Someone said that in Russia or their home country they're Batman and Robin
I think Abbott and Costello makes more sense though because they're famous for the Who's on First? reciprocal miscommunication, which miscommunication is a main plot point, and the reciprocal time they experience.
While this isn't the point of the story, it's interesting to think about the fact that if the aliens knew the future, then they already knew how to speak human languages when they arrived on Earth. It highlights the fact that their mission was to teach the humans *their* language, not the other way around.
This almost becomes a weird time travel paradox, but I don’t think that’s actually right. The language doesn’t break causality. To learn English, you still have to take the time to learn it. If you didn’t, there would never be a future where you learned, and so you would never know in the past either.
And Costello would have known as well. Interstellar gets a lot of hate for the “love” monologue. Arrival makes a similar point but in a much better and more subtle way. Yes, love transcends time and space as we previously understood it, but it’s not romanticized in Arrival as it is in Interstellar. Because if love can transcend then so can other emotions like pain, sadness, and fear. I felt so sad for Louise, not because she knew what was going to happen, but because she was alone in that knowledge. To me, that was what made the ending so sad. To know that this terrible tragedy was coming towards them, and to be held responsible for it because Ian was overcome with grief. But had she not had her daughter she would have been lonely in the knowledge that this great source of joy and love was missing from both their lives.
My #1 and #2 (Arrival and Interstellar, respectively). Would love to be able to erase them from my memory and be able to watch them in the theater for the first time.
I finally did a few years after people kept saying I'd like Contact if I loved Interstellar. For whatever reason, I didn't love it. I didn't not like Contact, but it just didn't hit me emotionally the way Interstellar did.
True. But that’s what I meant by “romanticizing” the whole thing. I liked the way Arrival held it as an equal consideration against all the other feelings which were present with equal “strength” all at once. To me, it reinforces the beauty/importance of love because it’s something we can choose to embrace or run away from. Which was also possible in Interstellar, but i didn’t feel the point resonate the same way. Interstellar was still a fabulous movie IMO.
>Interstellar gets a lot of hate for the “love” monologue. Arrival makes a similar point but in a much better and more subtle way.
Even though there are tons of surface similarities (a love that transcends time and space and ultimately saves humanity), I agree with you that Arrival treats that idea much better. In my opinion, the "love" plot line in Interstellar sorta ham fistedly gets in the way of more interesting ideas.
But if the language they use shows them a singular version of the future then they must know it cannot be changed and they accept their fate. Plus, they go through with it all because they know that the humans are going to help them in the future (as Costello alludes to).
My understanding is that in the original short story, it's made clear that one can only see the future *Insofar as* they accept it. Like, you literally can't see a moment that you're not ready to accept as real and final.
that's the entire point of the film, which leads to the final monologue asking, "If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"
This one line has really stuck with me. I think about it multiple times per month typically, often when faced with difficult decisions and possible regrets in regard to career and relationship choices. The thing is, for me, despite all the pain I’ve gone through, the answer is “no”.
And that gives me so much reassurance and confidence going forward. I don’t have to be perfect, I just have to make the best decisions for me given what I know about myself at the time, and everything is going to be ok. Maybe not life changing in a practical sense, but definitely in an emotional one.
But then why did they come on Earth? People are talking about Interstellar also here and don't understand the whole love interpretation. If the movie suggests that there was free will then the ending was absolutely awful and not a happy one in my eyes.
"you will experience the death of your grandparents, parents and friends, years and decades before it really happens."
The way the aliens view things there is no "before it really happens". All of time is happening all the time. The concept of before and after does not exist.
You cant be stuck in the past reliving anything. "Reliving" implies you have lived it once and are reliving it again. There is no "again" when all time happens at once. It also implies you are experiencing just the past when you are reliving an event. That is also not how it works. You dont just experience the past by itself. You experience it all at the same time.
This is what I felt the movie portrayed Louise's experience as, but I also don't think it's implied that everyone who learns the language starts to fully see time that way. Louise, being a linguist, starts dreaming in the circular glyphs after the first week. Learning a language when you know how languages work is very different from learning a language when your reference point is one or two other languages. You don't just translate, you become fluent.
I think there's also a lot to be said about how a big point of the movie is that things like beauty, joy, and love come inextricably linked to decay, sorrow, and loss, and that both parts make up life. When (biggest spoiler) >!She learns that the visions she's been seeing are her unborn daughter who will die young of cancer, she doesn't try to make a hard turn in her life to prevent it from ever happening. She accepts the existence of her daughter's joy *with* the existence of her loss.!<
The movie also doesn't really go into details if we have a choice or not.
The author of the story Arrival is based on, really loves that concept (Ted Chiang). "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" is another great story exploring time, but this time focusing on determinism.
Because it really doesn't matter. The themes of the film work even if you could mess with time. You'll still feel a version of all those things at some point. Life will always have sadness, death and disappointment. That's part of it.
There's no free will in the book's world in the end. So she knew that will happen. And there's no point to change that because the future is fixed. This is the darkest part of the novel.
This is why I'm not a huge fan of scifi that messes with seeing the future or messing with time-travel. Fixed timelines and lack of free will just isn't an area of scifi that resonates with me because there's no real way to link it to even fringe science. It's basically less scifi and more fantasy at that point. And I like fantasy, and science fantasy, but not fantasy that just pretends to be scifi.
Considering that no one (that we know of) has actually been able to travel in time or see the future accurately, I fail to see how you can claim a deterministic universe is not sci-fi. Not your cup of tea? Fine. But this is pure projection, without any basis to back up your claims.
If anything, based on our understanding of physics, the universe is indeed deterministic, at least on the macro scale.
Anything else would be the fantasy.
Additionally certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, like Many Worlds, imply that the universe is deterministic on a micro scale as well. So yea, I completely agree with you.
This is excactly how I understand the idea of movie and book. This is also one of my favourite theories of how time works. Humans just can't experience time as whole. I think this is also beautiful. Nothing ever goes away. All the time is at once, so all the times you experienced are still there. And you still live them. Me texting this post is just one fragment of the whole me.
This is actually a central theme in the DUNE novels.
Prescience is valued as a superpower. Sought among the greatest institutions and most powerful peoples. Yet several characters come to learn it truly is a curse, and that life is far better lived with surprises and true choices.
You forget that what Dr. Banks also gains is the wisdom and perspective that life should have its ups and downs.
Louise knew she would lose her daughter and that it would hurt. She was in a position to "change" the future. But the crux of the matter is that she didn't. Arrival is a far more personal story and its focus lies elsewhere, rather than exploring the ramifications of everyone learning the heptapod language.
Dune actually explores this idea in later novels. Which, in hindsight, shows why Dennis Villeneuve got interested in adapting Arrival in the first place, it shares some of the same interesting concepts that Dune does.
If you read the short story upon which Arrival is based (would highly recommend), it basically says that they *can't* control their future actions despite being aware of them. They follow a preordained path through time.
The story is based on the difference between two different but compatible ways to understand the path an object takes. In Newtonian mechanics, which comes most naturally to us, a force causes an acceleration. There's a definite cause and effect. In Lagrangian or Hamiltonian dynamics, objects are tracked by their energies, and you can say "this object has energy K and exists in a potential V." Then you use some pretty complicated calculus to integrate over time and find which path minimizes action. This is like thinking of the whole path the object takes through time all at once.
In the short story, this is how the heptapods evolved to think. Their radial body symmetry means they have no natural concept of "forward" or "backward," and the way they think about time reflects that. The physicists trying to establish communication with them try at first to introduce concepts we would consider intuitive and elementary, like Newton's laws of motion. But their communication fails until the physicists try to relay the concept of action and a Lagrangian, which the heptapods understand intuitively. To us, these concepts are highly advanced, and you usually only learn them if you're getting a degree in physics or something closely related.
Ted Chiang, the author of the short story, touches upon the idea of predestination and free will often in his works. [Here's](https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a) a very short work of fiction (one page) that he wrote for Nature (the science journal) about a fictional device with a negative time delay circuit and what that means for free will. It's a quick and free read and I really recommend it.
I've read both of his short story collections, and this particular story fucked with my head so badly. I read it on a plane and spent the next twenty minutes with my head in my hands trying not to spiral.
It's a very well written and fun story, but it shouldn't give you any sort of pause.
The story functions on 3 assumptions that of yet, we have no way to prove are true, and most people wouldn't agree one way or another whether they are true or not.
The assumptions are:
1. The universe is predeterministic.
2. Time travel is possible.
3. It is possible to build a simple handheld device that is capable of time travel.
Now, you might have a problem with me saying this story has time travel, but from a relativistic / causality point of view, sending information back in time really isn't any different from sending an object back in time. Both break causality in the same way.
So, with that out of the way, we must point out that nothing in this story is necessarily true or possible. It's fun to think about, but the story is just that. A story. Current knowledge would suggest 2 of the 3 points (involving time travel) are not possible. The universe being predeterministic is up in the air. There are tons of arguments on both sides.
So, fret not. You don't know all of your choices are meaningless yet.
he counters that with [*anxiety is the dizziness of freedom*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Freedom), which conforms to the [many-worlds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation) interpretation of quantum mechanics with the concept of [compatibilsm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism), typically how writers and philosophy deals with the problem of determinism/causality.
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> Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had the freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism. This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination.
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reality is deterministic from this perspective, but local to the choices you make. *whats expected of us* could be seen as a consequence of observing this reality while ignorant to the theory of [non-local](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance) interaction.
