Originally posted by JediHDM
what about, there is no choice, there is no causality, its just predetermined?
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?
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...
Everything can’t begin with causality. Causality is simply a name for the cause-effect relation ship.
So maybe the question should’ve been: Choice or cause.
Big Bang? Who knows? Best guess: Freak accident. If you wait long enough the improbable will happen, If you wait forever the impossible will happen. Before Big Bang there was no time. Voilá. So it began with fluctuation.
The rest began with causes.
We’re an intelligent species, and not only bound to obey instincts. But if we’re faced with a choice, isn’t that usually based on the effect of a cause? Which may follow a choice?
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 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:
[i]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.
Originally posted by JediHDM
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 meant 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.