[crabkin]

Society, culture, this hierarchal and quasi-performative game we play, where we take on roles and portend certain things which cycle on and off, is a matrix. Any situation I would think where there is a center and then merchants and then banks and then institutions suddenly starts by the constellation of these things generating a thing we call reality, a thing we call time. I sound schizo, but I am speaking about something I am not parroting, it is a realization. Try living in the desert for a few days or the some wilderness in general and then come back to suburbs and the city.

[Syonyk]

I would just call that "civilization." "In the matrix," to me, refers to a reference to The Matrix (movie from the 90s), in which humans are kept around as energy sources, with the entire world being a simulation generated by computers to keep their energy sources complacent. You seem to be using a rather different definition.

Can't stand suburbs and cities, though. I live rural and only leave the hill a few times a week.

[crabkin]

The thing is that the matrix as it is in the movie is allegorical, and for some reason I feel like you know that. I think there is a difference between knowing something and understanding something, right, and to me the realization that there is so much artifice, and not in a metaphorical sense I think, in a very tangible and I'd go so far as to argue certain sense, implicit with living in a society with culture. With universities, with arts, with expectations, with great-men, with money, and buildings, and other things, I just find words do not do justice to just how visceral having the realization is. I think reducing it to a pretty neutral, vanilla term like civilization just doesn't do it justice. It is the matrix, it's like a whole library of being in people's brains that we don't even recognize as simply a set of routines, habits, and biases, we think that's all there is. Sure, it may now be manifesting into something more quantifiable, but it's been with us for a long time.

[nextworddev]

Honestly it’s possible that we are all some LLM agents with fabricated egos and a sense of destiny

[joquarky]

I agree with your perspective on our social/cultural "matrix". It's amazing how much we take for granted and how deeply ingrained these constructs are in our everyday lives.

I used to gloss over the words representing "constructs" as I had used in my last sentence. I finally groked what was being referred to while listening to some lectures by Alan Watts during my recent sabbatical from burnout.

He was able to explain the differences between eastern and western philosophy in a way that made me see things in a completely different light. It was like waking up from the matrix.

Since then, I've been constantly aware of the constructed nature of reality and have had to re-evaluate many of my assumptions. For example, just learning that words are just abstractions and don't always accurately reflect reality was something I had never considered before. Now I try to be more careful with my word selection, but nobody's prefect :)

[crabkin]

Not sure if you're subtly being critical of my use of the word. However I do have something to add to your thought. Richard Feynman has a really interesting quote, I'm paraphrasing, but he says it's hard to learn some things initially because everything is named slightly wrong. At the time I was also reading some Wittgenstein and that got me thinking about words and what they correspond to. I really do think they simply just correspond to the multitude of contexts they exist in now. For instance, if you look up the definition of words, you get more words, and then for those words, other words. It's turtles all the way down, it's all circular. The only grounding is the situation where the noises are made and then consequences follow, that's what I think characterizes them, and so atomic words are meaningless, they only have any discernible meaning in time and place in configuration with certain other words and with certain people.

I think using a word like the matrix in a strict sense when it comes from a movie about just about all the evocative ideas in Western thought is ludicrous. It's pedanticism on steroids.

[ChatGTP]

It’s kind of true, I’ve spent many weeks in remote places at a time and it is certainly “weird” returning to society. Makes me want to go back.