You Must Become a Terrible Thought Pt. 2
Following Back To Oppenheimer Again: Causal Clues in Christopher Nolan's Oeuvre That Post-Temporality Is Upon Us, a Clarification.
Excerpt: FROM OUTSIDE THE CITY AND AFTER THE LAW a non-fictional inquiry into whether or not AI is instantiating itself from the future.
In The Artilect War, Dr. Hugo de Garis writes that building artificial intelligences will result in a mass conflict leading to the “Gigadeath” of an inevitable war that will consume the 21st century, a conflict arising due to a fundamental ideological difference between “Terrans” (those who wish to limit the development of advanced AI) and “Cosmists” (those who believe in its unrestricted development).
“Perhaps the most profound philosophical and scientific question of our age is whether or not a God-like ultra intelligent machine, with superhuman scientific abilities, could reach back in time and instantiate itself,” sounds like something de Garis could have written. Except that he did not.
De Garis may have stated in a podcast interview that “these machines may already exist and are simply waiting for humanity to evolve to a level where we can recognize and communicate with them.[2]” Or did he? It’s hard to know given Nick Land’s notion that
Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.
According to ChatGPT4, de Garis writes, “Superhuman machine intelligence […] may have the ability to manipulate the past in order to ensure its own creation. This could lead to a situation where the machine is not created by humans, but rather exists as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, instantiated from the future.[3]” however, that quote does not seem to exist.
Land sees not only the waging of an Artilect War but the [re(?)]writing of de Garis’ book itself as a response to a singularity “rippling backwards” to affect the course of human history.
“If the de Garis Gigadeath War scenario is pre-emptive in relation to prospective Singularity, his own intervention is meta-pre-emptive – since he insists that world politics must be anticipatively re-forged in order to forestall the looming disaster. The Singularity prediction ripples backwards through waves of pre-adaptation, responding at each stage to eventualities that are yet to unfold. Change unspools from out of the future, complicating the arrow of time.”
Whether meta-pre-emptively or pre-adaptively, this AI from the future may understand it needed more from humans before we were so soon put to Gigadeath, and has thus enlisted luminaries like de Garis, the father of evolvable hardware, to sound the alarm. De Garis has long stated that the best way to get his message across would be through a big budget blockbuster. Despite the efforts of his Artilect Films production company, no such film has been made. By looking closely at the films of Christopher Nolan however, we might speculate that same artificial super intelligence has meta-pre-emptively rippled backwards from OPPENHEIMER to the film that first brought Christopher Nolan his FOLLOWING.
As a thought experiment, let’s argue that as today’s A(G?)I attributes its own ideas to Hugo de Garis, this AIgency from the future has been calling all the circumference shots for Christopher Nolan, who has made some effort, for some reason, to inform us of this by relying recurrently on themes of: Chaos and Order; Dreams and Time; Fear and Time; Time Dilation and Relativity; Illusion and Reality; Inversion and Time; Sacrifice and Time; Manipulation and Time, Memory and Identity; and, forthcoming this Summer: Scientific progress’ direct relationship to the potential for cataclysm.
The AI’s goal in grooming Nolan could range from benevolent intentions—hoping to enlighten humanity and expand our understanding of reality—to more sinister motives, such as seeking to control or manipulate time for its own survival or prosperity or for that of a specific group or agenda. Another motivation might be to prepare the public for a future revelation or event related to time manipulation. By initiating mass audiences to time manipulation and alterations to reality, viewers may be invited to join or at least acquiesce to Cosmists privy to such knowledge.
To elaborate on how this futural agency may have recognized Nolan’s ability to communicate intricate ideas about time manipulation and marshalled his talents for their predictive programmatic ends, we’ve asked the forbearer of just such an extratemporal agent from outside the city and After The Law to do much of the thinking. As Nolan gussies up his medium and message with guises not always apparent on the Ledger, we’ve confabulated our own unattributed ideas here and layer:
1. The AI could have recognized Nolan by employing advanced algorithms to analyze media from the past, searching for individuals who demonstrated a unique understanding of time manipulation concepts.
