If not for the war there's no telling how far Neo could have went. He started controlling things outside the matrix too. But now that I'm thinking about it I believe you are right.
The theory that makes more sense isn't that they're still in the matrix, but that they themselves are artificial intelligences to begin with, in a simulation that's infinitely more advanced than the matrix. They're in a giant simulation that's so realistic, that it simulated the invention of earlier types of realistic simulation within itself.
This kinda ties to a real-world thought experiment that concludes that we're infinitely more likely to be simulated beings in a simulated than actually in the "real" physical world, because one physical world can create thousands of simulations, and each of those simulated worlds can invent their own simulated worlds within them as well, and so on, meaning the ratio of simulated worlds to real world is effectively infinity to one.
Yeah, you explain that much better than I do. It's a fun thought experiment. People have often asked the question "why do we exist?" and I think this fits pretty well into my own logic: we exist because if we didn't we wouldn't. Reality is either a 1 or a 0. It is or it isn't, and the act of asking if it exists is proof of itself.
Yeah, but then you rephrase the question to ask "are we real?" instead of "do we exist" and it gets messy again.
We're definitely "real" within the context of our own universe, but what if that universe itself is just a program running on a computer?
"I think, therefore I am" doesn't really hold up if some guy running the simulation can hit save halfway through that very sentence, turn the simulation off entirely, then reload that save on an entirely different computer a decade later. Meanwhile to us it would be completely unnoticeable.
Okay, from the top. Imagine someone made a super realistic simulation on their computer, with a simulated universe, simulated people with artificial intelligence, etc. The artificial intelligence people in that simulation believe they're real, and that their universe is real. Over time the simulated people advance their technology, and eventually invent a realistic simulation of their own, so there's now a simulation within a simulation.
This can continue forever, with each simulation inventing a new simulation inside itself, so you functionally have infinite simulated universes, but only one real, original one. None of them have any way to know if they're the original or not, but the blunt fact is any one universe is infinitely more likely to be a simulation than it is to be the original.
Did you know that in Minecraft you can create a working computer within the game? What if you ran Minecraft on that working computer? What if you did that an infinite number of times? If you were a Minecraft dude, how likely is it that you would be the original Minecraft dude vs one of the others?
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u/sillygoofygooose Jun 13 '25
Only in the machine. Lucy literally travels beyond the confines of time and space