The Real Matrix

[Anders]

At the dawn of human civilization people gathered in small tribes. Each tribe had a leader or a group of leaders. Over time tribes developed rules for social behavior which held the members together as a single unit. Tribes without rules would have been like baboon societies where dominance hierarchies form by males fighting for the alpha position. The introduction of rules reduced the infighting and leaders could be replaced without changing the structure of the tribe. This made the members able to rely on a consistent set of norms for how to behave and was an early form of law and order.

There were conflicts between tribes. A larger tribe naturally had an advantage over a smaller tribe. However the primitive social structures made the tribes prone to inner conflict and breaking apart if they got too large. The average size of a tribe was determined by the environment and the balance between being large enough to defend itself against enemy tribes and small enough to be ruled without too much inner conflict.

Social rules for the early tribes were the first building blocks of the real Matrix. As the human civilization evolved additional rules for trade between tribes developed. The Matrix grew gradually as rules got more advanced to enable societies to become larger without inner rebellions so that they could defend themselves against other societies and/or conquer other societies. Trade developed into monetary and tax systems. Spiritual beliefs became organized religions with clearly defined rules for social behavior.

The rules were already from the beginning based on the simplistic mechanism of reward and punishment. Since humans were, and to a large extent still are, competitive and driven by fear plus have a poor sense of personal integrity and a lack of intrinsic ethics, severe punishment was needed to enforce the rules. Too severe punishment and the people would rebel. Therefore an additional mechanism used was, and still is, divide and conquer among the members within the society. Keeping people separated and afraid of each other made them easier to rule and control.

What is the real Matrix? The answer is that all the rules, norms, customs, traditions, laws and regulations we have today are the Matrix. Everybody, whether a leader or another member of society, has to feed the Matrix. People have become so indoctrinated that they hardly can see any alternative than to live in constant fear, struggle and conflict. We have become trapped within a lifeless set of rules that suck us dry, with our lives being like batteries to be used, abused and then disposed of. The Matrix continues to grow fueled by humans that are replaced over time with new humans.

As Morpheus said in the movie Matrix: “The Matrix is everywhere. … when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work... when you go to church... when you pay your taxes.”

[Anders]

Maybe I should elaborate a bit and explain what an alternative to the real Matrix would be. The main problem with the Matrix is that it has huge friction within it, with conflicts going on all the time all over the place. Just look at the U.S. military defense spending. It's massive. And all of those enormous resources in the form of time, money and human effort etc are a result of conflict and potential threats. If we think of the world as a large body then the nations can be seen as organs. It would be silly if in the human body the liver was at war with the kidneys or the heart in conflict with the lungs, yet that's exactly the situation we have in the world today. And thousands of thousands of pages of laws, and lawsuits between husband and wife, between people and companies, between corporations and corporations and on and on.

If people had integrity and sound ethics then I would be able to safely post my bank account password publicly on the Internet in plain text. Today that would be crazy since evidently there are people who are unable to handle such situation in a cooperative manner, to say the least. But we can imagine an evolutionary leap in consciousness where all of humanity becomes like a well-functioning multi-multi-cellular organism; a Gaia/Sophia consciousness. Then all the titanic friction within the Matrix would be removed and enormous amounts of energy becomes available for constructive win-win cooperation.

The real Matrix has been a necessary development of our civilization. So from a very big cosmic perspective the Matrix is a good thing that has enabled humanity to produce a lot of novelty and creativity. The Matrix still sucks though, causing enormous amounts of suffering and is potentially meant to be transcended into a higher evolutionary level. And we may have come to a moment in history when the Matrix has served its purpose and is about to be transformed.

[Pris]

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Hello, Anders. Did you come up with this story of the so-called 'real Matrix' yourself or did you have some help?
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[Anders]

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Hello, Anders. Did you come up with this story of the so-called 'real Matrix' yourself or did you have some help?
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Hi Pris. I have been interested in the exponential technological progress described by Ray Kurzweil and others leading to a technological singularity. I think that will be awesome. But recently I learned on the web (YouTube etc) claims about how that progress is a false "timeline". That's the Matrix timeline some people called it. What we have now is an Earth timeline and the Matrix timeline will fail they said. Then I thought, whoa, there could be something to that. Because look at the Great Pyramid at Giza for example. How could "primitive people" design and construct the ceiling of the King's chamber with advanced relieving chambers that have held up all the tons of stone blocks above for millennia and through several earth quakes. No way! The great pyramid is a monument created by advanced AI, that's what I believe.

So there was already extremely advanced technology in existence thousands of years ago. The real Matrix is a cosmic trickery where the ancient AI made the great pyramid look like it might have possibly been made by humans. The larger trickery is the "fall of humankind" in the Bible. Humanity was deliberately left to develop on our own without the already existing advanced knowledge. Why? Because if we would have been given advanced technology thousands of years ago we would just have become a clone/copy of the already existing civilizations. A young civilization, like our own, needs to develop its own unique civilization with its own cultures, languages, science, art, architecture, music and technology etc. Like a toddler learning how to walk. The child has to learn how to walk by him- or herself. Adults cannot walk for the child. And then later when the child has drawn a picture, it would be foolish to tell the child: "Why did you draw that picture? There are many people who have already drawn pictures much better than you." Ha ha.

[Pris]

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This is all... interesting. But, you don't even touch on the apparent 'con job' done to the Sumerians -- that money was maliciously introduced to enslave us (conned-Sumers). Other malicious (hierarchical) systems of control: governments, religions... Etc, and whatever... I find it impossible to believe that we, the masses, came up with the messed up world as it stands all on our lonesome -- like it naturally evolved. It's 'in our nature'... Really? (I think that belief is part of our brainwashing, btw.)

