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    Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
by   Amara D. Angelica

It's only a movie. Or is it? The three coolest films of this millennium so far tantalizingly blur the boundary between real and virtual worlds and suggest the question: Are you living in a simulation? Spoilage warning: the following reveals plot details.


Originally published January 15, 2002 on KurzweilAI.net.

A Beautiful Mind -- a fascinating exploration of the nexus of genius and madness of eminent mathematician and Nobel prize in economics winner Dr. John Nash --is my nomination for the best accelerating-intelligence-related movie of the millennium (so far). Intellectually engaging plot, humor, great acting.



Best part: an explanation of the "Nash equilibrium"--a key concept in modern game theory--in a bar pickup scene. (It helps if you read the book first.)

Yes, cracking enemy codes in newspaper and magazine ads and being chased by Russians in a CIA getaway car is fictional. But Nash, who transformed von Neumann's game theory with his PhD dissertation in 1950, was indeed obsessed with finding obscure patterns--including those from ETs who were, he says, "communicating with him" through the newspaper.

And who's to say definitively they weren't? "The ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way my mathematical ideas did," said Nash. "So I took them seriously."

Reality vs. virtuality is also at the core of the mind-bending Vanilla Sky, number two on my list. The central character, David Ames, played by Tom Cruise, is disfigured in a car crash, has his face restored by plastic surgery, and finds himself being interrogated by a police psychologist for his alleged involvement in the bizarre murder of his girl friend, who morphs into another woman.



Like Nash, Ames seems to be involved in a bizarre conspiracy. But in a dramatic twist, it turns out he actually died after being in coma following the crash and was put in cryonic storage, having chosen to have a VR experience while in suspension -- presumably by having his brain downloaded prior to the accident.

The film joins the growing VR genre, including Brainstorm, The Lawnmower Man, Strange Days, The Matrix, eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, and Being John Malkevich.

"It's the first film that deals intelligently with the issues raised by cryonics," as cryonics pioneer and Alcor co-founder Mike Darwin was quoted on the Extropians list. "It is the first movie that captures the imagery created by cryonics technology (Alcor and Trans Time style) as filtered through the media. It was very, very strange to see the world I have participated in creating in microcosm writ large, and now clearly a part of The Culture."

An even stranger movie is my number 3, Richard Linklater's Waking Life. Using rotoscoping to convert live action into impressionistic, quasi-animated, dreamy sequences, this head-trippy film portrays the adventures of a twenty-something guy floating through a series of multilayered, free-associational philosophical and visionary musings about the nature of consciousness, existentialism, and lucid dreaming, while trying to figure out if he's awake, dreaming, or dead.



He's given one hint: if you turn on a light switch and nothing changes, you're dreaming. He wakes up, turns on a light switch, and nothing changes.

The highlight of the film for me is a hypercaffeinated Kurzweilian character who expounds on the exponential growth of life and intelligence on the planet over the past four billion years.

Are you living in a computer simulation?

So what's real and what's Memorex? In his essay, "Are You Living In a Computer Simulation," Dr. Nick Bostrom claims there's no way to know whether or not you're living in an "ancestor- simulation" (simulation of us by our descendents) created by some future posthuman civilization to amuse or educate themselves by reconstructing the past. [1]

Of course, we currently don't have the computer power or software to create conscious minds. But as Ray Kurzweil has said in The Age of Spiritual Machines, that might be achievable as early as 2020, when a massively parallel, neural-net personal computer will have the calculation capacity of the human brain, estimated at 2 x 1016 calculations per second -- or even by 2010, using a supercomputer. (It might take another ten years to develop the needed software, he adds.) Based on his "Law of Accelerating Returns" (double exponential growth), in just a few centuries, computer capacity would be beyond our imagination.

"Such a mature stage of technological development will make it possible to convert planets and other astronomical resources into enormously powerful computers," says Bostrom.

To be a true simulation, you would need to simulate the real world from the universe down to the quantum level, which would require mind-boggingly massive real-time computations. But, he argues, "to get a realistic simulation of human experience, much less is needed -- only whatever is required to ensure that the simulated humans, interacting in normal human ways with their simulated environment, don't notice any irregularities."

