Inception

So today I had the privilege of spending time with some great folks from the West Seattle Campus of Mars Hill. We all went out to the U. District Campus to enjoy the Movie Inception and Cinemagogue's theological take on this fine piece of cinematic philosophy. The metanarrative master's (Pastor Harleman) discussion of subjective reality explored the very curious yet blatantly obvious fact that the question "Did the top stop spinning?" is totally irrelevant. Here are some of my subjective recollections of Harleman's main points:

(1)Viewed from another perspective, one can see that Saito was actually breaking into Cobb's mind. Notice how Saito just happens to appear in Madras with the rescuing car, he has seemingly unlimited power to but an airline in the middle of a conversation, and he is the cause of Cobb's catharsis with both his children and his dead wife.

(2)Without an external and infallible person who knows all, there can by definition be no truly objective reality. Christopher Nolan (the director) focuses all his films on this premise. There is no objective reality, or at least no one can access it. In Memento, Guy Pierce's character has no short-term memory, so he relies on tattoos and photographs to interpret his perceived reality through. The story shows how fallible even relying on hard facts can be. Inception takes that idea and goes 10 steps further. What if you were able to enter someone's dreams and interact with them? What if you did such a good job of this that true life outside of the dream (we'll call this "reality") became hard to discern? What if you lost track of what was real and what was a dream? In many ways that gray area is precisely where we live everyday. What is objectively true? Does you spouse really truly love you? Or are you making a best guess based on your experience and what they have told you? Are even your memories of life trustworthy? These sorts of questions build a healthy paranoia don't they?


(3)In the Prestige (another Nolan Film), Michael Caine's character (Cutter) says, "Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called "The Pledge". The magician shows you something ordinary...Perhaps he asks you to inspect it to see if it is indeed real, unaltered, normal. But of course... it probably isn't. The second act is called "The Turn". The magician takes the ordinary something and makes it do something extraordinary. Now you're looking for the secret... but you won't find it, because of course you're not really looking. You don't really want to know. You want to be fooled." This reaction in each of our minds pulls us toward an idealized (or perhaps more palatable) reality where "truth" is forgotten. We all yearn for a subjective reality...Christian's call this original sin. We all want to live in a world where we can be our own god; where we have monopoly on what is real and what is not. For me, that is why I love to dream. As an amateur lucid dreamer, I have enjoyed the subjective reality of my own semi-conscious mind and the seeming omnipotence it offers.

(4)Cypher in the Matrix decided that whatever feels real is real. "If I have to choose between [reality] and the Matrix, I choose the Matrix." Some folks recognize that objective reality depends on an external hero but say that subjective reality is more than enough to live a full life. Cypher agrees.

There were many other intriguing insights from P. Harleman but you guys should have attended if you wanted to hear them. Too bad for you.
One final note before I try to sleep. A friend of mine who you can read about HERE recently renewed a debate I have had within my mind regarding a grand unified theory of everything. (No not quite the GUT) rather a consistent view of my own life, economic theory, and a more general sociological theory of mankind. She pointed me to a man by the name of John Robbins. He launches a fair-minded attack on my favorite economist Ludwig von Mises (coincidentally I have spent dozens of hours in Mises personal library whilst at Hillsdale College). Robbins points out the difficulty acknowledged by Misses, "Those divines [Theologians] who saw that nothing but revelation could provide man with perfect certainty were right. Human scientific inquiry cannot proceed beyond the limits drawn by the insufficiency of man's senses and narrowness of his mind." (He then goes on to explain causal indeterminance and all the annoying things in economics which have caused me to slam my head against my keyboard through the long nights of grad school.) The admission that those folks with a red line to the man upstairs seem to own objective truth seems hollow. I mean in mathematics there are such things as a limiting argument where a function never reaches a given threshold. Couldn't humanity be similar under a purely subjective world view, each day getting closer to objective truth but never reaching it? I appreciate Robbins views but dang guy. Maybe I have been to well indoctrinated by my Austrian professors. I want to be both a Christian and an rationalist economist.

Oh and Read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead y'all. She is a fascinating story telling and straight-up Austrian (maybe).