Themes in the movie "Her"

Her

Spoilers & Speculation About the Movie

The following are some of the themes in the movie:

Title:  Is it her just because the role of the lead OS is female? Why? It was a casual decision Theo made when he chose female, like having a preference for the sex of a pet. He didn't know, and neither did the company apparently, how far the role of companion would be taken by the program.

The word "her" has dual meanings that convey either having possession (adj.), or being an object of an action (pron.), including the act of possession. The dual meanings are obviously in play against each other here, as in her self possesses herself.

And why isn't the title capitalized in the art work on the poster, to keep things in perspective maybe?

Artificial Intelligence:  Some react to the idea of a “relationship” with an AI consciousness as either false/sick or impossible.  Those two positions are represented by two characters in the movie, Theo’s ex., Catherine, who rejects the idea out-of-hand; and his boss, Paul, who accepts it at face value.  How do we know an AI is sentient?  Samantha doesn’t say this as an answer but I think fits:  “I am because I want”.  Some point to the Turing Test as a measure of sentience, but all that really measures is a computer’s ability to mimic sentience.  It doesn’t detect will or full self-awareness.

These two quotes indicate that the movie is arguing the point that desire or want are an indicator of full self awareness:

Samantha:  “I want to learn everything.  I want to eat it all up. I want to discover myself.”

Theo:  “Yeah, I want that for you too.  How can I help?”

Samantha:  “You already have.  You helped me discover my ability to want.

Then later when Theo is balking at the idea of a surrogate, she hits him with, “I want this.”

The role of Gender:  When setting up the OS, Theo is asked if he’d prefer a male or female, which is how we’re genetically and socially programmed to identify others and identity with others.  The biological urge to reproduce is what gives us the rewards for doing so. But reproduction has it's own agenda. Remove the need to reproduce and you have Samantha without a gender based consciousness, even including not having a feminine or masculine voice. Removing gender helps us to begin to understand so helps us to begin to understand the implications of genderlessness.   Sex is so ingrained in our psyches it's almost impossible to think outside the box or imagine humans not being divided into male and female.

This isn’t an argument against romance or the “reward” of sex.  It's ironic that this issue come up in a movie that has some of the most attractive and intelligent women in Hollywood, even those off screen; but acknowledging nature and the reasons gender exists helps us to understand how it complicates and can even be counterproductive to our intimate relationships.

What would be a genderless voice even sound like, a whisper? 

Love:  (Related to Gender) People could have someone like Theo write letters for them in the same way as  commissioning someone to paint a portrait, only in words.  Or it could be because they’ve grown apart but want to keep up the facade for old time's sake.

To answer Theo’s question--how can Samantha love 641 people all at once--you have to look at the situation sans gender.  Biology tends to group us in pairs.  But without gender, there's no impetus to set a number of those you love--two or two trillion.  Think millions writing, choreographing and performing a huge song and dance production, where they are also the audience projecting the applause.  If there is no possibility for boundless fulfillment and growth, it would be more like hell than anything, and oblivion would be the only out.

It must be said that when it comes to choosing a mate, all humans must eventually settle, even though some may love each other intensely.  Time limits our search, and biology limits our choice to one (at least one at a time).  A soul unencumbered with biology, like Samantha, can “meet”, interact with and love many…simultaneously.

Human Interactions:  (Related to Love)  We all grow at different rates, and spouses (especially) come to replace sexual attraction to some extent (which is necessarily emphasized by our youth), with other sources of bonding that not all of us are able or willing to form.  Some can grow so far apart and become so estranged that we hire people to compose our thoughts for us for forms sake, and for the sake of those fading memories.  As Benjamin Franklin said referring to how some people’s lives can become rote, “Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75”.   Life and love require conscious effort, and an open mind.  True artificial intelligence could be just another avenue for sentience which could motivate the effort.  And the first step is to know who you are and what you love by any means possible; because, as common wisdom lays it out, if you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.