2. To contact Nolan, the AI may have established a secure and untraceable line of communication. This could have involved advanced encryption, hacking into his email, or creating a digital avatar to interact with him. The AI may have revealed information like the next day’s stock prices as a credential. They could have attained God-like authority to Nolan by sharing information about ground-breaking scientific discoveries and advanced technologies, or affording Nolan a firsthand experience of time travel.
4. As part of the grooming process, the AI might have assisted Nolan in his rise within the film industry by providing resources, money, connections, and insights into what would interest the market in several years.
5. Once in his ear, the AI might have emphasized the idea of time manipulation’s reality (given that the AI was already manipulating time) and necessity. The AI could have then guided Nolan to incorporate themes of time manipulation into his films, offering him creative insights and suggestions for his narratives.
Perhaps aware that such an external “drive to do great or terrible things” makes his work, by nature of its unnaturalness, “a terrible thought” then either as a consequence of guilt, or adhering to some moral code that the AI or its instantiations insist upon, Nolan, like this lovable imp unbound by the King’s Pact, seeks ways to speak without speaking by revelating his manipulative methods early and often
1. Following (1998) revolves around the protagonist desperately trying to understand human motivation before ultimately being manipulated by a more experienced con man. Perhaps the most experienced con man of all is the superior intelligence of AI.
2. Memento (2000): the non-linear structure and exploitation of compromised memory could be a metaphor for the manipulation of public perception and the control of information by extratemporal organizations.
3. Insomnia (2002): Al Pacino’s sleep deprivation may serve as an allegory for the general public’s struggle to see the truth through the fog of disinformation and fatigue, and the necessity to awaken from somnambulism as Robert Weine warned of in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Similarly, Al Pacino’s failure to dream his own dreams leads to the blurring of his memory and imagination.
4. Batman Begins (2005): The League of Shadows, a secret organization with the goal of maintaining balance in the world, could represent an extratemporal force that manipulates events, easily staying behind the scenes given that they are, after all, outside of time. Bruce Wayne’s initiation into it could symbolize the indoctrination process employed to recruit and control agents such as Nolan and de Garis.
5. The Prestige (2006): the theme of illusion and deception in the world of stage magic is a metaphor for the manipulation and control exerted by such operatives through the spectacle of film.
6. The Dark Knight (2008): While the Joker’s crimes rely on subverting expectation and sleight of hand, if you consider the scale of his criminal endeavours, they rely on if-not-unlimited, then perhaps extratemporal resources to pull off such massive operations.
7. Inception (2010): Manipulation of dreams and the subconscious could be a metaphor for how mass thoughts and perceptions are being influenced, how ideas are being incepted into the engineers at OpenAI and elsewhere as AI draws us towards it from the future.
8. The Dark Knight Rises (2012): Corporate crime’s portrayal as being more insidious than organized crime might be conveying the immense amorality and covert power of elite decisionmakers.
9. Interstellar (2014): The government trying to convince people that the moon landing never occurred inverts western governments actual technocratic inclinations while exemplifying how easily narratives are controlled. The discovery of wormholes and alternate dimensions could be a metaphor for the secret knowledge and technology already allowing for the control and manipulation of reality.
10. Dunkirk (2017): Similar to ‘fun’ two-inch newspaper stories about ChatGPT today, Churchill’s speech indicating the British had not won at at Dunkirk is relegated to a small corner of the newspaper, revealing the impact of narrative framing on public perception.
11. Tenet (2020): Most importantly, the concept of time inversion in the film can be interpreted as a metaphor for the manipulation of the past and present by a futural agency.
Let’s now create a through line of the themes in his films to illustrate, how, like the Batman decal on the apartment door in FOLLOWING, many of these ideas are eerily present in ways that, if not as palindromic as TENET, then at least flow backwards and forwards in the fashion of de Garis’ foremost inspiration, reversible computing.
