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Everything begins with ... ?

causaluty

Inside the Matrix? PRE-PROGRAMMED RESPONSES (call it what you will)
In the Machine World? CHOICE
In our world? WHO KNOWS?

the illusion of choice whish works hand in hand with causaluty

Choice, but choices based on the effects of causality. But is that true choice or choice completely controlled? Hmm.. :P

what about, there is no choice, there is no causality, its just predetermined?

i don't believe on that fate crap.... wonder who would say that

since adam and eve (birth of man), everything, in a way, is predetermined...

i like to believe i have some kind of control over my own life

Causality creates choice. If something does not happen there won't be something to choose from. It's like causality is the tree and choices are the leaves.

and fate it's the root?

yes that's it!

thats deep


seriously

IF you believe in fate, yes fate's the root. Hmmm root? /root ?

haha...

Do I sense a taste of irony in your laugh Jedi?

uhm, does nobody see the irony?

WE'RE CHOOSING what to vote

This is the choice. The cause is our curiosity about what other people believe in the subject. The is the cause. BUT appearances can be deceiving...

I believe in both, choice and causality. I don't believe in fate; we are in control of our own lives. Adam and Even chose to eat the fruit, they caused us to be forever imperfect. Choice and causality.

Hmmm fate? But because they ate it you could say in retrospect it was meant to be. Because everything happened in the world led to this point in history, you could say that the purpose of everything that occured before was for the purpose of creating oneself.

I believe in fate. We were all meant to do something no matter how obscure, or how obvious the task. Our lives and the lives of everyone who ever existed has a purpose. What that purpose is, we will probably never know on this planet.

Interesting. Predetermination is the idea that a deity is controlling all our actions and decisions. Causality on the other hand is non-religious predetermination, in which humans are genetically programmed to respond to stimuli in only one way. Similar concepts, yet different. Was Predetermination ever part of the Matrix?

The ultimate illusion: Choice

yes, it is apparent in Morpheus' speech "i do not beleive in chance. when i see three objectives, three captains, three ships, i do not see chance, i see PROVIDENCE, i see purpose..." PLus, if you go back and watch the part where Morpheus is giving his speech, it is pretty clear that everything there happened for a reason, the most obvious one being the Vigilant being blown up by Squiddies so that Trin would have to enter the Matrix...then theres Smith showing up at the exact right time, essentially saving Neo's and Morpheus' lives...

Causility is in direct relation to choice. The choices you make have effects and vice versa.

...assuming you have choice at all...

let me tell you what i believe
that everything begins with causality
coz without cause there is no effect
and without effect there is no purpose
and without purpose there is no choice

but what is the cause? wouldn't purpose be the cause, thus getting rid of any choice in the matter?

cause and effect, my love

There is not only one way to fulfil your mission, your "purpose". Thus, choice is created. Choice walks the path that cause creates. That path leads to purpose. In order to choose, there should be a cause and a purpose. All these 3 coexist nicely

the begining is always an effect with no cause
the primary move
and the primary mover of this universe is GOD

I believe that many things happen due to cause and effect. A leaf falls a certain way because of wind, gravity, tempurature, humidity, and so on... In other words, many things are just moved by thousands of little "causes." Some things we do in life are the same way. We blink because a piece of lint was about to hit our eye. Our stomach freaks out because we're on a roller coaster. Then there are things that we choose. I choose to love this girl or that one. I choose to do my homework instead of getting on the forum (lol). I choose the left door instead of the right one. There are many things that can "influence" our choice, and a lot of those "influences are based of causality. For example, my stomach is upset because I just got off a roller coaster, and a piece of lint just flew in my eye, so I'm not feeling so great. Now when I bump into this "girl of my dreams" that I was supposed to fall in love with I might be influenced not to, just because I'm not feeling well enough to go up and talk to her. The choice is still there. But a thousand different things in life work to make up my mind for or against a certain choice. *sigh* I don't think I'm making much sense right now. Well... I choose to go ahead and stop right now.

i understand Simple...so, was that hypothetical situation based in reality, or just made up...? JJ, i understand what you said.

can we say that choice is an illusion due to more than one causes? jedi..

question: give examples of more than one cause...

I choose Choice. But it depends on how you look at the situation. If we knew what would happen because of the choice that we make, would we still make that choice? Also, looking at time as a dimension that we travel through, I believe what the oracle said is true:

You didn't come here to make the choice, you've already made it. You're just here to understand why you made it...

Our biology and chemical make-up has given us a predisposed position to every stimulus (aka choice) that we face. But we have the uncanny ability to reason, thus we can choose not to follow our instinct. A perfect example is a friend of mine who just had surgery, she cannot be given anesthesia because it could kill her, but she choose to have the surgery without the anesthesia and ignore the pain, instead of living in comfort and ignoring the problem. Causality will only hold up if you react on impulse alone.

but what im saying is, what if those predetermined reactions were CHOSEN BEFORE, and set in stone...we are given the choice, we make the choice, but the choice we make is already known...our purpose is defined, and sometimes it appears our purpose and our choices are contradictory, when in fact they are both converging paths...and i dont think i answered your question...um, could you maybe give another example? cause that still seems to be one cause...

