Byteman Wrote:During the Clu sequence, we clearly hear Flynn and Clu converse back and forth. Flynn is typing and Clu is hearing it, Clu is talking and Flynn sees it as typing. There was nothing metaphorical about it, Flynn was really typing stuff like "You are dogged and relentless" "Keep that tank rolling".
Tell you what, why don't you explain what command "You are dogged and relentless" is supposed to metaphorically represent?
LOAD"ENCOURAGEMENT",8,1
Probably not. |
You're still coming at it too literal-mindedly. Flynn's sitting in front of his computer, typing in commands while he mentally urges his program on. I think we've
all done the "come on, baby, I know you can do it" thing when dealing with computers or other machinery at some point in our lives - it's something everyone can relate to. And then the perspective flips, and we see how that appears to a program on the other side of the screen. To
them, it's the voice of their User urging them on, both the literal program commands and the User's desire, the feeling behind them, coming through in the form of speech.
The only program we actually see
conversing with people in the real world, in a natural-language sense, is the MCP. Since the MCP's established as a real deal AI early on in the film, he's the obvious exception. If we had actually seen Clu and Flynn carrying on a conversation
in the real world, from
Flynn's POV, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But we don't. In fact, the filmmakers made a
point of cutting from Flynn's POV to Clu's in order to show the audience, "When a computer user does X in the real world, the program he's using perceives this as Y."
Byteman Wrote:I never said the computer world was in one arcade cabinet.
It's not the real world, using real 1980's tech as a yardstick isn't applicable.
Actually it's what anyone would have seen from the inside...not just Flynn. |
And here's where I'm going to get a little meta about things.
The original Tron was a movie about computers. It was made during the heady days of the personal computer revolution, when personal computers and videogames were still new. But more importantly, it was a movie about
our computers. It made us wonder what sort of things were taking place behind the screens of
our computers, and imagine the adventures the programs
we wrote were experiencing when we ran them. That made the film resonate with people more deeply than it ever would have otherwise. I believe that was the intent of the filmmakers, and that Tron was meant to be taken as metaphorical
for precisely that reason.
Your interpretation of the film strips it of that emotional resonance. It relies on the movie taking place in some early-80's alternate universe where the computers are
special, different from our own in a way that makes it possible for them to
literally host Matrix-type universes filled with simulated life. Where a gamer and hotshot programmer like Flynn - things every computerist could relate to back in the early 80's, since writing your own programs was still a huge part of the experience - isn't just a bright guy doing stuff that we could all realistically aspire to doing ourselves, but some sort of uber-programmer who creates a
sentient AI just to hack his former employer's mainframe. It's an interpretation that makes the movie less relatable. It's also weirdly, doggedly literal-minded on your part, which is the part I'm having the hardest time with. Did a metaphor run over your dog or something?
| Byteman Wrote:How convenient for you, you just get to write-off evidence that proves your whole metaphorical/mind-projection argument dead-wrong. |
I have a difficult time giving your evidence much weight, to be honest. You're trying to hang an argument on the cabinet art of an arcade game prop in the movie, which generally falls under the heading of "incidental details". (Not to mention "grasping at straws".)
| Byteman Wrote:The Space Paranoid machine, and gameplay proves my point. Likewise, every single scene of the computer world, before Flynn arrives, just puts more evidence in my camp. There was no-one in the computer to "project" the programs into a "dimensional" being in those cases. |
You seem to be confusing "metaphor" with "Flynn's subjective experience". The "computer world" and everything within it is a metaphorical representation of data and processes taking place within our computers and videogames. It existed before Flynn was transported there, and persists after he leaves - that much we both agree on. It takes its iconography from a number of different places - objects from the games we play, anthropormorphic representations of programs who look and sound like the people who wrote them, and other imagery - glowing lights, synthetic sounds, patterns resembling circuitry - that people in the real world associate with computer- and digital themes. It was never just Flynn's personal fantasy - it's an abstract representation of the inner workings of our computers,
humanity's collective mental image of the digital universe it has unknowingly created.
| Byteman Wrote:His very first comment wasn't "Where am I?", it was "This isn't happening, it only thinks it is". This is a sign of skepticism, not curiosity. He knew MCP put him on the game grid, just like the MCP told him it would...he just had trouble believing that the MCP could do that. |
"This isn't happening. It only thinks it's happening," is no different than Flynn saying, "Man, I must be dreaming. This can't be real."