Bostrom says the "main computational cost consists in simulating organic brains down to the neuronal or sub-neuronal level." But that assumes a neuromorphic design (based on the structure and operation of the brain) is required. Carver Mead, who pioneered neuromorphic design, tells me that he now believes non-neuromorphic algorithms are more efficient in simulating brain functions.

Perhaps it would also be more efficient to always generate ad hoc simulations that are based on the current attention state of each individual, rather than continuous simulation of the entire world. We could probably also achieve savings in storage requirements by representing objects in nature with fractals.

For more computational efficiency, you could also omit the structure of the inside of the Earth and use compressed representations for distant astronomical objects, says Bostrom. "The posthuman simulator would have enough computing power to keep track of the detailed belief-states in all human brains at all times. Thus, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficient detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as-needed basis. Should any error occur, the director could easily edit the states of any brains that have become aware of an anomaly before it spoils the simulation. Alternatively, the director can skip back a few seconds and rerun the simulation in a way that avoids the problem."

To do such an ancestor simulation of the entire mental human history to date would require ~1037 operations [2], polymath computer programmer Robert Bradbury calculates. Or if we accept Stuart Hameroff's speculation that "brain processes relevant to consciousness extend downward within neurons to the level of cytoskeletal microtubules," 1027 operations per second would be required to simulate a single person's mental history, or ~1047 operations for the entire human history.

But let's stay with the lower figure for now. Bradbury says it could be achieved with a "Matrioshka Brain" [MB, a megascale computer constructed as a series of shells around a star using nanoscale components], providing roughly 1042 operations per second. With some of the more advanced nanoscale computational architectures and cooling methods, you might be able to push this up by perhaps as much as 1010 operations per second."

Assuming the lower figure, an MB could run the entire ancestor- simulation of human history in less than 10-5 second [3]. Or else it could run 100,000 instantiations of virtual mental worlds simultaneously (parallel worlds). Interaction between these parallel realities would allow for some interesting anomalous experiences, including "time travel" (the interaction would add significant computational load and limit the number of instantiations, of course).

But the MB design assumes known nanotech design principles, "probably far from optimal," says Bostrom. "If we could create quantum computers, or learn to build computers of nuclear matter or plasma, we could push closer to the theoretical limits. Posthuman civilizations would have enough computing power to run hugely many ancestor-simulations even while using only a tiny fraction of their resources for that purpose," he says.

At the extreme, Seth Lloyd of MIT has calculated the conceivable limits of computing power of a black hole computer: a maximum processing speed of about 1051 operations/sec (equivalent to 1033 IBM Blue Gene supercomputers) for a 1-kg black hole.

To take it even further out, "It may be possible for simulated civilizations to become posthuman," Bostrom adds. "They may then run their own ancestor-simulations" using powerful virtual machines they build in their simulated universe (these virtual machines themselves could be stacked in multiple levels.)

What's more, "We would have to suspect that the posthumans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Reality may thus contain many levels. Even if it is necessary for the hierarchy to bottom out at some stage -- the metaphysical status of this claim is somewhat obscure -- there may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time."

Of course, all this assumes the human species doesn't go extinct first by some massive nuclear or biological catastrophe or global ecophagy (the "gray goo" scenario) in which out-of-control nanotech replicators wipe out all life on Earth--although Robert Freitas does offer some possible solutions.

Another possibility is that simulating even a single posthuman civilization might be too expensive, says Bostrom. " If so, then we should expect our simulation to be terminated when we are about to reach the posthuman stage." Talk about spoil sports!

How to live in a simulation

Are you still with me? OK, let's assume our posthuman successors have somehow made it to the future and they're running a simulation, starring ... us. What should we do--and would we have any control?

"The only way to influence the real world is to somehow influence whoever is observing this simulation," points out Robin Hanson in his Bostrom-inspired essay, "How To Live In A Simulation."

Since such simulations would be very costly, they would probably be limited in time and space. To make the simulators less likely to drop you from their simulation or end it, you should be entertaining--"funny, outrageous, violent, sexy, strange, pathetic, heroic ... in a word 'dramatic.' And since the simulators may want to play famous people, you should "keep famous people happy, or at least interested... and try to stay personally interesting to the famous people around you." Sounds like a typical Hollywood cocktail party.

The simulators might also want to play God, "punishing and rewarding people in the simulation based on how they lived their lives." In that case, "you'll have to figure out the common features of morality in descendants who are willing to play God."

