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Arrival: A short review (Spoilers)
Villeneuve is a unique director. His movies use bizarre settings or scenarios as a backdrop to tell intensely human and personal dramas.
In Bladerunner 2049 he evolves the 1982 movie's dystopian frame into its full aesthetic. Skyscraper mausoleums, home to living creatures with dead souls and dying creatures with living souls. The ruins of Vegas. A glimpse, briefly, into a potential uprising. All in service of a story where a nobody ensures that a somebody has final closure.
In Enemy, it is not clear, even by the end, whether the story takes place entirely inside the unreliable narrator's mind. Huge spiders roam the city, eventually invading the protagonist's very living room (or mind?).
While Villeneuve's unsettling aesthetic is at its peak in Dune I and II, I consider them two of his weaker movies. There are two characters in Herbert's Dune: the planet itself, and the directed inevitability of massed humanity. What is personal must be in service to this setting. Instead, Villeneuve's interpretation foregrounds individual agency.
Fortunately, Villeneuve has already directed his SciFi masterpiece in Arrival. The alien ships are massive ellipsoids hovering impossibly mere meters from the earth. The aliens themselves walk on tentacle appendages, grotesquely squid-like. The camera frequently takes a near-first-person view, with panicked and claustrophobic breathing emanating from all speakers (1). These moments of enclosed fear are juxtaposed against equally breathtaking cinematographic vistas. The slow panning as the helicopter approaches the alien ship with low-lying clouds roiling across the Montana prairie. A human hand reaching fingers up as the alien's tentacles stretch downward.
Amy Adams is perfectly cast. In 2016 she could pass for 30 or 45 or anywhere in between, key to the time-bending unfolding of the plot. She treats her character, Louise, much like Villeneuve treats the movie: with understated grace and moments of sublime. Louise's loneliness palpably exudes in the first third of the movie, before running an emotional gamut from fear, hope, acceptance, and finally transcendence.
The science is inaccurate (2), but Villeneuve perfectly captures the academic aesthetic.
The idea that language constrains and shapes our experience of reality is thoughtfully if subtly explored (3).
While there are nods to liberal sensibilities (when a general tells Louise she made short work of insurgent Farsi recordings, she retorts "you made short work of the insurgents"; a soldier turns rogue following a phone call with his inconsolable wife and listening to the in-universe stand-in for Alex Jones), Villeneuve rarely lets politics infect his storytelling.
This movie feels quasi-religious and transcendent (4) in its celebration of life and meaning in suffering and loss. Louise through her contact with the aliens is able to view her life outside of time, revealing memory-like sequences of her future. This future includes myriad happy moments with her daughter, but concludes with her daughter's devastating death from cancer. Arrival climaxes with Louise joyfully embracing this future despite knowing that it means the premature end of her only romantic relationship and the heartbreaking loss of her daughter. The time that she will have with her daughter is worth it all.
Last week's discussion on Down Syndrome prompted this post. How many parents who have Down syndrome children would trade those children for nothingness? How many, if they had perfect foresight, would still choose to have the child? Age begets wisdom, experience shapes us, and relationships become our great source of meaning. A couple choosing to abort their Down syndrome child are doing more than making an expedient choice. They are depriving themselves and their child of a rich tapestry of experience; one that is perhaps more challenging and painful, but also one that can and should be fulfilling. A life of short cuts is a life cut short; not in time but in meaning.
(1) Watch this on a big screen and with surround sound
(2) At one point a whiteboard displays the "top 10" most famous equations including Black Scholes...none of which would be relevant to alien first contact. It is also preposterous that we perceive time linearly solely due to our linear language.
(3) Yes, the fact that this is the "reason" behind Louise's ability to view her life outside of time is not "subtle", but this reveal is blink-and-miss-it: my guess is most viewers would simply associate her time-bending ability with prolonged exposure to the aliens.
(4) Villeneuve grew up Catholic
There's a relationship between Black Scholes and what ergodicity economics calls the "equation of life". There are surprising relationships between seemingly unrelated fields, such as probability theory, finance, physics, and socioeconomic systems. So I don't think we can necessarily assume what extraterrestrials would find relevant.
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Dissagree here. Any woman more attractive than Dr. Holly Krieger is not believable as a serious intellectual.
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Arrival at this point is a movie that I like more because it introduced me to the source material than for the movie in itself. Yes, the direction is good, but they way they butchered the original concept is inexcusable (thank you screenwriter Eric Heisserer).