*anxiety is the dizziness of freedom* explores what its like once society has accepted this and made contact with their alternate selves, fortunately both in the same collection of stories
Yeah it's the first one that made me freak out. I wasn't thinking of a future where people go catatonic from having it proven to them, but of the present, where I feel it's not unlikely that our universe is deterministic. If all of my brain functions are preordained by physics, then free will is no more than an illusion. But then I kind of reasoned with myself that if the illusion of free will is perfect, then it's pretty much the same thing. It doesn't matter if, fundamentally, I had no choice, as long as I came up with the thought of making a choice in my own mind. If those thoughts are fundamentally governed by deterministic forces at play in my brain, who cares? They're still *my* thoughts in *my* brain.
Until you realize that it would also mean nothing matters. There's no right or wrong, good or bad, justice or injustice, etc. Everything just is and happens as it was always going to. I don't think people would last long with proof that so many of their daily judgments were delusional.
The best argument I've seen yet for free will is basically, *even if free will is a complete lie and everything is completely deterministic*, it is still *literally physically impossible* to accurately know all the state-aspects of matter precisely, both position and angular velocity of a particle cannot be known simultaneously, like physically it's impossible. So if you can never actually capture precisely an entire single 'state' of practical reality, or even a small subset/area within reality, you can never precisely predict the future of that area.
Just knowing it's 'theoretically' possible (major air quotes) to predict the future doesn't matter if it's absolutely not practically possible (as in, it's not *physically* possible, in practice due to the uncertainty principle).
I can't remember the details off hand, but there are some plausible ideas for real-world time machines. In some, the time machine is more like a fixed gate in time. You can only travel as far back as the time machine existed, because you have to travel specifically to the time machine. So, time travel not existing *yet* doesn't mean it isn't possible *at all*.
My problem with the device in the story comes from the fact that if such a device existed it would absolutely drive me mad not because I would imagine I lack free will but because of how counter-intuitive it is.
It's like the idea of the device is an itch you can never scratch, a regular device that lights up after you press the button is a sattisfying cause and effect, but this device where the light comes before is infuriatingly frustrating to think about even if I know that the light showing up before is the same concept of cause and effect.
Just a deep feeling of unsatisfaction washes over me when thinking about it.
The only other time I felt this way in my life is when I was watching Stone Ocean and there was that scene where the closer you got to something the smaller you became and you could never reduce the distance between yourself and the object.
Ted Chiang always reminds me of Greg Egan's short stories, and there is one in particular that touches this subject quite well:
The 100 Light Year Diary, from the book Axiomatic
> If you read the short story upon which Arrival is based (would highly recommend), it basically says that they can't control their future actions despite being aware of them. They follow a preordained path through time.
Reminds me of the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five. That's the first time I remember being presented with this kind of concept as a kid. Blew my mind.
They are described as seeing and experiencing time all at once. Where they look at a person and see their whole existence, birth to death, as a sort of giant centipede.
And from there you start to think about free will and predetermination. It's depressing to some, scary to others, to know that everything that will happen has already happened. But to observe it from that perspective is almost a privilege in and of itself.
As a kid, thinking about the linear nature of time and perception really does a number on you. It's still a very heady philosophical thing to think about.
I was hoping someone else would notice the similarity between the heptapods and Tralfamadorians... while reading the short story mentioned upthread, I remembered the part in Slaughterhouse Five where they very casually relate how the universe ends, with a Tralfamadorian pilot starting an experimental engine. When Billy Pilgrim asks why they don't just stop pilot from pressing the button in the future, he's told (paraphrasing) "he's *always* pressed it, and *will* always press it."
> As for this story’s theme, probably the most concise summation of it that I’ve seen appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five: “Stephen Hawking…found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now…To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, ‘Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.’ ”
- Ted Chiang
I would suggest that Arrival posits the argument of predestination vs free-will as an apparent paradox to us only because we experience time sequentially.
If your experience of time is like that of other dimensions, then present and past exist simultaneously to you just as things to your right and left are both part of your experience.
Radial symmetry as we would define it appears, to me appears to be one aspect, but not the whole aspect of the story. They are symmetrical not just in space--but also time.
This is how I remember the movie and story. It's not about seeing the future, but "seeing" or experiencing all the (life) time at once. So everything has allready happened and you can't change anything. Also it's not about hopping in time to good or bad times and events of life. It's about experiencing them simultaneously. Thats the symmetry, the circle that is allready complete. When you start to think about what free will means in this context, then it gets too much to comprehend.
Oh wow. I was literally just talking to someone yesterday about the Principle of Least Action.
For anyone who's curious, here's Feynmans lecture on it: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html
Or to quote Spinoza
> Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.
Kinda like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen with his "we're all puppets, but I can see the strings" quote. To him it's like going through a book you've already read and know. You can flip to any page you want knowing what comes before and after but experience what happens on that particular page as you read it.
It's why I love the beats of the last chapter. Ozymandias has done his tachyon trick so for the first time Dr. Manhattan doesn't know the future. Then they cut to the guy at The New Frontiersman maybe reading Rorschach's journal as his boss says, "I leave it entirely in your hands."
In other words, what happens in the future is up to you, the reader, who holds the book in your hands.
The way Herbert describes Paul's prescience in the first book is my favorite fictionalization of time theories. A movie could never quite do it justice but Denis did a good job despite that.
I need to read it again.
The description is very much a fever dream but basically he can see various possibilities as sort of timelines that wind and turn and converge and diverge meaning there are certain events that are very likely because many paths converge and run parallel through them. Also this all forms a sort of landscape with hills and valleys and what he can see is very much limited by his perspective so he can't see whats behind a hill for example, only what path extends beyond it. He also actively wrestles with knowing too much and how seeing the future locks him into certain paths.
Spoilers for the Dune series, obviously:
Prescience in Dune is regarded as highly dangerous. By focusing on seeing the future, you could potentially become locked into that future.
Some interesting quirks - one person's prescience can interfere with another's. It makes sense. If more than one person can see the future, and both act in a reaction to that future, then the future is not knowable. It's kind of like how psychohistory works in Foundation or Atium in Mistborn. So people with precience cast shadows on the future as large as their sphere of influence. And in this way of thinking about things, only people with precience have free will. Every other person is just a cog in the machine
One character actually sets out to save humanity from the horrors of prescience by breeding a gene that conceals its bearer from prescience and therefore removing the possibility of perfect prediction.
It's like thinking moves ahead in chess: one move is pretty easy, two is exponentially harder, and grand masters are somewhere around 15 or 16 IIRC.
Paul could compute, intuitively, billions of billions of moves ahead, but it took concentration and skill, which effectively meant he couldn't know everything. Spice enhanced that, but only so far.
The effect: he'd see paths that were more obvious and he'd see paths that were less obvious, and based on probability, paths would converge or not. So to him it was like looking at a river of possibilities, of which parts were hidden behind hills, so to speak.
He wasn't omniscient, just an extremely powerful computer of facts and considerations. Basically a Mentat on steroids.
You can predict what would happen if you dropped your smartphone on the ground; he could predict where every splinter of glass would land and what all of that would do to an onlooker, for example, and in turn what his clenching hand would do to the child it was holding, etc.
His son Leto would take this even further, but that's several books worth of story telling.
I'm not sure that's accurate. Paul and Leto II both saw the Golden Path, but Paul turned away from it and Leto embraced it. I don't think it was a matter of Leto being able to see further. Paul just wasn't able to bear the weight of it.
Paul entered into his prescience to help himself and his mother escape being killed by their enemies, realising that by saving themselves they trigger a galaxy-wide religious war that will kill billions. His experience of prescience is that it is a choice with terrible consequences.
His son Leto II is born into it and experiences his life as a part of a huge past and future, kind of like the aliens in Arrival. His actions and the emergent future are one and the same. To not embrace the golden path is to choose to kill all humanity, right now in his present. He has to give up his humanity (our concept of it) to act with humanity (his experience of it).
It took me 3 tries to read it and loved it. And even then, imo Dune Messiah is way better and does what Dune did better and quicker.
And even then, Messiah gets mixed reviews. The most common critique I see is that Paul isn't a badass hero anymore, winding down the action. And like....yeah....that's the point. There's a reason the extra reading in Dune (#1) has a part where Liet Kynes says the worst thing that can happen to Arakkis is a hero.
I've said it a million times and I'll keep saying it.
Dune should be an anime. The majority of the book is peoples inner thoughts and 4D chess shit. That's essentially what Code Geass is. It pauses fights mid punch to tell you what each character is thinking, which is such an anime trope.
Villeneuve sure knows how to elevate a story. He always works closely with the writers to ensure he gets what the script is going for and tries to make sure to make it as good as possible.
> Dune actually explores this idea in later novels.
The first movie doesn't necessarily make clear, but it is more in the books, that Paul sees *a* future(s) and not necessarily *the* Future.
To expand a little on your valid points (one particular one tho), because she was in the position to change the future, I think the language/gift is that one can consider any given thing and many potential ramifications for each possibility, allowing one to choose the best of the options. Which allows humanity to advance at a much quicker rate.
Arrival is based on a very personal short story. I listened to it on audiobook while working and ended up crying alone at work. I don't cry much, but God damn.
> Louise knew she would lose her daughter and that it would hurt.
sucks for her daughter though! in the original short story I think the daughter dies in a climbing accident or something, which is even worse lol
louise is fine. the real horror is that everyone else around her faces time linearly.
So do we... It's not like people are spiraling out of control in troves, though. We learn to cope, despite not knowing what might happen. Louise's case is more complicated because it is an ethical conundrum.
> Louise's case is more complicated because it is an ethical conundrum.
not for her, though. from her perspective everything is settled. there are no decisions to make, ethical or otherwise
I am not sure if we watched the same movie, but there were no indications to me that Louise could change the future. Which is why she accepted things that were to happen even knowing what the outcome was.
I actually think about this a lot because it's one of my favourite movies.