Jedi

Now you're arguing philosophical science: Are we products of bio-chemistry, are we products of our environment, or are we a combination of the two? How does the food we eat effect us? And what is more of an effect on us, chemical stimulated reactions or environmental stimulated actions. The point is, if we could ever know all the variables, then the entirety of our lives could be predicted - even the machines cannot know this because they do not know what will happen outside of the matrix. The Oracle only knows because she reads Neo's digital code before he even starts talking to her. Then she can adapt herself to any changes that have happened outside of the matrix.

The philosophical side is that we do not know if we ever could have made the other choice, but the scope of this movie is that Neo could have very easily.. Since we are dealing with alternate states of reality (one being the real world and the other being the matrix world) it would grow far to complex to set up a method to predetermine every possible choice and predict the outcome with any accuracy.

but could he, really, have ever made the other choice? i dont think so. which brings up a good idea. perhaps Neo is doing the SAME THING every other ONE has done, and the matrix is reloaded anyway, because to save the humans, the matrix must continue. Perhaps Neo is not doing anything profound(sp?) but really the thing he was maeant to do, and the Architect makes him believe that he is doing something contrary. we are told the others did not have a love interest like Neo has Trin, but perhaps they were just pompous pricks who didn't want to restart the matrix, they thought they could handle it...and failed.

First of all, I think you're reaching beyond the scope of the movie, as I said before. I won't deny it's possibility, but, as Ushgarak stated in another thread (or this one?), the doors are as much symbolic as they are literal - the machines require Neo to consciously make a choice. That is what the whole anomaly is about - choice. If it were so simple to explain away that Neo has no choice to be made, but only an illusion of one, then there would be no anomaly in the system anyway. That's because Neo had to choose, at the subconscious level, not to accept the matrix program - ergo the problem with your theory is that it creates a paradox in which the anomaly wouldn't exist when the probability would require one to exist.

a choice is made always between two or more effects
now from where that effects came from?

haha

Causality -- A resulting perpetual situation initiated by choice. If you choose to react based soley upon instinct your life will be determined soley on chemical and environmental reactions to the direct stimuli that is, in effect, both your cause and your choice. However, if you choose to reason through, using logical processes of the mind to make an educated guess as to the outcome of all possible reactions to the cause, you have choice.

Choice cannot exist without a cause, and a cause cannot help but to give you a choice. It is you who decides your predisposition to the aspects that you will live life -- one with choice or one by cause.

Perfect simple example:
You find out you have cancer. You are given two choices:
1) to go live in a hospis where you will be made comfortable until you die,
2) or to undergo surgery followed by radiation and chemo therapy treatments. You are given a 75% chance of survival, and a 10% chance the cancer will come back.

Effects of choice 1 would be that you are comfortable, but you will die.

Effects of choice 2 are that you could die. Your hair would likely fall out, you will be very uncomfortable for a period of time, you wil be weak, you will not be able to hold down solid foods for a period of time, along with other "side effects" of radiation, chemo, and surgury.

Your going to die anyway - so which would you choose?

If causality were the absolute, we would not be able to decide between these two, but because we have the ability to foresee what may happen due to past experiences and informed guesses we do have a choice. It's our reasoning abilities that would say "Well it may be painful, but I want to live so I want choice 2.." OFCOURSE there are some of us who may choose choice 1 because we do not want to get in the way of destiny, god, or whatever else you want to call causality in this scenario.

metamorphosis
this is the same i has told jedi
u have elaborated it well

Osiris

Thanks. I feel I did too!

but is it really choice when the system already knows what you are going to choose? You may think you have a choice in the matter, but if the system already knows both what you are going to do and what it is going to do to stop it/counteract it, then how do you ever have a say-so in anything. Ex. Trinity tells Neo she will stay out of the Matrix. However, due to a squiddy tow bomb, she is charged with the choice of enter the matrix to save the lives of Neo and Morpheus, or stay and die. however, is this really a choice? i say no, due to the events after this "choice". Trinity HAD TO enter the matrix to give Neo any real choice in the doors. She was basically forced into entering the matrix, because of her love for Neo, and while you may say this is causality, i say it is purpose, and there is no real choice, as the Merovingian says.

Jedi

The system, a) does NOT know what you are going to choose (until moments before you choose it) and b) it only reacts to your choices by much of the same way we react in our everyday lives. Hence you choose to reply to my post or you choose to end it. You can ask the same question a thousand times and my answer will be the same:

Causality is a choice of response to given stimuli but by giving you a reason to react you are given a choice by how you are going to react. Choice is never taken away unless you strip youself of it by allowing yourself to be controlled by first instinct due to chemical and environmental interactions. There would be no choice without causality, there would be no causality (philisophically speaking) without choice.

the system already knew that Trinity would enter the matrix to save Neos life, even Neo saw that, but Neo did not know WHY she was doing what was happening, or when...the system knows your choices before hand, whether you accept them or not.

