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Comment by kbenson | Hacker News Reader

I specifically read "Story of Your Life" a few months back prior to watching Arrival, as some people here claimed they liked the movie Adaptation better. I have to say I agree. It was a fine short story, and had some very good conceptual elements, but I found his explanation of the phenomenon and it's consequences for people subject to it lacking (or perhaps I misunderstood a portion of it). The movie skirted actual explanations with respect to this, but thus wasn't subject to scrutiny that may have shown it to be less solid than was supposed.

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SPOILERS AHEAD

I don't like how the movie makes her daughter to be dying of a disease. In the book, she dies in a climbing accident, which the protagonist knows full well will happen but does nothing to prevent it, thus demonstrating how committed she was to an immutable, deterministic future.

I liked the story better. I think it helped that the actress reading the story in the audiobook was excellent.

I think some aspects of that are covered that well in the movie, in that she knew her daughter would die, and made a choice to have one anyways, and subject her husband to that pain presumably without his knowledge or consent.

The problem I had with the story, if I understood it correctly, is not that she chose to be committed, but that she actually had no choice. This is, essentially the part of the story I found problematic. It was explained enough to bypass my suspension of disbelief, but not enough to provide an explanation I could accept. How do you have free through without free action?

I would love to revisit the story and find evidence to support that point, or to find that I misread or misunderstood, but I unfortunately don't have a way to do that right now. :/

In the book she has no choice, knowing the future doesn't allow you to change it, it's deterministic. Free Will doesn't exist. In the movie they went out of their way to make it clear the future can be changed, and she does change it with the phone call. Which undermines the much cleaner scientific premise of the book and also makes her a bit selfish to decide to have the child anyway and only tell her husband months before she gets sick.

I don't think the suggestion is that she can change the future in the movie.

My interpretation of the phone call is that it demonstrates the reverse causality that is now possible thanks to her new understanding. It doesn't mean the cause nor the effect are mutable, just that they are now accessible in a different order than is typical.

I think in the movie the decision to have the child is also immutable. So when in the final scene she commits to that path - it is because of the paradoxical freedom born of fatalism that she manages to be cheerful. There is literally no other way things could go - so why worry?

If she's selfish - she's deterministically, immutably selfish. Under the new model - the concept of a "change" to the future through action is incomprehensible. The future just "is".

She can act on the knowledge of the future. She could have decided not to have the child right? The same as she decided to act to stop the Chinese. It's very inconsistent to argue she had to have the child and that he couldn't have told her husband earlier, since she eventually told him. In the book that's impossible, the present is not affected by the knowledge of the future. Things go along exactly in the same way, it's just that she perceives the future the same way as she perceives the past. It's difficult to understand because we are use to thinking we have free will. The book takes away that and makes us face the strangeness of this hypothetical reality. In the movie it's just inconsistent in my opinion.

> She could have decided not to have the child right?

There is nothing in the movie that explicitly supports this.

(Spoilers ahead.) My take is that as she learns the language, her mind is changed. Not only can she remember the future, she comes to understand that she cannot change it. Just like the other heptapod knew it was going to die, but came to Earth anyway because the future is immutable.

Giving her free will introduces a paradox: the future which she remembers will no longer exist if she veers off the path. Unless she can see all possible futures, which is a different story to Arrival altogether (see Dune). The whole visit could be pointless in any case (again, spoilers) if Earth decides not to help the heptapods in the far future. The entire plot hinges on an immutable future.

She comes to understand she cannot change it, yet from her point of view, she decides to call the Chinese. And she chooses, from her point of view, when she tells her husband. She does actions that would have been impossible without knowledge of the future. Maintaining that she didn't have free will when her actions depend on that knowledge is very difficult in my opinion. You have the subjective impression of free will, if you have certain knowledge and you can sometimes act on it, why not always? The book fixes this making it irrelevant to have that knowledge. The movie crosses the line when some causality is reversed.

It's possible that she decided to have the child knowing what would happen to her, and that's why she can see that future, but that's still her making her own selfish decision. If she wouldn't have done that, then she wouldn't "remember" having a child. I think this is why they changed how the child dies from the book. In the book she dies in a perfectly preventable accident. In the movies is kind of pre-arranged. Making her die in an accident that the mother know is going to happen would have been very obviously evil when it's been proven she can sometimes act on knowledge of the future. The book makes the situation maximize the fatalism of the character: she knows her daughter is going to die in that climbing trip, yet she can't do anything to avoid it, she's just an observer, a passenger in her own life.

According to the screenwriter, they hedged a bit on the question of free will in the movie compared to the book. He specifically addresses this here: https://youtu.be/xzEPU2PTjT4?t=23m55s

This is directly addressed in the books, sufficiently, in my opinion:

> 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.

> Freedom isn't an illusion; it's perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it's simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It's like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There's no "correct" interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can't see both at the same time.

> Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it.

That right there pretty much sums up the point I had trouble with. How does knowledge make it impossible to exercise free will? Or since it's stated the other way around, is it that you just don't know the things you would be compelled to change, so it's not that you see all of the future, but that you only see the future that you can't or won't change?

In any case, I find "Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future" hard to accept at face value. I find it hard to reconcile how free will will coexists with a system like this, since I imagine someone will try to fight that purely on principle. Maybe those people would know little or nothing about the future though, since their desire to change it would prevent it's knowledge in the first place.

Finally, "including telling others what I know: those who know the future don't talk about it. Those who've read the Book of Ages never admit to it." is odd to me. Why do they not talk about it? To me, this implies a lack of free will, otherwise again, someone would talk about it, even after the fact. Is it really that people do not or is it that they can not, because I can't really see do not being followed.

In the end, I'm left with a very muddy and inconsistent view of how this works because of those explanations. Then again, doing this well may have been an impossible task for me. If there isn't an explanation that blends free will and knowledge of the future that exists, or in a way I can understand and accept, the alternative for this story is no free will, and while consistent, it's also bleak and disconcerting, since I'm not sure there's much that's quite as bad as knowledge of the future and along with it knowledge that you can do nothing to change it. Either you never want to change it, which points to sentience being a lie, or you do but cannot, in which case you are a prisoner in your own body. :/

I read it differently from you. What I read is that there are two "modes", one with free will but with no knowledge of the future, and one with knowledge of the future but that effectively "forces" you to play your part in what you know the future to be. I feel that this explanation agrees with the two "interpretations" of refraction mentioned in the book.

However, then the question arises: How do you reconcile the fact that some beings can see the future when there are other beings in the world that have free will (and thus are able to change the future that the former see)?

I consider the explanation in the book sufficient, though. I don't expect my fiction to be perfectly consistent with everything, and this particular story passes my personal, subjective bar.

> I consider the explanation in the book sufficient, though. I don't expect my fiction to be perfectly consistent with everything, and this particular story passes my personal, subjective bar.

Sure, and that's your prerogative. For me, the explanation made me think about some of the mechanics more than I had bothered to up to that point, and what I viewed as inconsistencies actually detracted from the story and ruined some of the immersion. It changed my opinion of the story from "great" to just "very good, with some problems".

In the end, the movie was a bit more hand-wavey on the specifics, but in this case, I found that to provide for a tighter story, and one in which I wasn't plagued by some confusion at some point. So, I subjectively liked the movie as a story more, as it was more able to sustain a suspension of disbelief in my opinion, but that's not to imply I disliked the short story.

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