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“The Truman Show” is a profoundly disturbing movie. On the surface, it deals with the worn out issue of the intermingling of life and the media.

Examples for such incestuous relationships abound:

Ronald Reagan, the cinematic president was also a presidential movie star. In another movie (“The Philadelphia Experiment”) a defrosted Rip Van Winkle exclaims upon seeing Reagan on television (40 years after his forced hibernation started): “I know this guy, he used to play Cowboys in the movies”.

Candid cameras monitor the lives of webmasters (website owners) almost 24 hours a day. The resulting images are continuously posted on the Web and are available to anyone with a computer.

The last decade witnessed a spate of films, all concerned with the confusion between life and the imitations of life, the media. The ingenious “Capitan Fracasse”, “Capricorn One”, “Sliver”, “Wag the Dog” and many lesser films have all tried to tackle this (un)fortunate state of things and its moral and practical implications.

The blurring line between life and its representation in the arts is arguably the main theme of “The Truman Show”. The hero, Truman, lives in an artificial world, constructed especially for him. He was born and raised there. He knows no other place. The people around him – unbeknownst to him – are all actors. His life is monitored by 5000 cameras and broadcast live to the world, 24 hours a day, every day. He is spontaneous and funny because he is unaware of the monstrosity of which he is the main cogwheel.

But Peter Weir, the movie’s director, takes this issue one step further by perpetrating a massive act of immorality on screen. Truman is lied to, cheated, deprived of his ability to make choices, controlled and manipulated by sinister, half-mad Shylocks. As I said, he is unwittingly the only spontaneous, non-scripted, “actor” in the on-going soaper of his own life. All the other figures in his life, including his parents, are actors. Hundreds of millions of viewers and voyeurs plug in to take a peep, to intrude upon what Truman innocently and honestly believes to be his privacy. They are shown responding to various dramatic or anti-climactic events in Truman’s life. That we are the moral equivalent of these viewers-voyeurs, accomplices to the same crimes, comes as a shocking realization to us. We are (live) viewers and they are (celluloid) viewers. We both enjoy Truman’s inadvertent, non-consenting, exhibitionism. We know the truth about Truman and so do they. Of course, we are in a privileged moral position because we know it is a movie and they know it is a piece of raw life that they are watching. But moviegoers throughout Hollywood’s history have willingly and insatiably participated in numerous “Truman Shows”. The lives (real or concocted) of the studio stars were brutally exploited and incorporated in their films. Jean Harlow, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney all were forced to spill their guts in cathartic acts of on camera repentance and not so symbolic humiliation. “Truman Shows” is the more common phenomenon in the movie industry.

Then there is the question of the director of the movie as God and of God as the director of a movie. The members of his team – technical and non-technical alike – obey Christoff, the director, almost blindly. They suspend their better moral judgement and succumb to his whims and to the brutal and vulgar aspects of his pervasive dishonesty and sadism. The torturer loves his victims. They define him and infuse his life with meaning. Caught in a narrative, the movie says, people act immorally.

(IN)famous psychological experiments support this assertion. Students were led to administer what they thought were “deadly” electric shocks to their colleagues or to treat them bestially in simulated prisons. They obeyed orders. So did all the hideous genocidal criminals in history. The Director Weir asks: should God be allowed to be immoral or should he be bound by morality and ethics? Should his decisions and actions be constrained by an over-riding code of right and wrong? Should we obey his commandments blindly or should we exercise judgement? If we do exercise judgement are we then being immoral because God (and the Director Christoff) know more (about the world, about us, the viewers and about Truman), know better, are omnipotent? Is the exercise of judgement the usurpation of divine powers and attributes? Isn’t this act of rebelliousness bound to lead us down the path of apocalypse?

