Electrical stimulation of lobes of the brain and other sections of the brain. But the "mind" itself cannot leave the body. The mind is stimulated by outside stimulous but it cannot be usurped and replaced by something non-biological... the body dies.
In THE END the inhabitants of the matrix system are intact, but still jacked into the big machine in the safety of their individual pods.
Ushgarak said:
NO! The Matrix films clearly make the mind to be something OTHER than a purely biological thing- it is something that can detach and wonder through an artificial world. Else you would not die when you were in it- because if the mind is biological it is not being affected at all.When in the Matrix you exist as code. That code can be buggered around with, and when it returns to the brain it remains buggered or, in this case, replaced.
This is an excellent theory, but my question is if this is really true, then why didn’t the machines simply replace EVERYONES personalities with more docile agreeable personalities that would not reject the Matrix in the first place?
That was partially explained by Smith in the first movie. The A.I. created a utopia setting and the human mind rejected it. Many died for real. Smith said whole crops were lost. Disasterous. Replacing the mind itself would be equally disasterous. The body would die. Replacing the brain wouldn't work either. Perhaps it's immediate technology was not that intricate yet to replace the entire brain. But then why bother with that. It would be easier to correct the atmospheric disaster created by humans in their war against the big machine. Restoring sunlight to the earth surface would be less costly materially. Perhaps the A.I. need the human brain and mind intact so that it can evolve by its usage.