(urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing and yet more Laplace
Iorwerth Thomas
iorweththomas at hotmail.com
Thu Feb 17 07:49:39 PST 2005
>From: Dan'l Danehy-Oakes <danldo at gmail.com>
>I guess the question is whether the plan takes into account your
>knowledge of the plan.
>
>Suppose I have been given such a plan and, foolishly, read the
>first page of it. I would immediately be tempted to do something
>other than the first thing it said. If I then returned to the plan,
>would it say, "Reading the above, he decides to do something
>else?" Would it have changed to show what I actually did do?
>Or would it now be an utterly inaccurate plan? Might it self-
>destruct?
>
I just remembered - my great disappointment with the film of 'The Minority
Report' was that it replaced a philosophical teaser of this kind with a bog
standard Hollywood conspiracy and 'free will exists if I make enough
stirring speeches about it' type plot. In Dick's original story, the
precogs in fact view three different futures - the first being where the
protagonist commits murder, the second being where he doesn't commit the
murder as a result (in part) of believing the first prediction, and the last
being where he commits the murder as a result (in part) of believing the
second prediction. Since he chooses to believe the minority report (that he
won't commit murder), he winds up doing so.
This was probably considered a little tricky for cinema audiences to
understand. And would probably have caused Germaine Grier (who seems to
have problems with suspension of disbelief) even more problems with the film
than she already had [1] when she was on the reviewing panel of 'Newsnight
Review'.
Not a bad film, though.
Iorwerth
[1] They could be summed up as: 'I can't see how precognition could happen,
therefore it's impossible, therefore this film is nonsense, as it confuses
me. Surely representations of philosophical problems must be literally
possible in order to be worthwhile, or I won't be able to understand them.'
But I'm being a little cruel, particularly as she's always a good laugh when
she's on the panel unless you're talking sf or fantasy - then she's just
painful. The general views of the panel regarding the film were largely
positive, if I recall correctly.
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