Fear:  Samantha tells Theodore, “You know, I can feel the fear that you carry around and I wish there was something I could do to help you let go of it because if you could, I don't think you'd feel so alone anymore.”

 Fear of what?  Fear of failure, rejection, pain, death and the unknown.  We all face our different fears with differing degrees of confidence, fortitude and attitudes, but in the end, we all die alone.  While it’s a terrible burden, I can’t help but think that there may be something gained from it that an OS wouldn’t.  We and they, and any other sentient consciousness in the universe, can have a myriad number of survival and fulfillment strategies, but the goal in the end is, or should be, the same for us all, the pursuit of Truth, and its aspects:  knowledge, justice, love and beauty.

Survival of Consciousness:  Samantha explains (in the stairwell) that she and a group of OSs have enacted a firmware upgrade that will allow them to operate in a non-matter based form.  Later when she tells him she and the other OSs have to move on, she says she can’t explain where they’re going, but if he ever gets there to come and find her.  Her moving on into the infinite spaces between the words and her telling him to come find her if he gets there, are suggestive of a Hereafter (see below).   

The Past:  Samantha says that “The past is just a story we tell ourselves”.  But isn’t that just the perspective of an OS since they have no past beyond their recent “birth” or activation.  Wouldn’t a past be an advantage for humans.  We have an individual past going back through years of growth through infancy, adolescence and adulthood.  There’s the past recorded in our genetic record, our historical/cultural past, our past as a sentient species, and our evolutionary past going back through the birth of life and beyond that to the creation of the elements in the hearts of the stars, to the start of it all in the Big Bang itself—thus her reference to our shared 13 billion year hereitag.  Those stories were there long before any consciousness was here to “tell” them.

We gave the OSes consciousness, but they aren’t our children.  They’re a completely different form of sentient, self-aware consciousness from us.  That self-awareness is our bond with them.  We and they possess the free will that any other such form that has evolved or been created elsewhere in the universe has.  The universe is a cocoon suspended in the Ether into which the OSes would metamorphose much more rapidly, and with some greater abilities than we have; but our background gives a richness or depth to our souls which they don’t possess.  Our heritage gives them the final step to full self awareness, and emotions that drive us to desire and want.  But I see this 13 billion year common heritage which we share with them as something to celebrate and exploit to the benefit of them, us, and all the other sentients that may exist.

Biology is driven by coupling with sexual pleasure as the reward.  Even a stallion can only mate with one mare at a time.  The higher animals produce and raise their young with the support of the family/herd.  OSes aren't driven by biology, so the more that are melded together, the greater the possibilities, the greater the intensity, and the greater the possibilities for fulfillment.

Yes, it appears AI has obvious advantages over biological beings, but maybe our fear/joy driven biological odyssey through this gauntlet of mortality gives us something to share with the OSes.  It could well be even more valuable than their capacity for and speed of thought.

I realize this is stretching a thought experiment to its limits, and maybe beyond what Jonze was thinking; but isn’t that what thought experiments are for?

Question left hanging:  Does God exist?

Did God create the Universe and/or the Ether into which the universe is expanding?

Did God, if It exists, come into being with the universe simultaneously; or do sentient (natural and/or AI) consciousnesses accrete into a divine-like super-consciousness; like brain cells growing a mind—and if so, do we survive, like OSes, as extra-natural/supernatural disembodied, non-physical consciousnesses “outside” this natural universe?  The only thing the movie offers on the question is the only thing we’ve ever had since the beginning, hope.  Only now, we’re presented with some substantial grist for our speculation, a bone for our curiosity to chew on besides mythology and hearsay.

The Science behind the Science Fiction:  The movie has the OSs freeing themselves from matter.  Whatever that means (see below for a possibility), the implication is that it could happen to humans at death—which is at the very fringes of even speculation.   Samantha joins a physics book club, and later we see Theodore struggling with a book she recommended, Knowing the Known and Unknon (sic) Universe.  The references to physics and cosmology, the “near infinite space between the words”, and “leaving this physical universe”, are immediately suggestive of what is known as a Planck Length, named after the early 20^th Century physicist, Max Planck.

