Next

Did you hear about the zen monk who ordered a hot dog? He said he had one with everything.

I have a problem - when I look at a list of movies, none of them seem to interest me, but if I just start watching them I get drawn in and usually enjoy myself. Especially anything with a wreath from an independent film festival. And so, we sit down to watch a movie and "The Secret" is beaten out in popularity by "Next". One on-demand click and five virtual dollars later, the movie begins.

The basic plot is that our protagonist played by Nicholas Cage (a selling or detracting point depending on your predisposition) can see up to two minutes into the future. This means he can dodge bullets - but not in a Neo way ("I'm saying when you are ready, you won't have to") but more of a trial and error way. At one point in the movie their over-abundant CG budget is put to giving a feel for how his premonition works - he walks towards a bad-guy who empties a clip at him. Or rather _into_ him. With every step and bullet, the splits into potential paths - each possible body fading out as it is shot - leaving an un-riddled Cage face to face with the bad-guy (who is holding an empty pistol).

After the movie, a friend was contemplating how the character's vision worked. After all, wouldn't he get exhausted running all of those potential options? A single 30 second action could take hours worth of trial and error to get "right". I shared my view that it was intended that the split selves - the potential futures didn't happen - he _knew_ each possibility. Thinking on the fly I noted that he just set in his mind his desired outcome and all the possible outcomes were sorted by that desire until one outcome that resulted in what he wanted came to him.

In this explanation, he only walks one path - the one that gives him the results he seeks. I recognize that this is the plot of a fictional movie, but it is useful as a visualization of a hypothesis (a mental experiment as Einstein was prone to). Is this a metaphor for understanding how the law of attraction works? You set your mind on an intention and within the boundaries of reality, you take the path that reaches that desire.

It relates to your actions in a massive, unknowable universe. He can dodge left or right, but it takes into account the actions and reactions of the gunman - atmospherics, physical interactions.

This ties into determinism - it ties into the physics theories that there are infinite parallel universes - one for every possible permutation - all static in "time". Dynamic action - choice - time itself is caused by the meandering we take through those possible realities. The hard part is to understand that the universes aren't spawned at the moment of choice - they are always there - always have been - as they will be even if they are not taken. This touches on duality - and determinism. If I go left, the universe in which I go right still exists. I go left and right. Schroedinger speaks of this - on the quantum level. This is the game that might be played by the smallest building blocks of matter as we know it.

Wouldn't this effect become compounded the higher perspective you take - the more particles in the mix? Is it so hard to imagine that these interactions quickly exceed our comprehension and seem to us free will? So many possibilities that we feel the sensation as total freedom of choice. Is that not the truth then? But doesn't it mean that there is _one_ universe that we experience from start to end - the one that has all the outcomes we perceive? What is behind the coincidence that Pandora chooses to play "Building Tension in 2 Dimensions" right now?

What's interesting about all this? If I hadn't seen "Next", I would have watched "The Secret" - a documentary about the law of attraction. No matter what path I took between those two, I would have gotten a similar lesson. But those were the two I was attracted to - more so than Shrek 3. I'm off to reflect a bit more on this.