Getting a clue

So unless you are a God, how would you know you were living in a simulation? Well, there might be glitches or discontinuities. Ames figured out he was in a simulation when he encountered his VR tech support person, who was then able to modify the scenario in real time. In the movie Pleasantville, two contemporary teenagers arrive back in the 50s and influence it to transform into the 60s. In Fred Pohl's "Tunnel Under the World" scifi story, the hero discovers that the world is just empty space when he turns over a boat in his basement and figures out he's in a simulation created on a subatomic scale. That could ruin your day.

Bradbury suggested three other examples: Theodore Sturgeon's scifi "Yesterday Was Monday" (an auto mechanic wakes up and finds tiny blue men preparing the "set" for the next "act" the next day), the movie Dark City (soulless entities known as The Strangers freeze time every night to rearrange the skyline and warp every resident's mind to find out what makes us "tick") and the movie The Truman Show (a man's entire life is scripted as programming for a 24-hour television network). Innovator Mike Lorrey also suggested Stephen King's movie "The Langoliers" (ten passengers on a plane awaken to find everyone else in the world has disappeared and figure out how to get back into reality).

Another clue might be anomalous experiences, which might imply defective algorithms or hardware. For example, telepathy might imply "leaks" between data sets and UFOs, alien abductions and "miracles" might imply deliberate attempts to mess with our minds to test theories or for amusement. [4]

Bostrom added these tips: "You'd want to know what kind of simulations the simulators would be most interested in running, and the cost of these different kinds of simulations. Then the simulation hypothesis would predict that we should find ourselves in a world that ranks high on interest and low on cost. Right now, we don't have much evidence to go on in either these regards. (Remember that what we take as the fundamental physics may be largely merely apparent in a simulation, so we can't necessarily infer the real cost of running an adequate simulation of our experiences from the computational complexity of what we take to be physical laws.)

"Then there are obvious tipoffs, e.g., the simulators could tell us that we are in a simulation or even extract us from it into their own level of reality, so the hypothesis is clearly not conceptually unverifiable."

Tools for creating such future simulations are evolving rapidly. Already, with films like Final Fantasy, the best video games for PlayStation and Xbox, and the most powerful military simulators, the boundaries between real and virtual are dissolving as simulation representation approaches the limits of the "real" (whatever that means) world.

In just seven years, in 2009, we'll have "routine, full-immersion, visual-auditory, virtual-reality shared environments with images written directly to our retinas from our eyeglasses and contact lenses," says Ray Kurzweil. "By 2029, 'experience beamers' will beam their entire flow of sensory experiences and feelings onto the Web the way people now beam their images from their web cams."

At that point, synthesized simulacra and the real world may be indistinguishable, as will perhaps cyborgs and people. Telling the difference will become the challenge of the future -- and the subject of future films.

Amara D. Angelica is editor of KurzweilAI.net

Footnotes:

[1] Of course, reading this could be dangerous if "They" don't want anyone to know (à la the movie Conspiracy Theory) and decide to terminate your simulation. You have been warned :)

[2] The ~1037 figure is "based on ~1011 humans * ~50 years/human * 31*106 secs/year * 1017 operations in each human brain per second," said Bradbury. "The total number of humans and their life times are fuzzy because population estimates before the last couple of hundred years are all guesses (not on my part, but on the part of the people who have published data on the topic). We also know that the population may have gone through one or more bottlenecks so you can't assume a steadily increasing population."

[3] "One critical thing that must be kept in mind is network delays," said Bradbury. "You have to keep the nanocomputers separated by not-so-insignificant amounts of space (meters to many kilometers) because of the heat they radiate. So while you have the processing power to run an ancestor simulation in 10-5 aggregate CPU seconds, you may not be able to actually run the simulation in 10-5 "real" seconds because of the time that individual nodes will have to wait to get information about something that happened in another part of the simulation.

"Obviously you could optimize things by putting 'minds' that require close connectivity on the same 'node' or adjacent nodes of the net. So how fast in real time you could run an ancestor simulation depends in large part how interconnected individuals within the simulation are. The more interconnected they become, the slower the simulation will run in real time.

