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I argue above that the central loop of the film is in fact locked by the mutual dependence of the two central events, but this does not mean that anything outside of that loop is locked. So perhaps Louise can change the future outside of the loop, for instance with regard to her potential daughter.

I would argue that the same process true of the loop holds true of everything in Louise's life outside the loop, too. This is because of how Heptapod time works, and what it means for the events that start the plot off in the first place.

The Heptapods' stated purpose is to set up a series of events that will lead earth to produce something key to the Heptapods' future. Since Heptapods perceive time as a perpetual present, and we see that a key method of problem solving is to use time loops in which events and objects are prior to themselves, we can suppose that the titular arrival is itself part of a time loop. The Heptapods on earth are fulfilling the present section of whatever information has been generated in a future section of a loop--ensuring the present exists by ensuring the future does, ad infinitum. Louise's loop, indeed her entire life following it, is only a small section of a larger loop that must be fulfilled for the reasons I listed in my post above. Therefore, Louise is no more (or less) free outside of her small loop than inside of it. All the paradoxes remain, and we are still left with a problem that's not really about free will.

But free will is irrelevant for me in another way, because, as swo17 intimates, the crucial drama is not whether she can or cannot choose to have her daughter. It's that she'd have her daughter no matter where the metaphysics fall because she comes to understand how the loss does not negate the intense bounty--personal, professional, spiritual, and cosmological--that comes from it. That's the emotional core of the movie, the way it answers the 'love lost vs. never loved' question with a demonstration of the value of love lost.

This is why I disagree with Domino and think Arrival is a much better film than Interstellar. Scientifically, Interstellar is dense and highly conceptual; but philosophically, it's weak, bordering on trite, with no philosophical ideas to match its scientific ones. This is because, unlike Arrival, which sets its terms, Interstellar takes the power of love for granted. Love makes the characters in Interstellar go to incredible lengths, bending the fabric of time itself and communicating across universes. But love gets its power simply by virtue of being love, which we must already assume is powerful. The characters sometimes have to realize this, or rediscover it, but the power of it was there to begin with. It is the sine qua non of the story. That's the movie's limitation, that it takes its fundamental concepts for granted and so cannot arrive at a profound conclusion unless its audience takes the same concepts for granted. I don't, so I just got a complicated movie about a well-worn assertion. Arrival, at least, tries to set the terms behind love's value.

So, I had two thoughts about this. 1.) A situation in which the future influences the past doesn't NECESSARILY mean that causality has actually flowed that way, due to what I have heard called the Bill & Ted maneuver- if I, in the present, reach the intention that I will in the future travel back in time and take some specific action, I will therefore cause that already to have happened. Causality is maintained; while the apparent cause happened after the apparent effect, the fundamental cause is the point of decision, and that can happen as soon as the problem is known. Thus, in Arrival, one can presume that Adams recognized that the only way to defuse the situation would be to speak directly to the general, and therefore made the decision that she would, in the future, meet him, get his phone number, and provide it to her past self. This situation is more complex than the Bill & Ted one, because the circumstance of meeting the general only came about because she had already called him, but I think one can assume that on some timeline Adams made a plan that ran: I need to speak to the general personally. Therefore, I need personal information about him that I can only get by already having spoken to him. To meet him, I need to defuse this situation in a way that's beneficial for everyone; thus, my intention is to meet him at a celebration event after the situation is defused. This is highly circular thinking, admittedly, but that fits her character's mindset.

The other assumption I make about time travel is iterative loops- in other words, one arrives at a fixed loop because a loop will play out again and again until it reaches a steady state. So, let's assume on the first loop, Adams fails utterly, everyone dies. This gives information to her past self, which means she will now behave differently. After that, each loop will inform its own origin point, again and again, as Adams tries every conceivable solution and sees the outcome of it. The only way this stops is when the end point of the loop results in a set of actions that would not change based on knowing the end point- at which time, everything seems perfectly locked and fate-driven, and the actual decision points happen in loops that have now been overwritten.

I think this is important thematically because to me, it is vitally important that Adams made a conscious decision to have her daughter- if this was something caused by ontological determinism, it doesn't tell us anything about her, how she thinks, or what time and love mean in the world of the film. It's worth noting that in the story, the daughter dies not by illness, but in an accident- meaning that it was something preventable by future knowledge, which implicitly changes the way time works in that world. Here, there is nothing Adams can do, no matter what decision she makes, outside the simple binary of child or no child; we can assume that a fully empowered time traveler, able to use future knowledge to change the past, would not have any real advantage here, and it goes back to the original question of whether one would choose to embrace love at the expense of known future agony.

(I will admit that the heptapods' actions are harder to explain with this way of seeing time travel, unless they individually live for thousands of years- it would be impossible to change an inflection point occurring before one's own birth, though I suppose one could imagine some sort of backwards knowledge chain in which future generations intention would be to tell their parents to have done something differently as soon as they learn to talk.)

