November 22, 2014 at 12:52 P.M. I brought my laptop to the NYPL, Morningside Heights branch. I am prevented from accessing the Internet from my laptop even at the library.
Evidently, there is nothing wrong with the laptop. Hence, it is inexplicable to people why I am unable to use it to write from my home, or other Internet connection at a public location.
I have received no notice from any government agency that I am not permitted to write online. For the time being, accordingly, I am forced to use library computers exclusively.
I will try to find other public computers from which to access the Internet.
I have the impression that some powerful officials do not wish to have me writing and publishing online.
I wonder why this is true? ("Menendez Consorts With Underage Prostitutes" and "Christie Gives a Donor $1 Million of New Jersey Money.")
Neither laws, nor courts and/or police respond to these illegalities that are brought to their attention and that I will continue to bring to their attention. ("An Open Letter to Cyrus Vance, Jr., Esq.")
I will soon post the overnight mail receipt number for the package sent to Mr. Vance for a second time. Follow-up letters to government officials will also be posted at this blog.
"Silencing" me threatens all journalists and everyone writing on-line in America and elsewhere. ("New Jersey's 'Ethical' Legal System.")
As regards the Constitution's guarantee of freedom of speech, persons conducting this censorship effort are "playing with matches."
"Interstellar": Directed by Christopher Nolan; script by Jonathan Nolan & Christopher Nolan; Director of Photography (impressive) Hoyte Van Hoyten; edited by Lee Smith; music (not so impressive) Hans Zimmer. Paramount, 2014.
Performers: Mathew McConaughey (Coop, Oscar please!); Ann Hathaway (Dr. Amelia Brand); Jessica Chastain (Murph as an adult); Bill Irwin (voice of TARS); McKenzie Foy (Murph as a child); John Lithgow (Donald); Timothee Chalamert (Tom); Wes Bentley (Doyle); David Gyasic (Romilly); Topher Grace (Getty); Michael Caine (Professor Brand); Ellen Burstyn, Matt Damon, and Casey Affleck in supporting roles.
Reviews:
Adam Rodgers, "The Physics of Interstellar: A Conversation With Christopher Nolan and Kip Thorne," in Wired, December, 2014, p. 44. (Article appearing after I posted my review that is excellent on the physics, but misses the biology and mythic aspects of the film.)
Dennis Overbye, "'Interstellar': The Cinema of Physicists," The New York Times, Science Times, November 18, 2014, p. D1. (Some errors by Mr. Overbye, including failures to identify key issues: "The Theory of Everything"? Hawking and Sheldrake? "We" put the wormhole there under the plot-line which answers the question of who put the wormhole "there." The fifth dimension may be as many as eleven dimensions in string theory which would solve the planetary science issues. Is Mr. Overbye also "George Johnson"? "Is the universe only a numbers game?")
Lou Lumenick, "Over the Moon," The New York Post, November 14, 2014, p. 35. (Complementary review -- or even a rave -- but clueless about the science and philosophy in the film.)
A.O. Scott, "Off to the Stars, With Dread and Regret," The New York Times, November 5, 2014, p. C1. (Lost on the science; favorable on the performances. David Brooks is worse on the science and more confused on philosophical issues. Does Mr. Brooks write under pseudonyms? If so, what are those pseudonyms? "Manohla Dargis"? GOP?)
"There is No Reason At All [Why] You Should Care About the Universe. For One Thing, It Doesn't Care About You," Time, November 10, 2014, p. 44. (Arguably, this film is saying exactly the opposite of what this unsigned article suggests.)
Films Referenced in "Interstellar":
1. "2001, A Space Odyssey."
2. "The Wizard of Oz."
3. "Star Wars."
4. "Star Trek."
5. "Lost in Space," TV Show and Movie.
6. "The Bible."
7. "Prometheus."
8. "Mindwalk."
9. "Lifeforce."
10. "Silent Running."
11. "Looper."
12. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," "E.T.," "A.I."
"Man and nature will combine in an all-embracing unity." -- Friedrich Holderlin.
"Interstellar" is the latest film by Christopher Nolan featuring a thoughtful script co-authored with younger brother Jonathan Nolan. Mr. Nolan -- the director, not the writer -- studied literature at the University of London, specializing in the Romantics, while younger brother, Jonathan, read philosophy and science at Oxford University.
The Nolans display a shared interest in Romantic ideas as well as the philosophy of science and contemporary physics which continues to inform their works.