In the original work the idea is that only your perception of time changes, your consciousness can't time travel and everything you do still has to make sense in a linear, causal view of time. Learning the language lets you remember the future just as you remember the past but it also dispels you of the illusion of free will. The aliens came to earth not because "they know that some day we will help them or something" but simply as explorers. There is no big action scene where the protagonist averts a catastrophe by using her knowledge of the future.
The part about her daughter (it's a daughter in the book) underscores this. She dies not of an incurable illness but of an easily preventable rock climbing incident. Except that she can't easily prevent it because that's just how it happens, just like you can't change the past.
The movie muddles all this, probably to make the big action climax. I imagine somebody at some point figured out it would be callous for the protagonist not to warn her daughter that she's going to slip and die. Maybe they didn't even get the concept of the original story, in between the lines of coke they were doing. But it doesn't solve anything, if she can consciousness timetravel why not have a child the month before, or the one after. Why specifically pick the one born with an incurable illness? Yes they would be timetravel aborting him but no more so than all the other dozens of children they are timetravel aborting instead.
Yeah, the movie decided to take it in a different direction. Personally, I think that's because the concept behind the original novella is dumb and the movie is much better for abandoning it.
Not sure how much Ted Chiang you've read, but here's his formula:
Stories of your Life has a somewhat better human side (which is why I think its his most popular story, despite not in my opinion being anywhere close to his best) and a below average concept; it doesn't actually make sense if you think it through any more than he wants you to.
Say you learn the alien language and flip into this alternate mode of perceiving time: what exactly does this look like in your brain? Well, it can't look like anything in your brain, can it? Because brain state is part of the world state that makes those future events inevitable. If perceiving the future actually affected your brain in any way at all, then it would absolutely change the future. But if there's no difference in brain state, how can there be a difference in mental state? Dualism just isn't a serious scientific or philosophical position and it hasn't been for a century at least. Even if it were, your body still acts only on information it could gather without knowing the future. Is there a separate you who perceives time normally and makes all the decisions? What is the you that can perceive the future, then? In what sense is it actually you and not some outside observer?
It seems obvious to me that the story is dualist. It doesn't matter that it isn't scientifically serious (imo no theory of consciousness is scientifically serious, btw)
There are no decisions to be made, decisions don't exist in that way.
(I reread the story to make sure I was being fair. I stand by my point, but the story does execute on its (imo bad) premise well. I think over the years since I first read it I let that issue overshadow its good points -- it is an enjoyable and somewhat thoughtful work.)
I'm a Dennett fan, but I can agree it's a hard problem; the hard problem, even. But even so, there are answers which are clearly incorrect. I'd argue all forms of dualism fall into that category, but the story puts forward a particularly nonsensical variant in which there is a soul... but it doesn't do anything. It thinks it does -- the story talks a lot about putting on a performance of what the characters would have done if they couldn't perceive the future -- but it in fact does not, because every last atom in their bodies behaves identically to how it otherwise would. The soul has no causal or explanatory role on any observation except the subjective experience of perceiving the future. Why would it work like this? Obviously such a thing would never evolve -- it can't provide any fitness benefit since it doesn't do anything. Why would god or whoever make people this way? It's not like the soul is responsible for the body's actions: those were set in stone when the universe was created, and, anyway, that would require the soul to do something, which it never does.
I'm not opposed to speculative fiction exploring dualism, but Story of Your Life gets very into the weeds on physics and the determinism it builds up to is 100% grounded in physical laws... and then it abandons that premise to shoehorn in something nonphysical -- the soul -- but it can't actually let it affect anything or it would break the whole story. And note: the variational laws don't supersede the causal laws, they are equivalent to them. There's no trick here that lets you violate causality, and the future cannot cause the past.
... Except the heptapods actually do behave differently because of the way they perceive time! They don't write their sentences one character at a time but just efficiently use each stroke for several characters. And forget that: their very form or writing induces simultaneous consciousness! They (seem to be) confused by physical principles described from a linear time perspective! They're very patient for explorers (because, it's implied, they already have the answers they'll only actually learn later.) It's mentioned that our main character only imperfectly experiences simultaneous consciousness, but that should still only affect the subjective experience (as otherwise the future would affect the past, which remains impossible). And in fact she can't drop any hints about simultaneous consciousness, has to act exactly as though her subjective experience hadn't changed at all. Why the disconnect?
