the timboucher experience

One more post referencing the Matrix, and then I swear I’ll stop. I too get tired of people endlessly comparing things to it…

Anyway, I just wanted to link together a couple things. In whichever Matrix movie Neo first meets him, the Architect says something to the effect of:

“I am the Architect. I created the Matrix. I’ve been waiting for you … Your life is the sum of a remainder of an unbalanced equation inherent to the programming of the Matrix. You are the eventuality of an anomaly, which, despite my sincerest efforts, I have been unable to eliminate from what is otherwise a harmony of mathematical precision.”

There is a really awesome parallel Philip K. Dick talks about in The Divine Invasion. From an older post I wrote on it:

There’s a passage in the novel where the characters are talking about the judgement of the soul after death. According to this, in most ancient systems, the system of judgement was more or less mechanically driven. Like, you had all your sins on one hand, and all your good deeds on the other. Whichever one was more substantial indicated whether you would move on to your eternal reward or your eternal punishment. [...]

Right, so this whole system up until a certain point was completely mechanical and automated, and everyone was punished or rewarded according to their deeds. [...] Basically, the premise is that, each person, before the moment of their judgement is offered a choice. They can be fed into the “cosmic justic machine” and have it compute based on that person’s deeds and misdeeds. Or, they can take the assistance of the Beside-Helper. What this figure does then is it feeds in its own records of deeds and misdeeds into the cosmic justice machine in place of yours. But it’s record is completely blank, so the machine sort of misfires.

Dick says something about how it was an attempt to introduce “mercy into the circuit”.

I just wanted to bring that up because I think it’s a much more elegant and interesting approach than what they end up talking about in the Matrix.

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