Have you ever had a lucid dream? One that was so vivid it felt almost real, but you still
knew you were dreaming, and could even affect things within the dream when you tried? Looking at things from Flynn's point of view, I can easily imagine him rationalizing the experience that way - maybe he nodded off in front of the terminal and is just dreaming. The things he sees within the computer are pretty consistent with that, too - people he knows in the real world, but distorted in ways we see in dreams (the former co-worker who ripped off his games and had him sacked shows up as a tyrannical despot, his straight-arrow friend is a virtuous hero, the Master Control Program is an evil column of light the size of a mountain
with a face), objects and images from the games he's written, and beautiful, trippy imagery, all jumbled together. And feats of "User power" like reassembling the Recognizer are
classic lucid dream stuff.
I'm inclined to think Flynn just didn't believe any of it was really happening, at least not right after he arrived. Like a person unexpectedly finding himself in a dream, he just went along with things at first, taking an attitude of "let's ride this out and see where it goes". Fortunately for him, he began taking things more seriously in time to avoid getting himself derezzed.
| Byteman Wrote:It means that the Game-grid existed as an internal cyberspace structure, before Flynn got there. The MCP threatened to put him on the Game-grid, and it did. It threatened to put him in a place that you claim couldn't even exist until Flynn got there, because of your totally unproven "it's all an interpretation from Flynn's head argument". |
The Game Grid was only an "internal cyberspace structure" in the sense that
any computer system is. Viewed from a program's-eye perspective - a metaphorical view of computers "from the inside" that can be applied to
any computer,
not just some hypothetical Matrix-y supercomputer running a sophisticated holodeck simulation - its internal memory and storage media would appear as physical spaces, and the data and programs within it as people and things. Scanning Flynn broke his body down into its component particles and created a digital template of him within the mainframe, bringing him "inside". Once "inside", the digital world appeared to him the way it did
because that's the way it looks from the "inside". An I/O Tower looks like an I/O Tower there in the same way that a mountain looks like a mountain in our world. Its appearance reflects its function, and arguably the programming style of the coder who wrote it. Some guy at Encom didn't sit down and design it
as a building in a CAD system, then plunk the resulting 3D model down on a map of a virtual city like someone building an MMO world. It just
is.
| Byteman Wrote:I said that the technology in the Tron world is not 1:1 with reality and tech seen on-screen beats what we had in the real 80's. Please refrain from exaggerating that statement. As far as I saw, the arcade machine was host to TWO programs fighting each other in a Lightcycle arena. One was Sark. BTW, this proves that Tron universe arcade machines are either networked with the MCP, or direct terminals. |
I'd argue what it
really proves is that more than one copy of a program can exist, and that the whole point of the scene was to show the audience that what we see as just arcade games in our world are actually battles to the death from a program's point of view.
Not that all Light Cycles coin-ops are magically linked to a dedicated server at Encom HQ back in the age of the 300 baud modem.
| Byteman Wrote:Since they were able to digitize and store the information of a whole Human being, including memories, something we cannot do today. Then yes, it is BLATANTLY obvious that Tron universe tech is FAR FAR ahead of what we had in the 80's, and probably even today. |
I have no problem with the idea of a major corporation like Encom having some heavy-duty hardware on its corporate network, especially when you take the digitization project into account. I can accept the idea of
one sufficiently advanced program, possibly borderline AI to begin with, running on that network spontaneously bootstrapping itself to full sentience. We saw that with the MCP. I see
no evidence that Encom deliberately created some sort of cyberspace world within that system, which people apparently knew about (at least according to you, with your "evidence" being the MCP tower on the cabinet art of a game machine and Flynn's supposed lack of curiosity when he was transported), but no one
ever actually references in-universe. Not
once. No talk of 'that cyberworld project we've working on', nothing. And if it was the intent of the filmmakers for the film to have been taken that way, I am
positive that there would have been a mention of it. Hell, they gave us an onscreen explanation of how the laser worked in the first one - the screenplay was good about details like that.