"In very densely interconnected societies, where everyone may need to relate to everyone else, a Jupiter Brain [a posthuman being of extremely high computational power and size] may be an optimal simulation architecture. However, for loosely connected societies, such as that currently found on Earth, a Matrioshka Brain seems more likely to be an optimal simulation architecture because it provides greater computational capacity and allows closely interacting elements in the simulation to be located on relatively nearby network nodes."

[4] "I don't think UFOs or telepathy would be a way one would expect a defect to manifest itself," Bostrom said in an email. "Such phenomena most likely do not exist but if they do, and if we are in a simulation, they would probably be part of the design, IMO. (If there were telepathy, that may be some evidence in favor of the simulation hypothesis, but not especially for the defective simulation hypothesis.)"

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Amara's Movies!
posted on 01/16/2002 7:53 AM by bandwidthboy@hotmail.com

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Wow, thanks for the tipoff! :-)

I'm still skeptical that we're about to see intelligent SF in Hollywood, as flashy dystopic crud like The Matrix is easier to write and therefore to sell. But I'll dance in the street if I turn out to be wrong and cogent, engrossing cinematic treatments of the sort of stuff that routinely forms part of the mindfiles of the regular visitors to this site appear before they become actuality. As for nanotech bottlenecks, if RK is on the money we'll be into femtotech within a century or so, bringing emulators that much closer.

Re: Amara's Movies!
posted on 01/24/2002 4:55 PM by nowherenohow@nowhere.com

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Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/16/2002 10:29 AM by Charlie.anderson@jostens.com

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I love these ideas about the nature of our reality. The human potential is literally unlimited.It gives me great joy to know that if we have this potential,then indeed we are preceeded by something much greater who is responsible for us and our reality.This something then has the power to right every wrong.This something has the right to judge with perfect knowlege or lives. The beauty of this world simulation proves that our overseers are good. Beware all those who would pick up this power for there own ends, or who believe they will become the masters. It is pride that destroyed satan.

Target

P.S. Do you suppose our sun is a giant computer radiating (streaming) our reality or part of it.Do you think the sun could be that organized?

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/16/2002 10:41 AM by bandwidthboy@hotmail.com

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Additional to the above, I find myself wondering about the long-term prospects for life in the cosmos -- simulated or otherwise -- using Jupiter brains, SL's 'ultimate computer' and so forth.

If the current cosmological findings are correct, then the universe will keep expanding, so the biosphere will thin out and become cold. I am unsure how then intelligent life can exist beyond a finite time period in that event.

I discussed this briefly with David Deutsch and although he admitted he would be devoting some time in his next book to grappling with the matter he conceded it was an interesting conundrum, given the contradiction it implies to the Turing Principle which can be said to underly both computer science and epistemology.

Unless the data is being misinterpreted -- perhaps as a result of a central misconception, such as the existence of Time (as proposed by Julian Barbour) or the value of the Hubble Constant (as mooted by Frank Tipler) it appears to me that life is still boned, short of some astonishing new data that recinds this thesis.

Of course, if all this is an imaginary and simulated cosmos -- perhaps the work of a lab experiment (ala Alan Guth) or maybe some sort of eschatological artwork -- perhaps being hosted by AARON on the 'real' Kurzweil.AI site (!) then the problem may be less grave than first appears...

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/16/2002 12:57 PM by mike@mikyo.com

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Fascinating ideas in this review. Perhaps the universe itself is a massively parallel quantum computer. How many computations/second would that provide? How many virtual realities could it run?

- Mike

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/17/2002 11:38 PM by bmassey@hotmail.com

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Close your eyes, now image a complete void. Everything is energy, even you. There are slight variations, and fluctuations in this energy, and these subtleties form both the conduits of your senses and the stimuli of your sensations. Is this a virtual reality. Yes! Does it exist? Yes! Where? All around you, this is our universe. Remember, on a quantum level we are all energy, suspended in a lattice in a void of nothing.

The only question is, is the program that is our universe a random occurrance, or is there a divine programmer? ; ) I have always believed in the divine programmer, brilliant, passionate, but absolutely alone ... absent of all sensation and interaction. Our universe is a virtual reality for this divine programmer, however he/she/it did not only write the program, rather he/she/it is the computer on which it runs as well. This universe might be a means for something that is singular, infinite and timeless to experience plurality, mortality, etc.

