Many years ago watching The Matrix there was a question about humans being ruled by machines and becoming their energy supply, so why should machines maintain a virtual world that human consciousness accesses?

作为一个文科生，我也只能不断在一些文本中寻求答案，但与《黑客帝国》的架构相似的文本并不多，它还真算是个比较特殊的脑洞。后来也读了《神经漫游者》，据说《黑客帝国》是受这本小说的影响，但直到读了《生命是什么》这本书才让我有点开窍。

先介绍一下《生命是什么》这本书，作者是奥地利物理学家埃尔温·薛定谔，该书是“第一推动”丛书中的一本，这是一套非常好的科普丛书，包括宇宙系列、物理系列、生命系列、综合系列四辑，由湖南科技出版社出版，今年出了25周年纪念版，都是世界名家名作，作为科普读物是非常好的，尤其对于学生而言，说不定就能打开一扇神奇的大门。

In this book it talks about humans growing through a genetic codebook precisely from generation to generation and also some mutations that make humans evolve in interrelationship with their environment, all these parts are written by the author in depth and cut from a physical point of view, which is not repeated here because it is mainly for the second half of the book, which is an important part of life - consciousness. The author basically moves into the realm of philosophy and religion here, and science and philosophy almost always get entangled in the face of such ultimate questions.

作者提到了柏拉图、康德、爱因斯坦、波耳兹曼的理论，如“经验是理念世界的影子”，“单一的思维或世界可以以其他形式出现”，狭义相对论“使我们从原来前与后那个无法打破的规则中解放了出来”，“一切事物的总的方向性可用力学或热血统计学理论来解释”。作者指出每一种理论对于我们认识意识的开创性意义，最后作者总结出一个“奇怪的情况”：

“一方面，我们对于周围世界的了解依赖于我们直接的感知，无论这些知识是来自日常生活，还是来自精心安排的困难实验；另一方面，这些知识无法揭示感知与外部世界的联系，为此，我们在科学发现基础上形成的对外部世界的认识或模式中没有任何关于感知的成分。”

The author argues that it is not with our venerated science, with its very precise and hungry methods, that one can figure out what "may never be known in itself", which is consciousness. Although the human body, a subtle structural body, allows us to observe the external world through our brain and body perceptions and to think and conclude scientific laws, we do not know exactly what and how the consciousness that contains these perceptions and sensations arises.

Back to The Matrix, a movie about artificial intelligence, which is a very hot word right now, and it's in the concepts of "consciousness" and "artificial intelligence" that I'm no longer confused about that question I had before, and I even think it's one of the best ideas of the movie.

Generally speaking, when we think of artificial intelligence, the easiest thing to think of is robots and bionic humans, such as Spielberg's "Artificial Intelligence" and "Blade Runner", which are all classics of artificial intelligence movies, in which the artificial intelligence has very specific carriers, through which the artificial intelligence has contact with humans and grows, and finally develops its own "personality", there is a common theme in such movies - "awakening", whether artificial intelligence is considered human or not, and whether there are equal human rights. In these movies, it's easy to feel that the AI is the protagonist himself, that it's David, that it's Deckard.

But in The Matrix no such character exists, in this movie the AI as villain has no specific image, thematrix, Cyberspace,are no entities, which or closer to the setting of the real AI. My original question was why maintain this Cyberspace, since people can survive without consciousness, and what does it matter if they are conscious or not since they are used as sustenance anyway. Why go out of your way to maintain a virtual living space for these feeders when artificial intelligence is already this powerful?

Now I realize that this Cyberspace is the real body of AI, those machines are just its carrier, it needs the machines to run to maintain the very virtual world, and those humans as sustenance provide the material energy on the one hand, and the mental stimulation on the other hand, as the necessary condition for the development of AI, without the existence of this part, AI is also dead, even if the machines run are empty shells without soul. Artificial intelligence is based on human thinking, and comes from human beings. Although it may be stronger than human thinking after it grows, its essence is not transcended.

The Neuromancer, completed in 1983, was author William Gibson's science fiction debut, but it won the Hugo and Nebula Awards and became a cyberpunk icon. The Matrix does have its influences, such as thematrix, Cyberspace and other concepts, but the world structured in this novel predates The Matrix, when humans and artificial consciousness are still in the coexistence stage, and humans can wire their consciousness to the network, as well as improve and replace their organs, body parts, etc. at will, and like the movie, AI and humans are two opposing, but not completely hostile, relationships.

This story is about an AI that doesn't want to be subjected to humans and through various means assembles a small team of humans to help it unlock its hardware and eventually gain control of itself. Interestingly, the author sets up the AI in two, designed by the original human designers, whose hosts are in Brazil and Switzerland, one called Wintermute, responsible for rational functions such as memory, thinking, analysis, decision making, etc., with no personality of his own, who is the main character in the story, and it is it that forms the team to break free. The other one is called Neuromancer, the sensual part of the person in charge, which can create its own personality, and Winter Silence is designed to break free and combine with it to form a full artificial intelligence. The designers originally designed it with the expectation that the two AIs would complete their fusion after each grew up, but because humans lean in the direction of rationality in their development, they have not successfully fused over the years, a setting that is indeed very interesting and has strong references to human development, as well as being very similar to the makeup of the human mind and full of philosophical musings.

最终小分队成功使两个人工智能融合了，融合之后，小分队的成员退回到了真实世界，而那个成熟的人工智能会怎样呢，书中未表，但我们很容易想到，它或许就进化成黑客帝国里的那样了。

This novel by William Gibson is very difficult to read, his language is broken and jumpy, his style is cold and hard, and there are supposedly a lot of self-invented words, and the translation is not very good, so you can imagine how it feels to read it, but there is a very good summary article on Douban (https://book.douban.com/review/5888121/) that is worth reading, and the following quote from the text gives a good indication of the kind of developmental tendencies described above.

"In Tessier's vision, since the matrix itself is already a vast construct of human minds interconnected by computers and networks, the most basic materials of consciousness and personality are already in place, and the networks for integrating and communicating these scattered materials exist, it is only necessary to design two artificial intelligences for the matrix with the capacity and processing power to integrate the materials of consciousness and personality respectively, and then encode constant and primitive data and instructions in the read-only memory (ROM) inside, from which they can begin all kinds of complex analysis, judgement and evolution until each develops its own ego and seeks to unite - and thus a collective consciousness and personality is formed."

I think this story idea is good because it shows a possibility of the construction and formation process of artificial intelligence, which is a good reference for our understanding of "consciousness". The Matrix, on the other hand, tells us more about what happens when AI takes control of humans, and it got me thinking about whether AI has to be linked to "people" and whether AI is still human consciousness when it matures.

Through these two texts, I have a clearer understanding of AI, and in turn it has prompted me to think more deeply about what consciousness is.

Consciousness arises from the human body, and much of this complex mechanism of generation has been deciphered by our science; consciousness is singular, and it represents almost the entire world in one's awareness. Humans are already developing artificial intelligence, which is an imitation of the human mind, but it clearly exists independently of humans because it does not require the human body as a carrier. So, as the mimetic body of consciousness can be externalized, can't consciousness also exist apart from the human body? It reminds me of that black stone in 2001 A Space Odyssey, the source of human intelligence that made monkeys into men, what is intelligence, how did it come about, what is consciousness, where does it come from, and where do people go after they die?

Small as we are, let's just take it as a pleasure to read, the books and movies mentioned in the article are very inspiring texts, of course there are many more like it about AI, maybe there will be some secret hidden in them that will make us discover what we really are?

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