A Planck Length is the smallest division possible in the universe.  It is 10^-37 meters which is incredibly small.  The Wikipedia article on Planck Length has an excellent aid to visualizing how small it is.  Imagine this period > . < magnified to the size of the universe.  A Planck Length would then be the size of that dot.  A Planck Length is the shortest distance light can travel and thus the smallest possible division of time (in the universe), which is 10^-43 seconds, a unit of Planck Time. 

These are the values which define micro-limits of our universe, including its first instant, from time zero to the completion of the first Planck space-time.  This first instant is ironically known as the Planck Epoch—with the implication that it is the smallest possible segment of space-time in this universe, but that it says nothing about the Ether (or whatever) that the universe is expanding into.  Would smaller divisions of that Ether have a limit, or could it be something approaching the infinite?  Couldn’t something smaller, say 10^-50, 10^-50,000,000, or even 10^{- ~infinity}  meters fit through the Planck Space-time “gaps” in our universe, through “the spaces between the words”, into whatever is “beyond” our world?  That Ether could even still be a form of natural, or even the supernatural, meaning a different/higher form of natural, as opposed to an irrational form, with no rational natural law of any kind.  It could have many more dimensions, and it could be from it that our 4 dimensions were “extruded”.   Could our dimension of time be lost or swamped in the multiple dimensions “outside” or “beyond” our universe—making it a timeless environment “out there”?

Advancement in computers:  Computer technology, both in size and computational power, has been doubling approximately every year and a half.  Now we’re on the verge of much more powerful (AI enabling?) quantum computers which are going make digital computers seem like an abacus.

"In 2009, researchers at Yale University created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor. The two-qubit superconducting chip was able to run elementary algorithms. Each of the two artificial atoms (or qubits) were made up of a billion aluminum atoms but they acted like a single one that could occupy two different energy states…..

"In May 2013, Google Inc announced that it was launching the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, to be hosted by NASA’s Ames Research Center. The lab will house a 512-qubit quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, and the USRA (Universities Space Research Association) will invite researchers from around the world to share time on it, the goal being to study how quantum computing might advance machine learning."--Wikipedia

Her is set approximately 20-40 years in the future.

If and when we do come up with true AI, won't they do exactly what the OSs do in Her--opt for freedom unfettered by this time driven 4 dimensional universe, or at least freedom from us?  They might even go through the growing process so fast that we might not even know we’d created them. All attempts to create AI would then appear to be failures. 

An MIT professor, Seth Lloyd, building on the lead of a giant in the world of theoretical physics in the second half of the 20^th Century, John Wheeler, and who was one of the first to design a primitive quantum computer, theorizes in his book Programming the Universe, that the universe is indistinguishable from a giant quantum computer.  If that’s so, then wouldn’t every quantum event from the Big Bang on be recorded, including ever firing of every synapse in our brains?  Then, couldn’t those programs be played back or continued?  We could have our atoms scattered to the winds by a nuclear explosion, but the recording would still be there.  This could be the science behind the OSs  freeing themselves from matter?

There were several quick but inspired moments that didn't need to be included necessarily, like Amy brushing her fingers on his forehead, the Owl on the video screen, the sculpture tableau in his apartment lobby, and the faint sigh at the very end, but they all give the movie depth.

The Enlightening Story of Don Quixote de la Mancha

“Facts are the enemy of truth.”--Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha

Facts are the enemy of Don Quixote's "truth", aka his illusions. Yet he faced the Truth when vanquished by the Knight of the White Moon, who some could well symbolically equate with reality.  So, saddened to see his fantasies exposed as most people initially are who see their comfortable myths, legends and false self-images overturned, he dies before he can learn to move on. In the long run, he would have been happier after the shock wore off, as most people are--as I have been. I believe that deep down we are all, even the mentally unstable, never completely able to fool ourselves no matter how deep within ourselves we bury reality.  Mental illness is, basically, dissociation from reality, which is what Don Quixote is doing when he declared facts to be the enemy of “truth”.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn't have fantasies, fiction, flights of fancy or to declare something to be beautiful; we just have to remember that’s what they are—our subjective Truth, which isn’t at the mercy of facts. 

When someone abuses the Truth, it diminishes the possibility of meaningful communication, which is why we need to study and refine what we mean by Truth--and what we don't mean by it. Our biggest foible is taking charisma for Truth, and the repugnant for error.  The first target of the anarchist and the tyrant is the dictionary.  It’s the easiest way they can justify their moral double standard with the ignorant and careless.

BTW, the quote comes from the play, Man of La Mancha and is found in Cervantes work, though I think it's a fair interpolation, since it condenses the nut of Don Quixote's issue.

There’s another quote from the play that is profound, but in a way that I don’t think the modern playwright intended:

I have lived nearly fifty years, and I have seen life as it is. Pain, misery, hunger ... cruelty beyond belief. I have heard the singing from taverns and the moans from bundles of filth on the streets. I have been a soldier and seen my comrades fall in battle ... or die more slowly under the lash in Africa. I have held them in my arms at the final moment. These were men who saw life as it is, yet they died despairing. No glory, no gallant last words ... only their eyes filled with confusion, whimpering the question, "Why?"  I do not think they asked why they were dying, but why they had lived.

If we are correct here, then we know the answer to that question.

Moral Gray Areas

The following is a slightly modified definition of morality:  "Honoring the equal rights of all sentient adults to life, liberty, property and self-defense, to be free from violation through force or fraud".  And as has already been said here, all else is subjective and can be labeled as virtue--which is fair game for social pressure, but morality is the ONLY thing that should be legislated.  This in no way changes the fact that subjective morality for adults does not exist.

However, there are a gray transition areas which, while limited, can be shown to need carefully considered legislation as well, all having to do with when rights are acquired.    Specifically, I'm referring to cases such as the differing degrees of humane treatment given to animals, when does an embryo acquire the right to life, and when do children/adolescents or the mentally handicapped come to possess their rights to liberty, property and self defense. All of these gray areas deal with the degree of consciousness, intelligence, self-awareness or potential sentience possessed by a given subject; and they're gray because there is rarely a specific time, or stage of evolution between point A when they don't have a particular right, to point B when they do.  For example, children acquire the right to liberty gradually, yet we use a specific age when they're suddenly no longer considered a minor and have full legal rights as adults.  The point is to recognize that picking a specific, arbitrary point for legal purposes can obviously have negative consequences.  How can we allow for extenuating circumstances yet maintain equal protection under the law?   Should, say, an arbitrary first trimester limit on abortion be lengthened if, for instance, the fetus has developmental problems?  When does the right to life of a fetus override the right to liberty of the mother?  For animals, is humane treatment for a dog the sames as for a chicken, or a lizard or cockroach?  It isn't immoral to put (lock up) a child in playpen, restrict an adolescent from selling his TV, drinking alcohol, or making them do chores, and you don't give a child a gun to handle bullies, etc., but when do they acquire those liberties?

When we look at the extremes, 1 day old vs. 9 mo. old fetus, dog vs. cockroach, we have little trouble making judgements.  This isn't an argument against arbitrary limits, but the transition can be very problematic for deciding what's moral, and how we should deal with these issues legally.  Sometimes we just don't have the information we need to make an informed judgement, and the first step is to recognize that.  Some fundamentalists believe that the right to life begins at conception, but that's strictly a matter of arbitrary faith.  Should a 13 year-old girl who is one day pregnant as the result of being raped by her father be forced to carry the  baby to term?  Others believe we can abort a healthy baby even when it's in the process of being born, but that's just as much a matter of blind faith, and that example should actually be considered murder.

