The Emergent Matrix

Lately I've been perusing various books which analyze, criticize, or prostelitize The Matrix; this is my little way to both prepare for the release of the last movie & upcoming movie as well as still keep a finger in a philosophical pot (hard to do now that I'm years removed from graduate school). These books tend to be middling-okay to good, and right now I'm into a winner: Taking the Red Pill. Now one of the arguements against our "being" in the Matrix is the sheer amount of effort, information, and energy our digital oppressors would have to expend to create the Matrix; one author in the book Exploring the Matrix estimated that it would take the total energy output of a large star to encode a small city's worth of information. This got me thinking, however. All these arguements depend on the fact that The Matrix would have to simulate the world to a great degree of resolution, in order to fool the mind. But what if the mind was an unconcious conspirator in it's own enslavement?

Here's my thinking - there's all these folks hooked up to the Matrix power plant, right? And the machines are feeding a false illusionary world to this mass, right? So what if the machines only have to feed a small amount of info? What if the human minds themselves (out of a need to create order, sanity, what have you) create a consensual illusion based on limited clues fed by the machines? I mean, humans today in sensory deprivation tanks can begin to hallucinate vivid realities; the mind just gets bored and starts to make stuff up. And what are our nightly dreams but vivid illusions created solely by the mind? So the trick would be not to create the illusion world in great detail, but to simply give enough clues to convince the mind to create it for you. The other trick would be to get all the millions of separate minds to agree on the illusion somehow, and then just let the masses dream their dream, creating a group hallucination guided by your sparse inputs and controls.

Now since I'm not a philosopher, psychologist, or computer scientist, I'm sure there are many arguements against this idea of a consensual dream which emerges from the inactive minds of the imprisioned. Indeed, one problem would be that the machines must be molding the Matrix to follow the same rules as the "real" world - otherwise, why wouldn't everyone dream that they could fly like Neo (I know I've taken flight in a few pleasurable dreams)? And if there wasn't a strong correspondence between the illusion and the real, how would Neo know how to react and move when he awakens from his dream in his personal slime-pod? But still, I think the secret to building a Matrix (which I'm not suggesting, by the way) would be to create just enough and let the slaves fill in the mundane details (like the taste of food, the touch of fabric, the sky color, etc.) rather than dedicated piles of resources to controlling every aspect of the illusion. I mean, don't the machines have anything better to do?