“WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!”
“WHAT THE #$*! DO WE KNOW?!” is a film i watched yesterday. It had to be the strangest and most annoying intellectual spree into film i’ve ever experienced. Where do i start. The movie is ultimately boring.
Ok brief outline, it is apparently a jaunt into physics and describing the world and what quantum mechanics means for our understanding of the world.
Problems:
1) They fuck philosophy left and right. These ‘physicists’, oh shit i think they are physicists but i don’t really know because the film doesn’t tell you who the hell they are, sit around explainingquantum mechancis and what it is that this ‘science’ has told us about existence. They throw around phrases like, “Quantum mechanics tells us that the observer alters the object just by merely observing. ” and, ” We have looked all through the body and we can’t find something called the observer, (i.e. i assume he is talking about the soul) but yet we readily accept the fact that we play the role of observer.” How does this fuck philosophy? Just that Kant was arguing this shit in the 18th century. Quantum mechanics is pretty fucking new. THEY DIDN’T SOURCE HIM FOR THE IDEA AT ALL!!!
2) They kept making these broad claims like, “reality is 99% mystery and 1% understood” and, “quantum mechanics tells us a partical can be in two places at the same time, could you imagine what that means for us? WE could be at two places at the same time” WTF?! where the hell did they get that.. fallacy of composition.. sorry the movie sucks..
3) They have this framework of drama that is ultimately gay. This woman who is a photographer, ultimate observer see?, loses his boyfriend and we follow her around as she is bitchy all day. she has a dream and there is this explanation about how indians couldn’t see the clippers off the coast because they never had any experience seeing clipper ships and therefore they were invisible. Apparently a shaman examined the movement of the water and noticed the objects causeing it and then he told the other indians about the ships and suddenly they all saw the ships… I WISH I HAD A SOURCE FOR THIS BS. Does that mean we walk around ingoring things that don’t fit in our worldview? How does that explain lunatics? YOU CAN’T JUST STATE THIS SHIT WITHOUT ADDING BACKING!
i’m done.. the movie sucked.. waste of time.. i left in the middle of it.. i might rent it one day and try and find the sources for the worthless film but i doubt it.
December 9th, 2004 at 3:18 pm
I listed in three and quit…. strange…….. purely subconcious…
December 9th, 2004 at 6:07 pm
hehe… you confirmed a pattern of suckiness!
December 11th, 2004 at 2:28 am
Okay, i sat through the WHOLE movie. This is the kind of train wreck that happens when chemists and physicists and stuff try to do philosophy. Yeah, ok, there were a few parts that weren’t half bad. There were some really good quotes. Parts were very entertaining. Ultimately not a bad movie except it offended my sensibilities as a philosopher. 👿 Basically, the thesis of the movie was that we are all ‘gods’ – that the mind is wonderful and mysterious and full of untapped infinite potential – that we alter our surroundings through thought alone – that we create our own reality. If we could only muster enough faith in ourselves, we could quite literally walk on water. The ‘science’ used to justify all this was quantum mechanics and biochemistry. As far as quantum mechanics goes, I just don’t see what that has to do with the layer of reality we experience on a day-to-day basis. So WHAT if subatomic particles are more like fields of probability than anything physical? So WHAT if they seem to go away when we’re not looking at them? (I mean, what doesn’t?) So WHAT if these particles may pop in and out of existence and we don’t know where they go or where they came from? I mean, sure it’s interesting, but we’re talking about subatomic particles, not my cat. If I had one. Which I don’t. So there. The way it’s presented in the movie, quantum physics allows us to transcend time, space, and substance or something. The stuff dealing with biochemistry was not half bad, I think, although that’s not something I know a lot about. They explained the relationship between the brain and the cells, and about how patterns of behavior actually reinforce themselves through neurochemistry and other stuff. They had some neat little animated ‘cells’ that were quite entertaining – one of them danced and sang ‘Addicted to Love’ by Robert Palmer. There is a fabulously entertaining scene at a wedding reception with dancing and music and little animated hormones running amok. One of my favorites quotes from the movie is from this scene. A guy is complaining to a bridesmaid that she dipped her shrimp in the sauce twice, and she says, “I’m the sister of the bride – I can put my ASS in the dip if I want to!” Well, I guess you’d have to see it, but you probably shouldn’t bother. In the middle of that was a complete excoriation of organized religion. There is no such thing as good and evil, according to the movie, just choices – so how dare those pesky religions coerce us into living any particular lifestyle by inflicting on us their system of cosmic punishments and rewards? Not so bad – I’m a recovering fundamentalist myself. Fundamentalist religion gets no sympathy from me. But I just can’t help thinking that if I CHOOSE to pick up an axe and start chopping everybody up, that would be really bad. Really. Even worse, what if someone else did it to me? Is that not evil, but simply a choice? The movie had an uplifting, powerful, positive message. Too bad a lot of it was just plain wrong. I feel sorry for the unsuspecting public! Oh, but here’s the scary part. At the end they provide citations. All the commentators explain their degrees and qualifications. They’re all highly educated folks and active in their fields. So, David, they were all supposed to know wht they were talking about.
December 11th, 2004 at 3:53 pm
Well i am thoroughly pleased with your synopsis… thanks mike… I’m going to copy it to a front page journal so everyone can read it… that was an awesome description.. makes me wish i had watched the whole movie though, but it begins with the quantum mechanics crap and seemed to deteriorate in my eyes when they started talking about the ramifications about a particle being in two places simultaneously. I am pleased they listed their qualifications at the end of the movie, although too little too late in my opinion. You don’t listen to an insane man’s mumbling, and then ask his mom what his qualifications are… you get the qualifications and then listen to the mumbling. Your summary is very beautifully articulated, this is what happens when phycisists and biochemists get together and attempt philosophy. They might be experts in their field but unfortunatly they commit one of the most fundamental fallacies in logic, the fallacy of composition. They assume that since the subatomic particles perform certain actions at the subatomic level that then the larger things that those particles create must also perform these same properties. This is flawed… just because a golf ball can roll through a mouse hole doens’t mean a bunch of golfballs glued together can roll through. hillarious…