It all boils down to the question of free choice and free will versus the benevolent determinism imposed by an omniscient and omnipotent being. What is better: to have the choice and be damned (almost inevitably, as in the biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden) – or to succumb to the superior wisdom of a supreme being? A choice always involves a dilemma. It is the conflict between two equivalent states, two weighty decisions whose outcomes are equally desirable and two identically-preferable courses of action. Where there is no such equivalence – there is no choice, merely the pre-ordained (given full knowledge) exercise of a preference or inclination. Bees do not choose to make honey. A fan of football does not choose to watch a football game. He is motivated by a clear inequity between the choices that he faces. He can read a book or go to the game. His decision is clear and pre-determined by his predilection and by the inevitable and invariable implementation of the principle of pleasure. There is no choice here. It is all rather automatic. But compare this to the choice some victims had to make between two of their children in the face of Nazi brutality. Which child to sentence to death – which one to sentence to life? Now, this is a real choice. It involves conflicting emotions of equal strength. One must not confuse decisions, opportunities and choice. Decisions are the mere selection of courses of action. This selection can be the result of a choice or the result of a tendency (conscious, unconscious, or biological-genetic). Opportunities are current states of the world, which allow for a decision to be made and to affect the future state of the world. Choices are our conscious experience of moral or other dilemmas.

Christoff finds it strange that Truman – having discovered the truth – insists upon his right to make choices, i.e., upon his right to experience dilemmas. To the Director, dilemmas are painful, unnecessary, destructive, or at best disruptive. His utopian world – the one he constructed for Truman – is choice-free and dilemma-free. Truman is programmed not in the sense that his spontaneity is extinguished. Truman is wrong when, in one of the scenes, he keeps shouting: “Be careful, I am spontaneous”. The Director and fat-cat capitalistic producers want him to be spontaneous, they want him to make decisions. But they do not want him to make choices. So they influence his preferences and predilections by providing him with an absolutely totalitarian, micro-controlled, repetitive environment. Such an environment reduces the set of possible decisions so that there is only one favourable or acceptable decision (outcome) at any junction. Truman does decide whether to walk down a certain path or not. But when he does decide to walk – only one path is available to him. His world is constrained and limited – not his actions.

Actually, Truman’s only choice in the movie leads to an arguably immoral decision. He abandons ship. He walks out on the whole project. He destroys an investment of billions of dollars, people’s lives and careers. He turns his back on topfilmswatchmoviesonline some of the actors who seem to really be emotionally attached to him. He ignores the good and pleasure that the show has brought to the lives of millions of people (the viewers). He selfishly and vengefully goes away. He knows all this. By the time he makes his decision, he is fully informed. He knows that some people may commit suicide, go bankrupt, endure major depressive episodes, do drugs. But this massive landscape of resulting devastation does not deter him. He prefers his narrow, personal, interest. He walks.

But Truman did not ask or choose to be put in his position. He found himself responsible for all these people without being consulted. There was no consent or act of choice involved. How can anyone be responsible for the well-being and lives of other people – if he did not CHOOSE to be so responsible? Moreover, Truman had the perfect moral right to think that these people wronged him. Are we morally responsible and accountable for the well-being and lives of those who wrong us? True Christians are, for instance.

Moreover, most of us, most of the time, find ourselves in situations which we did not help mould by our decisions. We are unwillingly cast into the world. We do not provide prior consent to being born. This fundamental decision is made for us, forced upon us. This pattern persists throughout our childhood and adolescence: decisions are made elsewhere by others and influence our lives profoundly. As adults we are the objects – often the victims – of the decisions of corrupt politicians, mad scientists, megalomaniac media barons, gung-ho generals and demented artists. This world is not of our making and our ability to shape and influence it is very limited and rather illusory. We live in our own “Truman Show”. Does this mean that we are not morally responsible for others?

We are morally responsible even if we did not choose uhe circumstances and the parameters and characteristics of the universe that we inhabit. The Swedish Count Wallenberg imperilled his life (and lost it) smuggling hunted Jews out of Nazi occupied Europe. He did not choose, or helped to shape Nazi Europe. It was the brainchild of the deranged Director Hitler. Having found himself an unwilling participant in Hitler’s horror show, Wallenberg did not turn his back and opted out. He remained within the bloody and horrific set and did his best. Truman should have done the same. Jesus said that he should have loved his enemies. He should have felt and acted with responsibility towards his fellow human beings, even towards those who wronged him greatly.

But this may be an inhuman demand. Such forgiveness and magnanimity are the reserve of God. And the fact that Truman’s tormentors did not see themselves as such and believed that they were acting in his best interests and that they were catering to his every need – does not absolve them from their crimes. Truman should have maintained a fine balance between his responsibility to the show, its creators and its viewers and his natural drive to get back at his tormentors. The source of the dilemma (which led to his act of choosing) is that the two groups overlap. Truman found himself in the impossible position of being the sole guarantor of the well-being and lives of his tormentors. To put the question in sharper relief: are we morally obliged to save the life and livelihood of someone who greatly wronged us? Or is vengeance justified in such a case?