Lurking under the surface of the Nolans' plots and overt themes, however, is a fascinating and related meditation on the mystery of "doubleness" -- mirror-images and -symmetries -- leading to the mutuality of identity that must be poignant for twins, or any siblings and/or "dialectical partners."
There is a "yes-and-no" quality to the self-as-duality which is intriguing to the Nolans because it seems to parallel the puzzles of cinema and the latest aesthetic theory to say nothing of quantum physics. ("'Inception': A Movie Review" and "'The Prestige': A Movie Review" then "Drawing Room Comedy: A Philosophical Essay in the Form of a Film Script.")
Several entanglement relations are detectable in this movie between fathers and daughters: Michael Caine's Professor Brand gives a daughter to Coop for his Promethean journey only to acquire Coop's daughter "Murph" as his only student.
John Lithgow's aging paternal archetype adds to the poignancy of the "fathers and their children" theme that emphasizes the way most of us measure time's passage in our lives -- by way of transitions between or among generations -- as well as changes in our lives and concerns.
These disturbing themes ("Ford" and "Dolores" or God and Man/Woman) continue to be explored in Jonathan Nolan's and Lisa Joy's spectacular "Westworld" series on HBO that also delves into the mystery and paradox of freedom as -- or against evil -- at the center of personhood. The Nolan style of film-making is nothing if not metaphysically ambitious as well as aesthetically adventurous.
The child (in this case a daughter) is "father to the man," to paraphrase Wordsworth. "Lived" time will be contrasted with other forms of temporal passage and chronicling in this movie.
Coop's final quest for Amelia (as in the famous "aviator" Amelia Earhardt?) Brand takes him back to the stars as substitute father/lover to a new lover/partner/wife echoing themes from Greek mythology. Icharus?
Dispositions that find many forms of expression across the generations hint at an analogy between quantum entanglements and genetic relations or evolutionary drives.
Talents that are "inherited" as well as the instinct for survival reflect the curvature of moral space around the "morphogenetic" emotion and force that is love.
Much of the biology of "Interstellar" is found in discussions among the Chilean school of biologists, Humberto Maturana especially, and distinguished thinkers, such as Alister McGrath (genetic biologist and Anglican priest) of Oxford University together with Francisco Ayala of Princeton University.
The film offers both a search for and suggested resolution to the mystery of "The Theory of Everything." The movie also provides theological speculation on the transformations of the Christian narrative in a secular age or in postmodernist-scientific culture.
"Coop" is the Promethean/Christ figure who dies and is reborn, Michael Caine's Dr. Brand is the god that fails; Ms. Hathaway's Dr. Brand, Jr. is the unified version of Christianity's Mary Magdalene/Mary the Mother of God who creates the "Lazarus" settlement on a distant planet that (she believes) permits humanity to conquer death. ("Duality in Christian Feminine Identity" and "'The Da Vinci Code': A Movie Review.")
Love is what allows for the only genuine "conquest" of death leading to the "rebirth" of Coop and his return to dwell among us before ascending to the stars, as I said, to rejoin "Mary" -- I mean, Ann Hathaway's "Dr. Brand."
The crucial dialectic between love and death is at the center of this film with references to the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) balanced by suggestions of love as the unity of the other fundamental forces in the universe as well as the means of overcoming death.
If the new school of biologists is correct (autopoesis) spontaneous order may counter entropy with the creation of ever-more beautiful or elegant order from chaos or decay.
"Entropy" is the term for the way that all energy in the universe is running down (or dissipating) leading, eventually, to what has been called: "the heat death of the universe."
Life, survival, love is set against collapse, disintegration, or evil as death.
C.S. Peirce's classic essay "Evolutionary Love" is invoked beside the celebrated dialogue between David Bohm and Rupert Sheldrake.
More on this fascinating scholarship will be offered later in this discussion.
Several of Einstein's thought experiments -- notably, the "watch in the box and the watch in the rocket ship" -- are found in the plot twists of the movie, but these devices have not been detected or discussed by reviewers to the best of my knowledge.
"One of the early thought experiments proposed by Einstein is the clock in the box experiment ..." balanced by the watch in the space ship that, decades later, is dropped into a black hole by Stephen Hawking.
