ya ur rite i never thought about this b4 the matrix has soo many questions with so many possibilities thats one of the many reasons i love there series
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For any force that stands...
Blocking this path of his righteousness
i had a theory on this one before. i don't know where it's buried, but it's in here somewhere. i think it goes a little something like this.
since humans are grown in the endless feilds, your parents in the matrix are not your parents since technically, you don't have one. but new humans can't just be popping into the matrix like mushrooms, that would raise suspicions, especially to the red pills. the system introduces the new "crops" by "prgenancy." of course the system picks those women who are likely to be pregnant. by that i mean the system assigns a new crop to a married woman or a woman who's just promiscuous. if women just started getting pregnant outta nowhere, again that would raise suspicions.
and looking alike could just be environmental. like when women live together, they have the same menstrual cycle. or the system uses spliced genes to generate new crops instead of doing it from scratch.
but it would still require the machines to map out ALL the couples (and what about accidental pregnancy) never the less you ALWAYS share some kind of resemblance to your parents, and this, unlike menstrual cycles is determined by genes, people cant look alike simply by living in the same spot.
naturally it would seem that there would be numerous programs in the matrix that keep track of ALL pregnancy and who got who pregnant. then there would be a corresponding machine(s) that go around the fields and extract DNA from the correct two people and make a child.
this would be an awful amount of work however, although i guess the machines dont care, they're machines.
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Last edited by ((The_Anomaly)) on Nov 19th, 2005 at 12:40 AM
but all those humans are still plugged in. the system already knows who they are. and i guess there would be no accidental pregnancy as far as the matrix goes. the system saw an opportunity to introduce a new "crop" and took advantage of it. plus, the machines don't need to extract any DNA because they created it in the first place. the can just use the DNA of the parental units to map out how the new crop would look like.
anyways, i thought of that, too. firs i thought, when you get unplugged, what happens to your family's memories of you? do the machines wipe out any traces of your existence in the matrix? then the parent thing came about.
if that was the case, everybody that's plugged in the matrix would be immortal. the body can only produce so much energy, much like -- you gueseed it -- copper tops. then they get liquified and fed to the living. eeewww.
I'm just saying the ONLY problem I see with the whole situation is the looking like your parents.
Other then that nothing else really makes a difference. Other then that super pr*xy's idea seems valid, its what I had always assumed. But the problem of looking like your parents doesn't go away, its a hole. And although I agree mostly with what super pr*xy said. I don't think it makes sense to look like someone just cause you spend time around them. As although the RSI works in theory when you are capable of knowing what "self" is, it fails when talking about young children. So IF we were capable of having a RSI when we were young then the "looking like a person because being around them" theory would make sense. But it doesn't make sense until you are old enough to conceive of "self". And we all know that children look like their parents from when they are born.
So really before we can answer the first question we have to answer: Do newborn children age birth-1/2 years old know what the "self" is. And if not then how can they have an RSI?
the matrix itself could "assign" a virtual RSI to an newborn since their mind isn't really powerful enough to produce an RSI or aware of "theirself" like you said. and as the newborn ages and gains self-conciousness, then an actual RSI fades out the "assigned" one. think of it as a caterpillar morphing into a butterfly.
still doesn't answer the "looking like your parents" question though...
But most people look somewhat like they did when they were a child. AND to say that you "assign" a person a Residual "SELF" Image is a contradiction anyways. It would be a Residual 'Assigned' Image (RAI) since the term 'self' presupposes "I", or an individual.
Meaning that a child cannot have a real RSI, since it is unaware of the "self". However assigning a RAI to a child comes with the empirical fact that that when looking at baby pictures people still look the same (somewhat, enough to know who it is anyways) as they do when they are old. Meaning that people would have to somewhat hold onto their RAI even when they are aware of the "self" enough to have a real RSI.
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Nov 16th, 2005 01:52 AM
