Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

> It’s become very fashionable in the last couple of decades to forget what good government can do, what good union organizing can do. The idea that benevolent capitalists will just take care of us and the people on top will magically distribute wealth and happiness and security to us little people … no. It’s time we wised up. Strength comes from community in all things. Dunkirk is one of those stories.

This reminds me of something that Hany Abu-Assad, a Dutch-Palestinian film director[0], once said in an interview. He was asked how it is possible that from countries like Iran, with its oppressive regime, we get such amazing directors as Abbas Kiarostami, who created beautiful humanising movies. After a brief moment of contemplation, Abu-Assad answered "society is stronger than the system."

> Would you say “Dunkirk” is your most hopeful film?

> Well … yeah. “Interstellar” is pretty hopeful. But then again, the whole world has ended. There is that. [Laughs]

Funny how one can interpret that both as "doesn't sound very hopeful to me", and "the more impossible the odds are that were overcome, the more hopeful the message inherently is".

WARNING: INTERSTELLAR ENDING SPOILER BELOW

What makes Interstellar especially tricky here is that on the one hand, saving humanity (and presumably as much other life as possible) from extinction when the entire planet is dying is about as big a challenge as it gets, and therefore makes the film feel very hopeful, but on the other hand the ending also implies that the universe is predeterministic, and that can be viewed as the opposite of hopeful.

[0] http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0009463/?ref_=tt_ov_dr

How does the ending imply that the universe is predetermined? I might've missed that.

(It's also not surprising if it did because it's modern scientific dogma that the world is deterministic. Even if you take into account quantum uncertainty, as Hawking points out, it is determined probabilities. ).

(moar Interstellar spoilers)

Well in the end of the movie it turns out that the future humans built the tesseract (I believe it's called) and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole, leading the humans to survive and in the future built the tesseract and the wormhole... you get the idea.

It's a time travel movie, and the whole thing becomes a paradox - if the humans didn't survive they wouldn't have developed to be able to make wormholes and time travel magic, but they did survive because of time travel magic.

So which came first? It's a paradox. One explanation is that there was nothing that actually came first but everything just happened as it should and there was no other way it could've happened, thus, predetermination.

But yeah, time travel paradoxes, fun stuff.

There is another interpretation for that. Future humans built the tesseract... but no one knows from which universe. The tesseract is supposed to be something trans-dimensional, maybe trans-universe. So it could be future humans from another Earth seeing this one dying, and doing something about it. If an entity from "outside" built the (first?) wormhole and created that closed loop, there's no paradox.

I like this interpretation. It’s been a while since I saw Interstellar, but from my somewhat fuzzy memory of the film, that does seem to resolve everything nicely.

Cooper actually says "a people built this", not necessarily insisting it was humans or descendants of humans (though that was my impression too the first couple watch throughs).

The other thing to keep in mind is he does not actually have any way to know who (or what) built the tesseract.

Just like how Brand earlier states the spacetime curvature hand she shakes hands with is "the first handshake" (implying first contact with an extraterrestrial), but it actually just turns out to be Cooper. The characters are confident of things they think are right, without actually being totally reliable narrators.

Well, that's... incorrect. Cooper actually says, "They're not 'beings.' They're us," and later says, in response to TARS saying that people couldn't build the tesseract, "No, not yet, but one day. Not you and me, but people." I really don't see any wiggle room in the actual events for claiming Cooper believes they are anything but human; or at least beyond human. But he sees them as an extension of humanity.

Whether Cooper is right may be an open question, but the film heavily implies it. That 'first contact' turning out to be Cooper may be evidence of wrongness, but we don't necessarily need that since we know the characters are not omniscient, and in the context of the film it implies that there aren't any aliens. There are also no signs of any other life, despite several habitable planets. Frankly, the film doesn't even make sense if "aliens did it"; any message of hopefulness about human spirit would fall apart.

This is what ruined an otherwise good story for me. It would have been more interesting leaving it mysterious (like 2001) or implying aliens had decided to throw humanity a lifeline.

The entire film is an elaborate stable time loop (the protagonist provokes his own actions from the future). The film's big reveal is another stable time loop (future humanity saves past humanity).

Stable time loops imply predetermination.

> it's modern scientific dogma that the world is deterministic Really? Maybe I've lost touch with dogma while working to complete my physics PhD with one of the big LHC experiments, but this sounds hyperbolic to me. Could you explain?

> Even if you take into account quantum uncertainty, as Hawking points out, it is determined probabilities. That the probabilities are governed (determined?) by precise equations doesn't mean that quantum mechanics isn't stochastic; it gives us only probabilities. The indeterminacy principle is a better better name than the uncertainty principle. But perhaps I'm misunderstanding you.

Even if the universe is deterministic, its future is still unknowable, as in to predict the future of the universe you would need something to simulate every subatomic particle of all matter etc and so doing that computation would need something bigger than the universe.

I like to think of the universe as a deterministic computer that is calculating its own outcome - there is no shortcut to jump to the end.

> I like to think of the universe as a deterministic computer that is calculating its own outcome - there is no shortcut to jump to the end.

I've mostly heard this dubbed "computational irreducibility" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computational_irreducibility

>I like to think of the universe as a deterministic computer that is calculating its own outcome - there is no shortcut to jump to the end.

I hope there's no bugs in it then!

If there is no one to determine "correct" behavior, then there can be no bugs. If the universe crashes one day due to a mishandled null atom, we'll just have to take it as correct behavior (too bad for us!)

Causality. We know that everything follows a cause-and-effect model. And if you're a physicalist -- philosophical term that you believed the world doesn't have any supernatural forces -- then, leaving aside quantum uncertainty for a second, the next state of the universe is determined by all the previous ones.

They didn't teach you in your physics PhD that stochastic != Undetermined. We may not know how to predict stochastic processes but that doesn't mean they don't follow cause-and-effect.

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