A very problematic figure in this respect is that of Truman’s best and childhood friend. They grew up together, shared secrets, emotions and adventures. Yet he lies to Truman constantly and under the Director’s instructions. Everything he says is part of a script. It is this disinformation that convinces us that he is not Truman’s true friend. A real friend is expected, above all, to provide us with full and true information and, thereby, to enhance our ability to choose. Truman’s true love in the Show tried to do it. She paid the price: she was ousted from the show. But she tried to provide Truman with a choice. It is not sufficient to say the right things and make the right moves. Inner drive and motivation are required and the willingness to take risks (such as the risk of providing Truman with full information about his condition). All the actors who played Truman’s parents, loving wife, friends and colleagues, miserably failed on this score.

It is in this mimicry that the philosophical key to the whole movie rests. A Utopia cannot be faked. Captain Nemo’s utopian underwater city was a real Utopia because everyone knew everything about it. People were given a choice (though an irreversible and irrevocable one). They chose to become lifetime members of the reclusive Captain’s colony and to abide by its (overly rational) rules. The Utopia came closest to extinction when a group of stray survivors of a maritime accident were imprisoned in it against their expressed will. In the absence of choice, no utopia can exist. In the absence of full, timely and accurate information, no choice can exist. Actually, the availability of choice is so crucial that even when it is prevented by nature itself – and not by the designs of more or less sinister or monomaniac people – there can be no Utopia. In H.G. Wells’ book “The Time Machine”, the hero wanders off to the third millennium only to come across a peaceful Utopia. Its members are immortal, don’t have to work, or think in order to survive. Sophisticated machines take care of all their needs. No one forbids them to make choices. There simply is no need to make them. So the Utopia is fake and indeed ends badly.

Finally, the “Truman Show” encapsulates the most virulent attack on capitalism in a long time. Greedy, thoughtless money machines in the form of billionaire tycoon-producers exploit Truman’s life shamelessly and remorselessly in the ugliest display of human vices possible. The Director indulges in his control-mania. The producers indulge in their monetary obsession. The viewers (on both sides of the silver screen) indulge in voyeurism. The actors vie and compete in the compulsive activity of furthering their petty careers. It is a repulsive canvas of a disintegrating world. Perhaps Christoff is right after al when he warns Truman about the true nature of the world. But Truman chooses. He chooses the exit door leading to the outer darkness over the false sunlight in the Utopia that he leaves behind.

What Are Movie Download Services?

Movie download services are exactly what they sound like: a service that allows you to download movies from the Internet onto your hard drive or a DVD. Though this isn’t a new concept, it is relatively new to the legal world of consumerism. Though ‘pirates’ have been making free download of movies available for quite some time, movie studios are now getting in on the action and offering access to their movies for download the day they hit the stores in DVD format for a fee, of course.

Who’s Who In Movie Download Services?

In the relatively new world of legitimate movie download services, there are surprisingly many players, but only a few of them are major. There’s Movielink and Sony’s CinemaNow which offer old and new movies for purchase or 24 hour rental. Rental fees are comparable to the local video store but purchase is more expensive than if you were to buy the DVD. ClickStar, backed by Danny DeVito among other big names in Hollywood, is another up and comer in the world of movie download services, but this ones draw is that it will offer movies for download while they are still showing in the theater. It will also feature a streaming channel devoted to documentaries.

AT&T is teaming up with Vongo, another movie downloading site, to offer its DSL service in concert and duo promotions. Different from Movielink and CinemaNow, Vongo is a subscription service offered for a monthly fee which allows its members unlimited access to movies, videos, and a streaming Starz channel. Pay per view movies are available as well for an additional fee.

Movie Download Services: The Nitty Gritty

– Price Ranging anywhere from $10-$20, the irony is downloading movies legally isn’t cheap. In order to appease the retailers who make big bucks on DVDs released in stores, the online downloading services are keeping their fees in the clouds. Which of course, doesn’t hurt their pocketbook, either.