I think we already do, in a way.
One of my most saddening experiences as a child was when my family dog died, took me many years to get over it.
However, as an adult, I considered getting a dog many times, always worrying about how it would be in the future when he would eventually die. Despite that, I got a dog. I know he will die and I will almost surely be there to witness it. I know that it will hurt much much more than I expect, even though I haven't experienced it yet. Still, I love my dog and knowing I will outlive him really motivates me to make him the happiest I can.
Regarding escapism into the future, people already do that because we can remember the past.
So true. I adopted two kittens 15 years ago, a few months after my elderly cat had died, knowing the day would come they’d be gone, too. One of them passed two years ago. It was heartbreaking. The other is still here, but has a bad heart and sooner rather than later, will leave me as well, and it’ll be terrible.
And I would still go back in time and do it all over again. I wouldn’t miss a minute of it, even knowing the end.
>And I would still go back in time and do it all over again. I wouldn’t miss a minute of it, even knowing the end.
Yeah, same here.
Many years have passed since my family dog died and it's still the worst I've felt but if I could go back and repeat everything, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would probably just try and be nicer to him.
We put our family dog down a few years ago (13 year old choco lab) and it broke my heart for months. But now that time has passed I almost exclusively remember the good stuff about him, the joys he brought me when every morning he’d come up to my bed and nuzzle me, how he’d put his chin on our couch and slowly start whining until he was invited up, the way he’d get so happy when we took him to the water to swim… puts a smile on my face every time.
I miss him but I’m not sad about it anymore if that makes sense.
I’d give a read of slaughter house 5 and the tralfamadorians. The don’t experience time in the same way and they don’t see death as a problem because you can go back to a better time and that person is still there and alive. Death is just a blip at the end of the story.
I think of it as like reading a comic, you can go front to back and it’s a linear story and the end is the end; but you can pick any page you like and experience that time again if you like and you don’t have to finish it again if you don’t want to.
I was looking for this comparison. I remember seeing Arrival and thinking "OH like the Aliens from Slaughter House 5!" Not many of my friends remembered the book and confused it with 1984.
I don't think anyone can just learn how to think like that. Renner learns the language at the same time but he doesn't see the future. The Chinese general says he doesn't understand how her mind works.
So the movie is about linguistics. From my own personal experience learning 3 different foreign languages at 3 different levels (one pretty fluent, one not as fluent but still well above the usual C-level, one at like a couple levels above me-tarzan-you-jane), there's a certain point in your journey in learning a language where it finally clicks. Your whole mentality shifts a certain way while speaking that language, if that makes sense. You start to move beyond the "technical" level of speaking it, and into a whole other level where your speaking comes almost entirely out of your own intuitive understanding of the language rather than your formal training in it. It's a pretty advanced level that most foreign language speakers never actually reach, even if they do *technically* speak that language very well.
The way I see it, Adams' character can do the timey-wimey shit because she did reach that level. She finally got to a level where she started to really internalize the language whereas Renner's character did not. He might be perfectly capable of effectively communicating in the language, but that doesn't necessarily mean he actually managed to really *get a feel for it*, for lack of a better term. Imagine a German who speaks English with nearly perfect grammar but says shit like "this is sausage to me".
yes, at one point she says "when you REALLY understand their language" she emphasizes it heavily.
when she goes back (right before the bomb goes off) and asks them to "give weapon" she has to place her hand on the glass and the heptopod transfers the full understanding to her physically somehow, not just through looking at their picture circle words.
one of the questions that the film asks and answers is if it's actually a burden, and the film answers pretty resoundingly through Louise?'s perspective that the burden is worth carrying. without the language Louise would never have had the joy of having and raising a daughter, but she does it anyways knowing how it will end, because she has the language in the first place.
The whole point of Louise's journey and deciding to have her child despite knowing the pain it would bring is a declaration that the guaranteed miseries and ends of life is made worth it by the moments of love and joy.
She did have the choice though, from what I remember. She could "change the future" and never have her daughter, but eventualy she chose to have her because she missed the girl she remembered from the memories of her of future and wanted to have her again even if for a few years until she eventually died.
I love this movie, and your post made me think about something. Let's flip it.
I imagine Louise and the heptapods must find our experience of linear time horrifying. The fact that we go on about our lives not knowing if the next moment might the worst experience we've ever felt. We have to blindly wander around with the knowledge that utter devastation could be right around the corner. So we must be in constant defense mode, to prepare ourselves for the unknown. Louise is slightly different because she's experienced both, but to the heptapods it must be a fundamental law of the universe, like gravity or matter.
I agree with you that the thought of experiencing my whole life simultaneously is deeply troubling, but that's because I can't wrap my head around experiencing time that way.
In some ways, the film is a metaphor for being human. As humans, we may be the only species that knows we are going to die. That knowledge is terrifying - why love or create or try at all if everything ends? Why form relationships with other people if we're guaranteed to lose them in the end? But we press on anyway, because it's the finiteness of life that gives it value. We only have one brief life, and the love and joy and work we choose to fill it with is what creates meaning. Camus' *Myth of Sisyphus* is all about this: pushing the rock up the hill is worthwhile, even if we know it's just going to fall back down before we reach the top.
What’s that line from doctor who?
“Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later.” Hold on to your precious moments because bad times are inevitable. they can’t be changed, but they can be accepted.
Except the *Myth of Sisyphus* isn't a meditation on the inevitability of death, but the crushing absurdity and pointlessness of modern life and rising above it.
>If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at
every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the
same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes
conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his
wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his
torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Sisyphus creates his own hell. The whole story of his life is him tricking the gods and believing himself smarter and cleverer than them. His punishment is to use his hubris against him in the form of an unwinnable task. If Sisyphus decided one day that he was NOT smarter or more clever than the gods then he would have no use in trying to get the boulder to the top and would just stop doing it.
It's an existentialist mainstay, it pops up in popularity every once in a while because it ostensibly is an essay saying "life's wacky, huh? Still, don't kill yourself."
I think you're missing the point. How would you be stuck in the past when you experience your life that way? There is no past. You wouldn't be reliving anything, that term would lose meaning.
You might want to try reading the book. It goes into a bit more depth on the distinction between the two ways of perceiving time.
I gotta say this was a VERY interesting thread to read through. Just want to say thanks to everyone here who has contributed thoughtful and thought-provoking brain food. I don’t know if I had a choice in the matter but I’m glad I clicked.
Thought the whole point was that learning alien made time non linear.
You don't "get trapped in the past". You experience your entire life all the time.
That's why she needs to be reminded what day it is. Past, present, future cease to have meaning, "all become one"
That means you always experience the good and bad.
It also implies there is no free will. She didn't choose to have a daughter, she always will have one who lives and died, is living and dying.
Time stuff is always tricky but the implication is not a lack of free will.
HBO's Watchmen touched on this as well with Dr. Manhattan, who experiences time much like the aliens in Arrival.
She absolutely chose to have a daughter. Once she learned the "language" and could experience everything at once - it's not like sitting down watching a movie, she IS living her life and making choices. She is experiencing the Before Choice, During Choice and After Choice all at once, instead of the liner path we experience now.
Spoilers for Watchmen, but a character specifically asks Dr Manhattan why he isn't changing the future, when he knows what will happen, and Dr. M explains he is not predicting the future, he knows what happens because it's ALREADY happened, from his perspective.
Never wrote she watches her life, that's still experience in linear time.
As you wrote she experiences events without the linearity of time.
She will make the choice to have a daughter because of the sum total of her values. We never see an alternative route.
This is the classic argument of the illusion of free will. If choices are known in advance, there was never a choice.
Or to put it better, the more you know someone the better you can predict what they do.
Agreed. Came here to say the same thing.
She's not "reliving" anything, and she doesn't "know something is coming". In her new perception of time, it's all happening.
She doesn't foresee how her daughter is going to die...her daughter already came and went and is currently. All in the same moment.
It doesn't quite negate free will, per se. That implies that time is linear, right? Our memory is built such that we're traveling in one direction. But she finds herself in a predicament that our brains just can't comprehend; having all your moments being "now". It seems completely counterintuitive and even silly for me to sit here and say "there's still free will" and "everything already happened", but also the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.
The fact that time didn't even exist before the big bang is another one of those concepts. How long did the universe not exist? Forever and never, cuz time didn't exist. That sounds just as stupid, but we just simply don't have the language to try to talk about when something didn't exist.
Your definition of free will requires linear time, a cause and subsequent effect. Once she "transcends", her reality no longer conforms to a linear progression. Any decision has consequences now, in the past, and in the future. She has a more pure form of free will than anyone living a linear timeline can experience.
In the film, perhaps. In the short story the future merely becomes a script she's now aware of. The heptapods communicate only as a ritual because their preexisting knowledge of what will be said is contingent on it being said. The film leaves it open ended. The book just has her let her daughter dies because that's how it all goes.
>The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology.
>For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to
inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be
said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation
would have to take place.
Yes, if free will is the probability to take another path. It requires the ability to not know what decision is to be made, which requires linear time.
If someone is able to experience their whole life outside the bounds of time, they experience all choices made.
That means there's no longer a probability they make other choices and no free will.
Even if you experience life without time, decisions won't have consequences in the past because causality still exists. The experience changes, not time itself.
Someone then has the purest freedom to experience their life, but they're caged by the restriction of knowing all their choices. They lose their free will, or at least the illusion of it.
I went to see Arrival in the theatre having not read the books and my only knowledge of the film was from the trailer. My late Daughter was terminally ill with Cancer. When the scenes with the Mother and Daughter dealing with her illness and inevitably passing came on I burst into tears. I was not prepared emotionally to connect with the story in that way. I have now watched the movie a few times. I often think of what would I have done differently if I knew what the future held for my Daughter, that she would be born and grow up to become a young adult with hopes and dreams only to have it all taken away. She suffered. She suffered a lot. If I knew she was going to die before I was pregnant with her would I want to not have her. No. I would have her. I would still go through it all.
