Inception
So just got back from Inception at the IMAX (awesome!). The best part about the IMAX was the butt kickers. It's a very rumbly movie.
But yeah, Inception was great, of course. I really admired Nolan for Memento, and this of course takes it to a whole new level. Just the amount of thought it takes into writing something like that is astounding.
Mat and I were talking about it in the car, and Mat couldn't understand why the extra levels of dreaming sped up the brains processing speed even more than just the first level of dreaming. He seemed to think that once you were dreaming, that was the maximum speed you could process at. So I basically explained psychology to him.....
For those of you wondering what the explanation I gave was, it was basically that you have layers of cognition, or in this case, sub-conscious. Each layer you unlock is a new dream, and a even more percentage of your brain that you're using. Or something along those lines.
It was during this explanation to Mat that I realized the biggest problem I had with this movie. It's Freudian Psychology. That was a bit of a disappointment. I find Freudian psychology terribly simplistic, because it basically is just making up whatever the hell you want, and being like "well it's the brain, it's unfathomable, this is just how we can model it." So you can say that it has layers of sub conscious. You can say that dreams within dreams increase processing speed. You can say that you keep your deepest darkest secrets in vaults or safes. But it doesn't MEAN anything. It's not real. It's just made up.
Which is fine, for a movie like this. That almost fits in with the plot, since it may or may not have been all in Cobb's dream/imagination (as a side note: What a Shroedinger ending, eh?). But still, I wish there could be a movie about something other than freakin Freudian psychology. I guess that it's the only branch of studies in cognition that is simple enough for the average movie-goer to understand, since it's based in metaphor and oversimplification of brain processes.
And I'm not dissing Freud himself. It's a real shame, actually, that everyone clung to his ideas so firmly, because he himself knew that they were metaphors, that they couldn't even begin to capture the real workings of the mind. But he didn't have the technology to find out the real thing, so he did what he could. And everyone seems to think that his theories or principles or whatever are somehow more than just temporary metaphors for something that will be fully explainable in scientific term sin the future. Everyone seems to think that these ideas are more tangible than anything science can produce. Which is certainly a useful way of looking at it, but not exactly what Freud intended.
So yeah. I guess it's up to me to make a cognitive science movie, where we talk about neurons and working memory and philosophical zombies and the primary visual cortex and BRAINS instead of SUBCONSCIOUSNESS. It'll be a good time :)
But yeah, Inception was great, of course. I really admired Nolan for Memento, and this of course takes it to a whole new level. Just the amount of thought it takes into writing something like that is astounding.
Mat and I were talking about it in the car, and Mat couldn't understand why the extra levels of dreaming sped up the brains processing speed even more than just the first level of dreaming. He seemed to think that once you were dreaming, that was the maximum speed you could process at. So I basically explained psychology to him.....
For those of you wondering what the explanation I gave was, it was basically that you have layers of cognition, or in this case, sub-conscious. Each layer you unlock is a new dream, and a even more percentage of your brain that you're using. Or something along those lines.
It was during this explanation to Mat that I realized the biggest problem I had with this movie. It's Freudian Psychology. That was a bit of a disappointment. I find Freudian psychology terribly simplistic, because it basically is just making up whatever the hell you want, and being like "well it's the brain, it's unfathomable, this is just how we can model it." So you can say that it has layers of sub conscious. You can say that dreams within dreams increase processing speed. You can say that you keep your deepest darkest secrets in vaults or safes. But it doesn't MEAN anything. It's not real. It's just made up.
Which is fine, for a movie like this. That almost fits in with the plot, since it may or may not have been all in Cobb's dream/imagination (as a side note: What a Shroedinger ending, eh?). But still, I wish there could be a movie about something other than freakin Freudian psychology. I guess that it's the only branch of studies in cognition that is simple enough for the average movie-goer to understand, since it's based in metaphor and oversimplification of brain processes.
And I'm not dissing Freud himself. It's a real shame, actually, that everyone clung to his ideas so firmly, because he himself knew that they were metaphors, that they couldn't even begin to capture the real workings of the mind. But he didn't have the technology to find out the real thing, so he did what he could. And everyone seems to think that his theories or principles or whatever are somehow more than just temporary metaphors for something that will be fully explainable in scientific term sin the future. Everyone seems to think that these ideas are more tangible than anything science can produce. Which is certainly a useful way of looking at it, but not exactly what Freud intended.
So yeah. I guess it's up to me to make a cognitive science movie, where we talk about neurons and working memory and philosophical zombies and the primary visual cortex and BRAINS instead of SUBCONSCIOUSNESS. It'll be a good time :)