As for 'the story' in general, it probably does go back thousands of years, maybe even tens of thousands of years... or more. Emerald Tablets? Annunaki...? Enki/Enlil? 'Chosen ones'? Zionists? Illuminati? Cabalists? We are living in contrived, sick and twisted cultures for sure. Add to that Corporatocracy and Plutocracy... Totalitarianism... Have we been mass mind-controlled and programmed? Definitely. There's a small group of nuts 'at the top' running pretty much everything worldwide. Key word: psychopathy.

As for AI... Apparently, everyone's got their own stories to tell. Bull shit or real? I'm not even sure if I care at this point (I'm doing what I can to avoid unwanted clutter in my head).

This is my reaction to a quick impression of your posts so far. I don't always interpret accurately, but that's not my goal here.
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[Anders]

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This is all... interesting. But, you don't even touch on the apparent 'con job' done to the Sumerians -- that money was maliciously introduced to enslave us (conned-Sumers). Other malicious (hierarchical) systems of control: governments, religions... Etc, and whatever...
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The OP I wrote is very condensed. I briefly mentioned how monetary systems and organized religions arose out of simpler tribal rules. The simple principle of rules is key to the growth of the Matrix. The more powerful the rules the bigger the society can become, up to present day where we have societies in the form of large nations. And tribes that were unable to develop more advanced rules failed to be able to grow much in population size. This meant that in a raw Darwinian sense, the tribes with the most effective rules survived and those tribes with more primitive rules went extinct.

A monetary system is a very powerful set of rules. Another powerful set of rules is organized religions. Modern day governments have massive rule sets able to keep millions of sheeple, eh.. excuse me I meant people in line.., I meant efficiently governed. From a practical point of view, think of how a society today would function without money and only relied on barter. That would be a complete mess. In fact it wouldn't work, except for a small number of cases.

Dominator hierarchies evolved because that's an easy way to organize large societies. Peer-to-peer network structures have been too complicated to function because they require a much more advanced form of cooperation. For example the simple yet efficient reward and punishment method is difficult to implement in a distributed and decentralized networked way. Who will decide what is right or wrong? And how are those rules going to be enforced in a society without hierarchical chain of command?

[Christine]

Seems we are all tracking something called Truth here and to extract the simplicity out of the complexity ... the task at hand. Without going too deep at the moment I am very pleased Anders has joined the conversation.

Taking the pulse of planet EARTH - HEART

And wrapping my head around data overload, the layers are mind boogling ... a bit of mind exploding going on.

[Phil]

Well said Anders:

The average size of a tribe was determined by the environment and the balance between being large enough to defend itself against enemy tribes and small enough to be ruled without too much inner conflict.

Social rules for the early tribes were the first building blocks of the real Matrix. As the human civilization evolved additional rules for trade between tribes developed.

I think limiting this bit to "defense against outsiders" is a "rule" some authority wove into culture back in the day, and that it might be more empowering to imagine that the "fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil" was where we as species needed to take responsibility for the "survival mechanism" that differentiated us from the less of the life we cohabitated with: The ability to manipulate the environment to our will.

And perhaps even categorizing that as a "survival instinct" or whatever is part of the problem. For good or "evil", there was a moment in our history when a RULEr set us on a path where the balance required, between the respect for the environment and human "needs", was distorted...that's what I believe lead us to the reality we find ourselves in.

Those rules you mention, probably ALL of them back then had a purpose. When we began respecting, loving, protecting rules for rules' sake...rather than understanding them and why it's empowering to use them, that's where we lost the narrative. The emotional attachment to rules, authority..."being right"...make the matrix a touch nut to crack.

The prevailing belief seems to be that we are slave to our instincts, just like the animals. I guess it implies a inherent disbelief in my musings above...ignores that we as a species seemed to have transcend many of those survival instincts. We cannot see that many of the problems we face come from our ability to make decisions counter to them, blatantly "breaking those inbred rules" that science tells we cannot escape. These cognitive dissonances seem so comprehensive to me, it is a wonder to my sensibilities we are able to maintain the matrix.

Is that an implication that this is what we really want? It seems like it takes more energy to keep the lies alive, rather than "remember" how to live. Yet here we are...

[Anders]

There are the laws of nature and there are laws, or more generally rules, made by humans. Natural laws are the foundation for humanity, and rules made by humans are a layer on top of the natural laws. All rules made by humans are artificial and since the real Matrix is nothing but a bunch of rules made by humans, the whole Matrix is an artificial construct. And computers in the form of things like smartphones are moving into further separation from the organic foundation of the natural laws.

The progress of information technology is accelerating and is predicted to reach something called a technological singularity only a few decades from today:

[youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9iYEUq9Vgo[/youtube]

A technological singularity will, if it goes well, be an astonishing improvement of our civilization. One potential problem however is that the technological singularity is an artifact of the real Matrix. At first that might not seem like such a big deal. Why not be content with artificial intelligence (AI) with godlike capabilities? It's in the post-singularity world where we may hit a wall. Since the technological singularity will emerge out of the artificial construct of the real Matrix it will be detached from that which governs physical matter itself, the natural laws or what some people have called the Source. And as the singularity accelerates even further into the future it will move away from the natural laws, thereby missing the possibility of tapping into the Source of creation. A technological singularity may in this way end up as a bleak artificial layer on top of the much more powerful organic Source of its own existence.

[Phil]

Considering the gap between what we are allowed to know about and what actually exists technology-wise, what numbers is he using for his computation?

Wouldn't anything "they" tell us about 2045 more than likely already exist?