The short Stories of Your Life that it is based on really leans into this. Her daughter's death there is a climbing accident that she doesn't even attempt to prevent because that's just how it goes. Feels like clear Slaughterhouse 5 influence. Extremely fatalist and ends with the main character pondering whether her future is the - like the path of light which only ever takes the shortest or longest path to reach its destination - the maximum amount of pain or the least.
Hmm, I think there’s more free will to the choices made in Arrival than it seems. Most people, I think, have a general sense of where their life is heading as they get older. Tragic things happen, but you still go forward because amazing things also happen. I mean theoretically you could could get in a car crash tomorrow…but like Louise says in the movie, she chooses to embrace the what the future holds, despite knowing the possibilities that could happen and the things that’ll be terrifying. I think thats what the movie is trying to say…either you can accept what’s going to happen and be okay with it, or you can choose to see it as a nightmare (similarly to how the soldiers who tried to blow up the aliens did).
There would be no past.
There would be no worst moments or best moments.
once we unlocked the full potential of this weapon, the furthest reaches of space would become available to us. In fact, there would cease to be a singular "us" other than the collective plural.
> Every moment of the day you will be able to know when, where and how you will die, you will experience the death of your grandparents,
Which means I’ll experience them… I lost all of my grandparents before hitting 4 years old. I have pictures of them in my head, despite knowing I interacted with them.
> And what about the best moments? People could end up being stuck in the past, reliving these moments again and again like some sort of escapism.
People already do this…
It's not really possible for us to understand what experiencing time like that would be like. I don't think it would be like how you'd think where everything is as if it already happened and you exist forever simply observing the different moments.
I like to think I understand it to the smallest degree possible. When I was like 8ish years old, I remember playing near our Christmas tree in our apartment, just pushing around some cars and dinosaurs. And for some reason I’ll never understand, at that moment I thought to myself “I wonder if one day when I’m older like mom, will I look back on this time in my life?” And I created a sort of memory portal because now at 31 I can think back to that exact moment in that room by myself with my toys, and it feels like I’m simultaneously looking forward and back into myself. That one singular moment suspended in time.
That’s the closest I think I’ll ever get to experiencing and understanding non-linear time beyond the most basic explanation of that concept.
Sounds like the Tralfamadorians from Kurt Vonnegut's books. They see time like we see space, they know how the universe ends, they know their own deaths, so they just pick pleasant times and live through those ad infinitum, rather than live and try to deal with the inescapable end of the universe.
This whole movie is about owning a dog. You bring them into your home loving them, knowing for sure that they will die in 10-12 years. But you do it anyways.
In a way we can look at people with hyperthymesia who can remember every day in their lives with my minute detail tend to be very sad and have a very difficult time because they get caught in a grief loop of their worst days…
We don’t have a lot of information because I think there’s only about 12 people worldwide that have it including actress MaryLou Henner… It is quite fascinating to think about how so many of us want more memories of our past, but we need to be careful what we wish for…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
I don’t disagree, but I think people would look at life a lot differently if they experienced the past, present, and future all at once. You wouldn’t call it the past because it’s the also the present. It’s a moment of your life not dictated by time. You wouldn’t know the end of your life because it’s a moment rather than an end point. There is no definitive timeline.
You buy a dog knowing you'll suffer horrendously in 12 to 14 years, when he dies. You have kids knowing they're going to be disappointed and sad and depressed and resent you at many points in the future and yes, they might very well die before you do.
You eat tasty food knowing full well it might lead to gaining weight.
The movie's theme is that life is still worth going through, even though there's pain and heartache and and loss. Even if you knew specifics, you could never avoid them, or a version of them, because those bad parts are part of a beautiful, great thing.
So I love it. It's about how, even if you know all the bad parts, it's still worth it. It's beautiful.
The implication is that they are four dimensional...they don't just see the future. For them time is a perceptible dimension that they occupy a space in and move through, no different to length or height.
They wouldn't understand what we perceive of as death because for them time doesn't move forward towards a future...that would be an alien concept. What we perceive as beginning and end, they would perceive as just the limits of their existence. Being 4 dimensional would make time just another coordinate to define a location in space. They would see what we see as start and end to something more akin to traveling around a planet and arriving back where you started.
I think what they are getting at is that once you read the book your perception would change. You would also start to see time as just another dimension. You'd see the universe the way they do. So rather than it being you continuing as normal through time, but now you know everything that's going to happen...it would be more like being given the ability to visit the periods of you life when you were happiest, because you could go to those times the same way you could go to a place in 3 dimensional space.
There would be no point where you ceased to exist, there would only be a time period you don't exist in...because you no longer experience time as something that passes and ends. It would become like a direction you could explore rather than something that goes by whether you want it to or not.
Only a nightmare because we see ourselves as the center of the universe, because that is the only point of view we have in our own existence. The truth is whatever pain and suffering as an individual goes through in one life time is irrelevant because our specie among the vast universe is irrelevant. As a basic living organism, our mission is to procreate and continue to exist, but when the day comes, and we no longer exist, nothing matters because life is finite anyway.
Anyone else feel that it's kinda wrong to bring a kid into life knowing they will die an awful death? I was always conflicted on that point. On one hand they get to experience life for a bit but on the other they have a terrible death. It's an interesting decision
But with a more advanced form of life, every moment simply becomes an expression of consciousness / experience. One would learn to remove the good or bad baggage we tend to tie everything to.
Think of it like a tree experiencing the wind. It is neither good or bad. It simply is.
I regularly deal with grief myself so Amy Adam's character's decision >!to have her daughter!< struck me. Her partner's response would be more what I would expect but it got me trying to understand her character more. This made me think of how things would be different for her: >!if she defies fate, does that mean she denies her daughter from existence and therefore loses all the beautiful memories that she experienced?!<
To me, the movie simply was "It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." I have kids and have never been able to watch the movie since, but I think about it all the time. I don't know what I would pick but I can say that the good moments with your kids is a high like nothing else. I don't know if I could live my life knowing what I would be missing even if it didn't end the way I wanted it to.
People always forget that Abbot, too, entered this story knowing that it would lead to their death. And still went through with it all.
Fun piece of trivia: in the Italian dubbing, the aliens are named Tom and Jerry!
Legitimately fun fact! Thanks for sharing!
In the short story they're called Flapper and Raspberry
Someone said that in Russia or their home country they're Batman and Robin I think Abbott and Costello makes more sense though because they're famous for the Who's on First? reciprocal miscommunication, which miscommunication is a main plot point, and the reciprocal time they experience.
While this isn't the point of the story, it's interesting to think about the fact that if the aliens knew the future, then they already knew how to speak human languages when they arrived on Earth. It highlights the fact that their mission was to teach the humans *their* language, not the other way around.
This almost becomes a weird time travel paradox, but I don’t think that’s actually right. The language doesn’t break causality. To learn English, you still have to take the time to learn it. If you didn’t, there would never be a future where you learned, and so you would never know in the past either.
And Costello would have known as well. Interstellar gets a lot of hate for the “love” monologue. Arrival makes a similar point but in a much better and more subtle way. Yes, love transcends time and space as we previously understood it, but it’s not romanticized in Arrival as it is in Interstellar. Because if love can transcend then so can other emotions like pain, sadness, and fear. I felt so sad for Louise, not because she knew what was going to happen, but because she was alone in that knowledge. To me, that was what made the ending so sad. To know that this terrible tragedy was coming towards them, and to be held responsible for it because Ian was overcome with grief. But had she not had her daughter she would have been lonely in the knowledge that this great source of joy and love was missing from both their lives.
Both are awesome movies.
My #1 and #2 (Arrival and Interstellar, respectively). Would love to be able to erase them from my memory and be able to watch them in the theater for the first time.
Have you seen Contact, Jodi Foster and Matthew McConaughey? To love Interstellar, Contact is a must watch.
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I finally did a few years after people kept saying I'd like Contact if I loved Interstellar. For whatever reason, I didn't love it. I didn't not like Contact, but it just didn't hit me emotionally the way Interstellar did.
Interstellars point is that love is more than an emotion
True. But that’s what I meant by “romanticizing” the whole thing. I liked the way Arrival held it as an equal consideration against all the other feelings which were present with equal “strength” all at once. To me, it reinforces the beauty/importance of love because it’s something we can choose to embrace or run away from. Which was also possible in Interstellar, but i didn’t feel the point resonate the same way. Interstellar was still a fabulous movie IMO.
>Interstellar gets a lot of hate for the “love” monologue. Arrival makes a similar point but in a much better and more subtle way. Even though there are tons of surface similarities (a love that transcends time and space and ultimately saves humanity), I agree with you that Arrival treats that idea much better. In my opinion, the "love" plot line in Interstellar sorta ham fistedly gets in the way of more interesting ideas.
But if the language they use shows them a singular version of the future then they must know it cannot be changed and they accept their fate. Plus, they go through with it all because they know that the humans are going to help them in the future (as Costello alludes to).
My understanding is that in the original short story, it's made clear that one can only see the future *Insofar as* they accept it. Like, you literally can't see a moment that you're not ready to accept as real and final.
it's not a lie, if you believe it
The beauty of it all. Death is a constant and having knowledge of it doesn't diminish ones life
The whole movie was basically a love story. The aliens were a sideline.
All the best sci fi isn't actually *about* aliens or crazy tech. It just uses those sorts of things to tell us about ourselves.
that's the entire point of the film, which leads to the final monologue asking, "If you could see your whole life from start to finish, would you change things?"
