son of a bitch. i don't know why all the quotation marks in the last post turned into boxes. sorry. i'm not going to go through and edit each one, though. here's another cool post from that website:

(by the way, i absolutely detest the matrix within a matrix theory. sure, that could be true, but how incredibly lame would it be? i give the wachowski brothers more credit than that)

In the scene where Neo meets the Architect of the matrix, we see Neo in front of a wall full of TV monitors. Each monitor displays an image of Neo himself, and each image shows a bank of monitors behind Neo, forming an infinite regress. At first each image of Neo looks identical, but later when the architect makes statements, we see the Neo images reacting in a variety of different ways.

This scene evokes the work of artists like M. C. Escher (link). (Escher, like the Matrix movies, featured many mirrors in his work -- compare Escher's reflecting sphere with Neo's reflection in the spoon in The Matrix.) Rene Magritte's work also comes to mind. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the image resembles the Buddhist/Hindu image known as the Net of Indra, which some consider an apt metaphor for cyberspace and the web:


"The Net of Indra is a profound and subtle metaphor for the structure of reality. Imagine a vast net; at each crossing point there is a jewel; each jewel is perfectly clear and reflects all the other jewels in the net, the way two mirrors placed opposite each other will reflect an image ad infinitum. The jewel in this metaphor stands for an individual being, or an individual consciousness, or a cell or an atom. Every jewel is intimately connected with all other jewels in the universe, and a change in one jewel means a change, however slight, in every other jewel." -- Stephen Mitchell, quoted here


Where do the images of the "other" Neos come from? Are they simulations, projections by the Matrix of how Neo might react? Are they recordings of things that happened in other versions or copies of the Matrix? Or are they views into alternate realities -- like the "many-worlds" theory of quantum physics -- superimposed on the current situation?

Consider the camera work in this scene. The camera moves from Neo to an image of Neo in the Bank of monitors, then zooms in on a single monitor until its picture fills the screen, and the scene continues with the viewer now observing that picture rather than the original room. This same camera movement occurs several times in the scene, so by the end of the scene we are several levels removed from the original room, watching an image of an image of an image. This serves as an important clue, hinting that we must consider multiple nested levels of representation/simulation -- the Zion world may be just as much of an illusion as the Matrix.

If we use the "many worlds" metaphor, then we first see possible futures for Neo, but don't know which one will "occur." When the camera picks a monitor and zooms in on it, we experience the "collapse of the wave function" subjectively, and so in our reality only one of those futures happens (though they all happen in some universe). But does this result from "choice" or "fate?" It seems that question is one of the central meditations of Reloaded.