Aliens saw they need to get stuff done in order to survive. They get it done as planned and not one human makes anything to change that. The end.

matrixschmatrix wrote:1.) A situation in which the future influences the past doesn't NECESSARILY mean that causality has actually flowed that way, due to what I have heard called the Bill & Ted maneuver- if I, in the present, reach the intention that I will in the future travel back in time and take some specific action, I will therefore cause that already to have happened. Causality is maintained; while the apparent cause happened after the apparent effect, the fundamental cause is the point of decision, and that can happen as soon as the problem is known. Thus, in Arrival, one can presume that Adams recognized that the only way to defuse the situation would be to speak directly to the general, and therefore made the decision that she would, in the future, meet him, get his phone number, and provide it to her past self. This situation is more complex than the Bill & Ted one, because the circumstance of meeting the general only came about because she had already called him, but I think one can assume that on some timeline Adams made a plan that ran: I need to speak to the general personally. Therefore, I need personal information about him that I can only get by already having spoken to him. To meet him, I need to defuse this situation in a way that's beneficial for everyone; thus, my intention is to meet him at a celebration event after the situation is defused. This is highly circular thinking, admittedly, but that fits her character's mindset.

That's clever. I like that. I think I can formulate some counters to it, tho', if you feel like indulging me.

Argument 1. The problem is that the information gathered is self-generating, or exists prior to itself, so how does a person in the present get the intention to gather information from the future which cannot exist except at the point of being gathered? For this to work, you have to posit that Louise knows that: A. the general has a wife, B. the general has a pet name for his wife, C. the general has told this information to no other person. You then have to posit that Louise knows this information prior to it generating itself. It has to be gathered before it is gathered, and that assumes ontology and temporality are the same, which they no longer are. So the intention can only be generated by the future being prior to the past, ie. by the loop.

Argument 2. The other problem of course is that it requires the intention to reach the future and then travel back from it. Louise doesn't travel anywhere, she experiences a memory before she could have it, as it were. She cannot intend to come back from anywhere, she can only experience something prior to its happening. She cannot plan future actions because she is never there; she can only plan current actions. And she cannot plan what she will do in the future, only use that information to make decisions in the present (and in that case, see Argument 1).

Argument 3. Let's take causality out of it. Let's say it doesn't matter what causes what; let's say the cause of this loop has its location outside the loop rather than in (Heptapods, god, whatever), and forget the whole nature of cause. Now let's make a broad philosophical claim that I couldn't possibly have space to prove so you'll sort of have to just go with it: everything relies on something else for its being. Assuming that: what gives the future being in a time loop? For your argument to be true, it would have to be the intentions of the people in the present and only that. But the present moment is only happening as it does--that is, has its being--based the future happening as it does. Again, things are ontologically prior in the loop. So the present has its being by virtue of the future, and the future has its being by virtue of the present (which delivers the information). So they depend on each other, not for their cause, but for their being.

Outside a loop, things depend for their being on many, many things; within a loop, that dependence is reduced to a more narrow range of things. In particular, the dependence in this loop is reduced primarily to two things: a present and a future. Since they depend for their own being on each other's being, if one does not exist the other cannot exist, so both must exist (or not at all). So the biconditional formula I used above, a if and only if b, or (a ≡ b), also holds because conditional statements are not statements of causality.

matrixschmatrix wrote:The other assumption I make about time travel is iterative loops- in other words, one arrives at a fixed loop because a loop will play out again and again until it reaches a steady state. So, let's assume on the first loop, Adams fails utterly, everyone dies. This gives information to her past self, which means she will now behave differently. After that, each loop will inform its own origin point, again and again, as Adams tries every conceivable solution and sees the outcome of it. The only way this stops is when the end point of the loop results in a set of actions that would not change based on knowing the end point- at which time, everything seems perfectly locked and fate-driven, and the actual decision points happen in loops that have now been overwritten.

I like this and you may well be right. But as Adams experiences the future simultaneously with the present, it's odd that her visions would not simply change with each change in her behaviour, every action producing another vision of the future, her brain crowded with an infinity of possibilities all passing in waves. I wonder how she would even get to have iterations. I think your iteration argument might work better with an actual time traveling device, so that the intention to use it could instantiate the loop. I think we're bumping against the limits of our ability to conceive, here.

matrixschmatrix wrote:I think this is important thematically because to me, it is vitally important that Adams made a conscious decision to have her daughter- if this was something caused by ontological determinism, it doesn't tell us anything about her, how she thinks, or what time and love mean in the world of the film.

I disagree completely. It does not matter what she does. What matters is how she feels about it. Whether she can or cannot choose to change the fact of her daughter's birth is irrelevant. What matters is that she believes and feels that having her daughter is a good thing even though she knows the pain and loss attached to it. The key here is the meaning Louise gives it, not whether the Universe allows her to act on that. I think I stated something to that effect in my second of my two posts above.