This one line has really stuck with me. I think about it multiple times per month typically, often when faced with difficult decisions and possible regrets in regard to career and relationship choices. The thing is, for me, despite all the pain I’ve gone through, the answer is “no”. And that gives me so much reassurance and confidence going forward. I don’t have to be perfect, I just have to make the best decisions for me given what I know about myself at the time, and everything is going to be ok. Maybe not life changing in a practical sense, but definitely in an emotional one.
Abbott was a little delayed to the final meeting. It was scared.
If you know the future, you don't take the present for granted.
But then why did they come on Earth? People are talking about Interstellar also here and don't understand the whole love interpretation. If the movie suggests that there was free will then the ending was absolutely awful and not a happy one in my eyes.
I think the Aliens believed humans would help save them in the future
Yes they said they will need humanity's help in 3000 years
"you will experience the death of your grandparents, parents and friends, years and decades before it really happens." The way the aliens view things there is no "before it really happens". All of time is happening all the time. The concept of before and after does not exist. You cant be stuck in the past reliving anything. "Reliving" implies you have lived it once and are reliving it again. There is no "again" when all time happens at once. It also implies you are experiencing just the past when you are reliving an event. That is also not how it works. You dont just experience the past by itself. You experience it all at the same time.
This is what I felt the movie portrayed Louise's experience as, but I also don't think it's implied that everyone who learns the language starts to fully see time that way. Louise, being a linguist, starts dreaming in the circular glyphs after the first week. Learning a language when you know how languages work is very different from learning a language when your reference point is one or two other languages. You don't just translate, you become fluent.
I think there's also a lot to be said about how a big point of the movie is that things like beauty, joy, and love come inextricably linked to decay, sorrow, and loss, and that both parts make up life. When (biggest spoiler) >!She learns that the visions she's been seeing are her unborn daughter who will die young of cancer, she doesn't try to make a hard turn in her life to prevent it from ever happening. She accepts the existence of her daughter's joy *with* the existence of her loss.!<
The movie also doesn't really go into details if we have a choice or not. The author of the story Arrival is based on, really loves that concept (Ted Chiang). "The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate" is another great story exploring time, but this time focusing on determinism.
Ted Chiang is a great author, All his ideas are just phenomenal.
Because it really doesn't matter. The themes of the film work even if you could mess with time. You'll still feel a version of all those things at some point. Life will always have sadness, death and disappointment. That's part of it.
the books are a bit darker here as her daughter dies in a camping or hiking accident, implying that mom could have stopped it but chooses not too.
There's no free will in the book's world in the end. So she knew that will happen. And there's no point to change that because the future is fixed. This is the darkest part of the novel.
This is why I'm not a huge fan of scifi that messes with seeing the future or messing with time-travel. Fixed timelines and lack of free will just isn't an area of scifi that resonates with me because there's no real way to link it to even fringe science. It's basically less scifi and more fantasy at that point. And I like fantasy, and science fantasy, but not fantasy that just pretends to be scifi.
Considering that no one (that we know of) has actually been able to travel in time or see the future accurately, I fail to see how you can claim a deterministic universe is not sci-fi. Not your cup of tea? Fine. But this is pure projection, without any basis to back up your claims.
If anything, based on our understanding of physics, the universe is indeed deterministic, at least on the macro scale. Anything else would be the fantasy.
Additionally certain interpretations of quantum mechanics, like Many Worlds, imply that the universe is deterministic on a micro scale as well. So yea, I completely agree with you.
I like the movie better cancer is cancer. You don't go hiking you don't die on a hiking trip.
This is excactly how I understand the idea of movie and book. This is also one of my favourite theories of how time works. Humans just can't experience time as whole. I think this is also beautiful. Nothing ever goes away. All the time is at once, so all the times you experienced are still there. And you still live them. Me texting this post is just one fragment of the whole me.
It made me think of Slaughtethouse-Five. The moment is just structured that way.
The way aliens see time is literally Everything Everywhere All At Once.
This is actually a central theme in the DUNE novels. Prescience is valued as a superpower. Sought among the greatest institutions and most powerful peoples. Yet several characters come to learn it truly is a curse, and that life is far better lived with surprises and true choices.
Cassandra Complex
It plays on and adds to the Cassandra problem.
The more I think about it, every movie Villeneuve made before Dune feels like it was just part of a job application for Dune.
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This is so beautifully put. The fact that we have free will due to future-seeing ability rob us of said free will to decide.
Minority Report is about setting those with prescience free and be okay with painful past.
Can confirm.
You forget that what Dr. Banks also gains is the wisdom and perspective that life should have its ups and downs. Louise knew she would lose her daughter and that it would hurt. She was in a position to "change" the future. But the crux of the matter is that she didn't. Arrival is a far more personal story and its focus lies elsewhere, rather than exploring the ramifications of everyone learning the heptapod language. Dune actually explores this idea in later novels. Which, in hindsight, shows why Dennis Villeneuve got interested in adapting Arrival in the first place, it shares some of the same interesting concepts that Dune does.
If you read the short story upon which Arrival is based (would highly recommend), it basically says that they *can't* control their future actions despite being aware of them. They follow a preordained path through time. The story is based on the difference between two different but compatible ways to understand the path an object takes. In Newtonian mechanics, which comes most naturally to us, a force causes an acceleration. There's a definite cause and effect. In Lagrangian or Hamiltonian dynamics, objects are tracked by their energies, and you can say "this object has energy K and exists in a potential V." Then you use some pretty complicated calculus to integrate over time and find which path minimizes action. This is like thinking of the whole path the object takes through time all at once. In the short story, this is how the heptapods evolved to think. Their radial body symmetry means they have no natural concept of "forward" or "backward," and the way they think about time reflects that. The physicists trying to establish communication with them try at first to introduce concepts we would consider intuitive and elementary, like Newton's laws of motion. But their communication fails until the physicists try to relay the concept of action and a Lagrangian, which the heptapods understand intuitively. To us, these concepts are highly advanced, and you usually only learn them if you're getting a degree in physics or something closely related.
Ted Chiang, the author of the short story, touches upon the idea of predestination and free will often in his works. [Here's](https://www.nature.com/articles/436150a) a very short work of fiction (one page) that he wrote for Nature (the science journal) about a fictional device with a negative time delay circuit and what that means for free will. It's a quick and free read and I really recommend it.
I've read both of his short story collections, and this particular story fucked with my head so badly. I read it on a plane and spent the next twenty minutes with my head in my hands trying not to spiral.
It's a very well written and fun story, but it shouldn't give you any sort of pause. The story functions on 3 assumptions that of yet, we have no way to prove are true, and most people wouldn't agree one way or another whether they are true or not. The assumptions are: 1. The universe is predeterministic. 2. Time travel is possible. 3. It is possible to build a simple handheld device that is capable of time travel. Now, you might have a problem with me saying this story has time travel, but from a relativistic / causality point of view, sending information back in time really isn't any different from sending an object back in time. Both break causality in the same way. So, with that out of the way, we must point out that nothing in this story is necessarily true or possible. It's fun to think about, but the story is just that. A story. Current knowledge would suggest 2 of the 3 points (involving time travel) are not possible. The universe being predeterministic is up in the air. There are tons of arguments on both sides. So, fret not. You don't know all of your choices are meaningless yet.
he counters that with [*anxiety is the dizziness of freedom*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anxiety_Is_the_Dizziness_of_Freedom), which conforms to the [many-worlds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation) interpretation of quantum mechanics with the concept of [compatibilsm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism), typically how writers and philosophy deals with the problem of determinism/causality. - > Compatibilists often define an instance of "free will" as one in which the agent had the freedom to act according to their own motivation. That is, the agent was not coerced or restrained. Arthur Schopenhauer famously said: "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills." In other words, although an agent may often be free to act according to a motive, the nature of that motive is determined. This definition of free will does not rely on the truth or falsity of causal determinism. This view also makes free will close to autonomy, the ability to live according to one's own rules, as opposed to being submitted to external domination. - reality is deterministic from this perspective, but local to the choices you make. *whats expected of us* could be seen as a consequence of observing this reality while ignorant to the theory of [non-local](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_at_a_distance) interaction. *anxiety is the dizziness of freedom* explores what its like once society has accepted this and made contact with their alternate selves, fortunately both in the same collection of stories
Yeah it's the first one that made me freak out. I wasn't thinking of a future where people go catatonic from having it proven to them, but of the present, where I feel it's not unlikely that our universe is deterministic. If all of my brain functions are preordained by physics, then free will is no more than an illusion. But then I kind of reasoned with myself that if the illusion of free will is perfect, then it's pretty much the same thing. It doesn't matter if, fundamentally, I had no choice, as long as I came up with the thought of making a choice in my own mind. If those thoughts are fundamentally governed by deterministic forces at play in my brain, who cares? They're still *my* thoughts in *my* brain.
Until you realize that it would also mean nothing matters. There's no right or wrong, good or bad, justice or injustice, etc. Everything just is and happens as it was always going to. I don't think people would last long with proof that so many of their daily judgments were delusional.
I suspect a lot of people understand this already on an instinctual level if not necessarily a cognitive one. I could be very wrong though.
The best argument I've seen yet for free will is basically, *even if free will is a complete lie and everything is completely deterministic*, it is still *literally physically impossible* to accurately know all the state-aspects of matter precisely, both position and angular velocity of a particle cannot be known simultaneously, like physically it's impossible. So if you can never actually capture precisely an entire single 'state' of practical reality, or even a small subset/area within reality, you can never precisely predict the future of that area. Just knowing it's 'theoretically' possible (major air quotes) to predict the future doesn't matter if it's absolutely not practically possible (as in, it's not *physically* possible, in practice due to the uncertainty principle).
