> So I'm still mystified by what the exciting ideas in Matrix are.
> Maybe I've assimilated those ideas too deeply to notice them.
The central idea to me was that it demonstrates that "artificial" or "illusory" sentience is in fact real sentience. Humans built machines that mimicked intelligence, only to discover that their intelligence was real and their motives were their own. In a proper dramatic turnabout, the artificial world these machines then created to keep the human minds active (regardless of the silly justification for this) itself became genuinely sentient, and capable of its own motives. The point was not that Neo was in fact a body in a vat; the point was that the "simulated" Neo was the real hero--more real in fact than the limited flesh version. His "escape" served only to inspire him to do his real work of hacking from the inside.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC