A crossover waiting to happen.
An omnipresent, near-omniscient machine that watches, diagnoses, and predicts the future?
What is Person of Interest about but Skynet 1.0?
It's a funny, funny show that takes itself way too seriously (kind of like Abrams' other show, Fringe, did in its first season, too). For all the purported "science", what it ultimately comes down to is faith in a modern version of numerology. Abrams is great at that sort of stuff - think of Rambaldi in Alias, the aforementioned Fringe, and of course, Lost - conflating the mystical and the high-tech. Which could be, from one way of looking at it, a comment on how the science and reason of any given belief system can look like irrational superstition from outside that belief system. Or perhaps Abrams is just very good at putting a pseudo-scientific gloss on stories that are practically primordial, when you get down to it; stories about fate versus free-will.
(Just hashing out a half-formed thought here...but the impression I get is that the preoccupation with causality - and hence, with questions of determinism/free-will, nature/nurture - is a typically Western phenomenon, going back to the earliest Western philosopher-scientists. I might even go so far as to call it the central problem of Western society. Some might be tempted to say, "of humanity in general", but I'm not sure that's the case at all.)
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/953615.html and has
comments.
What is Person of Interest about but Skynet 1.0?
It's a funny, funny show that takes itself way too seriously (kind of like Abrams' other show, Fringe, did in its first season, too). For all the purported "science", what it ultimately comes down to is faith in a modern version of numerology. Abrams is great at that sort of stuff - think of Rambaldi in Alias, the aforementioned Fringe, and of course, Lost - conflating the mystical and the high-tech. Which could be, from one way of looking at it, a comment on how the science and reason of any given belief system can look like irrational superstition from outside that belief system. Or perhaps Abrams is just very good at putting a pseudo-scientific gloss on stories that are practically primordial, when you get down to it; stories about fate versus free-will.
(Just hashing out a half-formed thought here...but the impression I get is that the preoccupation with causality - and hence, with questions of determinism/free-will, nature/nurture - is a typically Western phenomenon, going back to the earliest Western philosopher-scientists. I might even go so far as to call it the central problem of Western society. Some might be tempted to say, "of humanity in general", but I'm not sure that's the case at all.)
This entry was originally posted at http://the-grynne.dreamwidth.org/953615.html and has
comments.