– Availability It depends. Different services have different deals with different movie studios. As for old movies, those are being added all the time. But the nice thing is, if they have it, you can get it instantly.

– Space You will need between 1200 and 2000 MBs of free space to store your movie. Depending on your system, this may be a lot or a little. Some services may allow you to burn your download to a DVD, but only if you’re buying the movie and even then, most won’t.

– Download Time This is no hdwatchmoviesonline time for dial-up, that’s for sure. Anything DSL and faster should get you your movie in under an hour with an average of 35 to 40 minutes, and that’s if you want it fast and grainy. If you’re willing to wait a little longer, say, up to two hours, you can download a higher quality version. A nice feature that some services offer is the ability to start watching the movie while it’s still downloading.

– Technical Requirements At least Windows Media Player 10, fast Internet connection, Internet Explorer 6.0, Windows XP. You might be able to get away with older versions, but it isn’t recommended. And yes, did you note it’s all PC and no Mac. That’s right. PC users only, please.

– Computer Viewing Only Currently, that’s the state of things. That is, unless you choose a service that allows you to download it to some other electronic handheld device of your choosing, like PSP or iPod. Of course, you could always use an S-video jack to hook your computer to your TV and watch it on the big screen. Some services allow limited DVD burning, but they may restrict the DVD to playing only in the computer to which the movie was downloaded, allowing your fancy DVD player to gather dust.

– Buy Versus Rent It’s a strange situation at this point, but different studios offer different services different licenses to different movies. So, you may only be able to rent a title through one service that another is offering for sale. Other services may not have any access to certain titles while others do. There’s no standard just yet, so it’s a bit of a crap shoot.

What’s the Benefit of Movie Download Services?

Convenience! Forget long lines at the theater, the video store being out of a new release, or waiting in virtual queue to get your mailed DVD through a subscription service. No more concern about court cases and legal fees for downloading movies illegally or spyware from file sharing applications that will slow down your computer if not cripple it beyond repair. Then, of course, there’s the fact that you can watch the newest movies as many times as you like on your personal computer and instantly upon purchase no waiting and no driving to the store.

What’s the Downside of Movie Download Services?

At the moment, cost and restricted viewing access. You may not necessarily want to watch a movie on your computer when you just invested $2000 in a big screen HDTV. And you may not want to invest $20 in a movie that you can’t even resell online if you don’t like it. If you have a slow internet connection, the download time may be a bummer, too, especially if you’re trying to use your computer for other things while the process slows your computer to a painful snail pace. And if you use a Mac, well, obviously, the downside is that movie download services simply dont exist. Then, what if a virus infects the computer where all your movies are stored? Yup. Have to buy them all over again.

Movie Download Services Yay or Nay?

The state of affairs being what they are – that is, in their ugly braces and zits prepubescent stage – probably nay. Remember the first BETA machines? Or the $700 CD players back in the ’80s? When movie download service lowers their prices and speed up the technology, allow for actual DVD burnings that include the extras and TV viewings as well as access to films that are still in theaters, then yay! In the meantime, sticking with higher quality DVDs that don’t discriminate against Mac users and big screen television sets and allow for resale later on. Unless you have to see the movie This Very Second, movie download services are not yet the incredible service they have the potential to be in the future.

If you are short on the funds for your Friday night date with your girl, all you need to do is to get creative. One good idea for a fun date on a Friday night is to go on a movie marathon of your girls favorite chick flicks.

In case you have been living under a rock for most of your life, you would know that a chick flick is a movie with a storyline that appeals to women and deals with issues and relationships that women often relate to. A chick flick can either be a comedy or a tearjerker. Some have a bit of action in it, but the action stuff that is typical of guy movies is rare in chick flicks.

Are you sold on the idea of going on a marathon of chick flicks with your chick, but you do not have a clue on what movies to put together for the marathon? Here are a few suggested titles of good chick flicks.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s

This Audrey Hepburn movie, widely acclaimed and widely considered to be one of the classics of 20th century cinema, simply appeals to women on many different levels. On one level is the stylish elegance of Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly in her little black dress, jewels and reed-thin cigarette holder. On another level is the complicated attraction and relationship between Holly Golightly and her author neighbor Paul Varjak. On yet another level is the haunting song Moon River, composed by Henri Mancini and sung by Audrey Hepburn herself. What about this movie does not scream chick flick?