Determinism doesn't actually render the concept of a decision meaningless, it just means that decisions are part of the causal chain that will inevitably result in the future. While it is trivially true that "You will choose to do X because X is what you will choose to do," there must still be other reasons why you will choose to do X that make no reference to the future. My point is that the entire decision-making apparatus must still exist (or causality would be violated), so you're postulating an entire second self to make this work, and the self that perceives the future is extraneous.
Dualism is very sneaky. Like you said, it makes very little logical sense; it almost certainly doesn't describe anything real. But it's so hard to get over our instinctive belief in it. It can show up in many ways, some of them quite subtle.
My personal bugbear is the Doomsday Argument, which many rationalists believe, including Scott. But for a statistical argument like this one to work, there has to be some actual selection process, not metaphorical, not a clever turn of phrase, but a really truly actually real random lottery. And such a process requires the absurd form of dualism that you've mentioned. Your soul has to be presented with the deterministic universe as a whole, with all the humans that will ever live already set in stone, and will then "find itself" (the obscuring language Wikipedia uses) in one of the humans. And which one you inhabit can't have a physical effect on anything, because otherwise how could future humans have been available as a choice?
In an experiment where you create a simulated universe in your basement, flip a coin to determine whether it will simulate 2 entities or 20, and then ask entity #2 what it thinks the coin flip was, of course it should say 50/50. Repeating the experiment will show it's miscalibrated if it says anything else. Now, if duality holds, then perhaps some soul came along and is "surprised" to be inhabiting entity #2 in a universe that could have up to 20, and maybe that soul is subjectively correct to believe in the Doomsday Argument. But like the main character of Story of Your Life, that realization can't be shared with anyone else. When you ask the entity what it thinks, it can't give a different response based on whether this time it's souled or a p-zombie. So it has to give the averaged answer: 50/50.
Despite the resultant absurdity, the idea of "finding yourself" as a particular human - that your awareness is separable from the body you inhabit - still survives in a Wikipedia article. And in Scott's writings. It's embarrassing that rationalism isn't enough to conquer this trope.
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In a perfectly simulated universe, all decisions are predictable, including any decisions you make after learning the future and learning that you learned the future etc, recursively, forever, blah blah blah. This is not a narratively or philosophically interesting concept. Quantum mechanics aside, ultimate determinism and therefore hypothetical foresight given total information and a fully comprehensive universe model has been the default assumption among most smart people for a long time. Chiang does nothing in the story to say anything interesting about this at all.
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Exhalation is pretty good, but the point of the story is not "what if the Second Law of Thermodynamics," but rather to describe how a mind could be explicitly instantiated within a machine, and also remain completely inaccessible to technological comprehension/deconstruction.
Eh, is it really more inaccessible than a program running on ram without a disk installed? If ram loses power, whatever it stores is gone, just like their brains. And if ram were integrated into a system not designed with non-volatile storage or external access in mind, I think it would be comparably difficult to get the running program out. Not impossible, but it's not impossible here, either: our protagonist was actually able to watch his bits flip and trace the path the air took through his brain. I don't think you'd get very far without a lot of computer assistance, but the same tech was doubtless necessary to build their brains in the first place.
Anyway, I don't think this is what Exhalation thinks its own point is: it spends about ten times as long explaining entropy.
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The original work is very interesting although I’m not sure it’s very good. It raises some interesting philosophical questions. The story is probably the best possible story you could write about a form of pseudo-precognition in hindsight that makes immediate, near-term sense to a reader.
But its deliberate ambiguities exist more to paper over the questions than to answer them. Gwern presents the most plausible explanation which is that nothing physically / cosmologically interesting is going on, the protagonist is basically just ‘reflecting’ on her life, in the standard past tense, in a kind of holistic way enabled by the alien language. But that also makes the story a lot less interesting.
I don’t think it even does this. I think it just lets you view your life, in hindsight, in a way that projects memories of the future you actually experienced (in normal linear time, you’re old now) onto your younger self.
I'm not even sure there is any difference between those explanations but still:
(...)
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I could not disagree more, I love this change from the source material.
In order to have that version work everything after her perception gets rewired functionally makes her a zombie, unable to perform basic actions like suggesting her daughter not go rock climbing today, because she has seen the future and is unable to change it. She is functionally a prisoner inside her own life as she is forced to read from a script. Her take away is to relish the good times and try to remember every detail of them since she can relive those moments ad nauseum, which is a lovely take away from what is essentially a nonsensical horror story ending.