Please refer to Menos Kafatos & Robert Nordeau, The Conscious Universe: Part and Whole in Modern Physical Theory (New York: Springer/Verlag, 1990), p. 61 and then the crucial extended discussion of relativity, the time-space continuum, and quantum mechanics in Albert Einstein, "Quantum Theory and the Fundamentals of Physics," from 1936 that is reprinted in Out of My Later Years (New York: Castle Books, 1956), pp. 59-98, especially pp. 85-93.
The Wizard of Oz is one of the films haunting "Interstellar" since survival -- like happiness or the proverbial bluebird -- is in our own backyard all along, or so we are told.
Death and Hamlet's questions, Noir images, have continued to grow in importance for Mr. Nolan as he enters what is laughingly called "middle age."
Climate warming is easily solved as a human crisis in "Interstellar" by locating another habitable planet or two. The plot device suggests, unintentionally, that we should not worry about destroying the Earth because we can continue polluting multiple dimensions of reality and countless other worlds thanks to science.
I suggest that we worry about climate warming here and now so that we do not have to escape our friendly planet.
I doubt that this is the idea we are intended to derive from the movie ("don't worry about it!"), but I am sure that more than one audience member will exit the theater with a sigh of relief in order to get into a gas-guzzling BMW SUV.
There is a surprising (and suspicious) shortage of African-Americans in this future America and very few, if any, dark-skinned persons who survive into the brave New World of the multiverse.
I am somewhat alarmed by this development (to say nothing of the censorship I struggle against!) for many of our friends in urban neighborhoods, or those who presume to think differently, since the distant future looks like America in the nineteen-fifties.
A key theme is time and the running out of time (death for planets, species, persons) together with the prospects of transcendence and overcoming of death. The solution we are offered has to do with the elongation of time achieved not only in relativistic accounts of the space-time continuum, but also by way of the controlled plasticity of time achieved through a new "theory of everything" re-unifying the fundamental forces of physics -- gravity, the weak and strong nuclear forces, electromagnetism -- by way of the unsuspected "morphic field" of love.
Along the way we will travel through a wormhole and fall into a black hole to discover the "singularity," a mathematical representation of infinite information in all directions (the tesseract) that amounts to a new definition of God. Ian Stewart, Nature's Numbers: The Unreal Reality of Mathematics (New York: Basic Books, 1995), pp. 146-147. (Abstract mathematical "forms" may exist logically, but not empirically, as with multi-dimensional objects that are numerically definable and simulated in computer programs without being encountered in the "real" world.)
"We put it there." We did indeed. This human origin does not make any concept less real. "We" also invented physics and mathematics. Part of what is at issue in Christopher Nolan's films is the concept of "reality" and the ambiguous boundaries between the real versus unreal, dream and wakefulness, time and space, fiction and fact in an age when all bivalent relations are subject to intense challenge and debate. ("Has science made philosophy obsolete?" and "Michel Foucault and the Authorship Question" then "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz.")
Critics have mistakenly suggested that there is no vision of the divine in this movie. This is inaccurate: God is the mathematical structure that is infinite in all directions, perfect, eternal, where the force of love may impel us in one direction or another, towards one moment (and person) or another, based on need and connection. ("Would Jesus be a Christian?" and "'The American': A Movie Review.")
Among the dimensions and entities brought together in the tesseract, a kind of mathematical weaving together of dimensions and forces, is time-space that becomes a Borgesian infinite library of moments, or "nows." Amit Goswami, The Self-Aware Universe: How Consciousness Creates the Material World (New York: Penguin, 1995), pp. 139-145.
It is in this mathematical space that Coop experiences the "gravitational" pull of love bringing him to the crucial moment of his relationship with Murph that allows him to hint to her of a solution to the paradoxes in which we find ourselves located resulting in the rescuing of the human race. Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism, Physics, and Global Politics (New York: Anchor Press, 1982), pp. 280-318. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.")
Before offering a more detailed consideration of key plot elements and turning to a full discussion of themes highlighted in the film that are unified under the symbol of the "twin" watches, I will comment on the concept(s) of time in the narrative: one watch is in a box on Earth, the other is in the rocket ship in the heavens; one (a "baby" watch) is given to Murph; the other (a "grown-up" watch, a Longines, by the way, certainly a respectable choice) is worn by Coop.
We all have such watches inside ourselves that will one day stop ticking. Time's subtle dance and coy seductions is attached to gravity's enhanced solidity and malleability in the Smolin/Greene "loop quantum gravity" discussions of the unification problem in physics. Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality (London & New York: Penguin, 2007), pp. 489-491 ("Loop Quantum Gravity").
