matrix as story-complex

I posted this article a couple weeks ago on my livejournal, Through the Spaces Between, but thought it was pretty applicable to the topics I want to discuss in True Names, so I'm reposting it here.

While catching up on the Net, ever a source for unexpected connections, I stumbled upon an article posted on Posthuman Blues a most amusing article: "Why make a matrix? And why you might be in one". Like much talk of matrices following those unfortunate movies, this article only talks about matrices in the movies' technological terms of simulated realities, and neglects to mention the roots and use of the word and how that has played out in many cultures. Now, I don't claim to understand the finer points of the term matrix, especially as they are used in mathematics, but most obviously missing from all this buzz is the roots of the word matrix in the Latin mater, meaning mother. Merriam-Webster defines a matrix as essentially being something from which form emerges, the substrate or medium for information. In many cultures, the Earth is considered the Mother, in that we all are born from her and return to her and are essentially just rearrangements of her parts. We are embedded in the matrix of our planet. Another name for this mother figure is also Maya, illusion, the veil that creates our sense of reality. In my last entry I talked about 'the lines of the world,' how people and events cross over each other to bring meaning to our experience of reality and in a sense create the worlds we see. This is very akin to the idea of Indra's Net, that each thing is a jewel reflecting each other and all the other reflections. This net is woven of all the disparate elements and connects them together to become reality, in much the way that meaning is derived from a mathematical matrix by placing disparate numbers in line with each other. It is from their arrangement that sense is made, and it is from the net of the matrix placed over them, the network of connections between them, that they are arranged.

The author of the article states that we are most likely living in a matrix, in his terms, a simulated reality, but then goes on to say that we haven't yet created one due to a lack of the necessary technologies. I am inclined to agree that we are living in matrices, but that we have been ever since the earliest humans began trying to understand the world by looking at their experiences in relation to each other. I am of the opinion that every attempt at understanding and communicating our experiences is the telling of a story, the interpretation of events to fit a framework in which they make sense and that others might be able to understand. These stories are only maps and metaphors, they are descriptions created to help us fit reality into a comprehendable form and are created by tying together the disparate and sometimes seemingly unconnected events of our lives, the chaos (also a mother figure e.g:Tiamat) of impressions and feelings, into a personal(or localized) network of relations, a matrix. If the Earth (mother) is the medium of our world, and (as McLuhan propheticaly stated) the medium is the message, then the matrices we use to interpret our expereinces are in a sense giving birth to new realities: The medium is your mother (medium- something in between, means of conveying info, someone that channels information between worlds). And like mathematical matrices, these realities can be read in a multiple of ways depending on what lines you choose to interpret it; which is why we each seem to have our own set of understandings that oftentimes do not seem to correlate with each other. It all depends on which fliter you have placed over your perceptions.

Now, I would argue that in this sense we are indeed living in a collective matrix as well, in that there are a large set of beliefs societaly ingrained in our cultures that over time have come to form the framework through which as memebers of the society we are expected to see the world. Such as views on education, other countries, the necessity of money and war, etc... But as this matrix is collectively created individuals will often times find themselves at odd with it like round pegs in square holes, their own experiences of the world being rather different than what they have been told it should be. This creates conflict, either doubt on the individual of their expereinces or doubt of the societal framework as being a bit too unflexible in its perspectives, and can also result in the individual (and even the society) reevaluating their matrices in relation to conflicting information, broadening their view of the world. And when our experiences of the world do not fit our own matrices we can change either as well, looking at conflicting info only in light of our assumed views or allowing it to change those assumptions and show the world from a new angle. This strikes to the heart of Magick, that our worlds change by changing the ways we look at them; that if we try and understand things systematicaly the rules have to be flexible enough, anarchic enough, for our systems to actually work in a univese that is just too big and unknown to fit into any one particular theory or description or order (including this one).


No to go outside and do something visceral. I've been working on this blog all day, and the peculiar 60 degree weather we've been having is supposed to turn into snow at midnight.