Category: Blog/News

Rhizome.org: Black Hole of Vision: On Rune Peitersen’s Saccadic Sightings

September 8th, 2010 · Blog/News
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By Vesna Madzoski on Wednesday, September 8th, 2010 at 12:00 pm.


If our eyes were to be turned into a camera, it would be a rather poor device. More precisely, it would not resemble a single-frame snapshot camera, but a video stream of a mostly blurred visual field with only spots of clarity. Our eyes move rapidly and continuously update the image in the brain, and it has been concluded that the brain, resembling a high-tech processor, cleans up the received input. Paradoxically, one of the functions of photography is to remind us of the impossibility of our eyes to perceive reality as a still image – as the saccadic scanning of our eyes show, there is nothing fixed or stable in nature. Matter is always in flux.


Read the rest here: http://rhizome.org/editorial/3750

To read more of Vesna Madzoski’s writings, please visit her website: http://madzoski.synthasite.com/

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Aanhikken

July 19th, 2010 · Blog/News
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In her weekly column in the Dutch NRC Handelsblad, Maria Barnas contemplates the difficulties of grasping Einstein’s theory of relativity and how Andre Klukhuhn’s lecture at the minisymposium made her come closer to an understanding of the fourth dimension.

http://weblogs.nrc.nl/cultuurblog/2010/07/18/cs-maria-barnas-aanhikken/

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Contact – Art as the outer limits of the Universe

July 2nd, 2010 · Blog/News, Texts
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CONTACT – ART AS THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE UNIVERSE
©Rune Peitersen 2010

The movie ‘Contact’ (1997) explores different aspects of the traditional positions of science and faith; what is faith and how does faith differ from scientific deduction. It cleverly raises a few questions about the validity, or reality, of individual experience versus ‘objective’ experience. The most interesting point, however, is that it (unintentionally?) provides a definition of art, and a way to look at art as playing a fundamental part in the construction of reality.

In the beginning of the movie, young Ellie Arroway is sitting behind a shortwave-radio trying to make contact with other radio enthusiasts. After a brief conversation with a man from Pensacola, Florida (the farthest away from her home so far), she makes a drawing of how she believes it looks like there – a nice beach and some palm trees. According to her caring widower-father it’s ‘a beauty’. Shortly after, her father dies of a heart attack, leaving Ellie calling out for him on her shortwave radio.
Twenty years later, Ellie is a passionate astronomer searching for extraterrestrial life using large radio telescopes. Eventually, she receives a signal, which apparently comes from very far away. Through a series of events, the signal is decoded and a giant ‘machine’ is constructed using the instructions given in the signal. What this machine is supposed to do is unclear, but it is believed that it will create a wormhole allowing ‘the passenger’ to travel to ‘the other end of the universe’. Having been chosen to be the passenger, Ellie takes her place inside the machine and, from her perspective, travels through a series of tunnels of light and eventually awakens on a beach, which closely resembles the drawing of Florida that she made many years earlier. It is there that she meets an entity who looks like her father. Baffled by the scenery and seeing her dead ‘father’, she assumes that her mind ‘has been downloaded’ by the aliens in order to create a non-threatening setting. After a brief talk with the entity she suddenly ‘wakes up’ again in the machine – according to her experience (and the recording equipment she carried) 18 hours later, and according to the onlookers from the machine control centre an instant later.
The final stages of the movie deal with questions concerning the veracity of Ellie’s individual experience (“I cannot explain it, but it was real”) as opposed to the multiple concurring observations made from the control centre (“We didn’t see anything”). Eventually, Ellie gives into the accepted narrative, that “…some things just can’t be explained”. (From a feminist point of view, this is when the strong heroine breaks and becomes vulnerable, and is eventually swept off in a limousine by her male, Christian protector, who only then says, that he “…for one, believes her story.” She’s finally been reigned in.)
At the end of the movie, Ellie tells a group of school kids that nobody knows how big the universe is, but that “…it’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of.”

This final statement is a typical example of the hierarchical incongruity between our perception of the subjective experience and ‘objective’ reality. Ellie has just travelled to the far ends of the universe and found it to be a real version of a drawing she herself made, and her conclusion is that the universe is somehow “…bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of”!?! It seems to me that she sees exactly what she herself had dreamed, regarding the farthest place from her home, would be like and that, by implication, our dreams and visions define our universe. Even though she applies an explanation that makes sense from her technologically based worldview (“downloading my mind”), the fact remains that she walks in a world constructed by her own brain. Now, normally we dismiss that as a hallucination, but what we then overlook is that everything anyone ever experiences is a construction of the brain. It makes no sense to speak of one experience being a construction of the brain and the other not. It is how we choose to incorporate these experiences into our shared construction of reality that matters.

