I would take them at their word for that. If they made some sort of hyper real super pleasure heaven of pure bliss the tendency towards betterment would drive humans insane. Maybe once that failed there were just like 'these fuckers are a mess, just dupe back when they thought they were happy and call it good.'

The idiot is a machine!

Morpheus says the goop is made of dead humans. But they never mention reproduction.

This also means total biomass of humans i.e. pooulation must be decreasing but whatever. The brain network kind of makes energy source makes no sense, just go with it.

Where do they get new humans? Why do they keep the whole body?

Have you ever had a wet dream?

If you cum in the Matrix you cum in real life.

Warm vat of liquid goo doesn't sound so nice when it's recirculation community jizz (I mean, not to mention. I ain't judging.)

But like… we eat a LOT of calories a day to stay alive as a whole body I can’t imagine dead bodies being enough to feed us unless the population is going down a LOT. (Like a human body has maybe 2 years worth of calories)

I would say maybe less in a coma but those humans have fully developed bodies and muscles and all, so should be consuming about the same.

And yeah, extra processing power makes more sense than battery.

This has always been my theory. Some kind of inbuilt mechanism whereby they must trick themselves into thinking that what they are doing is somehow to our benefit, as in the first law of robotics by Isaac Asimov.

Yeah I could see like the machines having to keep humans alive so this is the way to keep them from killing themselves and also proving useful for some background processing power.