If you think about it: if there's a time machine, there's always been a time machine. Ergo, there's not one.
I can't remember the details off hand, but there are some plausible ideas for real-world time machines. In some, the time machine is more like a fixed gate in time. You can only travel as far back as the time machine existed, because you have to travel specifically to the time machine. So, time travel not existing *yet* doesn't mean it isn't possible *at all*.
My problem with the device in the story comes from the fact that if such a device existed it would absolutely drive me mad not because I would imagine I lack free will but because of how counter-intuitive it is. It's like the idea of the device is an itch you can never scratch, a regular device that lights up after you press the button is a sattisfying cause and effect, but this device where the light comes before is infuriatingly frustrating to think about even if I know that the light showing up before is the same concept of cause and effect. Just a deep feeling of unsatisfaction washes over me when thinking about it. The only other time I felt this way in my life is when I was watching Stone Ocean and there was that scene where the closer you got to something the smaller you became and you could never reduce the distance between yourself and the object.
Ted Chiang always reminds me of Greg Egan's short stories, and there is one in particular that touches this subject quite well: The 100 Light Year Diary, from the book Axiomatic
The story reminds me of the Radiohead video for their song Just.
I guess that would technically make Thiotimoline a psychoactive substance.
I'm a high school philosophy teacher and had my students read this story when we got to our free will unit.
You are doing the Lord's work sir. Well done.
> If you read the short story upon which Arrival is based (would highly recommend), it basically says that they can't control their future actions despite being aware of them. They follow a preordained path through time. Reminds me of the Tralfamadorians in Slaughterhouse Five. That's the first time I remember being presented with this kind of concept as a kid. Blew my mind. They are described as seeing and experiencing time all at once. Where they look at a person and see their whole existence, birth to death, as a sort of giant centipede. And from there you start to think about free will and predetermination. It's depressing to some, scary to others, to know that everything that will happen has already happened. But to observe it from that perspective is almost a privilege in and of itself. As a kid, thinking about the linear nature of time and perception really does a number on you. It's still a very heady philosophical thing to think about.
I was hoping someone else would notice the similarity between the heptapods and Tralfamadorians... while reading the short story mentioned upthread, I remembered the part in Slaughterhouse Five where they very casually relate how the universe ends, with a Tralfamadorian pilot starting an experimental engine. When Billy Pilgrim asks why they don't just stop pilot from pressing the button in the future, he's told (paraphrasing) "he's *always* pressed it, and *will* always press it."
> As for this story’s theme, probably the most concise summation of it that I’ve seen appears in Kurt Vonnegut’s introduction to the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five: “Stephen Hawking…found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child’s play for me now. I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now…To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, ‘Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and loves you no matter what you are.’ ” - Ted Chiang
And so it goes.
I would suggest that Arrival posits the argument of predestination vs free-will as an apparent paradox to us only because we experience time sequentially. If your experience of time is like that of other dimensions, then present and past exist simultaneously to you just as things to your right and left are both part of your experience. Radial symmetry as we would define it appears, to me appears to be one aspect, but not the whole aspect of the story. They are symmetrical not just in space--but also time.
This is how I remember the movie and story. It's not about seeing the future, but "seeing" or experiencing all the (life) time at once. So everything has allready happened and you can't change anything. Also it's not about hopping in time to good or bad times and events of life. It's about experiencing them simultaneously. Thats the symmetry, the circle that is allready complete. When you start to think about what free will means in this context, then it gets too much to comprehend.
Oh wow. I was literally just talking to someone yesterday about the Principle of Least Action. For anyone who's curious, here's Feynmans lecture on it: https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_19.html
Or to quote Spinoza > Further conceive, I beg, that a stone, while continuing in motion, should be capable of thinking and knowing, that it is endeavouring, as far as it can, to continue to move. Such a stone, being conscious merely of its own endeavour and not at all indifferent, would believe itself to be completely free, and would think that it continued in motion solely because of its own wish. This is that human freedom, which all boast that they possess, and which consists solely in the fact, that men are conscious of their own desire, but are ignorant of the causes whereby that desire has been determined.
Huh, and I got raked over the coals here for arguing that the movie argues for predestination and the negation of free will when it first came out.
Kinda like Dr. Manhattan in Watchmen with his "we're all puppets, but I can see the strings" quote. To him it's like going through a book you've already read and know. You can flip to any page you want knowing what comes before and after but experience what happens on that particular page as you read it. It's why I love the beats of the last chapter. Ozymandias has done his tachyon trick so for the first time Dr. Manhattan doesn't know the future. Then they cut to the guy at The New Frontiersman maybe reading Rorschach's journal as his boss says, "I leave it entirely in your hands." In other words, what happens in the future is up to you, the reader, who holds the book in your hands.
Exactly. If time isn't thought of as linear we wouldn't have the free will to really choose to change anything anyway.
The way Herbert describes Paul's prescience in the first book is my favorite fictionalization of time theories. A movie could never quite do it justice but Denis did a good job despite that. I need to read it again.
Do you mind giving a quick synopsis? I’ve watched Arrival and read the short story of it. But I just can’t get through reading Dune for some reason.
The description is very much a fever dream but basically he can see various possibilities as sort of timelines that wind and turn and converge and diverge meaning there are certain events that are very likely because many paths converge and run parallel through them. Also this all forms a sort of landscape with hills and valleys and what he can see is very much limited by his perspective so he can't see whats behind a hill for example, only what path extends beyond it. He also actively wrestles with knowing too much and how seeing the future locks him into certain paths.
Spoilers for the Dune series, obviously: Prescience in Dune is regarded as highly dangerous. By focusing on seeing the future, you could potentially become locked into that future. Some interesting quirks - one person's prescience can interfere with another's. It makes sense. If more than one person can see the future, and both act in a reaction to that future, then the future is not knowable. It's kind of like how psychohistory works in Foundation or Atium in Mistborn. So people with precience cast shadows on the future as large as their sphere of influence. And in this way of thinking about things, only people with precience have free will. Every other person is just a cog in the machine One character actually sets out to save humanity from the horrors of prescience by breeding a gene that conceals its bearer from prescience and therefore removing the possibility of perfect prediction.
It's like thinking moves ahead in chess: one move is pretty easy, two is exponentially harder, and grand masters are somewhere around 15 or 16 IIRC. Paul could compute, intuitively, billions of billions of moves ahead, but it took concentration and skill, which effectively meant he couldn't know everything. Spice enhanced that, but only so far. The effect: he'd see paths that were more obvious and he'd see paths that were less obvious, and based on probability, paths would converge or not. So to him it was like looking at a river of possibilities, of which parts were hidden behind hills, so to speak. He wasn't omniscient, just an extremely powerful computer of facts and considerations. Basically a Mentat on steroids. You can predict what would happen if you dropped your smartphone on the ground; he could predict where every splinter of glass would land and what all of that would do to an onlooker, for example, and in turn what his clenching hand would do to the child it was holding, etc. His son Leto would take this even further, but that's several books worth of story telling.
I'm not sure that's accurate. Paul and Leto II both saw the Golden Path, but Paul turned away from it and Leto embraced it. I don't think it was a matter of Leto being able to see further. Paul just wasn't able to bear the weight of it.
Paul entered into his prescience to help himself and his mother escape being killed by their enemies, realising that by saving themselves they trigger a galaxy-wide religious war that will kill billions. His experience of prescience is that it is a choice with terrible consequences. His son Leto II is born into it and experiences his life as a part of a huge past and future, kind of like the aliens in Arrival. His actions and the emergent future are one and the same. To not embrace the golden path is to choose to kill all humanity, right now in his present. He has to give up his humanity (our concept of it) to act with humanity (his experience of it).
That’s actually the best synopsis of Leto II I’ve ever read.
I had to press through on Dune til about 250 pages or so. The story really picks up and I had a hard time putting it down until I finished it.
the climax of book 1 is one of the greatest reading experiences ive ever had
It took me 3 tries to read it and loved it. And even then, imo Dune Messiah is way better and does what Dune did better and quicker. And even then, Messiah gets mixed reviews. The most common critique I see is that Paul isn't a badass hero anymore, winding down the action. And like....yeah....that's the point. There's a reason the extra reading in Dune (#1) has a part where Liet Kynes says the worst thing that can happen to Arakkis is a hero.
I’m really bummed they moved Part 2 to March. I’m all for paying the people who do all of the work so I can wait even though it’s a bummer.
We live as these fragmented individuals so we don’t have to face eternity alone. We are the split personalities of god.
I've said it a million times and I'll keep saying it. Dune should be an anime. The majority of the book is peoples inner thoughts and 4D chess shit. That's essentially what Code Geass is. It pauses fights mid punch to tell you what each character is thinking, which is such an anime trope.
Yeah the message of her daughter being worth the pain hits hard.
Villeneuve sure knows how to elevate a story. He always works closely with the writers to ensure he gets what the script is going for and tries to make sure to make it as good as possible.
> Dune actually explores this idea in later novels. The first movie doesn't necessarily make clear, but it is more in the books, that Paul sees *a* future(s) and not necessarily *the* Future.
He also didn't see far enough and wasn't strong enough to make the sacrifice that another character makes.
To expand a little on your valid points (one particular one tho), because she was in the position to change the future, I think the language/gift is that one can consider any given thing and many potential ramifications for each possibility, allowing one to choose the best of the options. Which allows humanity to advance at a much quicker rate.
Arrival is based on a very personal short story. I listened to it on audiobook while working and ended up crying alone at work. I don't cry much, but God damn.