We are used to thinking of the universe as a pretty solid construction where everything is ordered according to certain deducible laws; given enough time, we will find out all there is to know about the workings of the universe, and consequently our position in it. This is a remainder of Cartesian dualistic thought that, although discredited by science, still seems to determine the everyday worldview of our (Western) culture. It proclaims the division between mind and matter, and thereby reinforces the notion of ‘mind over matter’, which in turn is used to justify the proclaimed superiority of Western culture (as the ‘head’ of the world). However, the same science that was fathered by this dualistic worldview has long since found that the universe is not as ordered as it once was thought. It makes no sense to speak of mind and matter as separate phenomena. Our experience of the world is determined by sensory experience and expectations of this experience, which in turn are determined by the structure of our brain and nervous system. The world we experience (and it makes no sense to speak of any other) is a construction of our brain and extended nervous system, which are extensions of cellular structures working to feed themselves. In order for the brain to maintain an ever-growing metabolism, at some point self-consciousness gradually evolved. This caused a growing division between an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ world. Some sensory experiences were interpreted to deal with an ‘outside’ world, some with an ‘inside’ world (to the brain there is no difference). Thus, the experience of ‘me’, of a personality linked to ‘my body’, was gradually born. In order for several ‘me’s’ to share and experience the same reality, we need to be able to speak of the same reality and, consequently, the more complex a society becomes the more the need for ‘objectivity’ (a shared communicable reality) arises. Over time, ‘I’ becomes so ingrained in thought, language, and culture that the division between ‘me inside’ and ‘the world outside’ becomes near impossible to bridge. Eventually this leads to the idea of a world disconnected from our experience of it. Descartes distils this idea in his meditations and proclaims that we cannot trust our senses to show us the ‘real’ world and subsequently he places consciousness (‘I’) ‘above’ a mechanical world. However, as Ellie learns on the other side of the universe, the world is an expression of the brain, our consciousness is a consequence of dealing with the world – the brain is simultaneously the creator of and actor in the world.

In the movie, Ellie finds herself at a point, or in a place, outside of the shared reality. She ‘travels’ in a machine, which tests the outer limits of Einstein’s theories, our shared understanding of the universe. It is simple to speak of infinite mass, the speed of light and creating a singularity in mathematics, but imagine a machine that actually does it. What would it look like if you were transported to a place where time, matter, and energy approach infinity? How would the brain help the consciousness make sense of it? In Ellie’s case, it produces a world, based on a familiar image, related to suitable concepts. Had she never made that drawing, never envisioned what ‘the place farthest away from home’ might look like, she would probably have experienced something entirely different – perhaps, scenery from a science fiction movie, an Escher-inspired world, or nothing at all. However, the conceptual link (or neurological link) between the image and the concept makes it the ‘logical’ choice for her brain. It constructs a world, which allows her to deal with the new reality in which she finds herself, without breaking down the conceptual framework of her everyday reality. This way, her ‘self’ can incorporate the new reality alongside the shared reality.

Nobody follows Ellie through the machine, but imagine her experience had been taken seriously (and while doing so, reflect upon why it was not), the next passenger would then expect to arrive at a beach with palm trees. Perhaps he or she would start to explore the beach further, walking beyond the trees. Upon his or her return, he or she would confirm that he or she had travelled to the ‘same’ beach and thereby begin to establish the shared experience of ‘the beach in space’ as a real place you can travel to. In time, more people would go there and a consensus would arise on how to define ‘the beach’. After a while, it might not look anything like the original beach anymore, perhaps someone would cut down the trees or build a house, start measuring distances, defining ‘natural laws’ etc., but the foundation of the beach would always be Ellie’s first experience, based on her drawing.