Byteman Wrote:You only find your "metaphor" solution more palatable because it's YOUR idea. You don't want to admit that your "this is what real technology is like, and those limits are imposed upon a fantasy world argument" is invalid.
Your argument is like saying, the Muppets cannot be "real" (within the muppet universe), because real frogs and bears don't talk. |
No, I find my interpretation more palatable because it
makes more sense. It doesn't require me to accept full-fledged AI agents running on somebody's home computer in the 80's, or the existence of a full-fledged virtual world simulation running on the Encom servers that seems to serve no practical purpose whatsoever. It also doesn't undermine the core concept of
a digital universe within the computers we use every day. It's a big part of the original's charm, and your interpretation - alternate 80's technology, Encom's servers being somehow "special" - doesn't leave much room for that.
| Byteman Wrote:Yeah, first of all..your whole "it's just a metaphor world" argument is a HUGE assumption. There is NOTHING on screen in the movie that says "The digital world is just a psychological metaphorical projection of data, by a Human consciousness in cyberspace" or anything like it, so it's not only an assumption...it's based on NOTHING within the movies themselves. You have no place trying to criticize others for using assumptions. Second, what I said is not an assumption...everything I conclude is based on what I see in the movie. |
As explanations go, the idea of a metaphorical digital realm that exists as a reflection of what's going on within our computers and electronic devices is easier to justify than the alternative you're suggesting, given the evidence we have to work with.
What I took issue with was you declaring your assumptions to be FACT, as you put it. There's a definite difference. And I disagree with a number of the conclusions you've drawn so far.
Byteman Wrote:Anyways, the fact that there are clouds, gravity, water, pressure, even Solar winds. Proves that the first Tron world simulates the reality in many ways.
Also, you are trying to limit a fantasy-world to real world limits again. The fact is, in the Tron world if they can store an Orange, they can program for atomic or perhaps subatomic structures. After all, they figured out the "language" to translate it from organic matter to digitized information. Our real life inability to do this is irrelevant. |
The problem isn't how, it's
why.
One of the hallmarks of good science fiction is
verisimilitude. The fictional world doesn't need to limit itself to what we know of science and technology today, but it needs to adhere to its own internal logic. The things people do in-universe should make sense, given what we know of human nature and the rules of whatever special technology exists there. This is particularly true when you're talking about fiction set in the real world. We
know how our world works, so you have to try to keep things consistent with what people will reasonably expect, and work out the implications of whatever new science or technology you're introducing in the setting.
So: A major corporation isn't going to create a virtual world simulation without a very good reason. It's reasonable to believe that such an undertaking would involve a great deal of time and money on their part, and they're going to expect a return on their investment. Yet nothing we see inside Encom's system suggests that those programs, if they
are actually all AI's as you assume, are doing anything to justify the added expense. Arguably the most advanced thing we see is the solar sailer simulation, and modeling spacecraft physics is something we were already able to do back in the 80's. We didn't need a digitizing laser to transport us into a living holodeck world of sentient software to do it, either.
Simulating an entire mini-universe down to the subatomic level would be orders of magnitude more involved. Even if we assume that the hardware is somehow capable of handling the load, you're still talking about far more data and calculations. And what would this gain us from a practical standpoint? If your goal is to simulate the behavior of physical objects under specific conditions (like, say, how the solar sailer would perform in a deep space environment, for example), you could obtain virtually the same results using a traditional simulation that treats those things as abstractions. That means using less system resources, which means the same system could run more simulations simultaneously, or run through current simulations more quickly, both of which would stand to bring in more money for a company.