Self-Programming Universe?
posted on 01/18/2002 2:47 AM by jjaeger@mecfilms.com

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I saw A BEAUTIFUL MIND and VANILLA SKY and they were both good. Either one could be Best Picture, especially the former.

VANILLA SKY, no MATRIX, smacked a little of TOTAL RECALL. Which is fine.

As far as reality being a program. Why not? Superstring theory suggests that all subatomic particles are but 1-dimentional vibrating loops of immensely small proportions. Thus we may have a digital universe, i.e. the loops are bits. The universe could be a self-programming entity, programming in various dimensions without necessarily knowing where it's going. This self-programming may be the result of a given mandate, or set of mandates. Such a mandate might be: 1) recursively observe reality for Lorenz-type attractors, 2) observe any anomalies in the attractors multi-dimensionally, 3) seek out experience in the "direction" of the anomaly and then go to 1) above until a new attractor manifests.

In other words the universe changes in the direction of change and only for the sake of experiencing change, thus the universe has a mindless component and an intelligent component --God is both a wandering idiot and a design genius.

James Jaeger

Re: Self-Programming Universe?
posted on 01/24/2002 8:19 PM by darkstar@mail.ru

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What is Lorentz attractor and where do these ideas come from? Can you explain them to a more primitive creature in more detail? (I heard about the string theory but only superficially).

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/18/2002 9:38 AM by mike@mikyo

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It's a nice picture. I'm not so sure I like the idea of being at the mercy of someone else's program, though -- no matter how divine. I like the idea of self-organizing systems emerging out of the chaos. It seems to provide more degrees of freedom somehow. I guess that's why I like the Open Source concept. We are all hacking away at reality, doing our own thing, to our mutual benefit.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/19/2002 3:58 AM by jjaeger@mecfilms.com

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>I guess that's why I like the Open Source concept.

Yes, open source seems to be the way to go. It will be very interesting to see how Linux performs against Microsoft's products, for instance, in the next 10 years.

James Jaeger

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/02/2002 9:30 AM by the big bang computer

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Well, if you are going to pretend about a Jovian computer, and then upgrade that to a smart star, and then a real physicist starts talking about black hole computers, well, why not go all the way? Let's pretend the first instants of the big bang [where faster than light "information processing" supposedly had to occur whithin an environment of antigravity] were a computer. The moment of "inflation" was somebody's faster than light computer. The rest of it was just waste matter. We're nothing but wild dogs that grew up accidenally in the ashes and waste heat of their "adjacent universe" or "manufactured universe" computer.

--Harold

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/15/2002 2:23 AM by amara@kurzweilai.net

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About about 10^51 operations/sec., according to Seth Lloyd. See http://www.kurzweilai.net/news/frame.html?main=news_single.html?id%3D1008

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 01/21/2002 11:43 PM by normdoering@mad.scientist.com

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The thing about virtual reality is that it doesn't have to mirror reality -- it could be a big lie, and used to tell big lies.

Consider how we have already been lied to by the film "A Beautiful Mind":

The film is supposedly a film-biography of John Nash based on a book of the same name. But Nash's life story and history were substantially altered for the film's story. Specifically, it removes all references to Nash, like Alan Turing (another important code breaker), being gay. Nash was arrested for soliciting gay sex and this caused his losing security clearance for his job at the government think tank. In 1954, with the House of UnAmerican Activities still very strong, there was an extreme fear of having homosexuals in security positions. Nash's case was one of the best known and strongest for the argument against allowing homosexuals into sensitive positions.

The book (and there have been several books written about Nash - his homosexuality is mentioned in all of them) deals with this in detail but it's removed from the film.

This is a literal re-writing of history... Removing not only gay people from history, but also removing the unfair legal tactics used against them. Instead, the film makes much of an utterly fictional relationship between Nash and his wife, who in reality were never close.

I'm not gay myself, but I have friends who are and this kind of stuff disturbs them.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 05/27/2002 12:47 PM by karun@tranuilmoney.com

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I loved Vanilla Sky -- it was very well done.

Did anyone notice that in the end the question was answered -- he chooses to wake up in a real world where he will have to deal with uncertainties, grow old, and die.