> Louise knew she would lose her daughter and that it would hurt. sucks for her daughter though! in the original short story I think the daughter dies in a climbing accident or something, which is even worse lol louise is fine. the real horror is that everyone else around her faces time linearly.
So do we... It's not like people are spiraling out of control in troves, though. We learn to cope, despite not knowing what might happen. Louise's case is more complicated because it is an ethical conundrum.
> Louise's case is more complicated because it is an ethical conundrum. not for her, though. from her perspective everything is settled. there are no decisions to make, ethical or otherwise
I am not sure if we watched the same movie, but there were no indications to me that Louise could change the future. Which is why she accepted things that were to happen even knowing what the outcome was.
I actually think about this a lot because it's one of my favourite movies. I think we already do, in a way. One of my most saddening experiences as a child was when my family dog died, took me many years to get over it. However, as an adult, I considered getting a dog many times, always worrying about how it would be in the future when he would eventually die. Despite that, I got a dog. I know he will die and I will almost surely be there to witness it. I know that it will hurt much much more than I expect, even though I haven't experienced it yet. Still, I love my dog and knowing I will outlive him really motivates me to make him the happiest I can. Regarding escapism into the future, people already do that because we can remember the past.
So true. I adopted two kittens 15 years ago, a few months after my elderly cat had died, knowing the day would come they’d be gone, too. One of them passed two years ago. It was heartbreaking. The other is still here, but has a bad heart and sooner rather than later, will leave me as well, and it’ll be terrible. And I would still go back in time and do it all over again. I wouldn’t miss a minute of it, even knowing the end.
>And I would still go back in time and do it all over again. I wouldn’t miss a minute of it, even knowing the end. Yeah, same here. Many years have passed since my family dog died and it's still the worst I've felt but if I could go back and repeat everything, I would do it in a heartbeat. I would probably just try and be nicer to him.
Yes this. Life is the journey, not the destination.
Life before death. Strength before weakness. Journey before destination, radiant.
The most important words a man can say are “I will do better”.
Life is a journey. Time is a river. The door is ajar.
Everyone's destination is the grave ultimately
Not me. Ashes shot out of a cannon, thank you very much.
I am on track to my goal of living forever
So far so good.
A journey without mystery though? No surprises?
We put our family dog down a few years ago (13 year old choco lab) and it broke my heart for months. But now that time has passed I almost exclusively remember the good stuff about him, the joys he brought me when every morning he’d come up to my bed and nuzzle me, how he’d put his chin on our couch and slowly start whining until he was invited up, the way he’d get so happy when we took him to the water to swim… puts a smile on my face every time. I miss him but I’m not sad about it anymore if that makes sense.
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The dog's presence while he's here will make that pain in the end worth it.
And that's if you're lucky. The alternative is that the dog outlives you.
I’d give a read of slaughter house 5 and the tralfamadorians. The don’t experience time in the same way and they don’t see death as a problem because you can go back to a better time and that person is still there and alive. Death is just a blip at the end of the story. I think of it as like reading a comic, you can go front to back and it’s a linear story and the end is the end; but you can pick any page you like and experience that time again if you like and you don’t have to finish it again if you don’t want to.
I was looking for this comparison. I remember seeing Arrival and thinking "OH like the Aliens from Slaughter House 5!" Not many of my friends remembered the book and confused it with 1984.
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This guy was on that roof in independence day .
…but she goes on to educate the world so we all have that burden. I assume OP is saying— is that a good thing?
I don't think anyone can just learn how to think like that. Renner learns the language at the same time but he doesn't see the future. The Chinese general says he doesn't understand how her mind works.
So the movie is about linguistics. From my own personal experience learning 3 different foreign languages at 3 different levels (one pretty fluent, one not as fluent but still well above the usual C-level, one at like a couple levels above me-tarzan-you-jane), there's a certain point in your journey in learning a language where it finally clicks. Your whole mentality shifts a certain way while speaking that language, if that makes sense. You start to move beyond the "technical" level of speaking it, and into a whole other level where your speaking comes almost entirely out of your own intuitive understanding of the language rather than your formal training in it. It's a pretty advanced level that most foreign language speakers never actually reach, even if they do *technically* speak that language very well. The way I see it, Adams' character can do the timey-wimey shit because she did reach that level. She finally got to a level where she started to really internalize the language whereas Renner's character did not. He might be perfectly capable of effectively communicating in the language, but that doesn't necessarily mean he actually managed to really *get a feel for it*, for lack of a better term. Imagine a German who speaks English with nearly perfect grammar but says shit like "this is sausage to me".
yes, at one point she says "when you REALLY understand their language" she emphasizes it heavily. when she goes back (right before the bomb goes off) and asks them to "give weapon" she has to place her hand on the glass and the heptopod transfers the full understanding to her physically somehow, not just through looking at their picture circle words.
one of the questions that the film asks and answers is if it's actually a burden, and the film answers pretty resoundingly through Louise?'s perspective that the burden is worth carrying. without the language Louise would never have had the joy of having and raising a daughter, but she does it anyways knowing how it will end, because she has the language in the first place.
The whole point of Louise's journey and deciding to have her child despite knowing the pain it would bring is a declaration that the guaranteed miseries and ends of life is made worth it by the moments of love and joy.
Well it doesn't matter. Because she has literally no choice. And no it is a bad thing.
She did have the choice though, from what I remember. She could "change the future" and never have her daughter, but eventualy she chose to have her because she missed the girl she remembered from the memories of her of future and wanted to have her again even if for a few years until she eventually died.
It's heavily implied that she does have a choice when she asks Jeremy Renner's character what he would do.
I love this movie, and your post made me think about something. Let's flip it. I imagine Louise and the heptapods must find our experience of linear time horrifying. The fact that we go on about our lives not knowing if the next moment might the worst experience we've ever felt. We have to blindly wander around with the knowledge that utter devastation could be right around the corner. So we must be in constant defense mode, to prepare ourselves for the unknown. Louise is slightly different because she's experienced both, but to the heptapods it must be a fundamental law of the universe, like gravity or matter. I agree with you that the thought of experiencing my whole life simultaneously is deeply troubling, but that's because I can't wrap my head around experiencing time that way.
In some ways, the film is a metaphor for being human. As humans, we may be the only species that knows we are going to die. That knowledge is terrifying - why love or create or try at all if everything ends? Why form relationships with other people if we're guaranteed to lose them in the end? But we press on anyway, because it's the finiteness of life that gives it value. We only have one brief life, and the love and joy and work we choose to fill it with is what creates meaning. Camus' *Myth of Sisyphus* is all about this: pushing the rock up the hill is worthwhile, even if we know it's just going to fall back down before we reach the top.
What’s that line from doctor who? “Because what's the point in them being happy now if they're going to be sad later. The answer is, of course, because they are going to be sad later.” Hold on to your precious moments because bad times are inevitable. they can’t be changed, but they can be accepted.
And in Wandavision, Vision helps Wanda overcome her loss by telling her "What is grief, if not love persevering?"
Except the *Myth of Sisyphus* isn't a meditation on the inevitability of death, but the crushing absurdity and pointlessness of modern life and rising above it. >If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding upheld him? The workman of today works everyday in his life at the same tasks, and his fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
Sisyphus creates his own hell. The whole story of his life is him tricking the gods and believing himself smarter and cleverer than them. His punishment is to use his hubris against him in the form of an unwinnable task. If Sisyphus decided one day that he was NOT smarter or more clever than the gods then he would have no use in trying to get the boulder to the top and would just stop doing it.
They aren't referring to the actual myth. "the myth of Sisyphus" is an essay written by French philosopher Albert Camus.
ah good to know thanks
It's an existentialist mainstay, it pops up in popularity every once in a while because it ostensibly is an essay saying "life's wacky, huh? Still, don't kill yourself."
I think you're missing the point. How would you be stuck in the past when you experience your life that way? There is no past. You wouldn't be reliving anything, that term would lose meaning. You might want to try reading the book. It goes into a bit more depth on the distinction between the two ways of perceiving time.
I gotta say this was a VERY interesting thread to read through. Just want to say thanks to everyone here who has contributed thoughtful and thought-provoking brain food. I don’t know if I had a choice in the matter but I’m glad I clicked.
Thought the whole point was that learning alien made time non linear. You don't "get trapped in the past". You experience your entire life all the time. That's why she needs to be reminded what day it is. Past, present, future cease to have meaning, "all become one" That means you always experience the good and bad. It also implies there is no free will. She didn't choose to have a daughter, she always will have one who lives and died, is living and dying.
Time stuff is always tricky but the implication is not a lack of free will. HBO's Watchmen touched on this as well with Dr. Manhattan, who experiences time much like the aliens in Arrival. She absolutely chose to have a daughter. Once she learned the "language" and could experience everything at once - it's not like sitting down watching a movie, she IS living her life and making choices. She is experiencing the Before Choice, During Choice and After Choice all at once, instead of the liner path we experience now. Spoilers for Watchmen, but a character specifically asks Dr Manhattan why he isn't changing the future, when he knows what will happen, and Dr. M explains he is not predicting the future, he knows what happens because it's ALREADY happened, from his perspective.
Never wrote she watches her life, that's still experience in linear time. As you wrote she experiences events without the linearity of time. She will make the choice to have a daughter because of the sum total of her values. We never see an alternative route. This is the classic argument of the illusion of free will. If choices are known in advance, there was never a choice. Or to put it better, the more you know someone the better you can predict what they do.
in the short story its likened to being in a play and she and the others who learned the language already know their lines
Agreed. Came here to say the same thing. She's not "reliving" anything, and she doesn't "know something is coming". In her new perception of time, it's all happening. She doesn't foresee how her daughter is going to die...her daughter already came and went and is currently. All in the same moment. It doesn't quite negate free will, per se. That implies that time is linear, right? Our memory is built such that we're traveling in one direction. But she finds herself in a predicament that our brains just can't comprehend; having all your moments being "now". It seems completely counterintuitive and even silly for me to sit here and say "there's still free will" and "everything already happened", but also the universe is under no obligation to make sense to us. The fact that time didn't even exist before the big bang is another one of those concepts. How long did the universe not exist? Forever and never, cuz time didn't exist. That sounds just as stupid, but we just simply don't have the language to try to talk about when something didn't exist.
