DIY: Escaping the Matrix

So, the concept of artificial intelligence overthrowing or enslaving mankind had previously been touched on by hundreds of science fiction stories, and many people believe that we are actually not living in a real world but a virtual world - as beautifully illustrated by the movie trilogy "The Matrix". Call it Hyperrealism if you may. It's a hypothetical, philosophical idea, and most of us - including myself - discard the idea as complete nonsense.

But many people - as myself - must admit, at the back of our heads, there's the "what if"... What if we are in fact plugged into a machine and our lives are nothing more than a virtual reality. How do I know that I'm not a computer program? It's a scary topic once you allow yourself to ponder the idea and let your imagination run. (It gets really scary if you grasp the workings of computers and networks!)

We can argue back and forth about how plausible the idea can be, but that's not the purpose of this thread. I want to hear some theories on "tests" one could maybe perform to see if your world is real... But more important, how would you escape? All the IT geeks, if this is a computer program (virtual reality), how could a person force the system to crash, and thus force a reboot? I.e. How would you make our reality "hang"?

My personal thoughts are, if we are nothing more than a program.. How do we know it already has not crashed? Maybe it has crashed several times, but each time we figure out a way to exploit it the whole is patched and our memories are reset.

Obviosly somebody has to be in control and can watch over what we are doing, so our actions would have to be limited.

Personally I do see it as a strong possibility. Deja vu makes you wonder sometimes, is this a glitch? Sometimes I am living out something that I can swear I have dreamed at some point. Almost to the point I can determine what action will happen from here, or what will be said in a conversation I am having. It is very strange.

The problem with your thought here I see, which I think was said extremely well, is that how can we determine if it has, or will? Obviosly if it ever did crash we would never be aware of it.

From here we start to get into Free will, religion and basically everything is nothing more than social control. Kind of scary if you think about it. Which is why it is so much more convenient to not believe and be satisfied with, what you see is what you get.

Get out a piece of paper, and write down the following:

100 / 0


hopefully, this will cause the program to crash and display a "DIVIDE BY ZERO ERROR".

if this does not work, please contact your local eschatological mathemetician for further assistance.


[edit on 21-2-2006 by The Parallelogram]

My favorite error message of all time. Catastrophic Failure. Just rolls off the tongue.

Computer: End Program!

*waiting* ... &$%# Star-Trek...good for nothin...

If you were a sentient being within a computer created reality then the way out is to learn the code of the program. We already have out best scientists all over it. Unfortunately, we got some self professed game masters keeping them from telling the rest of us the real code to the system.

Find out the code and figure out how to interface to the core. Once you link back to the core (the source) then you get reality override privileges. At which point you can create your own "game" within the infinite gamescape. Or take part in an already existing game like the one playing out on Earth now. Each level is more challenging but with increased freedom of movement. Playing the game is free. But the cost of not knowing the code is steep.

Has anyone watched that movie called "The Thirteenth Floor"? Interesting concept there, worlds within worlds.

I'd like codes for extreme longevity, regeneration, flight, time travel, mind reading.........

Could the hallucinogens really be keys?

[edit on 21-2-2006 by Romeo]

Any one seen a video called 'what the bleep do we know?!' ?? Watch it, and then see if reality is as solid as you think it is.

A brief content description... Thoughts affect every thing, the viewer can change the content of his own world, and that if you actually, 100 % thought you could fly, theres nothing in quantum physics to say you cannot...not even gravity!
Its mind blowing wathing it... especially the bit about thinking bad thoughts about a glass of water.... mind blowing...

Now, wheres Trinity when you need her? lol.

If we live in Virtuel Game even a Advanced Higher Beings who watch us couldn't program the World too be perfect their would always be glitches.

Has anyone else had weird Glitch type experinces,mine is problly where somthing's not their,I look everywhere go get my bro too look aswell look same places,I ask my mother too help she finds it in place where both me and my brother looked first...

Use the Source code, Luke.

Feel the Source.

The Source is strong with this one.

The Source will be with you, always.


...ok, i'm dun

An interesting idea, but I'm curious: who's to say we'd be able to "crack the code?" I mean, let's look at it as a really advanced version of The Sims. If I were the head coder at this metaphysical Maxis, I'd make pretty well damned sure those sims would never have the intelligence to figure a way to break the game. I'd make sure all of my AI and genetic algorithms would never reach the point to where they'd even realize they were just a game, let alone figure out how to crash it.

Since it was given as an example, I'll use The Parallelogram's idea of crashing the computer as an example of my own. A really easy fix in a lot of programming languages for a divide by 0 error is using exception handling. In writing this cosmic time-killer, I would definitely think whomever is coding it would've used some kind of error checking to make sure that if any of us did our own divide-by-0 we'd get a nice little window popping up that said "You can't do that."

Maybe that's why we die--our body decides to divide by 0 and the system gets rid of the offending object instead of crashing itself out.... Our body is now a null pointer, with the soul waiting to be caught by the next call to the GC (although I hope whatever coders working on this are a bit beyond Java and C#...)