Bridget Jones’ Diary

Bridget Jones’ Diary puts a hilarious spin to the woe of some women who have reached the age of thirty-something with a lot of hang-ups, including having yet to find someone to have a stable relationship with that can become a long-term one. The heroine in this funny British chick flick is the frustrated Bridget Jones, played by Renee Zellweger, who had a highly sexual relationship with her boss Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), which ended in heartbreak. Into her life comes Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), a human-rights barrister who is Bridgets mothers choice to be Bridgets husband. At the center of it all is the diary into which Bridget pours all her anger, irritations, insults and frustrations.

Pretty Woman

A modern take on the classic Cinderella story, this movie tells the tale of a golden-hearted, street-smart Hollywood hooker named Vivian Ward, who is actually a diamond in the rough. She meets a lonely but extremely wealthy businessman Edward Lewis, who hires her to be his arm candy for the various social functions he needed to attend while he was in town. They discover each other, fall in love and act as each others savior. watchmoviesonlinefree18+ Starring the chick flick staple Julia Roberts and the delicious Richard Gere, this movie is a top favorite for chick flick marathons.

Sense and Sensibility

Any movie made out of a Jane Austen book almost always gets the chick flick label. A prime example is the 1995 film adaptation of Sense and Sensibility, starring Emma Thompson as Elinor Dashwood and Kate Winslet as Elinors sister Marianne. The hopes, dreams and struggles that these two Dashwood sisters went through as dramatized in this movie is something that all women can relate to.

Somethings Gotta Give

This movie is quite unusual in the sense that the protagonists are both sagging middle-aged people when most chick flick couples are often young, firm and beautiful. Nonetheless, Somethings Gotta Give is a very endearing movie. This film stars Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson as two aging people who had to deal with relationship insecurities in order to finally be together.

Thelma and Louise

Who could best help a girl get out of her fun other than her girlfriends? Who else would stick with her through the best of times and the worst of times, regardless of whatever circumstances they may be in? The answer: her girlfriends. Thelma and Louise is the chick flick that celebrates female friendship come hell or high water. It stars Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon, and is popular for being Brad Pitts first major Hollywood role.

When Harry Met Sally

Whoever said that men and women can never be great friends? Whoever said that this friendship always has to end when sex comes into the picture? When Harry Met Sally is one of the best chick flicks ever made. It is a romantic comedy starring Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, and it is probably known best for the deli scene where Meg Ryans character demonstrated a fake orgasm.

Guys, you do not have to worry about lack of cash just to score a great date with your girl on Friday night. You can just buy or rent copies of these chick flicks, prepare tubs of popcorn and packs of tissue, and enjoy the movies.

It is easy to confuse the concepts freehdmovies2020online of “virtual reality” and a “computerized model of reality (simulation)”. The former is a self-contained Universe, replete with its “laws of physics” and “logic”. It can bear resemblance to the real world or not. It can be consistent or not. It can interact with the real world or not. In short, it is an arbitrary environment. In contrast, a model of reality must have a direct and strong relationship to the world. It must obey the rules of physics and of logic. The absence of such a relationship renders it meaningless. A flight simulator is not much good in a world without airplanes or if it ignores the laws of nature. A technical analysis program is useless without a stock exchange or if its mathematically erroneous.

Yet, the two concepts are often confused because they are both mediated by and reside on computers. The computer is a self-contained (though not closed) Universe. It incorporates the hardware, the data and the instructions for the manipulation of the data (software). It is, therefore, by definition, a virtual reality. It is versatile and can correlate its reality with the world outside. But it can also refrain from doing so. This is the ominous “what if” in artificial intelligence (AI). What if a computer were to refuse to correlate its internal (virtual) reality with the reality of its makers? What if it were to impose its own reality on us and make it the privileged one?

In the visually tantalizing movie, “The Matrix”, a breed of AI computers takes over the world. It harvests human embryos in laboratories called “fields”. It then feeds them through grim looking tubes and keeps them immersed in gelatinous liquid in cocoons. This new “machine species” derives its energy needs from the electricity produced by the billions of human bodies thus preserved. A sophisticated, all-pervasive, computer program called “The Matrix” generates a “world” inhabited by the consciousness of the unfortunate human batteries. Ensconced in their shells, they see themselves walking, talking, working and making love. This is a tangible and olfactory phantasm masterfully created by the Matrix. Its computing power is mind boggling. It generates the minutest details and reams of data in a spectacularly successful effort to maintain the illusion.