If there is a way to unite nature's fundamental forces, gravity is probably the key to the solution.
In terms of subconscious associations, in this movie, time is "feminine" while gravity seems to be "masculine," whereas the fusion of the two is love with a bow to Darwin and Freud.
Love and death, again, define the human condition. The idea is not that through love we return to a past moment, but that crucial moments in our lives -- as well as in life-narratives -- travel with us in our life-journeys. The influence of hermeneutic thinkers, especially Ricoeur and Gadamer is also important:
"Once inside the hole, therefore, [the hypothetical astronaut] will be imprisoned in a timewarp, unable to return to the outside universe again, because the outside universe will have happened. He will be, literally, beyond the end of time as far as the universe is concerned. To emerge from the hole, he would have to come out before he went in. This is absurd [only in a four-dimensional universe!] and shows there is no escape. The inexorable grip of the hole's gravity drags the hapless astronaut towards the singularity where, a microsecond later, he reaches the edge of time, and obliteration; the singularity marks the end of a one-way journey to 'nowhere' and 'nowhen.' It is a non-place where the physical universe ceases."
The quantum paradoxes become obvious and are underscored as the narrative progresses. In fact, the very idea of "narrative progression" is called into question in the movie's "cinematic" time:
"Questions such as 'What is happening now on Mars?' are intended to refer to a particular instant on that planet. But as we have seen, a space traveller sweeping past Earth in a rocket who asked the same question at the same instant would be referring to a different moment on Mars. In fact, the range of possible 'nows' on Mars available to an observer near Earth (depending on his motion) actually spans several minutes. When the distance to the subject is greater, so is this range of 'nows.' For a distant Quasar 'now' could refer to any interval over BILLIONS of years. Even the effect of strolling around on foot alters the 'present moment' on a quasar by thousands of years."
Physicist Paul Davies explains these anomalies in "Time," God and the New Physics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983), pp. 123-124. ("What is memory?" and "'In Time': A Movie Review.")
Please compare Errol E. Harris, "Time and the Transcendental Subject," in The Reality of Time (New York: SUNY, 1988), pp. 88-92 (" ... cognitive acts are not phenomena, but transcend, as they must in order to cognize, the objects and relations which they intend ...") with Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 174-175 ("If we find the answer to that, [the unified field theory,] it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason -- for then we should know the mind of God ...").
Thanks to Christopher and Jonathan Nolan we now know that the mind of God is love and (or "as") a sublime mathematical elegance which may be redundant. Love is beauty for these thinkers. Hence, the "elegant universe hypothesis."
" ... the unimaginable touch of time." -- William Wordsworth.
Coop finds himself farming some of the few remaining acres in North America capable of yielding viable crops after climate warming's dire effects. Mostly people eat corn in post-apocalyptic America. This must be better than government cheese. I say this as someone who has eaten government cheese and known days when he would have been grateful for some of that cheese.
Coop's son (played as an adult by Casey Affleck in an underappreciated part) may have a genuine grievance against dad and Murph, since he seems to get the short end of the stick in parental attention and love.
I am a Casey Affleck fan because he is not only a superb actor, but (like most of the best actors) Casey is willing to play disturbing and far from likable characters and unconcerned about appearing in the most flattering manner on screen. Please see: "The Killer Inside."
Murph will become the bearer of the torch for humanity and Jr. will be only another struggling farmer from the heartland.
A meeting at the boy's school makes it clear to Coop that the American decline includes school textbooks denying the reality of the moon landing as well as most other American achievements that are seemingly impossible to attribute to transgendered persons of color residing in the East Village of Manhattan. ("Whatever happened to the liberal arts?" and "Is the universe only a numbers game?")
In one of the few scenes featuring an African-American, the audience is told that the moon landing was staged to force an impossible economic competition on the former Soviet Union. Such insanity, apparently, is not unheard of in academic circles these days. ("Why Jane can't read" and "America's Nursery School Campus.")
Michael Caine's presence makes any movie better. He serves as "Philemon," or a Stephen Hawking-like scientist forced underground by political correctness who is a mentor to Coop. The senior Dr. Brand offers Coop redemption and the chance to do what he is trained to do so well -- pilot a space ship. ("Nihilists in Disneyworld.")
As Murph will fulfill her genetic endowment -- dad is an engineer and scientist, but a crappy farmer -- and salvific mission only by finding a formula for the theory of everything with dad's help ("back to the future!"), so Dr. Amelia Brand (Ann Hathaway) will "go where no man has gone before" to create the first off-world human colony called "Lazarus" when it is no longer needed.
That is so annoying for a woman scientist -- to save the world when it is no longer necessary. On the other hand, the home planet is endowed with 11 more dimensions that we can happily ruin at our leisure.
For those who crave more about the physics of the multiverse, Professor Michiu Kaku has devoted substantial attention to the topic in a Science Channel documentary on the "physics of the future" that accompanies his book by the same title.
We will journey into wormholes and, eventually, fall into a black hole to discover the "singularity" that allows for an experience of the infinite mathematics that is ultimate reality in which we are placed, uncomfortably and confusedly at the "moment."
References to the stories of the Hebrew Bible (complete with a flood) will prevent viewers from claiming that this is only a Christian narrative which it is, mostly.
The tesseract, of course, is a representation of the "mind of God."
Along the way, as I have suggested, there are knowing references to Einstein's most famous thought-experiments and their subsequent elaborations, coupled with key themes in hermeneutic theory concerning temporality and narrative: 124 years elapse in the story on screen but only 2 and 1/2 hours pass in the movie theater, suggesting that the clever Nolans have placed all of us (in the audience) on a "spaceship" that alters the experience of time for the film's recipients. The movie "Interstellar" is our "spaceship" as audience members and participants in the work. The reference is to Hans-Robert Jauss and the "reader-response" theory. ("Metaphor is Mystery" and "A Doll's Aria.")
We have become time-travelers. Cool, pass me the popcorn.
Derrida's "deconstruction" of time-experience and time-conception in language(s) comes to mind establishing beyond any doubt that the Nolan brothers have their postmodernist credentials fully up-to-date. Professor Derrida was among the leading thinkers posing a powerful critique to Western dualisms and all bivalent relations. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) and Paul Ricoeur, Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998) are meditations on death as the "end of time" by two of the leading philosophers of their generation in France concerned with "time and narrative" and the "deconstruction of time."
Modernism's "linear" understandings time have been transformed into a postmodernist conception of time as circles/mandalas as we are forced to enter the "sliding doors" universe of the twenty-first century. ("'The Adjustment Bureau': A Movie Review.")
The Nolan brothers are transformed into robots paraphrasing the device on the old "Lost in Space" television show ("Danger Will Robinson!") except that the machines seem to have read Hans-Georg Gadamer.
The tribute to "Star Wars" and the twin robots in the original film by Mr. Lucas is cute if a little heavy-handed. "Use the force!," Mr. Nolan. When combined with the "twin" watches the only conclusion is that the Nolans see themselves as mirror-images of one another in a very mutually annoying way. ("Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
Jonathan Nolan seems to believe that his brother Christopher "talks enough for both of us." (Again: "'The Prestige': A Movie Review.")
The concept of evil in the film is "entrapment in ego" in the form of Mr. Damon's character (what did Dr. Brand see in him?) whereas freedom is self-giving love, or sacrifice for others, in the form of Coop.
Several ideas or concepts of love are juxtaposed, including eros that is only hinted at in the film. Love at several stages in the plot exerts a gravitational pull on characters, not exclusively on Coop or Murph.
The fusion of Buddhist themes with astro-physics -- derived from Ken Wilber's writings -- is fascinating and familiar to those of us who have read these brilliant books:
"The level of mind ["Inception"] by whatever other name it is given, is what there is and all there is -- so say its explorers. This, however, introduces a new task for this synthesis, namely, to attempt to describe the apparent (i.e., illusory) creation or evolution of our conventional levels of consciousness 'from' or 'out of' the level of Mind, somewhat as a physicist would describe the optics of a prism that creates a [second] prism from a single beam of light. But this is not an actual evolution of Mind through time, as we will explain, but a seeming evolution of Mind into time, for Mind itself is intemporal, timeless, eternal. We are approaching consciousness, in other words, from the viewpoint of the absolute Now-moment, and so this synthesis becomes a psychological interpretation of the philosophia perennis. It is this [view] inescapably made prey to the paradoxes, logical contradictions, and baffling assertions that must accompany all such interpretations for the sublimely simple reason that the level of Mind is ultimately not an idea but an intensely intimate experience which is so close to us that it slips through the net of words; and that is why it was so emphasized that treating consciousness as a spectrum [multiverse] is pure metaphor or analogy -- it tells what consciousness is like, but not at all what it is, for what it is goes behind words and symbols 'to the inwardness of one's spiritual experience,' which cannot be analyzed intellectually without somehow involving logical contradictions."