That reality could be a simulation is refuted by provable incompleteness of formal systems. All simulations are incomplete, but reality exists anyway. That our knowledge of it is alway incomplete and fallible is the simple lesson that modernity is trying to teach us. Fallibility is overcome in one way alone -- paying attention to the data that reality is giving you at all times, and adapt your plans based on the new data you get in the middle of your plans.

Simulations are kind of nice, but nothing beats the exhileration of navigating reality itself given the fallibility of our plans. And nothing gives pleasure like observing nature itself and participating just for the experience itself rather than to analyze it. The Enlightenment philosophers used to call it Cosmotheology -- who needs an anthropomorphic God/programmer when the material universe itself is the body of God.

Regards,

Karun.
--
Karun Philip
Author: Zen and the Art of Funk Capitalism: A General Theory of Fallibility.
http://www.k-capital.com


Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 05/27/2002 1:31 PM by tomaz@techemail.com

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> he chooses to wake up in a real world where he will have to deal with uncertainties, grow old, and die.

Which Vanilla Sky did you watch?

Was she Gullia or Sophia - the eyes at the end?

- Thomas

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 05/27/2002 2:35 PM by karun@tranquilmoney.com

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>Was she Gullia or Sophia - the eyes at the end?

I thought that was him waking up in the real world (whereas if they hadn't showed that, we don't know whether he just died when he jumped off or he actually woke up in the real world). But maybe you're right. Need to see it again.


Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 05/27/2002 2:46 PM by tomaz@techemail.com

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You bet! :)

- Thomas

Vanilla Sky: Open Your Eyes
posted on 07/13/2003 11:55 PM by danyelli

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I am confused....when you ask whose "eyes" did he see---when exactly did that happen? I thought it was his eyes opening at the end and it was Sophia's voice on the machine that he heard. Or am I way off?

And that also confuses me...because if you listen, the voice at both the beginning and the end of the movie both sound like Sophia's voice--but how could that be if at the beginning he has yet to meet her?

Re: Vanilla Sky: Open Your Eyes
posted on 07/14/2003 4:27 AM by Thomas Kristan

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Have to see it again.

- Thomas

Re: Vanilla Sky: Open Your Eyes
posted on 07/15/2003 2:25 AM by Hail Eris

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I think the fact that the actress whose voice you hear at the end of movie is referred to as "The Future" in the casting credits should pretty much settle the intended interpretation.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/14/2002 4:06 AM by rvrsde413@aol.com

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Where did this movie reviewer of Vanilla Sky get the idea that Aimes died in the car crash? Everything was explained at the end. He didn't die in the car crash but survived, only to later commit suicide and then be cryonized. His life was later a vitual, or lucid dream, while still in cryostasis. He only discovered his life was a lucid dream with the help of tech support from the company that cryonized him, Life Extension, because his dream turned into a nightmare. He chose to wake up from his dream, and be unfrozen, by facing his fear of heights and jumping off the skyscraper at the end of the movie.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/14/2002 6:03 AM by tomaz@techemail.com

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> He chose to wake up from his dream, and be unfrozen

Maybe you should watch it again. :)

- Thomas

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/14/2002 8:01 AM by Rvrsde413@aol.com

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I saw this movie several times. Where in this movie does it tell you he died in the car crash? You must be assuming something in the story :)

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/14/2002 8:10 AM by tomaz@techemail.com

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No, no, I've quoted the part, where I do not agree with you. Of course he (David) was an invalid under the great pains and decided to die and lived inside the virtual world of Life Extension Inc., since. No doubt about.

But saying that he abandoned the virtuality in the end - is wrong.

Who's eyes did he saw? Sophia or Gullia? They were both dead for a century, already. Don't you think so?