Much like the Australian Aboriginals who tell of how their forefathers in the Dreamtime sang songs which solidified and became the world, Ellie’s drawing, or rather the neurological processes (her ‘pre-conscious’ ) which ‘inspired’ the drawing, becomes the new world. Although we do not have access to a machine like Ellie’s, the processes described here can be used to describe the origin of the foundations of our world as well. From the caves of Lascaux to the perspectival visions of the Renaissance or the definition of Cyberspace by William Gibson, the foundation of our shared reality is an artistic vision, an artist’s rendering of pre-conscious neurological processes. The scientific goal is the exploration of this rendition – how does it work, how can it best be described, what does it do, and how can we best use it?

Art plays a much more fundamental part in the construction of reality than we usually accredit it with. Art is not something that develops in a society as a means of ‘exploring emotions’, analyzing current political trends, or keeping the masses content. Without art, there is no society. It is neither passive nor descriptive, it is active in its creation, and it is literally creative. Not as an exercise in metaphor or symbolism, but the concrete experience we know as reality. Art enables the construction of a shared reality, which can be used as foundation for the world and eventually, civilization. It is not at odds with science, it is the precursor to science and the scientific worldview – as Ellie stammers when she travels through the wormhole, ‘No, no words can describe this…they should have sent a poet’.

What she does not realize is that they did.



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1. I use the term pre-conscious not in the Freudian sense, but as a term for the neurological fact that e.g. decisions are shown to be already decided upon in the brain before the decision becomes conscious. We may think ‘we’ decide but our consciousness merely acts out decisions taken at a ‘deeper’ level of the brain, the ‘pre-conscious’.

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Einstein & Bohr

June 28th, 2010 · Blog/News, Texts

This text was written for the exhibition “Saccadic Sightings: Einstein & Bohr”. The text is on display in the exhibition between the two works, “Observer Effect – Underpath Sequence” and “Observing Uncertainty – Underpath”.

©Rune Peitersen 2010

In the beginning of the 20th century, The Quantum Revolution changed reality. It is not the most well known revolution, but its implications may be among the most dramatic ever. It is at the base of almost every technological advance of the 20th century, from perms to PCs, and space travel to surfing the Web and still, its implications remain highly controversial and counter- intuitive.

The two people at the heart of The Quantum Revolution were Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr. They are often described as close friends who, in being confronted with the consequences of their research, became adversaries in a debate about the structure of reality.

Both contributed to the overthrow of Newtonian physics as the universal explanation of natural forces. When introducing his theory of special relativity, Einstein dismissed the theory of the Aether (nowadays only used by radio hosts) and thereby broke with the idea of a universal frame of reference. According to the theories of relativity, the observers’ velocity and position relative to another observer can result in different experiences, in turn causing even time and space to bend. Although Einstein’s theories fairly quickly became widely accepted, the upheaval that they caused within physics was far-reaching and controversial. The tidy clockwork universe of Newton had been replaced by a universe in which the relative position of the observer played an important part. Influenced by his research, Bohr developed the model of the atom, and with a group of prominent physicists, he proposed one of the defining and most controversial ideas of quantum mechanics, the Principle of Complementarity. This principle roughly states that matter can behave as a wave or particle, depending on how it is being observed. In combination with Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty, which states that it is not possible to know both the location and the mass of a particle at the same time, Bohr concluded that, at quantum level, it is principally impossible to see exactly what ‘is going on’, and that, as a consequence hereof, we cannot speak of a universe separate from the observation of it.

This was a groundbreaking statement. It instantly shattered the foundations of the traditional Western dualistic world view. It completely defies our daily experience of the world and our common sense. The materialistic heritage from Descartes was proven scientifically wrong, and the relationship between the observer and the observed had to be completely revaluated. ‘We’ were no longer ‘detached’ from a world ‘outside’, as such concepts are meaningless in quantum mechanics – somehow, there is interconnectivity between consciousness and the world. Einstein disproved Newton’s concept of a universal frame of reference and substituted it by the relative position of the observer, but to involve the act of observing into the equation was to break with the perceived objectivity of science itself. In addition, on a deeper level, if an observer influences the outcome of an experiment, then it is impossible to speak of a reality separate from the observer; the search for a Newtonian ‘truth’, any absolute truth, made no sense anymore. These implications led Einstein, during a nightly walk in Copenhagen, to ask a colleague: “…but, do you really believe the moon only exists when you look at it?”.