A group of human miscreants succeeds to learn the secret of the Matrix. They form an underground and live aboard a ship, loosely communicating with a halcyon city called “Zion”, the last bastion of resistance. In one of the scenes, Cypher, one of the rebels defects. Over a glass of (illusory) rubicund wine and (spectral) juicy steak, he poses the main dilemma of the movie. Is it better to live happily in a perfectly detailed delusion – or to survive unhappily but free of its hold?

The Matrix controls the minds of all the humans in the world. It is a bridge between them, they inter-connected through it. It makes them share the same sights, smells and textures. They remember. They compete. They make decisions. The Matrix is sufficiently complex to allow for this apparent lack of determinism and ubiquity of free will. The root question is: is there any difference between making decisions and feeling certain of making them (not having made them)? If one is unaware of the existence of the Matrix, the answer is no. From the inside, as a part of the Matrix, making decisions and appearing to be making them are identical states. Only an outside observer – one who in possession of full information regarding both the Matrix and the humans – can tell the difference.

Moreover, if the Matrix were a computer program of infinite complexity, no observer (finite or infinite) would have been able to say with any certainty whose a decision was – the Matrix’s or the human’s. And because the Matrix, for all intents and purposes, is infinite compared to the mind of any single, tube-nourished, individual – it is safe to say that the states of “making a decision” and “appearing to be making a decision” are subjectively indistinguishable. No individual within the Matrix would be able to tell the difference. His or her life would seem to him or her as real as ours are to us. The Matrix may be deterministic – but this determinism is inaccessible to individual minds because of the complexity involved. When faced with a trillion deterministic paths, one would be justified to feel that he exercised free, unconstrained will in choosing one of them. Free will and determinism are indistinguishable at a certain level of complexity.

Yet, we KNOW that the Matrix is different to our world. It is NOT the same. This is an intuitive kind of knowledge, for sure, but this does not detract from its firmness. If there is no subjective difference between the Matrix and our Universe, there must be an objective one. Another key sentence is uttered by Morpheus, the leader of the rebels. He says to “The Chosen One” (the Messiah) that it is really the year 2199, though the Matrix gives the impression that it is 1999.

This is where the Matrix and reality diverge. Though a human who would experience both would find them indistinguishable – objectively they are different. In one of them (the Matrix), people have no objective TIME (though the Matrix might have it). The other (reality) is governed by it.

Under the spell of the Matrix, people feel as though time goes by. They have functioning watches. The sun rises and sets. Seasons change. They grow old and die. This is not entirely an illusion. Their bodies do decay and die, as ours do. They are not exempt from the laws of nature. But their AWARENESS of time is computer generated. The Matrix is sufficiently sophisticated and knowledgeable to maintain a close correlation between the physical state of the human (his health and age) and his consciousness of the passage of time. The basic rules of time – for instance, its asymmetry – are part of the program.

But this is precisely it. Time in the minds of these people is program-generated, not reality-induced. It is not the derivative of change and irreversible (thermodynamic and other) processes OUT THERE. Their minds are part of a computer program and the computer program is a part of their minds. Their bodies are static, degenerating in their protective nests. Nothing happens to them except in their minds. They have no physical effect on the world. They effect no change. These things set the Matrix and reality apart.

To “qualify” as reality a two-way interaction must occur. One flow of data is when reality influences the minds of people (as does the Matrix). The obverse, but equally necessary, type of data flow is when people know reality and influence it. The Matrix triggers a time sensation in people the same way that the Universe triggers a time sensation in us. Something does happen OUT THERE and it is called the Matrix. In this sense, the Matrix is real, it is the reality of these humans. It maintains the requirement of the first type of flow of data. But it fails the second test: people do not know that it exists or any of its attributes, nor do they affect it irreversibly. They do not change the Matrix. Paradoxically, the rebels do affect the Matrix (they almost destroy it). In doing so, they make it REAL. It is their REALITY because they KNOW it and they irreversibly CHANGE it.