The Spectrum of Consciousness (Illinois: Fourth Quest, 1985), p. 26 then Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (Boston: Shambala, 2007), pp. 423-453 ("The Ego and the Eco"). Juan Galis-Menendez, Paul Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Freedom (North Carolina: Lulu, 2004). (With the loss of linear time determinism is undermined. I understand that my essay on Ricoeur's philosophy is being translated into other languages. I will post the result at this blog: "Stephen Hawking's Free Will is Determined" and "Stephen Hawking is Right On Time.")
"Rage against the dying of the light." -- Dylan Thomas.
Unlike most of us, Coop is able to see his child grown very old and on the verge of death. Coop experiences a kind of death and resurrection, as I have noted, and so does our planet in the story.
This is a theological theme of renewal that is found in all of the Nolans' films. The classic hermeneutic example of this device is the "Virgin birth": the animal grows into a spiritual being from base origins.
Against the ubiquity of decline and death is the idea of an instinct for survival, for the human species and individuals. This instinct is also connected to love, as an emotion and cultural phenomenon, that is transformed into actual energy for "creative evolution" through elegance. The idea of creative evolution is part of the many teleological interpretations of cosmology currently being investigated in universities. John P. Briggs & F. David Peat, Looking Glass Universe: The Emerging Science of Wholeness (London: Fontana, 1984), pp. 163-265. (References to the biologists mentioned above can be found in this work.)
Coop is almost killed by the Matt Damon character and his effort at survival, in Darwinian terms, is described as "instinctive." Later in the story more complex notions of survival and subtle elaborations of Darwinian theory where "organicism" leads to further teleological interpretations of the universe's "narrative" will emerge. ("Is it rational to believe in God?")
During a moment of inspiration the adult Murph speaks of love as the potential unifying power (form) that prevents the process of "dissipation" from holding sway. ("Pieta" and "The Allegory of the Cave.")
It is love alone which guides Coop back to the crucial "now" in time that allows him to provide the essential hint for his child's key insight about the multiverse. ("God is Texting Me!" and "Magician's Choice.")
This moment in the film-narrative is a single hermeneutic circle in a story that contains several such circles forming "clock-faces" that recapitulate the themes of the text underlining the Nolans' reading of Derrida as well as their fascination with the multi-verse or post-quantum physics. (Again: "Jacques Derrida's Philosophy as Jazz" and "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Author.")
Compare David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order (New York & London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 140-157, pp. 172-214 with Jacques Derrida, The Problem of Genesis in Husserl's Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), entirety. (Derrida's book is a short one and devoted to parallel themes to those in "Interstellar.")
I do not believe that the movie's hints concerning the sources to read are accidental or difficult to miss. The obvious reference is to C.S. Peirce's "Evolutionary Love" and to Rupert Sheldrake's concept of "Morphic Fields" exerted by and for life-forms.
I begin with Peirce, then I turn to the conversation between Sheldrake and Bohm:
"The doctrine of the primacy of chance naturally suggests the primacy of mind. Just as law is chance habit, [Murph's law: "Anything that can happen will happen."] so is matter inert mind. The principle law of mind is that ideas literally spread themselves continuously [Richard Dawkins' "memes"?] and become more and more general or inclusive, so that people who form communities of any sort develop general ideas in common when this continuous reaching out of feeling becomes nurturing love, such e.g., which parents have for their offspring or thinkers for their ideas, we have creative evolution."
Charles Sanders Peirce, "Evolutionary Love," in Chance, Love, and Logic: Philosophical Essays (Lincoln & London: U. Nebraska Press, 1998), pp. 282-292.
F.H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality (New York: McMillan, 1893), pp. 35-43 ("Space and Time") anticipates Einstein as well as developments in contemporary science by underscoring exactly this point about convergence, pp. 141-161. (Einstein's papers on "Relativity" date from 1905, then 1915 and 1918.) ("A Review of the t.v. Show 'Alice.'")
Professor Sheldrake is one of the foremost biologists in the world today whose theory of morphic fields contributes to the plot of "interstellar." The dialectic between Sheldrake's and David Bohm's ideas is crucial to appreciating the contemporary science of emotive connection or organic entanglement parallel to entanglement among particles. ("Reality and The Theory of Everything" and, once more, "Dialectics, Entanglement, and Special Relativity.")