Einstein was a realist, he believed in a physical universe. His research was aimed at understanding how that physical universe worked, and eventually combine all of nature’s forces into a single theory, which would be able to contain and explain everything. He had proclaimed that two observers standing at different positions could see the universe differently and both would still be right, but he remained confident that somewhere beyond their observations that there still was a universe, indifferent to the individual observers. Bohr simply said that the two observers would see two different realities because they were looking for two different things, and that the two realities they saw were equally valid, even if they were contradictory. According to Bohr, there is no universe beyond the observations and there are no hidden variables.

Einstein could never come to terms with Bohr’s interpretation, known as The Copenhagen Interpretation, of quantum theory. He simply could not let go of his realist views, and consequently spent the rest of his life trying to find a flaw in the Copenhagen Interpretation. He devised brilliant thought experiments to try to prove Bohr wrong. It is in part thanks to Einstein’s intransigence that quantum mechanics became as successful as it did; he tested it to the limits of his genius, and yet, it didn’t budge. Bohr was able to refute all of Einstein’s thought experiments. For all of Einstein’s genius, his ability to relativize and see things from different perspectives, he was unable to let go of the solid world even when experiments proved him wrong. He had toppled the Newtonian universe of classical mechanics as a young man, but he could not bring himself to kill the absolute world that he so strongly believed in – there had to be something beyond the observations.

Bohr may not have been happy with the demise of the physical universe as he knew it, but he was able to accept the uncertainty and complementarity of the Copenhagen interpretation. He accepted that although science may be objective that does not mean its subject shares that objectivity – the truth is not out there.

There are many versions of the story of their friendship and how it gradually deteriorated because they disagreed on how to interpret the results of their research. These stories probably all exaggerate the animosity between the two former friends somewhat, but nevertheless eyewitnesses tell of how in their later years, at parties, they would be standing at opposite sides of a room, each with their own group of followers.


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Saccadic Sightings: Einstein&Bohr, at Ellen de Bruijne Projects, July 3rd to August 28th

June 27th, 2010 · Blog/News
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THE VIDEOS FROM THE MINI SYMPOSIUM JULY 8th ARE NOW ONLINE.


 

 

In Dolores Rune Peitersen will be showing the most recent installment, Einstein & Bohr, from his ongoing project Saccadic Sightings from July 3rd to August 28th.

Initiated in 2008, Saccadic Sightings began as a study of visual perception. Using a Mobile Eye, a scientific eye tracking device, Peitersen was able to film his field of view while simultaneously capturing the exploratory movements of his eye. He was interested in the ‘raw’ visual input captured by the retina before it was interpreted and processed into experience by the brain. Underlying this project were questions raised by quantum mechanics concerning e.g. the Uncertainty Principle and whether or not it is possible to speak of a world separate from our observation of it.

During his research Peitersen started looking into the way in which we construct our reality. Besides the physiological and psychological aspects of perception, scientific paradigms determine our view of the world. Peitersen became intrigued by how outdated but popular paradigms have developed into inflexible dogmas. The materialistic dualism of Rene Descartes, which presupposes a strict division of mind and matter, is such a dogma, which although discredited decennia ago by quantum physics, by thinkers such as Einstein and Bohr and more recently by neurological research, still remains the most commonly accepted and widely held world view. This raises the questions of why such a world view persists and what can be done to substitute it with a more adequate construction. Furthermore, Peitersen became convinced that it is art which shapes our understanding of reality. By formulating questions about perception, by visualizing conceptual constructions and making these constructions manifest in the world, art plays a much more fundamental part in the construction of our collective reality than we usually realize.

These are the considerations underlying the most recent work. In one image we see the track travelled by the searching eye. It is superimposed on a video still of an urban landscape: a snapshot, out of focus but still implying an overview. In the second work, a combination of several images, the overview is abandoned in favor of fragmented visual acuity also referring to the passage of time. Both works are linked to the text Einstein & Bohr.


The issues raised will be the starting point of a public discussion in the gallery on Thursday July 8th in which Robert Zwijnenberg (Prof. Art history, University of Leiden and founding Director of The Arts & Genomics Centre), André Klukhuhn (scientist and philosopher), Saskia Monshouwer (curator and anthropologist), Mariska van den Berg (curator SKOR), Voebe de Gruyter (artist), Huib Haye van der Werf (curator NAi), Anne Kienhuis (postdoc researcher at RIVM), Tamuna Chabashvili and Adi Hollander (artists PSWAR.org), Laura Schuster (phd student UvA, Imagined Futures research group) and others will participate.

Click here for biographical information of the speakers and participants.