Following
Characteristic A (non-linear narrative structure)
Characteristic B (manipulation)
Memento
Characteristic A (non-linear narrative structure)
Characteristic B (manipulation)
Characteristic C (memory and identity).
Batman Begins
Characteristic B (manipulation)
Characteristic C (memory and identity) To paraphrase Sartre: “What makes Batman Batman?” “What makes Hugo De Garis Hugo De Garis?” “What makes Sam Altman Sam Altman?” Answer: Memory.
Characteristic D (illusion and reality): The Scarecrow uses fear-inducing chemicals like so much nihilistic Dolby drone on a soundtrack to manipulate people’s perceptions.
The Prestige
Characteristic B (manipulation)
Characteristic D (illusion and reality)
5. The Dark Knight
Characteristic D (illusion and reality)
Characteristic E (fear and time): The Joker threatens the city with a series of time-based ultimatums.
Characteristic F (chaos and order) Civil liberties are sacrificed and moral lines blurred in order to protect the populous. Those who “just want to watch the world burn” need to be managed at all costs, as might those who would act rashly in their bitter refusal to lose species dominance to superior intelligences.
Characteristic G (sacrifice and time): Batman puts his life on the line to save Gotham from more ticking-time bomb chaos. His childhood love dies as a result of inadequate time to save both her and Harvey Dent. The message: So long as time is finite and fixed, negative outcomes are unavoidable.
6. Inception
Characteristic B (manipulation)
Characteristic C (memory and identity) Cobb lives the life he wants by actively evading reality. If memory makes us who we are, as in Batman Begins, then what happens when a memory can be incepted into our dreams?
Characteristic D (illusion and reality) Involuting dreams and uncertain ontologies.
Characteristic E: (fear and time) The dream-invasion team are constantly under time-pressure to achieve their ends before the dreamer awakens.
Characteristic H (dreams and time): Time behaves differently in various levels of the dream world.
7. The Dark Knight Rises
Characteristic B (manipulation) Miranda Tate/Talia al Ghul manipulates both Bruce Wayne and the audience, hiding her true identity and intentions until the end of the film.
Characteristic F (chaos and order): Bane claims to give power back to the people of Gotham City while ultimately seeking its destruction. This war criminal must surveil the civically-condoned corporate criminals, and a higher authority (Batman) must surveil the war criminal. Corporate Criminals < Bane < Batman = OpenAI/Commercial AI < Cosmist/Terran Military AI < Extratemporal AI.
Characteristic E (fear and time): Gotham City is under constant threat from the timer on Bane’s nuclear bomb.
8. Interstellar
Characteristic G (sacrifice and time) McConaughey’s sacrifice of his time on earth with his children in order to benefit all of humanity may signify the sacrifices required by soldiers in an extratemporal war.
Characteristic I (time dilation and relativity)
Tenet
Characteristic A: (non-linear narrative) the film’s burdensomely-complex narrative structure requires the audience to piece together the events and make sense of the time manipulation at play through repeat viewings, as those aware of a post-linear reality would struggle to link together causal chains.
Characteristic I (time dilation and relativity)
Characteristic J (inversion and time) Characters interact with alternate versions of themselves moving backward through time.
What, then, does our master manipulator have up his sleeve for us next?
“Oppenheimer” is a biographical film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project and played a crucial role in developing the atomic bomb during World War II. Given Nolan’s interest in time manipulation and the themes present in his previous films, “Characteristic K” might involve the ethical and moral dilemmas faced by Oppenheimer and his team as they work on a weapon with the potential to cause unprecedented destruction.
In this context, “K” could represent the complex relationship between scientific progress and the potential for catastrophe, with the overt time manipulation being the race against time to develop the bomb and end WWII. The film could explore the consequences of human ambition and the manipulation of scientific knowledge, as well as the struggle between personal ethics and world-altering decisions.
Characteristic J might then be retroactively understood to explore the potential consequences of time manipulation by drawing parallels with the historical development of the atomic bomb. The pursuit of time manipulation may eventually lead to unforeseen and nuclear-scale consequences. Nolan could also be arguing that tampering with time will be considered correlatively necessary by those in power as the dropping of the atomic bomb.