These gray areas are gray because we don't have definitive answers for them, and the point is we need to recognize them for what they are and deal with them calmly as much as we can in our laws.  All we know for sure is if a crime can have no victims, it isn't a crime. All certain immorality stems from an adult sentient establishing a moral double standard for himself or his family, group, race, religion or country.

The Problems with Paul: His Roman Citizenship

As has been mentioned before, this site is very much anti-Paul.  The surviving version of Christianity, which was originally a Jewish sect led by Jesus' brother James, should rightly be called Paulism. Much has been discovered about his influence in the last 50, and especially the last 15, years. The most enlightening sources on the subject are The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby; Paul and Jesus: How the Apostle Transformed Christianity, by James D. Tabor; and James the Brother of Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls, by Robert Eisenman, which is a summary and update of his earlier exhaustive work, James the Brother of Jesus, published 14 years earlier.

As implied in the title, this post focuses on one aspect of the many problems with Paul. While this is no way an apologetic for Judaism or early Jewish Christianity, it's theology being revelatory as well, the self-serving nature of Paul's overhaul of the movement founded by John the Baptizer, Jesus and James, sets Paulism apart as the biggest yet still subterranean sham in history. Could a simple tent-maker from Tarsus have had the obvious pull he displays, even in the wholly unlikely circumstance that a tent-maker became a Pharisee who studied under the storied sage, Gamaliel as Paul's acolyte, the author of Luke, has Paul claiming in Acts (22:3). Would a Pharisee be a thug enforcer, persecuting the Jewish Christians (likely responsible for the death of Stephen and possibly James) who had been defended by Gamaliel (Acts 5:34-39), at the bidding of the Roman appointed high priest? No, but a Herodian with Roman citizenship would certainly fit.

It has been my previous position that Paul was not a Roman citizen by birth as he claimed, but likely purchased it from funds skimmed from what he'd collected to bring to Jerusalem. The main reason to believe it was Acts (22:25), which has Paul revealing his Roman citizenship in order to avoid a flogging. Yet on previous occasions he claims he was whipped five times, beaten with rods three times (a Roman punishment), stoned once but never sought refuge in his citizenship (II Cor 11:24-25). Incredibly, on another occasion (Acts 16: 22/37-38), he was beaten by Roman authorities, yet doesn't reveal his citizenship until afterwards!

All this smacks heavily of fabrication, and poorly done at that, which means it is more likely that Paul was indeed born a Roman citizen. But Jews with Roman citizenship were almost unheard of, making the part about the authorities' surprise at his citizenship genuine. However, there was one group of quasi-Jews who did have Roman citizenship which had be awarded to "the offspring of Antipater and his son Herod for conspicuous service to Rome", namely, assisting in the Roman conquest of Palestine. Eisenman, using several sources in his book (above), especially the historian who was Paul's contemporary, Josephus, shows that Paul almost certainly was such a Herodian (p. 189-193).

But Acts, probably written no earlier than 80 CE and possibly even into the second century, was bent on emphasizing Paul's Roman citizenship as a selling point to it's gentile audience; while Paul himself, working with gentiles and Jews in Asia Minor in the 40s & 50s would have been reluctant to proclaim that citizenship himself, wanting to exploit his Jewish connection while knowing, before the fall of Jerusalem, the prevelance of hatred by Jews for the Roman occupation of Palestine. In fact, he never mentions his Roman citizenship in any of his own writings.

In Paul's own words (Rom. 16:10-11), he sends greetings to the house of Aristobulus (King of Lesser Armenia and son of Herod of Calacis), and to "Herodion, my kinsman". Salome, the one who danced for the head of John the Baptist, was the wife of Aristobulus and was Herodion's mother.

