[Devs] Ex Machina and Annihilation Creator Takes on Free Will and Techbros

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > TV IV > [Devs] Ex Machina and Annihilation Creator Takes on Free Will and Techbros

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

I'm glad someone made this thread because now I don't have to. This show is certainly intriguing so far. Could be very good, or could completely fall apart in the second half. No way to know yet!

# ¿ Mar 9, 2020 12:26

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 19:23

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

large_gourd posted:

the trailer both piqued my interest and made it seem likely that it's a bunch of bullshit with its 'what is behind the mystery door' 'EVERYTHING' talk, because that usually turns out to be a bunch of crap especially when they lead with that and i didn't really pick up on anything else going on, but it's just a trailer.

They basically explain in episode two what the big secret project is, so they're not dragging that out to keep you watching.

# ¿ Mar 9, 2020 13:02

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Zachack posted:

I took it more to mean that it doesn't matter because what will happen will happen. If free will doesn't exist then your existence doesn't have.. I dunno, meaning? Dying of lung cancer is simply a perceived effect of what is actually just atoms bouncing around the universe, and those atoms will keep bouncing after your illusion of awareness ends.

It's not so much that determinism eliminates meaning, it's just that if you know that the future is already written then there's no point worrying about whether or not you're going to die of lung cancer; either you will or you won't and there's nothing you can do about it so you may as well smoke.

BaldDwarfOnPCP posted:

When I saw the scene with the quantum crucifixion in order to wrap my head around the wacky mix of science and religion I couldn�t help but think back to the thing in Contact where the first message they get from aliens is encoded in a Hitler speech.

Not trying to dance around it honestly but it�s a big elephant and it just seems unlikely that this is a show where everyone is on the same page, ah yes Jesus of Nazareth this thing does work!

I assumed it was just some random crucifixion. Obviously you see a crucifixion and think of Jesus, but it doesn't necessarily follow that we were seeing that specific crucifixion or that that specific crucifixion even happened in the show's reality. The point is that we're seeing a scene from ~2000 years ago so it just had to be something that we, the audience, would associate with that time as a visual shorthand.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2020 13:03

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Laserface posted:

it seems they are then extrapolating that out to attempting to predict the future?

They're explicitly not doing that. That was one of the rules: no looking at the future and no invading privacy. Although that might be a potential goal, it seems like Forest is more (or exclusively) interested in revisiting the past - and perhaps changing it? Or possibly just working out a way to "beat" determinism; to get off the rails.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2020 12:14

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Cojawfee posted:

This was a great episode, but I didn't like the sudden credits right when it felt like the episode was reaching a climax. I have a feeling that Lily will walk into the viewing room, and Forest will be in there watching the future or whatever. Then the Lily on screen shoots forest as revenge for Kenton killing both of her boyfriends. Real Lily sees it, freaks out and decides not to shoot Forest. That's what breaks the deterministicness of the universe or whatever. She introduces something that was truly random and that breaks the machine.

The thing that's bothering me is, if it's possible to change the future once you know it then it pretty much has to be unavoidable. There's no way that Katie could have seen her own future and not have that affect her in some way and therefore alter what she does, even if only slightly. If Lily breaks the machine (or universe) by not doing what she was predicted to do then that should already have happened.

If that's what happens then it'll be a real dumb ending.

OTC posted:

Based on the multiverse-theory visual depictions we've seen already, would I be correct in interpreting that Lyndon falls in all possible universes?

Pretty sure that's impossible? If many worlds is true then anything possible will happen in some universe even if it's extremely unlikely. So even if he's far more likely to climb the railing and even if it's far more likely that, having done so, he'll fall to his death, there are still infinite universes in which he either doesn't do it or does it and survives. There are infinite universes in which he climbs over the railing and a sudden gust of wind blows him back to safety. Everything possible happens and then every possibility stemming from each of those outcomes also happens and on to an infinity of infinities.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2020 15:11

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Donnerberg posted:

Katie is in some sort of paradox loop. She always knew what her future would be because it was predicted before she lived it, and she resigns herself to that because she never sees herself break out of it, and it never predicts her breaking out because she never tries, etc, etc.