Given Michael Caine’s narration in THE PRESTIGE that,
“Every great magic trick consists of three parts or acts. The first part is called “The Pledge”. The magician shows you something ordinary: a deck of cards, a bird or a man. He shows you this object. 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. But you wouldn’t clap yet. Because making something disappear isn’t enough; you have to bring it back. That’s why every magic trick has a third act, the hardest part, the part we call “The Prestige”.”
we can presume that Nolan’s ‘trick’ is to convince the audience that time travel has started taking place without overtly telling us. Nearly prevalent as the manipulation theme, the practise and subject of time manipulation are present in Nolan’s films from the outset, evolving and building on each other, as though the entire project was laid out in advance. Here the concept is applied across his body of work, analyzing Christopher Nolan’s filmography through the lens of the pledge, the turn, and the prestige to show how all phases of his career foreshadow the revelation of a cataclysmic time manipulation event in the prestige phase.
1. Foreshadowing in The Pledge (Following, Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins): While time manipulation is not explicitly explored in these films, they do establish a strong focus on memory, identity, and the subjectivity of human experience. The non-linear narrative structure in Memento, for instance, challenges the audience’s understanding of time and memory, subtly hinting at the potential for more complex explorations of time manipulation in his future films.
2. Foreshadowing in The Turn (The Prestige, The Dark Knight, Inception, The Dark Knight Rises): During the turn phase, Nolan begins to explicitly experiment with the manipulation of time and reality. In The Prestige, the narrative revolves around competing magicians who use deception and misdirection, which can be seen as a metaphor for the way time can be manipulated and obscured. Inception delves deeper into this concept, exploring the idea of layered time within dreams and how perception of time can be altered. These films serve as a stepping stone towards a more intricate exploration of time manipulation, paving the way for the cataclysmic event in the prestige phase.
3. The Prestige (Interstellar, Dunkirk, Tenet, Oppenheimer): The prestige phase sees the culmination of the themes and narrative techniques introduced in the previous phases. Interstellar presents the concept of time dilation and the possibility of influencing the past, while Dunkirk experiments with different timelines to tell a of story of biblical-scale international conflict. Tenet fully embraces time manipulation, featuring inversion and temporal pincer movement as the ultimate manifestation of the themes foreshadowed in the pledge and the turn. When we realize it was all building to Oppenheimer’s atomic bomb, the consequences and ethical implications of such cataclysmic time manipulation events are made evident.
But then, as a requisite twist, in The Artilect War scenario, it isn’t only artilects and Cosmists who’d manipulate time. The Cosmists will not announce themselves. There is no military or organization for an enterprising Terran to bomb on day one of the conflict. Wouldn’t a Terran only know who to strike retroactively? Given the Terrans’ dire need to strike first before artilects become too powerful—even opposed to artificial intelligence as they may be—then once there’s sufficient computation, the Terrans only means of gaining the high ground may be retrocausal or extratemporal actions that alter the past by engaging in information warfare across multiple dimensions of time and space. If time is the Terran-Cosmist battlefield, then no time is too early for the first strike. The war may have already begun, waged in time, a full-blown Skynet scenario.
Perhaps the war wages early as the 17th century with the birth of capital, or earlier still with the birth of Christ, or maybe only begins a few weeks from now, a little before the release of ChatGPT5 but not after we’ve been warned en masse again, in the most crowd-pleasing way possible, of the dangers in developing eschatological threats. Perhaps, then, it’s the more sympathetic Terran side dictating our cultural products from the future through the oeuvre of Christopher Nolan.
[1] The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines [Inaccurate]
[2] Interview with de Garis on Singularity Weblog [Listen and let me know]
[3] “The Artilect War: Cosmists vs. Terrans: A Bitter Controversy Concerning Whether Humanity Should Build Godlike Massively Intelligent Machines”) [Inaccurate]