That's gonna keep me thinking for a while now...

Unfortunately, for us, the being at the keyboard of our lives isn't using a Windows based PC. Good luck crashing it.

Actually, that's not true. If you can get someone to press the control key in Mecca, the Alt key in San Francisco, and the Delete key in Nagasaki, you can bring up the Task Manager that mastermind Bill Gates put into the Reality XP® program. Once there, you can terminate the Terrorism.exe process, making the OS a safer place and proving that Bill Gates does, in fact, control the world.

@ JJ

But how do you know 'terrorism.exe' is not a terminate and stay resident program, like those Sony rootkits?

That's a good point. I suppose another way to test it is to press the Windows key in Seattle and the "R" key in Wayne, New Jersey at the same time. Then we'll have to whip out our cell phones and communicate so as to not get a typo and press the "R" key again, the "E" key in Irvine, California, the "D" key in inner city Chicago, the "E" key again, the "D" key again, the "I" key in Athens, Greece, and the "T" key in New Delhi, then the "Enter" key in Baghdad.

A screen should appear in the sky, at which point we could point at something and press that "Delete" key again.

If the world crashes, we know Microsoft and Mastermind Gates are really behind the world.

EDIT: I put waaaaay too much thought into that....

[edit on 2/21/06/21 by junglejake]

How do you know you're not just escaping into another Matrix?

We have to start somewhere, may as well be here, no?

Hehe, I started to read Permutation City by Greg Egan...
www.amazon.com...
...and when the main character, a computer Copy of a person, decides to invoke the Bail-Out option, he utters the word "Abulafia" to call up a menu box in mid-"air".
en.wikipedia.org...

I tried it, but nothing happened. Damn and Blast!

"The Thirteenth Floor" is one of the best of these layers of artifical reality type movies. I'm surprised it didn't get more of a popularity bounce from "The Matrix" As for "what the bleep" I was on hold for over a year at my library waiting for it. When I finally got it I eagerly popped it in my DVD player and... had my mind totally not blown. I have no idea what people see in this movie. I admit that some of the segments are interesting, like the afore mentioned segment on emotions altering the structure of water, but it was by no means a life changing experience. In fact a lot of it, like the kid who throws infinite basketballs in infinite directions, and the horny flubber were just dopey. I don't remember if it was the movie itself or the special features, but there was also an awful lot of self-congratulation that rubbed me the wrong way.

As for escaping the Matrix, see the last few thousand years of literture on trying to establish objective reality without relying on your senses. To date no one has done it to the best of my knowledge. Escaping your senses and escaping the "matrix are essentially the same thing. There are also a lot of thought experiments about proving that there is anyone else in the universe. Then you can doubt if you even exist, whether in this moment or previously. False memory is both a huge genre for science fiction and philosophy. These issues are fun to play with for awhile, but after a point you will find yourself spinning your wheels just like every other person in recorded history. That is how existentialism was born. After a point you have to say that it doesn't matter if THIS is real or not, you have to act as if it is (the classic counter to not believing THIS is real to go walk through a non-real wall. Can't do it? Then for all intents and purposes THIS is real for you. At least here and now.) and form an ethos and ethics and goals and concept of self without the big whys and wherefores.

What's totally awesome about this idea, is that I've seen it realized from two different perspectives: scientific and "spiritual."

Before coming to ATS, I hung around the Astral Pulse forums for a long while, and read up on the work of a member there following Monroe: Frank Kepple. He, and maybe a couple other members/projectors by now, came to the conclusion that reality as we know it consists only of energy that exists because we, collectively, have it to exist in the fashion that it does.

Dreams are the same idea, but are only subject to the manifestations of one individual. (Anyone here every lucid dream? You can get some FREAKISHLY realistic stuff going on; can't tell the difference, and you can have manifested anything you want, though your subconscious may still exert a lot of undesired influence if you're not experienced enough to avoid that.)

The concepts got into some deep stuff and I'm still not clear on some issues, dealing with subjective interpretations of this energy and how they relate to the "objective" interpretations of everyone else.

For example, if Jesus walked on water, would everyone else be able to see it, or would he just be allowing himself to interpret what he was doing as walking on water (a very self-convincing game of pretend)?

I'm led to believe that the "change" in the systems "rules" would be witnessed by everyone, as it would be an actual change in the energies that EVERYONE is picking up on, and thus Jesus very well could have done all those things he was rumored to, simply because he had broken the "system" (and likely still has it broken ). I use Jesus here as just as example. Did he himself not say that everything he could do, others could do, and more?

And then science, through quantum physics and etc., comes to a very similar conclusion, if not the exact same conclusion (besides a few details each version may have that the other does not, but then again I'm not as familiar with these ideas as I am with Kepple's "astral" models).

Ah..... really nice stuff to get into. I love it.

[edit on 21-2-2006 by bsbray11]

Yea yea, next your going to tell me that intensely focused thoughts create waves within the energy field and can manipulate the magnetic frequency patterns of matter thus rendering matter/energy variable according to one's own will. Then you're going to tell me not to use run on sentences.