But what I'm saying is, she shouldn't even have to try. Knowing in advance what you're about to say, how do you not have that momentary panic of "wait, is that right? Is that exactly what I said?" or a feeling of d�j� vu that throws off your timing? It doesn't even have to be something a human would notice, even the tiniest of hesitations is a change.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2020 15:34

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Zachack posted:

I viewed the scene with the other staff and one-second buffer as the show confirming that Katie is, barring whatever Lily does, correct/stuck. The main issue is that, unless I missed it, the show hasn't really gone into why a deterministic multiverse modification to the machine would make it work, other than allowing the machine to guess as a means of error correction? And the depictions of the multiverse don't really gel with the machine being able to look into the same future.

If many worlds is correct and the machine is based on that then it's probably just showing the most probable possibilities and can constantly make the tiny corrections needed to account for whatever actually does happen. Since no one deviated noticeably from the predictions, any corrections it made would also be too small to spot. Presumably if someone deviated in a major way then you'd see a "glitch" in the playback as it adjusted to the new reality and recalculated. Nothing we've seen confirms or directly refutes that, but if it is possible for something Lily does to break the machine (or the universe) then that whole hypothesis goes out the window.

The problem with trying to work out what's going to happen is that we don't know the rules. Because it's a made-up machine in a made-up universe, we don't know how it works or how the universe it exists within works. There's also the issue that apparently before Lyndon's breakthrough they weren't accounting for many worlds at all, which raises more questions about how any of this works. The more I think about it, the more I doubt that they can actually manage to give us a satisfactory answer to any of these questions, which is going to be annoying because they seem to be building the final episode entirely around them.

# ¿ Apr 9, 2020 18:08

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Cojawfee posted:

I wonder if it's a similar situation to that Crichton book Timelines where they never figured out how to make their machine work. They just assume that there's another universe where they did figure it out, and they piggyback off that.

That book is so dumb it hurts. :argh:

# ¿ Apr 10, 2020 04:53

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Ramrod Hotshot posted:

So Lyndon took his chances with the idea his "conciousness" will wake up somewhere in which he didn't fall?

Not "wake up", he'll just always have been there. If many-worlds is true then everything that possibly can happen does happen. So if it's possible for you to die at a particular time then an infinite subset of the infinite number of yous will die and there's nothing you can do about that. Either you're in a branch of the universe where you die or you're in a branch where you live, and since you'll only go on experiencing anything in the branches where you live, from your own perspective you will always end up living.

Cojawfee posted:

He was pissed off that Forrest and Katie were being nice to them. He probably decided to take things into his own hands.

He wasn't just pissed off, he assumed they'd double-crossed him (as he would have done to them in their position - or what he believed their position to be).

# ¿ Apr 10, 2020 07:01

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Shageletic posted:

This is supposed to be a mystery right?

No? At least not in the way that you seem to think. The stuff Lily's been investigating is all stuff that the audience already knows. We're not uncovering clues along with her, because the mystery we care about is not the one she's investigating and the mystery she's trying to solve is one we've already been given the solution to.

OTC posted:

Anyone watching Dispatches from Elsewhere?

Yes. It's extremely good and there's a thread here.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2020 06:07

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

priznat posted:

Yeah I just thought Lyndon was a prepubescent (perhaps late bloomer 13/14year old) child prodigy type and as portrayed it fit with that completely imo.

Same. I was very surprised when it turned out he was supposed to be 19. I guess they wanted him to seem extremely young while still being plausible as an adult, so they cast an adult who can pass for a young boy?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2020 01:14

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

OTC posted:

But do they have a shween??!
Show's over folks, a character's sex/gender/sexual orientation is not explicitly specified so we can no longer continue this inquiry into how the universe operates.

Of all the things that don't matter in the slightest, this sure is one of them.

Who's saying it does?

# ¿ Apr 15, 2020 11:13

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Well, that was incredibly dumb.

If you can just choose to not follow the prediction and that's what breaks the sim, there's no way it could possibly have gotten this far. Even with only Katie and Forrest knowing anything about their own futures, there's no way both of them managed to stay perfectly on-script that entire time. Bullshit.

And why would going against the prediction break the machine anyway? That implies that it predicted that its prediction was wrong, which makes no sense. Because otherwise it would just go on cheerfully predicting an inaccurate future beyond the point where reality deviated. Plus, if it's using many worlds now, isn't it predicting every possible future including the ones in which someone saw their own future and deliberately deviated from it?