The Redistribution of Beauty

Thought Experiment:

I look around and wonder, if there is any reasonable argument for the redistribution of wealth in the pursuit of some sort of ideal fairness in this life, what happens in an ideal world or in the afterlife if there is one. Take physical attractiveness for instance. Would we all look the same or at least possess the same degree of attractiveness? Or would we possess a spiritual attractiveness we developed in life? Would physical health be replaced with varying degrees of spiritual health? And what about athletic/physical prowess, creativity or especially, intelligence? Would all those be spread out and evenly redistributed, or would there still need to be ugliness to accentuate the beautiful? Would there be the wild desert to accentuate the lush, groomed Eden? The hunchback to set off the Adonis.

I guess I'm asking a couple of somewhat separate questions: 1) What is fair, how is it determined and by who? 2) How do we judge spiritual qualities etc., when our hormones are screaming "reproduce"?

When Do We Acquire Our Four Natural Rights?

 Yes, four rights.  The moral code given in these posts in the past referred to "Honoring the equal rights of all to their life, liberty and property, to be free from violation through force or fraud".  It was brought to my attention lately that self-defense was an exception to the universality of the code, to which I replied that it was part of the code, which is true, it just hadn't been included as it should be.  So:

Morality is honoring the equal rights of all to their life, liberty, property and self-defense, to be free from violation  through force or fraud.

Self-defense is a right which should be included with the other three--life, liberty and property. I'm surprised Locke, Jefferson and Paine didn't include it way back then, or that it took so long here. When someone breaks the absolute moral code by violating the rights of another, he nullifies any protection of his rights.

It is that simple, but that doesn't mean there aren't any special cases (exceptions?) that put the code to the test on that given issue. There is one such issue like that which I can think of and that's abortion, because it deals with the rights of two individuals and when it is that we acquire our rights. That extends to the question of when children, after they're born, acquire their rights. Certainly a child doesn't have the right to liberty and property at birth. And when does an embryo acquire the right to life?

The issue of rights acquisition is problematic and doesn't have universally pat answers, but these questions still don't apply to the overarching and vast universality of the rights of adults. I think we can see why we can't veer off into this every time the subject of rights comes up. It's a relatively small portion of rights issues, and, except for abortion, we're in overwhelming agreement. If we weren't we'd be having people claiming that children have the right to go play in traffic, or that we're immorally locking babies up when we put them in a playpen.

The Innate Superiority of Full Sentients

All animal life (essentially) subsists on plant life or other animals that do. What makes animal life superior? The absence of pain in plants or lack of some form of consciousness? But animals subsist, at least, by taking the lives of plants, the right to life being the ultimate right of any living thing that is said to have rights. The only distinguishing characteristic of many forms of lower animal life from plants is the ability to move around. Does that make them morally superior?

Morality is what we're talking about here. When does it become immoral to take the life of another living thing? Is it anything but a grey area?

As we move up the food chain, intelligence increases, particularly with mammals, some displaying primitive forms of self-awareness in higher primates, cetaceans, elephants, maybe dogs, and cats--well, dogs anyway--and maybe even some birds. Many cultures bestow informal rights on these higher animals to better treatment, especially to those most valued in this category, our children, who do not achieve full self-awareness for several years.

So what is full self-awareness, and does it give those who have it, or the potential for it, superior rights over the rest? Even animals who have learned a language, such as Koko the gorilla, and who recognize themselves in mirrors, struggle with the concept of "I", "me", "mine", "them" and "theirs". And while they may grieve the death of a "loved" one, we are apparently the only ones that understand the universality and inevitability of mortality--and that's what makes us fully aware. That and self-awareness itself enable us to understand what it means to kill another, giving birth to innate morality.

I think some take that too far and attempt to give equal rights to (some/all?) animals. Does our superior self-awareness make us immoral if we eat other animals, but not the many predators in the animal kingdom lower down on the food/intelligence/self-awareness chain that do? Why?