Determinism in pop culture: Episode 1
One reason I launched this blog is to correct misunderstandings of determinism. As easy as it is to define determinism (my first post did so in eleven words), it’s that easy for people to misunderstand its content and implications. Popular culture sometimes encourages these misunderstandings. On the few occasions when Hollywood writers pay any attention to determinism, you can pretty much count on them to get it wrong.
My first case in point: the 2002 movie Minority Report. Tom Cruise plays the expert in charge of schooling Colin Farrell’s character on the nature of determinism. Click to watch this 19-second clip:
Cruise’s character gets one thing right: Necessitation by prior conditions (what he calls “pre-determination”) happens all the time. It happens literally constantly. But he blunders when he says, “The fact that you prevented it from happening doesn’t change the fact that it was going to happen.” No! The fact, we discovered, is that it wasn’t going to happen: the ball wasn’t going to fall because it was going to be caught instead. No one, least of all a determinist, should deny that obvious fact.
More charitably, what Cruise’s character perhaps meant was that the ball would have fallen if Farrell’s character hadn’t caught it. Interestingly, however, determinists ought to reject even that claim! According to determinism, if Farrell’s character hadn’t caught the ball, the ball itself would almost certainly never have existed in the first place, and neither would any of the characters in the movie. More about this in later posts.