In the movie she sees potential future but retains some agency. Which the science works less well than in the book, it avoids the question of what exactly is forcing her to act out the script and instead focuses on the question of if she believes the good times with her husband and daughter are worth the bad. This is a more beautiful and meaningful ending IMHO, it gives her suffering meaning because she went into it with both eyes open in order to grab onto the good that comes with it instead of her being locked in her head screaming that she wants to pick up the phone and tell her daughter to do anything else today OTHER than rock climb but being unable to do so because she is locked out of agency by 4th dimensional vision.
That worked fine for Doctor Manhattan because part of his story was that the 4th dimensional vision and associated super powers altered him so much he was no longer meaningfully human, and I really liked those parts of Watchmen. But they explained it better and worked with it better.
I got the Ted Chiang Short story collection this story is from, and frankly I found The Story of Your Life (the one Arrival is based on) to be the best one despite my many problems with it. I was pretty unimpressed by Chiang tbh.
Dr. Manhattan was a Straw Vulcan who thought that there was no difference between a live body and a dead body because they have the same number of particles, yet liked to do scientific experiments on things that had the same number of particles before and after the experiment.
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Thanks for the writeup. This is probably my favorite movie of all time, or at least top 3. Incredible story, incredibly acted and directed and scripted. Love it so much.
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The implication seems to be that you should have children with as many different neurological disorders as possible rather than boring neurotypicals. Is that really your position?
No, that is not my position. Each child has their own joys and challenges. Some are more difficult than others. One of my children is "mildly" autistic and it is a very different and more challenging relationship than with my others. But we have also shared unique and memorable experiences. A couple months ago she made a mistake in a piano recital and looked at the audience with a one of the most genuine sheepish expressions I've ever seen and said "sorry". The audience chuckled in appreciative surprise. She then started over and played the piece perfectly. When we got back home she was inconsolable because she had "made a mistake and everyone had laughed at her".
We shouldn't seek out "odd" children (unless feeling called to adopt difficult children), but we should accept what life throws at us and find the joy in that life.
In that case, I hardly see why someone should have a down syndrome child instead of a normal one.
Acceptance of a situation is different from intentionally creating (or uncreating) the situation.
Taken to an extreme, if I there had been some screen that showed my autistic child would have been autistic I could have aborted her and immediately had a (higher shot at a) "normal" child. But just typing that sentence makes my blood boil.
I don't like that she is disabled, but I wouldn't trade her or our experiences for anything.
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Not OP but that doesn't seem to follow in the slightest, no. The child is (obviously) denied a rich tapestry of experience and so is the parent. This doesn't imply that on the parent's side it's worthwhile to maximize for diversity of weird and unpleasant challenges. Only that if they do get a child with those differences, they're missing out on something by not experiencing the child and the relationship they'd have had with him or her.
As an inveterate baby-maker (on the male side) myself, my concern isn't for the burden on my wife and I. We'd rise to it well, I think. My concern is for the dampening effect it might have on the lives of my other children. I don't see murder as a reasonable solution, though; if I did, I can think of a lot of other people whose deaths would probably also improve my children's lives.
I thought of this. I knew multiple people growing up that had special needs siblings that made their own childhoods suck. Or they might not even have those other siblings if the drain on time, finances, and attention is too great. I read once, years ago, that women who have abortions go on to have more children than women who don't, with the idea being that it is a lot harder to get your 2.5 child happy ending marriage and picket fence once you are a single mom. I don't know if that fact is still true of millenials like it was for gen-z, but I could very well imagine that this trade off is actually 1 down syndrome child vs 2-3 without.
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Does a Down syndrome child entail a richer tapestry of experiences for the parent than a neurotypical child? That's the tradeoff being made here.
This seems to assume that having a Down syndrome child precludes having another child afterward, which strikes me as odd.
A Down syndrome child is such a massive sink of resources that it DOES (if not absolutely preclude) make it much more difficult to have another child afterwards.
As for the "rich tapestry"... an afternoon being subject to torture is a richer tapestry of experience than taking a nap, but all things considered, I'd take the nap every time.
Waiting for a promotion opportunity can feel like torture too. How much easier might life be if your boss unfortunately, unexpectedly passed away when you're the obvious candidate to replace him? Or if that competitor who's making business hard just vanished one day, not to be heard from again? It'd probably be really good for your kids, too.
Yes, and as long as we're talking about enriching experiences, those who engage in corporate scheming and assassination are, in fact, living richer lives than those who just drudge on waiting until natural aging frees up a spot for them.