Program can be found here (English pdf), here (Dutch pdf) and here (link)

Texts ‘Einstein & Bohr‘ and ‘Contact – Art as the outer limits of the Universe‘


Ellen de Bruijne Projects
Rozengracht 207 A
1016 LZ Amsterdam
The Netherlands

www.edbprojects.nl


Saccadic Sightings is generously sponsored by The Arts&Genomics Centre, Leiden, www.artsgenomics.org,, Stephen Oliver Associates, London, www.s-oliver-associates.com and The Netherlands Foundation for Visual Arts, www.fondsbkvb.nl

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Global Pyramid Schemes – suing the world economy

May 21st, 2010 · Blog/News
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If it could be argued/proved that the global economy is a de facto pyramid scheme, would it then be possible to take legal action against the economic system as a whole?


http://curezone.com/forums/fm.asp?i=1618076

http://www.grist.org/article/our-global-ponzi-economy/

http://www.iied.org/pubs/pdfs/17058IIED.pdf

http://www.alternet.org/environment/130897/why_the_global_economy_is_a_ponzi_scheme_and_we_are_all_bernie_madoffs/

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How to think about science – podcasts

May 19th, 2010 · Blog/News
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http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2009/01/02/how-to-think-about-science-part-1—24-listen/

—The link has been updated—

If science is neither cookery, nor angelic virtuosity, then what is it?
Modern societies have tended to take science for granted as a way of knowing, ordering and controlling the world. Everything was subject to science, but science itself largely escaped scrutiny. This situation has changed dramatically in recent years. Historians, sociologists, philosophers and sometimes scientists themselves have begun to ask fundamental questions about how the institution of science is structured and how it knows what it knows. David Cayley talks to some of the leading lights of this new field of study.

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Scanning the brain is like scanning a computer with no screen.

May 11th, 2010 · Blog/News, Texts
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©Rune Peitersen 2010

Although I have the utmost respect for scientific research and am personally fascinated by the field of neurology, recently I find myself questioning the methods used to gather information about brain activity, namely the measuring of electrical fields or electrical activity in the brain. Not the specific methods themselves, whether one uses electrodes or mri scans to determine brain activity is of no interest to me. Rather the thinking behind the research seems odd. What can one really hope to gather from measuring a certain area of activity? If a subject is stimulated in a certain manner e.g. hit on the finger, told to think of something nice or shown evocative imagery, then specific parts of the brain light up and the more the subject’s finger is hit, the more accurately the area in the brain can be pinpointed. But what does that really tell us?

There’s no metaphor I reject more than comparing the human brain to a computer, but in this particular case I think it is a valid metaphor. Scanning the brain and drawing conclusions from these scans about the human mind or the human experience of the world, is like removing the monitor from a pc, putting electrodes on the outside of the tower and hammering away at the keyboard. Indeed, certain key stroke combinations seem to evoke very specific responses from the tower, and with a little patience we might be able to piece together an idea of the anatomy of the inside of the computer i.e. motherboard, cpu, gpu, hard drive etc. We may discover that repeatedly hitting ctrl+alt+del invokes a specific response, there might even be a sound, but without the screen we can never know if we’re playing a game, surfing the web, photoshopping or have crashed.

It is an old dilemma of neurology, that whatever else it is, it is always the brain examining the brain. But this is looking for sparks and trying to guess their meaning, this is the brain projecting unto the brain.

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The Dark Mountain Project

May 11th, 2010 · Blog/News
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“…Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of ‘progress’, of the conquest of ‘nature’, of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world. We call this Uncivilisation.

Our aim is to bring together writers and artists, thinkers and doers, to assault the established citadels of literature and thought, and to begin to redraw the maps by which we navigate the places and times in which we find ourselves…”

From The Project


The Dark Mountain Project Website

more here

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The Cartesian theater of The Matrix and Avatar

May 8th, 2010 · Blog/News, Texts
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©Rune Peitersen 2010

Both The Matrix and, more recently, Avatar feature the ability of the protagonist(s) to transfer their mind/consciousness to another (virtual) body. The premise seems to be Cartesian. The human consciousness is trapped somewhere inside our head or brain, but if we were able to ‘free’ it from its corporeal existence, there is nothing hindering it from taking possession of another body.

