5HC : Skinner, Turing and yet more Laplace

Iorwerth Thomas · 17 Feb 2005, 07:50 · from 2005-February.txt.gz

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From: iorweththomas at hotmail.com (Iorwerth Thomas)
Date: Thu Feb 17 07:50:23 2005
Subject: (urth) 5HC : Skinner, Turing and yet more Laplace
In-Reply-To: <1f7617370502161013313befb7 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <BAY102-F108359800D88A61F21CF23B96D0 at phx.gbl>

>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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