And the ending where they get to live on in the simulation, which is indistinguishable from reality; okay, so what? They already were. If the machine is simulating every possible future and past then it was already simulating this before they died in real life. In fact, as Forrest points out, determinism means that life is essentially a film and the present is just the bit of it you're seeing now, no more nor less real than any other bit of it, so they're not living in the simulation "now", they always were and always will be. And it doesn't even matter if the simulation keeps running or not (except from Katie's perspective if she wants to spy on them or something) because time is an illusion. The fact that they did exist means they do exist, just not necessarily in the bit of reality you're looking at right now.

It's dumb. It's all dumb.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2020 13:39

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

mr. unhsib posted:

I know Katie calls it a sim in the denouement but I think the show makes clear that Forest and Lily are in one of the "many worlds".

There's literally no difference. That's the big problem with the ending: not only is the future fixed, but every possible future actually happens therefore nothing matters and everything is meaningless. Simulation and reality are the same, the decisions you make change nothing (because in other universes you made different decisions), and even time is an illusion. The message of the show is: live your life, or don't; eat an ice cream or kick a puppy or jump off a bridge; regardless of what you choose to do you will always have been going to do it and also you will never have done it and there's literally nothing you can do that has any meaning or consequence - even for yourself - because in some other universe you're doing the opposite. It totally vindicates Forrest. He was right; Sergei had no choice about betraying him and he had no choice about having him killed and it doesn't matter that they died and everything will be okay and life is just a movie we're watching so there's no reason to care about any of it. You might as well just watch a simulation of your dead daughter all day because she's just as alive as anyone else.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2020 18:02

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

ghostwritingduck posted:

Katie and Forest are fanatics who have complete faith that the machine works. Even if they went off script at some point by accident, their minor changes were unlikely to actually impact outcomes.

That really shouldn't matter. Either reality conflicting with the prediction breaks the machine or it doesn't. Whether that discrepancy seems important or significant to a human should be irrelevant to the machine.

ghostwritingduck posted:

Even if multiverse determinism is the answer to our universe, we only have one consciousness.

Consciousness isn't a "thing" you can "have". A person - a being that existed in the past and will continue to exist in the future - is just an idea, not a real thing that exists. A human body is real, but the person that "is" that body is a fictional construct. You're not the same person you were a decade ago in any sense - physically, mentally, emotionally, etc. If you stepped into a machine that duplicated your body perfectly then both people who walked out of it would have equal claim to being the "real you".

ghostwritingduck posted:

Katie and Forest emotionally suffered for going along with the script based on pure belief and Lily later demonstrated to them that they always had the power to not make those painful decisions.

They didn't though. If every possible future happens then every decision you could have made happens to some version of you. If "you" don't experience it, some other "you" will, and they're all really you.

mr. unhsib posted:

Seen a few people say this and it's not true. "Many worlds" is not "every world".

Every possible world.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2020 19:49

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Fallom posted:

Isn't the point that it's a matter of perspective? It's not that there could be zero universes in which Lyndon survives, it's that there could be zero universes in which Lyndon survives from Katie's perspective as she continues along one of her own paths. From Lyndon's perspective, he may have stepped back from the brink, seen Katie get hit by a bus, and continued life some other way that we're not shown because it's not his timeline we're following, it's some variation of Katie's or someone else's.

Seems unlikely that there would be no possible universes in which Lyndon and Katie both survive. :shrug:

# ¿ Apr 17, 2020 04:33

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Cojawfee posted:

Maybe it means that the universe is both deterministic and you can still make choices to slightly change the outcome.

That is literally nonsense.

Cojawfee posted:

He's dead forever. Katie ran the simulation up until he died and then copied that into a new simulation starting at the beginning of the show. So I guess like in the Prestige. One is created, one dies. The one that was created feels like he's the original, but the original is very much dead. If there's any such thing as a soul or whatever, the original one is gone.

If there's a soul then whatever happens to souls happens, I guess, but its well outside the scope of the show. If there are no souls then there's no such thing as an "original". A perfect duplicate of you is just as much you as any supposed "original" is.

Mr Shiny Pants posted:

The wokeness of it all was just too much: all the diversity!

What the gently caress are you talking about?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 11:53

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Any explanation that relies on the computer not being able to accurately predict the future kind of eliminates the entire point of the show. "What if there was a machine that could perfectly predict the future except it's broken and actually doesn't?" What kind of a dumb question is that?

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 15:53

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

QuoProQuid posted:

But the computer does predict the future, just not in the way Forrest wants. The method to get there is not always identical (see: Katie walking dejected out of her class versus Katie throwing her binders at the floor in rage versus Katie walking out unperturbed), but the outcome is the same (Forrest hires Katie to join Amara). It's the same thing that happens in the scene with Lyndon. How he falls differs from simulation to simulation but he does, always, fall.