The modern day logic is the computer logic – we all have the same corporeal hardware and our software (mind) is therefore instantly compatible with any other body. All we need in order to transfer our software is an interface of some sort. In The Matrix this is done by connecting directly to an even bigger piece of hardware, whereas in Avatar it’s all wireless (of course, there are 10+ years between the two movies, but one can’t help notice the distinct tinker-toy PC-feel of The Matrix as opposed to the superficially smooth Apple experience of Avatar). In both cases the mind is ‘uploaded’ to another piece of hardware, and thereafter free to enter another reality where the rules and limitations of the ‘normal’ world don’t apply. IT-worker Mr. Anderson becomes an übercool, streetwise goth super hero, and the disabled soldier becomes a 3 meter tall, blue ‘warrior’ who rides an enormous dinosaur turkey and nails (or rather, ‘tails’) the daughter of the chief (I shudder at the thought, that the soldiers at bases in the US, who are remote controlling Predator drones in Afghanistan and elsewhere, might envision themselves undergoing similar ‘transformations’ when ‘going’ on missions).

Although mind and body seem to have little if any influence on each other, in both movies you still need a ‘real’ body. If your ‘real’ body dies, you’re dead. In The Matrix you die even if your virtual body dies – at least sometimes. In Avatar this is less of a problem; the big blue avatar vehicle can survive without the mind in a vegetative, brain-dead, state – very handy. Also, if you’re lucky, you can have your mind permanently transferred to the big blue body, but that takes a lot of processing power and all the blue people have to jack in to make that work. What happens to the original body after that, is somewhat unclear, but I like to imagine, that in true totemistic style, the heart and liver are ripped out of the still warm body and ritually devoured by the tribe (normally, I’d say the brain as well, but in this particular case, it’s safe to assume that it’s empty(?)).

Now, normally, the brain takes care of regulating a lot of the body’s vital functions. These include regulating temperature, breathing, heartbeat, hormone balance etc. etc. Since the bodies, which are left behind, in the movies don’t die completely, we must assume that the part of the mind which is transferred isn’t involved in any of these tasks. Likewise, sensory input is ‘taken care of’ by the new body, which seems to imply that either all brains are built exactly alike when it comes to e.g. the visual cortex regardless of what kind of eyes you have (goodbye environmental influence – and common sense), or the mind just settles in the driver’s seat of the new brain and lets all the sensory information come to it ‘from the outside’ (hello homunculus problem). In any case, the ongoing individual neural wiring of the brain (which starts as soon as the brain begins to evolve and is more personal and complex than a fingerprint the size of the moon) seems to play little or no part at all, which is good because that would present a problem – how would you get new memories or newly learned skills with you from one body to the other if memories and newly learned skills were brain structures? In fact, it’s probably safe to say, that the only aspects of the mind, which are transferred are: personality (whatever that is when detached from the bodily experience and the individually wired neural network), memory (whatever that is when detached from the bodily experience and the individually wired neural network) and emotions (whatever that is when detached from the bodily experience and and the individually wired neural network).

Anyway, the important thing is that it works. Apparently, we are told, it’s just a matter of the right technology before we can all become the heroes in our own lives – be what we were really meant to be – simply by uploading our ‘mind’ to another body. This is fortunate, because then we don’t have to worry about being ‘what we were really meant to be’ in our everyday lives, all we have to do is wait for the right technology to appear, and then we can be transformed into freedom fighters on far away planets or on a world dominated by machines. We can finally be as brave and bold as we know we really are. We will fight oppression, liberate some people and get the girl in the end. In other words, we can finally do all the stuff we were destined to do, but you can’t do in the real world…because you’re not allowed, or there are no oppressed people anywhere, no injustice and no girls either.

But, what if the technology isn’t developed within our lifetime?!? Luckily, the movies seem to deal with that eventuality as well. It’s a bit tricky, but nonetheless. By stating that the mind (or at least, the mythological 10% we care about) is kind of a separate thing from the body, it seems plausible that it could survive after we die as well – since the body isn’t really needed after all. And then perhaps after we die, we can go to a place where we can finally be ‘what we were really meant to be’, but were unable to be in our former life (for reasons mentioned above). This may sound vaguely familiar, and I can only assume that that is the noble intention of the film makers. To let us know it’s okay if we aren’t the heroes or even protagonists of our own lives, because in the Matrix/Pandora/Afterlife we will be. So, even though the movies may appear to be showing us something new, they are in fact telling us something old. They are giving us a 17th century view of the world dressed up in 21st century effects.

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