Non-critical movie viewing: am I the only one ?

[hunter]

7. That's one of the things I *LIKED* most about Arrival.

My own perception of time is a little twisted. I don't know why, but the narratives in my head fade in and out sometimes. Déjà vu and dread are constant companions. At times (heh, he said "times&quot I'm deliberately ignoring the narrative voice or voices in my head. We humans do what we do, and then another part of our physical brain makes up a story for it; a reason. Powerful psych meds with some irritating side effects keep me somewhat functional in this society; I suspect in less clock-calendar-and-linear-narrative obsessed society I'd do a little better. Maybe I wouldn't have to take meds at all.

I think our human perception of time, and our insistence on narrative, blinds us to many aspects of the universe we live in. A lot of it is cultural, but most of it is genetic. Every one of your ancestors, all the way back to the beginning of life on earth, survived to reproduce. Most every perception that wasn't conductive to that (even single cell life forms perceive) has been ruthlessly edited out by natural selection.

When I exam the physics of our situation, everything we think we know is an interference pattern written in light. E=mc² doesn't mean matter can be converted to energy as most people think (atomic bombs go boom!), it means matter *is* energy and energy *is* matter. Yet photons know no time.

The universe is very big, the human mind is very small. There are many things we humans will never know; things we will never be able to comprehend.

I'm not a mystic in any way, I'm rather autistic in some ways and a fan of Richard Feynman and Houdini. Spiritualism and quantum physics don't mix. I don't have any patience with anyone's Tesla electric cosmologies, homeopathy, or power of positive thinking because, you know, quantum physics! crap. Faster than light travel, and time travel, so popular in science fiction, are eternal fantasy too, no more "real" than wizards and dragons and comic book superheros.

I enjoyed Arrival immensely, a story told as a gestalt, not as a "first this happened, then this, then this, then this..." narrative. And the visitors didn't fly in our out, they were just there and tangible to us, and then they were not. Our own lives in this universe are like that.