Forrest built the machine to predict the most future, to demonstrate that all choices are meaningless and everyone is operating on a track. He wants to show that free will is an illusion and that no one has a choice, something he explains again to Lily when she confronts him in the projection room. Almost all the people at Devs have accepted this worldview, falling into a nihilistic funk where they believe that nothing they do has meaning. Lily demonstrates that this is false. Even if we always wind up at the same destination, our choices still do matter. She makes the improbable choice not to shoot Forrest, despite all she has seen, and sends the world skittering off onto a separate timeline that the Devs machine cannot predict.

Sorry, but this is nonsense. You literally cannot have free will and determinism. What you're talking about is some kind of supernatural force (ie. fate or destiny).

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 16:51

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

Cojawfee posted:

Sorry my idea doesn't fit into your idea of something we'll never be able to prove

It's not unprovable, it's impossible by definition. If the universe is deterministic then you can't "make choices to slightly change the outcome" because that would mean that the universe was not deterministic.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 16:57

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

QuoProQuid posted:

But there is no one world. Lily shooting Forrest is the most likely future in many worlds, but it is not the only future and Lily can still make a choice (even if it means she still dies), which puts their world on a different trajectory than all the other iterations of Devs in the multiverse. The accumulation of errors that result from the machine trying to figure out what happens in this extremely improbable future causes it to break.

It's not at all clear whether the real world is deterministic (and the machine doesn't work) or many worlds is correct (and the machine broke for unexplained reasons) or Forrest was just entirely wrong and the machine was never doing what they thought it was doing. The many worlds are only confirmed to exist inside the simulation. Reality remains a mystery. We know that adjusting the machine to account for many worlds made it appear to work better, but it still broke.

grate deceiver posted:

The universe is still deterministic, it's just that Forrest is completely wrong and Deus doesn't accurately predict it, because it can't account for people changing their mind based on the machine's predictions, because it sends it into an infinite loop. Lily didn't violate any laws of nature or determinism, she just found a fault in the machine.

That doesn't make sense, because she wasn't the first one to see it predict the future. There's no reason that her more dramatic action would be more significant than someone else's less dramatic action because the machine isn't a human. It doesn't regard the universe as a story. Even microscopic changes are changes. Situations humans would regard as being fundamentally the same aren't to a computer.

# ¿ Apr 19, 2020 19:05

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

QuoProQuid posted:

The show seems to come firmly down on the view that Lyndon was right and many worlds do exist both in its filmmaking (all those scenes of alternate Katies and Lyndons) and in its narrative (the machine only starts working when Lyndon throws out Forrest's one-world determinism and switches to the Everett interpretation).

It's not at all clear that those scenes of multiple alternatives actually do represent reality actually following the many worlds model. And surely the fact that the machine broke suggests that whatever it was doing wasn't actually working 100% so its model of the universe was, at best, incomplete.

Cojawfee posted:

They all believe that they have to do exactly what the machine says they will do, so they do it.

They do it exactly, without any measurable deviation? Because even a difference imperceptible to a human should make the prediction wrong as far as a computer is concerned.

D-Pad posted:

Up until Lily is shown the future she is on deterministic rails in which time is a straight arrow. When she is shown the future, whether she is shown herself shooting forest OR throwing the gun or even a bunch of puppies, what the machine shows her becomes the cause for her future actions (the effect). Therefore the cause takes place after the effect in time and this creates a paradox in that it becomes possible for the effect to be different than the prediction even though its still all determistic and no actual choice was made.

Ugh this is hard to put into words but basically from the universes point of view everything that happened was still deterministic and Lily made no actual free will choice, but it caused the machine to bug out because it was trying to calculate outside the straight arrow of time and determinism only works and can be calculated if time runs one way with no ability to see the future.

Nah. If the universe is deterministic and the machine can predict the future then it should be able to account for its own predictions. If the initial prediction being observed alters the outcome then the prediction must be updated until it reaches equilibrium (or the machine runs out of time to calculate it but that doesn't seem to be a factor for whatever reason, it can just simulate the entire universe instantaneously). But apparently in the show the machine showed a static, unchanging prediction. It wasn't iterating through possible futures affected by its own predictions, it was just showing one consistently - which, in a deterministic universe, would have to have happened. You can't beat the prediction because it's already accounting for you trying to do that.