one person (which didn't exist before viewing) can be viewed by another person. So the image translators are in the business of producing information, information which didn't exist before viewing, which is in turn feed back into the Matrix for others to view, for the sake of consistency. Thus there is no way to passively view the Matrix visually. You would be feeding information into it as an observer, and it would know you were there. Therefore the only way to view is through some kind of code, symbols representing transient probability spaces, imposing boundaries on what can be seen in a space, but no absolutely defining it.
END PART 1
"Well you have to" Cypher responds. "The image translators work FOR the construct program. But there's way too much information to decode the Matrix."
It was a weird line, so I looked it up online. The consensus is that the actor flubbed the line. He was supposed to have read the line "Well you have to. The image translators WORK for the construct program: (referring to the simulator program Neo was in earlier with Morpheus) but theres..."
So, by putting emphasis on the wrong words, he changed the meaning of the sentence, from saying that
The image translators we have are sufficient for our construct program, but not the Matrix.
to something like:
There is something called a construct program, which we have a copy of but the Matrix also runs, and since the image translators always work on behalf of this program, (work for) we can't use them to see the matrix, only things in the construct program we control.
Anyway, for some reason this whole thing got caught in my head, I couldn't let it go. It said off a pretty interesting line of thought - what are the physics of a world that exists for the benefit of conscious observers? By that, I mean a universe which is simulated and feeds into the senses of conscious beings. A simulated world, with the singular goal of appearing not simulated? One thing would be for damn sure: The image translators would work FOR the construct program.
What do I mean? Well think of that fact you learned as a child: Every tiny snowflake in God's creation is unique. Now think of all the snowflakes falling over the vast uninhabited wastes of northern Greenland. Think of the vast computer resources that would be required to render each one, a uniqueness that would never be seen or appreciated by any conscious mind. Why bother? Why, when the system exists to convince conscious entities of its reality, not to actually recreate reality? There's no way it would sit around making mandalas in the sand that have no impact on the minds it exists for. So what would it do?
It would render the snowstorms. And in so doing, it would feeding satellite imagery, confirm or deny weather system models, even for years into the future, as the data sits on NCAR or NOAA servers. This would define a consensus reality that would be shared for all scientific observers, a shared construct of reality, produced by the program. But the question is, to what depth does it need to render the storms to create this? Certainly not to the level of each snowflake. Its doubtful individual snowflakes would even have locations in space or time, rather they would exist in a far more computationally efficient form. Probably something like probability density vectors or waves. But that raises the next question: What happens when a researcher is actually out there, in northern Greenland in the storm? Does he then only encounter probability density vectors instead of snowflakes? Of course not. At that point he could see individual snowflakes. But how would the Matrix know to render them? Well, what that researcher SEES is a product of where the researcher LOOKS. To look would be to query the image translators. And what happens when a researcher sees a beautiful one and points it out to his comrade? How would he be able to see the same snowflake? Because the image translator collapses the probability density patterns into a unique manifest shape on its first viewing, and then this information is feed back into the construct program, the shared reality, to be stored for other viewers as consensus reality.
In short, the image translators work FOR the construct program. Which is to say they inform it, so things observed by one person (which didn't exist before viewing) can be viewed by another person. So the image translators are in the business of producing information, information which didn't exist before viewing, which is in turn feed back into the Matrix for others to view, for the sake of consistency. Thus there is no way to passively view the Matrix visually. You would be feeding information into it as an observer, and it would know you were there. Therefore the only way to view is through some kind of code, symbols representing transient probability spaces, imposing boundaries on what can be seen in a space, but no absolutely defining it.
END PART 1
posted by tridentblue | 3:22 PM
2 Comments:
Thank you for writing this.
Wherever you are.
The way I always saw it was like this:
The humans hooked up to The Matrix didn't receive images like your monitor receives images from your graphics card in your computer. The humans WERE the graphics cards. And so what the image translators did was translate the code into electrical impulses that the brains could understand in order for all the humans to create their own views of The Matrix.
And the image translators do work FOR the construct program, in this sense: the rebels have their own copy of the construct program (how they got it, I have no idea. Maybe they intercepted enough packets to create their own "private server" like with World of Warcraft) and this construct program has its own image translators separate from the Matrix's, because they're built in, working for their respective construct programs. They're pieces of the program itself. This is why they were able to see images of what was happening in their construct (when Morpheus and Neo were sparring), but not in the Matrix's construct. They can't access the Matrix's construct program and its parts (the image translators) because they aren't running it, the machines are.
Presumably, the only reason they were able to reenter the Matrix is because of the way the Matrix's data is transferred between its different parts. It sounds like the rebels were using a "man-in-middle attack" (which is a technique used in real life networking) to simultaneously eavesdrop on the Matrix's data packets and also trick the Matrix into giving them access. The machines probably would've been able to easily fix this vulnerability had the Matrix not been such an incredibly complex and vital system.
All that being said, I know this post was made years ago, but thank you for it nevertheless. I really enjoy talking about the details of The Matrix, but I don't often find anybody who cares enough to discuss it.
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