- Thomas

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/14/2002 8:25 PM by Rvrsde413@aol.com

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I misread the movie reviewer's review of Vanilla Sky. He never said Ames died in the car crash after all, but died after he woke up from the coma after the car crash. You also never assumed Ames died in the car crash either, like you mentioned. I stand corrected on this. As to whose eyes he saw at the end? Nobody's as far as I could tell. It looked liked his own eyes that he opened. Also, what he said in the movie at the end. He said he wanted to wake up from his virtual dream and live a real life. This is what he told his tech support person at the end of the movie. This is what he chose to do, after the tech support guy gave him his two choices, whether to remain in suspension and still live with Sofia through his lucid dream, or wake up to the real world. So why would he be looking at Juliana Gianni's eyes,(his blonde stalker bed pal)or Sofia's eyes at the end of the movie after he supposedly woke up? This contradicts what he wanted, i. e. to wake up and live a real life. You got me curious again about this movie. I might rent the video and watch the end very closely. If he did see someone else's eyes at the end, either Juliana's or Sofia's, this means he never woke up, because he couldn't wake up to the real world and see Juliana's eyes or Sofia's eyes since they were both dead. The only reason I can see for him not waking up to the real world, after jumping off the skyscraper, is that there was a unrepairable glitch-error in his lucid dream that prevented him from doing so, and he never woke up, but woke up to the same nightmare he was having, seeing his face become disfigured again, and seeing Sofia changing into Juliana and back into Sofia, lol.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/15/2002 2:44 AM by tomaz@techemail.com

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It was said in the dialog:

- the glitch has been corrected

- he did choose the "real life"

Never the less, it didn't happen.

Nor was Gullia a nightmare - just an option.

What did he really want - was unclear to him, and to us. Maybe those people from LE knew?

- Thomas

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/15/2002 2:08 PM by Rvrsde413@aol.com

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It was said in the dialog:

- the glitch has been corrected

- he did choose the "real life"

Never the less, it didn't happen.

Nor was Gullia a nightmare - just an option.

What did he really want - was unclear to him, and to us. Maybe those people from LE knew?

Hello there,
Right, the glitch in his virtual dream/nightmare created by him, was corrected.
He did choose the real life.
Never the less, it didn't happen? Ok, what do you base this assertion on in the movie? It did happen because he dove off the skyscraper at the end, and woke up from from his vitual dream, into real life. That's what it showed at the end, him opening his eyes after jumping off the building and hitting the pavement below.
During the course of his vitual dream, Julianna was a nightmare for him, because Sofia kept transforming into Julianna. It was unclear what he wanted for awhile, but he choose to wake up from his dream and into real life. He choose to live a real life. Again, what evidence in the movie do you base your assertion on that it was unclear to him, and to us, that he didn't know what he wanted? He simply wanted to wake up and live a real life. What he wanted to do in his real life is unclear after waking up into real life. So if this is what you are referring to, about what he wanted to do with his life after waking up, is moot, since this is where the movie ends.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/15/2002 3:49 PM by tomaz@techemail.com

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Who asked David, if he had a nightmare again - in the end of the movie?

Was it Gullia?

Was it Sophia?

A combination of both?

In those cases - it was the last nightmare - falling from the skyscraper - as a necessary glitch repairing - or whatever.

If we are more pessimistic - it was not the last nightmare. But it would be too cheap.

If he woke in the real world - what was the cause of the nightmares? Remember "again"? Who was already there for David?


I wouldn't give much importance to what movie makers decided to do - in the first place.

- Thomas

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/16/2002 8:29 PM by Rvrsde413@aol.com

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I didn't see it as Julianna or Sofia asking him to open his eyes at the end of the movie, thus keeping him in his virtual dream state and him having another dream/nightmare. You percieved this movie differently than I did. The voice asking him to open his eyes at the end was just somewho who worked for the cryonic company, the company that unfroze him.

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 06/16/2002 8:37 PM by Rvrsde413@aol.com

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The cause of his nightmares in his virtual dream? His subconcious. It was playing tricks on him. I think the reason for his subconcious doing this to him was given as a clue in the movie. The clue to this was where McCabe, the psychologist, theorized to Aames that his feelings of resposibility and guilt towards Julianna Gianni, because of the way he treated her, which was indifferently, turned Julianna into Sofia during his virtual dream state. He cared more about Sofia than Julianna

Re: Movie reviews: A Beautiful Mind, Vanilla Sky, Waking Life
posted on 03/10/2003 11:18 PM by mikew12345

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Obviously you could optimize things by putting 'minds' that require close connectivity on the same 'node' or adjacent nodes of the net.


Aha! There's proof to support this! :-)
When somebody travels across several time zones they experience "jet lag". Maybe this is actually "net lag", caused by the delay from interacting with others from a different server. And then, during a sleep period, their data files are moved to the new server. When they wake up, the lag effect is gone!