I've thought of a way to rationalize the whole issue of missing particle templates and program-to-real-world conversion in Flynn's system - I touched on that in another thread here - but it still doesn't explain why
Encom would have ever deliberately built a system like that in the first place, one that seems to do nothing but act as a program meet-and-greet/3D virtualizer.
It's not that I can't believe in the tech. It's that companies don't build things without a reason. If there's one thing that can shoot a viewer's suspension of disbelief to hell and gone, it's expecting them to accept that something was created in-universe for no better reason than to serve as a plot device.
| Byteman Wrote:The programs can directly interact with Flynn in the computer world, that means they are an equivalent form where it counts. What was that show, a guy says "A difference, that makes no difference, is no difference". That applies here. Just because the programs were programmed, and the user is digitized from organic matter, doesn't mean they both cannot survive in both the real world and the Tron world. |
We're working from different assumptions here.
My take on it is that we only see programs interacting with Flynn like people because that's how they're represented at the (for lack of a better term) level of reality he's interacting with them on. From the point of view of an ordinary person in the real world, they're just regular, garden-variety computer programs, running on ordinary computers. That's it. They're not AI's, they're not intentionally-crafted digital personae, they're merely "clusters of information moving through the computer", just viewed from a vastly different perspective.
Like I said before, I can come up with some ways to rationalize these things in the context of Legacy. (Though given how adversarial you've been in your posts, I doubt you're really interested in listening to me talk about any of that.) It's when you try to bring the first film into the equation that the issues become more headache-inducing.
Byteman Wrote:If you allow?
You have no choice. It's a fantasy world, they obviously have MUCH better tech then we did and still do in some ways.
It's funny, you can accept that they have an advanced AI, and can digitize a Human into the computer world...however you choose to interpret that. But you cannot accept that they may have superior hardware or programming techniques. |
You're still not getting it, are you? I can accept that a major corporation has some advanced prototype hardware that's capable of exceptional things. I can accept a matter-digitizing laser in that context, and a sentient AI running the corporate network as the movie's Big Bad. But the rest of the Tron world still looks like the 80's. It's
meant to look like the 80's. Not "a look into an alternate 1980's, where computers in general are vastly more powerful than anything we had at the time," but
our 80's. That means no bedroom coders writing sentient AI's to run on their ultra-powerful alternate-Earth Commodore PETs in between rounds of Space Paranoids.
(And if the hardware in the Tron universe is so advanced compared to our own, why is it that the most visually sophisticated games we see in the real world in Tron are what amount to a flat-shaded version of Battlezone and Snake with motorcycles?)
| Byteman Wrote:What if I told you that Bit, shows signs of being a Qubit. Interestingly enough, about a decade before anyone proposed such a thing in the real world. |
I'd say show me its superposition state.
Byteman Wrote:Yes, that is what it means in reality.
In the Tron world, they can take a digitally stored structure and make it real.
You think it matters that the orange was real in the first place? It does not.
If they can perfectly express organics as digital information, then they can also "make" something from scratch digitally and make it organic. |
There's a
huge difference between rebuilding something from a blueprint you've made and creating an entirely new blueprint from scratch.
Think of it this way: We've got a digitizing laser that can break down matter into its constituent particles, recording their positions and states as it goes. Using that recording, it can then reassemble those particles into the object at a remote destination. We don't need to know the first thing about designing objects down to the subatomic level from scratch to make it work - we just point, shoot, and boom! Teleportation. Being able to do the first doesn't automatically imply that we can do the second.
Byteman Wrote:As far as this computer power argument you keep bringing up, they had enough storage space for the pattern and memories of a whole Human being down to his subatomic particles and their positions. Do I even need to explain that we don't have that much computing power in the real world...right now?
