I Robot – random segments of code grouping together to form what we might call the beginning of sentience. Not programmed, or coded in, but a tangent that develops and takes its own path. Creating those ‘Ghosts in the Machine’ that was part of the whole premise of that film. But if you replace the idea of robots, with people, you could say that it how we develop thought and ideas. We are in groups, in new environments or finding ourselves under different conditions than we have been accustomed to. We change, we adapt and something else happens, that is not usually programmed in.

Matrix – Smith code, absorbed into the ‘body’ of Neo, when he expanded his consciousness and appeared to destroy Smith. And if you think of the characters as parts of one brain, as I now do and as discussed in A Matrix in Mind, then Smith ends up representing people generally, the average Joe, your ordinary self, any old Smith. You can’t be special and ‘The One’, if you believe you are just anyone or no-one.

DNA code – that special strand that hold the information for our entire make-up, the key to our design and programming they say. Reminds me of how they portrayed Superman in Man of Steel, that when he was sent to Earth, the ‘Codex’ for all the engineered people on his home world, was hidden in his DNA. Crossing into the idea perhaps put forward in Prometheus, of something being created, and a substance that seemed to disband and break apart DNA. We seem to spend much time trying to unravel what we are, from a physical perspective anyway.

Codex – the word comes from the Latin (as they all do) Caudex, which means the trunk of a tree or a block of wood. Funny, I as was only rethinking the other day about the wooden men of first creation apparently according to Mayan myth (currently in a work in progress follow-up article to Monkey Puzzle) book of laws / tree trunk

Safe – having a code to get in, the code meaning you can gain access to the valuables inside, whatever that may be. Perhaps that is actually what supercomputers get to work on, breaking that code which will allow access to something deemed valuable, the answer, the goal. To get to that all important number, 42.

And we also have made use of it to mean an agreed upon set of rules. Code of Honour being a good example.

Coding – for all the new-fangled tech, the AI, the systems, the future… apparently. And for a number of years, the tech people and job market couldn’t get enough of talking about coding. How it was the future of everything, send your kids to study it, it will be the job market of the future. That didn’t quite pan out, and only last year AI overtook all that and replaced people before they had even had time to get out there. Keeping the word active, but letting it change meanings and become part of ‘the machine’, which we see as separate from us. We are people, not machine. Yet, sometimes I think we are not so separate, with of their systems based on how life operates and functions, but processed into something mechanical and only based on the perception of what we think we are, for now. And people have likened some seemingly vacant types as NPCs, as if they are an extra side character within the game of life. My article Not Properly Coded took a look at those types, to see what it is that people think is missing in others to give them that label.

So, we follow the coded breadcrumbs, with twists and turns as the drama of humanity unfolds, as we try to get to The Heart of the Matter and understand our individual and collective purposes. Trying to see through the decoys and distractions, of which there are many, for a bit of clarity in amongst all the illusions and programming. There is much to mull over…

(c) MKW Publishing