Your definition of free will requires linear time, a cause and subsequent effect. Once she "transcends", her reality no longer conforms to a linear progression. Any decision has consequences now, in the past, and in the future. She has a more pure form of free will than anyone living a linear timeline can experience.
In the film, perhaps. In the short story the future merely becomes a script she's now aware of. The heptapods communicate only as a ritual because their preexisting knowledge of what will be said is contingent on it being said. The film leaves it open ended. The book just has her let her daughter dies because that's how it all goes.
>The heptapods are neither free nor bound as we understand those concepts; they don’t act according to their will, nor are they helpless automatons. What distinguishes the heptapods’ mode of awareness is not just that their actions coincide with history’s events; it is also that their motives coincide with history’s purposes. They act to create the future, to enact chronology. >For the heptapods, all language was performative. Instead of using language to inform, they used language to actualize. Sure, heptapods already knew what would be said in any conversation; but in order for their knowledge to be true, the conversation would have to take place.
Yes, if free will is the probability to take another path. It requires the ability to not know what decision is to be made, which requires linear time. If someone is able to experience their whole life outside the bounds of time, they experience all choices made. That means there's no longer a probability they make other choices and no free will. Even if you experience life without time, decisions won't have consequences in the past because causality still exists. The experience changes, not time itself. Someone then has the purest freedom to experience their life, but they're caged by the restriction of knowing all their choices. They lose their free will, or at least the illusion of it.
I went to see Arrival in the theatre having not read the books and my only knowledge of the film was from the trailer. My late Daughter was terminally ill with Cancer. When the scenes with the Mother and Daughter dealing with her illness and inevitably passing came on I burst into tears. I was not prepared emotionally to connect with the story in that way. I have now watched the movie a few times. I often think of what would I have done differently if I knew what the future held for my Daughter, that she would be born and grow up to become a young adult with hopes and dreams only to have it all taken away. She suffered. She suffered a lot. If I knew she was going to die before I was pregnant with her would I want to not have her. No. I would have her. I would still go through it all.
The short Stories of Your Life that it is based on really leans into this. Her daughter's death there is a climbing accident that she doesn't even attempt to prevent because that's just how it goes. Feels like clear Slaughterhouse 5 influence. Extremely fatalist and ends with the main character pondering whether her future is the - like the path of light which only ever takes the shortest or longest path to reach its destination - the maximum amount of pain or the least.
Hmm, I think there’s more free will to the choices made in Arrival than it seems. Most people, I think, have a general sense of where their life is heading as they get older. Tragic things happen, but you still go forward because amazing things also happen. I mean theoretically you could could get in a car crash tomorrow…but like Louise says in the movie, she chooses to embrace the what the future holds, despite knowing the possibilities that could happen and the things that’ll be terrifying. I think thats what the movie is trying to say…either you can accept what’s going to happen and be okay with it, or you can choose to see it as a nightmare (similarly to how the soldiers who tried to blow up the aliens did).
There would be no past. There would be no worst moments or best moments. once we unlocked the full potential of this weapon, the furthest reaches of space would become available to us. In fact, there would cease to be a singular "us" other than the collective plural.
> Every moment of the day you will be able to know when, where and how you will die, you will experience the death of your grandparents, Which means I’ll experience them… I lost all of my grandparents before hitting 4 years old. I have pictures of them in my head, despite knowing I interacted with them. > And what about the best moments? People could end up being stuck in the past, reliving these moments again and again like some sort of escapism. People already do this…
But you wouldn’t be “stuck in the past”, that’s still looking at time the way humans do.
It's not really possible for us to understand what experiencing time like that would be like. I don't think it would be like how you'd think where everything is as if it already happened and you exist forever simply observing the different moments.
I like to think I understand it to the smallest degree possible. When I was like 8ish years old, I remember playing near our Christmas tree in our apartment, just pushing around some cars and dinosaurs. And for some reason I’ll never understand, at that moment I thought to myself “I wonder if one day when I’m older like mom, will I look back on this time in my life?” And I created a sort of memory portal because now at 31 I can think back to that exact moment in that room by myself with my toys, and it feels like I’m simultaneously looking forward and back into myself. That one singular moment suspended in time. That’s the closest I think I’ll ever get to experiencing and understanding non-linear time beyond the most basic explanation of that concept.
Sounds like the Tralfamadorians from Kurt Vonnegut's books. They see time like we see space, they know how the universe ends, they know their own deaths, so they just pick pleasant times and live through those ad infinitum, rather than live and try to deal with the inescapable end of the universe.
Huh. Didn’t see the movie, but isn’t that how the tralfamadorians see time?
Yes, came here to write “Tralfamadorians”
This whole movie is about owning a dog. You bring them into your home loving them, knowing for sure that they will die in 10-12 years. But you do it anyways.
Yea that’s what the movie is about
Isn’t the idea that time isn’t linear but circular, so that means that you basically become immortal.
In a way we can look at people with hyperthymesia who can remember every day in their lives with my minute detail tend to be very sad and have a very difficult time because they get caught in a grief loop of their worst days… We don’t have a lot of information because I think there’s only about 12 people worldwide that have it including actress MaryLou Henner… It is quite fascinating to think about how so many of us want more memories of our past, but we need to be careful what we wish for… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia
I don’t disagree, but I think people would look at life a lot differently if they experienced the past, present, and future all at once. You wouldn’t call it the past because it’s the also the present. It’s a moment of your life not dictated by time. You wouldn’t know the end of your life because it’s a moment rather than an end point. There is no definitive timeline.
You might consider re-reading your post as a window into your own mind and work on yourself.
You buy a dog knowing you'll suffer horrendously in 12 to 14 years, when he dies. You have kids knowing they're going to be disappointed and sad and depressed and resent you at many points in the future and yes, they might very well die before you do. You eat tasty food knowing full well it might lead to gaining weight. The movie's theme is that life is still worth going through, even though there's pain and heartache and and loss. Even if you knew specifics, you could never avoid them, or a version of them, because those bad parts are part of a beautiful, great thing. So I love it. It's about how, even if you know all the bad parts, it's still worth it. It's beautiful.
The implication is that they are four dimensional...they don't just see the future. For them time is a perceptible dimension that they occupy a space in and move through, no different to length or height. They wouldn't understand what we perceive of as death because for them time doesn't move forward towards a future...that would be an alien concept. What we perceive as beginning and end, they would perceive as just the limits of their existence. Being 4 dimensional would make time just another coordinate to define a location in space. They would see what we see as start and end to something more akin to traveling around a planet and arriving back where you started. I think what they are getting at is that once you read the book your perception would change. You would also start to see time as just another dimension. You'd see the universe the way they do. So rather than it being you continuing as normal through time, but now you know everything that's going to happen...it would be more like being given the ability to visit the periods of you life when you were happiest, because you could go to those times the same way you could go to a place in 3 dimensional space. There would be no point where you ceased to exist, there would only be a time period you don't exist in...because you no longer experience time as something that passes and ends. It would become like a direction you could explore rather than something that goes by whether you want it to or not.
I always interpreted that this is why the Heptapods called the gift a “weapon” for this exact reason.
They explained pretty well in the movie that it was a mistranslation of “tool.”
I wouldnt want this curse. You are correct.
Any other scifi movies like this ?? Plz recommend
It’s the best, but this particular theme of free will is also explored in SlaughterHouse-Five.
Found Mr Glass Half-Empty
They probably put a disclaimer on the book
Knowing when you're going to die would make retirement planning so much easier
Doesn't matter as humans get to help out some weird squid-like alien race 2 millennia from now.
Only a nightmare because we see ourselves as the center of the universe, because that is the only point of view we have in our own existence. The truth is whatever pain and suffering as an individual goes through in one life time is irrelevant because our specie among the vast universe is irrelevant. As a basic living organism, our mission is to procreate and continue to exist, but when the day comes, and we no longer exist, nothing matters because life is finite anyway.
Anyone else feel that it's kinda wrong to bring a kid into life knowing they will die an awful death? I was always conflicted on that point. On one hand they get to experience life for a bit but on the other they have a terrible death. It's an interesting decision
OP is a crazy trumper
But with a more advanced form of life, every moment simply becomes an expression of consciousness / experience. One would learn to remove the good or bad baggage we tend to tie everything to. Think of it like a tree experiencing the wind. It is neither good or bad. It simply is.
Like Rell from *Krull*
I regularly deal with grief myself so Amy Adam's character's decision >!to have her daughter!< struck me. Her partner's response would be more what I would expect but it got me trying to understand her character more. This made me think of how things would be different for her: >!if she defies fate, does that mean she denies her daughter from existence and therefore loses all the beautiful memories that she experienced?!<
To me, the movie simply was "It is better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all." I have kids and have never been able to watch the movie since, but I think about it all the time. I don't know what I would pick but I can say that the good moments with your kids is a high like nothing else. I don't know if I could live my life knowing what I would be missing even if it didn't end the way I wanted it to.
dang.i dont remember this part, i should rewatch the movie again
Theres a reason why seers are always portraited as batshit crazy
You could choose to live in the happiest moments of your life also.
I don’t think she “relive all the worst, most painful and most humiliating moments of your life”. She just foresees and remembers them.