Jedi's the Oracle...

Jedi

The only mention of Trinity entering the matrix BEFORE she entered was given only by Neo! Trinity entered the matrix before Neo got to the Architect - though Neo did not know this prior to his conversation with the Architect. The only other time her entering the matrix is mentioned is in Neo's dream (when he's sleeping next to her in the real world) and when he tell's the Oracle about his dream. The oracle did not say "You're dreaming about Trinity entering the Matrix, do you see her die?" Also, the architect says "Already I can see the chain reaction the chemical precursors that signal the onset of an emotion designed specifically to overwhelm logic and reason." Now, let me point out, the architect does not see the chemical reactions at all!! Only the results of them that are translated to Neo's digital self. So, please tell me how the machines are able to read these chemical precursors from within the matrix, when the body is disconnected from the matrix?

you think that Neo can see it, but somehow the Oracle cannot? "wuoldn't be much of an oracle if she didn't"...good question, although it is the same as the Oracle saying "I know you're not sleeping, we'll get to that..." she is not in the real world, she does not stand over him, knowing he is not sleeping...

No, she does not stand over him. But, much as the architect implies, she is no Oracle.
"Neo: The Oracle. Architect: Please. As I was saying, she mearly stumbled upon a solution from which 99% of the test subject would accept the programming as long as they were given a choice...."
That is just the name given to her because, up to this point, Neo, Morpheus, and everyone thought she was human.
The "Oracle" simply knew that Neo was not sleeping by reading the code given by his digital self. That is the same code that told her whether or not he was going to sit down, or take the candy. There would be no prediction in that.
Neo, on the otherhand, is a human embodyment that is implanted with machine technology. Combine this with the fact that his mind is ever expanding, and possibly unlocking portions of the brain that are not even used today (about 60% of the human brain lays dormant), and the fact that he, himself, is able to read the code within the Matrix, and he is intimate with the individual at hand, his dreams and subconcious took on the task of inturpreting the data stored by his brain and developing senses in much the manner many psychologist believe does happen in our everyday lives. He simply dreamed of a possibility for the future, that, had he been able to determine all the variables, he would have been able to control.

so this means that everything begins with causality...?????!!!!!

Osiris

Jedi is just confused, he doesn't believe in choice...

Depends on what world we're talking about.
There was this story of how something was fated to be.Someone tried to prevent it but fate anticipated this and planted it so when the person did this, the thing would happen.
Depends on what world we're talking about.

Scientifically speaking, you are absolutely correct. But that is scientifically, and this issued, as tackled by the movies, are philosophically speaking - in which case they cannot co-exist. Philosophically speaking causality determins our choices as nothing but illusions presented to us as reality, and that, whatever choice we make is the only choice we COULD have made. So according to causality, my choice to reply to your post was predetermined and no matter what happened I could not have changed that, even though I had the choice of replying or not commenting. I do not think that I need to reitterated choice on a philosophical sense though, and it is my choice not to.

Saying that, phillisophically speaking, causality precedes choise is misleading. When speaking philosophically, the two are separated to their purest forms. Cause does not always have to precede choice. And even though it does in some cases, does not justify causality because it does not eliminate choice.

Causality DOES strip you completely of free will. Be it God, a demon, Machines, or science, how ever you believe, causaility is just as you described it an more. Your instincts, in the theory of causality, are just tools to lead you to believe that you do have a choice. Thought and reasoning abilities follow the same pattern. Essentially we could be stripped of our brains by some higher power and still follow in a predetermined path. Science behind causality would reflect our chemical make up. Just as chemists can predict chemical reactions, how long they will last, and what various things will happen when they mix two or more chemicals, it can be reasoned that the same can be known about us if we understood and unlocked the entire human genome. By knowing our entire chemical make up with a massive super computer for comparisons to the parents chemical make up, it should be able to be predicted what schools will be attended, who you have intimate relationships with, and the things that your grand kids will do - according to causality.

Freewill, which I am a strong believer in, might I add, is based on the absence of cause preceeding choice, but rather following it. Lets face it, that's a pureist definition, but it is necessary to offset the pure definition of causality. Freewill assumes that you always know all of your possible options, if only at a subconcious level. You do not have to be conciously aware that you can/should react in a manner that leads to concequenses that you want in order to react in that manner. If' you've ever done something and you didn't understand why, but you felt it had to be done, is an example of this. This is where we could talk about Neo, and how he made choices that were presented in other fashions when he did not have all the information, or we could talk about the Oracle and how she wasn't telling Neo what was going on, but rather, only helping him to "Know thy self." You do not have to know the reasons and results of a choice to make it, you just have to be aware that there is a choice to be made, and this is where those who follow causality see a "flaw" and thus causality's theory was born.

Meta> there is always something that causes you to make a choice, something that brings about a decision in you. Even if you cannot see what the cause is, there is something causing you to decide a choice, otherwise the choice would not be there at all...