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I can live a perfectly functional life even if I don’t get that promotion. The same is not true when it comes to raising a child with special needs.
Siblings of a Down syndrome child will also be affected. They receive less parental attention, are forced to grow up faster than their peers, and carry heavier emotional burdens for years. The costs are not trivial.
The analogy reads like backwards reasoning. You believe all abortion is murder, so you retroactively justify keeping the downs baby despite the trade-offs for the child and the rest of the family.
To me, the great downside of a child with down's syndrome is the worry that no one will take care of them if the parents die first. That they will end their life in misery, pain, neglect, and crying for their parents. Normal siblings can help guard against that scenario, but that's passing a heavy responsibility to someone else without their adult consent.
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Surely any business would welcome their competitor randomly exiting the market. This seems like an unambiguously great piece of luck for a business.
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If you're not going to get a promotion unless you murder your boss, you are better off changing companies. Obviously there's no equivalent of that in the analogy... so you're not getting that promotion (or having that next child)
I don't find early-term abortion tantamount to murder, so the analogy really doesn't convince me.
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If you want to argue that's it's immoral to abort a down syndrome baby, go ahead - but what you're doing is arguing that the parents are missing out, in fact impoverishing themselves, by not having a disabled child.
I'm not. I'm arguing that they're missing out, in fact impoverishing themselves, by not having and loving every child God gives them.
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It obviously does, on the margin, since the options are:
Humans have a limited fertility window and most people are trying to hit some target number of kids. However, even if you are just trying to maximize the number of kids you have until you hit menopause, you're trading off a neurotypical kid for a down syndrome kid. Exception would be situations like "you're over 40 and you probably can't get pregnant again".
Not only have we shifted the goal posts to what I agree is a highly non-central situation at best, but even people who happen to be in that situation can't, in practice, know whether they are.
Seems just as plausible to me that if they're at the end of their child-bearing years they might abort what would have been their last (and in some cases only) child and not be able to conceive again.
Bird in the hand and all that.
Indeed. So let's focus on the modal case where people are overwhelmingly likely to conceive again after aborting a down syndrome baby.
This is my point, that outside the cases of highly geriatric pregnancies we're talking about trading off a down syndrome child for a neurotypical child.
We could also trade off dumb and ugly and sad children for better ones, I guess. It's not a slope I'd care to find myself on and I have zero faith in others to not keep sliding down it.
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Arrival is probably a Top 5 movie all time for me.
Aborting your child after finding out it has down syndrome is understandable in a material world, which is what most of our society lives in. Pain and suffering in a material world is a variable that must be minimized or eliminated. We all get that. In the spiritual world, pain and suffering often have meaning, and people who see that tend to understand something that a life of comfort sometimes cannot.
That is one of the core points of disagreement is it not?
You say pain and suffering are variables that must be minimized or eliminated, and I say that this attitude is dysgenic and fundamentally incompatible with human flourishing.
... But in this case, it means having healthy children and not children with crippling genetic disabilities. There isn't a more central case of eugenics than aborting fetuses with Down Syndrome -- the word literally means 'good genes.' I don't disagree that extreme saftey-ism and aversion to struggle and pain can ironically be very unhealthy, but reversed stupidity isn't intelligence. Castrating oneself, while doubtless an impressive display of grit and emotional regulation, does not make a man a good father; it ensures he will never be a father of any sort. Good things are good, as you say, and healthy children are good and unhealthy children are less good.
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The downstream effects are dysgenic and anti-human, but my comment leans more toward those effects seeming to be symptoms of a deeper immaterial or spiritual problem. I see the materialist culture as having no strong category for meaningful suffering. That is where belief in the immaterial or spiritual tends to matter at scale. It does not make suffering pleasant, and it does not require one to pretend that pain is not real or that it is good in all cases. But it does give people a reason not to treat suffering as the ultimate evil to be avoided at all costs.
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I think 'human flourishing' is a dodge; a nice-sounding but ultimately empty referent. Sure, just wave vaguely in a direction that most people agree has appealing vibes. But is that really a basis on which to build any sort of worthwhile moral system or institute policy?
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This is a false dichotomy, most who would abort a downs child would then go on to have a normal child. Not nothing. Everything in life has an opportunity cost.
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Arrival was good, but it mostly missed the point of the short story, in that it shouldn't have included time travel.
https://gwern.net/story-of-your-life
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