"You could say that if the whole universe is thought-like, [tesseract] then you automatically have a sort of cosmic memory developing. There are systems of thought that take exactly this view. One of them is Mahayana Buddhist system -- the idea of Alayavijana, 'store consciousness,' is rather similar to that of cosmic memory ... The entire universe is, in one school of thought, Vishnu's dream. Vishnu dreams the universe into being -- it has the same kind of reality as a dream, and because Vishnu is a long-lasting god who goes on dreaming for a long time it retains a certain consistency. ... for example, could the gravitational forces that link together all matter have arisen through an original creative insight that all matter was one? ..."
Rupert Sheldrake, Morphic Resonance: The Nature of Formative Causation (Vermont: Park Street, 2009), pp. 261-265. ("'Total Recall': A Movie Review" then, again, "'Inception': A Movie Review.")
In light of this comment, see Nick Herbert's discussion of the "multiverse" interpretation of quantum phenomena on a cosmological scale alongside Professor Bohm's scholarship on the "implicate order" of reality: Nick Herbert, Quantum Reality: Beyond the New Physics -- An Excursion Into Metaphysics and the Meaning of Reality (New York: Doubleday, 1985), pp. 168-175 and David Bohm, Wholeness and the Implicate Order, pp. 172-214. ("John Searle and David Chalmers On Consciousness" and "Robert Brandom's Reason in Philosophy.")
On the mathematics of "entanglement," see Amir D. Aczel, Entanglement (London: Plume, 2001), pp. 249-253 then John Archibald Wheeler, A Journey Into Gravity and Spacetime (New York: Scientific American Library, 1990), entirety, and Roger Penrose, The Emperor's New Mind: Concerning Computers, Minds and the Laws of Physics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 391-450, pp. 450-483. ("Consciousness and Computers" and "Mind and Machine.")
The thematics of the film come down to another dialogue, this time between poets Dylan Thomas and W.H. Auden. Thomas is quoted several times by Michael Caine's character, Dr. Brand, notably on his death-bed:
Do not go gently into that good night,
Old age should burn and rage at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
W.H. Auden's response to the message of this poem is also Nolan's protest against decline and death for the nation and species that will open the final section of my review essay if I am allowed to complete this work.
"We must love one another or die." -- W.H. Auden.
W.H. Auden's response to the evil and death that he saw hovering over European civilization (September 1, 1939) -- life's response to the inescapable entropy in all of creation -- is emphasized:
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man in the street
And the life of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
"Interstellar" suggests that the mystery of life alone is a kind of defeat of death. The purpose of life is love.
This resolution is proposed as at least one meaning of the universe. This idea is certainly theological, but it is expressed entirely in a vocabulary of science and secular philosophy in a popular work of art in keeping with (and developing) the themes of the Nolans' earlier films.
In raising the issue of whether physics has merged with bio-chemistry, given the conscious or "living universe" model, some of the leading scientists of our age have noted the paradoxical nature of the mere existence of conscious and intelligent life in a universe that comes to know itself as "living" and "knowing" only through us.
Hegel spoke of "Spirit coming to know itself as Spirit":
"The theory of evolution today describes a process in which individual atoms and molecules are organized into amino acids and proteins. More curiously it describes the development of cells and increasingly complex organisms which, once formed, carefully readjust themselves to pursue their integrity for future growth. How can this be? How can life appear, sustain itself, and display organizational growth" -- creative evolution towards ever higher forms? -- "in the face of the universal march of entropy?"
Looking Glass Universe, pp. 172-173. ("Ronald Dworkin Says: 'The Law Works Itself Pure!'" and "Thomas Nagel's Guilt by Association.")
Albert Camus reminds us that "the last judgment takes place every day." ("Stuart Hampshire and Iris Murdoch On Freedom of Mind.")
We must live our lives with the knowledge of their precious and fleeting nature even -- or especially -- in coping with suffering and loss (love often includes both painful emotions) since everything and every person we love must die. ("Shakespeare's Black Prince" and "The Soldier and the Ballerina.")
Perhaps this is the universe's way of instructing us to treasure the beauty of the presence of loved-ones, NOW, to cherish and celebrate the vanishing moment in which we live, to struggle for the good in order to create or achieve our fragile and fleeting meanings eternally if not forever.
Bravo, Nolan brothers and to all of the players and artists who have made this fine movie possible.
