Ay ay ayyyyy….

I just had another thought about the Encom system and how program consciousness works there

Wowww

So. First watch through of Tron 1982, I missed any attempt at explanation for just HOW these floppydisk sized programs ended up being capable of thought and emotion. Surely they couldn’t actually be complex enough to be true artificial intelligence. I mean one of them’s a compound interest calculator.

BUT I just sorta rolled with it and still enjoyed the movie.

Then, second watch through, I caught the Walter Gibbs line about “spirit,” and Dillinger dismissing it as “religious” discussion… suggesting that there’s a supernatural explanation for what happens with the energies of programmers and programs in the Encom system. (And suggesting that Gibbs has talked about it before, in detail… enough that Dillinger is sick of it and calls it out as soon as it comes up, dismissing it as weird spiritual woo-woo stuff.)

And I actually loved that interpretation, because it forms another parallel between Users and Programs. Gibbs has faith and reverence for some supernatural phenomenon within the computer system… just as his program, Dumont, enshrines his own User-belief in profound ritual. And arguably, at this point, it’s much bolder of Gibbs to believe in the Programs (or at least, in some force capable of forming them) than it is for the Programs to believe in the Users.

I’ve been writing all my fanfic in basically this headcanon. With the added detail that it’s specifically the ENCOM system that’s “haunted” by this spiritual energy– and programs elsewhere aren’t brought to life by it unless they’re uploaded into the Encom system….

In my headcanon, these uplifted programs from other companies have memories of events from before, in terms of factual detail… BUT since they didn’t have thoughts or feelings back then, they’ll either have no mental or emotional context to the memory…. or they’ll construct such context in the framework of how the program currently thinks and feels. (i.e. “great feeling” and “helping folks plan for future needs”)

But then, there’s the other interpretation– that the programs in the Encom system are actually just normal programs. All except for MCP, which really is a true artificial intelligence, and did digitize Kevin Flynn into the system… Where he ended up perceiving the Programs as if they were people, projecting his own ideas onto them…. because a human mind could never perceive that experience the way it really is; you’d HAVE to project something from your own mind in order to make any sense of it.

And I don’t like that headcanon… but I accept that it makes some sense in some ways….

Aaaand then, it occurred to me there’s at least one other possibility.

What if the programs ARE all intelligent, capable of human-level thought and feelings…. But they ONLY have that capacity because of the true AI of the MCP.

In this idea, my other headcanon about this being an Encom-only phenomenon could still hold true. Except the mechanism is different: When a non-sentient program is added to the Encom grid, it becomes connected to the same processing ability that permits the MCP to be conscious. There’s something in that processing that takes a program’s functions and, like, translates them into character traits of a living consciousness.

Each program becomes a sort of…. alternate personality within the MCP’s brain. And of course many of them are vastly different from MCP, vehemently opposed to the views of MCP’s main personality… but all of them are reliant on its processes in order to function as conscious entities.

In this headcanon, things could get pretty dark at the end of the movie.

Everyone’s rejoicing about having just destroyed the MCP….

And then the destruction of the MCP spreads all the way… the effect of what they did reaches their own processes… and, suddenly all that magic consciousness is gone, and Tron is just a knockoff Norton Antivirus.

Or, going a happier route… Alan figured out some of what was happening, and he made sure that his edits to Tron’s disc would destroy only the evil personality and leave the vital functions that keep everyone else alive.

In that case, Alan is the real hero of the movie and he DESERVES to get the truth from Flynn, plus an invite to a friggin party thrown in his honor inside that system.