The Matrix

[WarBlade]

WarBlade:
> Go back to the beginning, to the unanswered question of the first film: Why does the system need
> an artificial construct for the the human minds to exist in. To the machine, the people are
> supposedly just batteries and yet the machine wants people to think and learn and make decisions.

The problem with the whole battery thing is you have to put more energy into the humans than you get out. It's the Second Law of Thermodynamics. I always just suspended disbelief on that point (after chuckling for a bit), but I read a very convincing explanation a week ago: Morpheus was lying or (more likely) flat-out wrong and the machines use humans, not as batteries, but as processors in a neural network for monitoring and controlling their very computationally demanding cold fusion reactors. There is an immense amount of highly parallel processing power available in the human brain which works exceptionally well for abstract pattern matching. Hardware like that might be necessary to control a fusion reaction without having it blow up in your face.

*chokes*

As reasons for using human brain power go, that one is abysmal! :blink: A fusion reaction strikes me as being something that would be a straight event and response computation. Something that programs of the caliber of agents should be able to handle. The processing power required to make the calculation to catch a flying baseball is a task better suited to human brains.

I'd even speculate that a large precentage of the human 'collective' might be needed to sustain the processing invloved in rendering the matrix. The question is still "Why?".

To actually answer your question, it's very possible that sensory deprived humans would die after a certain period of time, and it's even more likely that the higher functions of their brains would atrophy and become unusable.

I'm not so sure about sensory deprived people dying. People in today's world can spend extended periods of time in a coma on life support, the body can still be sustained after brain death and so on. "The higher functions of the brain" thing is a better bet, but that's a no-brainer. It only gives a an answer to how to keep the human minds sustained and lends nothing at all in the direction of why they are being sustained in the first place.