Sure, we could store a whole gene sequence. But we cannot store the position of every single particle in a body, or a lifetime of memories. They can in the Tron world, you are just in denial about the obvious levels of technology they demonstrated.
Just to drive my point home...
The Human brain is estimated to hold anywhere from 500 Terabytes to 1000 Terabytes, if every neuron operates as a single bit. If the brain stores information on the molecular level then it rises to 3.6 x 10 to the 19th power bytes. A smart guy like Flynn would probably be on the high side of those figures, and he got stored no problem.
Just one single DNA molecule is about 750mb of data, when expressed as the letters GTCA.
How many DNA molecules does the Human body contain?
Care to guess if we could actually do that in the 1980's? |
Repeating myself here again, but my issue isn't with the idea of a major multinational corporation in the 80's having the hardware necessary to digitize
a person, and for the corporate network this system is on to host
one fully-sentient AI, which I'm inclined to believe would take a large chunk of its available resources. No weird assumptions about the rest of the world required to make the movie work - everyone else in the movie is using the same old computers we see every day. It's when you start making sweeping assumptions about how much better the computer tech is in the Tron universe overall, despite the fact that we see no evidence of this in everyday life there, that I have a problem with it.
| Byteman Wrote:I guess simple curiosity has me, but really would it be genuine? |
SR's mythology bible for Legacy? Working out how things are supposed to function in fictional universes is a big part of their job, and the mythology bibles are there to serve as references for writers working on associated properties. So outside of something appearing in a future sequel, I figure that's about as canon as it gets.
Byteman Wrote:
Quorra did not age, Flynn did.
Both can survive in the real world.
This implies that ISO's could give Humanity immortality.
Again though, the ISO's themselves. A whole topic, easily. |
No program in the system aged, as far as I know. So I wouldn't automatically assume Quorra's agelessness is a function of her being an Iso, or that the fact that she's in the real world now means this is somehow applicable to humans as well. Then again, I found it kind of ridiculous that Flynn had aged in the first place, another idea that must have looked good on paper but is hard to rationalize to my satisfaction (and many others', even if you have no problem with it).
Like I said before, it sounds like a good topic, so I think you should go for it.
Byteman Wrote:Foreshadowing his athleticism makes his efforts on The Grid more believable for the general audience. Whether or not you prefer using that time otherwise, that is the reason. Sam gets plenty of time to shine, not only with his decisive victory over Encom and it's OS12 release, his disc war battles (except Rinzler, well...Rinzler didn't kill him so that's gotta be worth something), and his rescue of Quorra in The Rectifier.
Also, I think you are confusing protagonist and hero. Most of the time, they turn out to be the same thing...but it's not so cut and dry with the Tron movies.
For instance, whose the hero in Tron...Kevin Flynn or Tron?
Kevin Flynn distracts the MCP by sacrificing himself and jumping in, but Tron wins it by actually destroying the MCP with his disc.
Whose the hero in Legacy...Sam, Quorra, or Flynn?
Why do you think Sam should be the protagonist and hero in Legacy?
What about Quorra constantly rescuing him, doesn't that make her the hero?
What about Kevin Flynn's sacrifice at the end? |
Sam's our viewpoint character, the one we're intended to empathize with. We're following him on his journey to find (and ultimately reconcile with) his father - their relationship was interrupted by Flynn's disappearance, and he reunites with him and finds closure - and his transition from arrested boyhood to finally coming of age as a man. You make some good points, but I still feel that the film would have benefited from that particular scene. Apparently the writers and director felt the same way, since the scene in question
was written and storyboarded, and the only reason it wasn't shot was (IIRC) due to the tight shooting schedule.
| Byteman Wrote:If that happened, then I think Tron would definitely die when the explosion happens. |
Depends on how it was written. As things stand now, though, I'm going to be pretty irritated if we don't get a proper sequel following on the end of Legacy. It's good to know we'll be seeing more of Tron in the animated series, but I would rather his fate not be left on some sort of indefinite cliffhanger.