Applying this dual-track test, “virtual” reality IS a reality, albeit, at this stage, of a deterministic type. It affects our minds, we know that it exists and we affect it in return. Our choices and actions irreversibly alter the state of the system. This altered state, in turn, affects our minds. This interaction IS what we call “reality”. With the advent of stochastic and quantum virtual reality generators – the distinction between “real” and “virtual” will fade. The Matrix thus is not impossible. But that it is possible – does not make it real.

Appendix – God and Gdel

The second movie in the Matrix series – “The Matrix Reloaded” – culminates in an encounter between Neo (“The One”) and the architect of the Matrix (a thinly disguised God, white beard and all). The architect informs Neo that he is the sixth reincarnation of The One and that Zion, a shelter for those decoupled from the Matrix, has been destroyed before and is about to be demolished again.

The architect goes on to reveal that his attempts to render the Matrix “harmonious” (perfect) failed. He was, thus, forced to introduce an element of intuition into the equations to reflect the unpredictability and “grotesqueries” of human nature. This in-built error tends to accumulate over time and to threaten the very existence of the Matrix – hence the need to obliterate Zion, the seat of malcontents and rebels, periodically.

God appears to be unaware of the work of an important, though eccentric, Czech-Austrian mathematical logician, Kurt Gdel (1906-1978). A passing acquaintance with his two theorems would have saved the architect a lot of time.

Gdel’s First Incompleteness Theorem states that every consistent axiomatic logical system, sufficient to express arithmetic, contains true but unprovable (“not decidable”) sentences. In certain cases (when the system is omega-consistent), both said sentences and their negation are unprovable. The system is consistent and true – but not “complete” because not all its sentences can be decided as true or false by either being proved or by being refuted.

The Second Incompleteness Theorem is even more earth-shattering. It says that no consistent formal logical system can prove its own consistency. The system may be complete – but then we are unable to show, using its axioms and inference laws, that it is consistent

In other words, a computational system, like the Matrix, can either be complete and inconsistent – or consistent and incomplete. By trying to construct a system both complete and consistent, God has run afoul of Gdel’s theorem and made possible the third sequel, “Matrix Revolutions”.

Recipient of two Emmy nominations and varying critical watchfreehdmoviesonline acclaim, Oz is considered by many to be one of the greatest prison dramas ever devised. Created by former St. Elsewhere writer Tom Fontana, the show was one of a number of highly touted and commercially successful HBO original series created in the 1990s. Initially aired in the summer of 1997, Oz built a strong following of viewers addicted to its vivid depiction of American prison life and hypnotic voyeuristic window into the bad side of American life. Along with The Sopranos and Sex And The City, it rose to prominence as one of the top series on HBO…

The Oz (Season 2) DVD features a number of dramatic episodes including the season premiere “The Tip” in which Oz takes a rest following a deadly riot that left two officers and six prisoners dead. Governor James Devlin (Zeljko Ivanek) demands an answer to the riot’s cause, and he enlists Alvah Case (Charles S. Dutton) to investigate, promising him his support for state Attorney General. After a thorough investigation, he decides to look the other way in regard to Whittlesey and Ross’s cigarette operation and Ross’s subsequent murder, and he deems the riot a “no-fault” occurrence, incurring the wrath of Governor Devlin Other notable episodes from Season 2 include “Great Men” in which Kareem Said sees the opportunity to have his conviction overturned when the judge from his trial is admonished for accepting bribes, and “Escape from Oz” in which two prisoners are killed when an escape tunnel collapses, while Said turns down a pardon from the Governor, making him all the more popular in Oz

Below is a list of episodes included on the Oz (Season 2) DVD:

Episode 9 (The Tip) Air Date: 07-11-1998

Episode 10 (Ancient Tribes) Air Date: 07-20-1998

Episode 11 (Great Men) Air Date: 07-27-1998

Episode 12 (Losing Your Appeal) Air Date: 08-03-1998

Episode 13 (Family Bizness) Air Date: 08-10-1998

Episode 14 (Strange Bedfellows) Air Date: 08-17-1998

Episode 15 (Animal Farm) Air Date: 08-24-1998

Episode 16 (Escape from Oz) Air Date: 08-31-1998