why.” It turns out that he is wrong and he walks away crestfallen,
with a somewhat startled look back at David. Herein we see the
inferiority of even the highest of angels, an archangel, in the face of an extraordinary human individual.
In response to a question about whether it was a test, while
looking out over Central Park lined by the buildings of Manhattan’s
upper east and west sides, Harry explains: “In a way. It’s all a test, for everybody, even the members of the Adjustment Bureau. David,
you risked everything for Elise. And Elise, when you came through
that door at the Statue of Liberty you risked everything too. But you
inspired me. Seems like you inspired the chairman too.” After we
learn that the chairman has rewritten The Plan so that the “serious
deviation” for which David is responsible can be accommodated, we
hear the following closing narration spoken by Harry over a scene of
David and Elise walking down 5th avenue, past Rockefeller Center,
which is home to statues of the rebellious titans Prometheus and
Atlas:
Most people live life on a path we set for them, too afraid to
explore any other. But once in a while people like you come
along who knock down all the obstacles we put in your way –
people who realize that free will is a gift you’ll never know how
to use until you fight for it. I think that’s the chairman’s real plan, and maybe, one day, we won’t write the plan. You wil .
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This is a second answer to David’s question to Thompson in the
vacant concrete lot that is used as a space wherein to interrogate
and intimidate him. It is the central question of the film: “Whatever
happened to free will?” The Adjustment Bureau, including its
chairman, think that a small dose of Elise can be used to inspire
David because of the magnetic connection that they feel when they
are together on account of the remaining fragments of the many
previous plans when they were meant to be together. Yet David cares
more about being with her than following the path to the Presidency
that his inspired concession speech is supposed to put him on.
Despite their detailed knowledge of the significant influence that his father’s political interests has on him and the way in which he needs
politics to fill the void left by the early losses that he has suffered in life, the angels fail to anticipate and, thereby to control, the full complexity of his psychological makeup. Even the chairman fails at
this.
David knows better than god what the future should hold in
store for him and, since he is meant to be someone who “real y
matters”, he is also presuming to know better what the future should
hold in store for Humanity. The only god that can allow for such
creative self-determination on the part of an individual is a finite
and fallible god, who can be prevailed upon, and whose relatively
unthinking bureaucratic apparatus can be overpowered in such a
way as to afford one the possibility of addressing him more directly.
The gravity of ethical decisions remains squarely in the hands of
exceptional individuals for whom there is no moral Plan written in
“black and white.”
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CHANGING DESTINY
In Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report, based on the
short story by Philip K. Dick, Captain John Anderton
takes a very scientific attitude towards the precogs and
the Precrime program that they make possible. He wants
to see the precogs as “pattern recognition filters.” We learn about
the science behind Precrime methodology at two points in the film.
First, when Danny Witwer, the attorney general’s representative
from the justice department, is being given a tour of the facility
and then later in the conversation between Anderton and Dr. Iris
Hineman, who is supposed to have “developed precogs, designed the
system, and pioneered the interface.” The three precogs are floating
in a photon milk that acts both as a nutrient supply and a liquid
conductor that enhances the images that each of them perceive.
Their brain tissue is scanned by means of optical tomography, with
white lights pinpointing pulses of neuronal information along the
entire length of their headgear. They are drugged with dopamine
and endorphins so that they do not feel any pain. Their serotonin
levels are also careful y controlled so that they are kept in a state of sleep that is not too deep.
The three are a hive mind. Arthur and Daschel are twins and
they defer to the subconscious guidance of Agatha, who is the one
of the three with superior ability. Dr. Hineman tel s Anderton that
is because Agatha is a female. While the three precogs are, on one
level, named after three of the greatest mystery writers – Agatha
Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Dashiell Hammett – Agathon
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also means “the best one” in Greek. Of the three, at least Agatha is
still able to see the future without the other two and her precognitive abilities are only augmented by the technological interface. We know
that she can do without it, and without the twins, when she guides
Anderton through the mal , moment to moment. She also sees or
has already seen the future of an Asian lady who happens to pass
by, presumably an adulteress, to whom she gives the warning: “He
knows. Don’t go home.”
Later on, Hineman laughs at Anderton’s suggestion that she
“invented” Precrime. She disabuses Anderton of his view of the
precogs as creatures grown in a test tube, entities that he had
advised Witwer not to think of as human. It turns out that they are
the children of addicts to an impure first generation of the drug,
Neuroin, whose new and improved “Clarity” version Anderton
himself is addicted to and seeks out from a dealer in the shady sprawl area of DC. (More on this dealer, momentarily.) Hineman was doing
genetic research on these children at the Woodhaven Clinic. It
appears that at first she was attempting to treat them. Their severe
brain damage had enhanced an apparently latent human ability
for extrasensory perception. In particular, they apparently began
to be bombarded with precognitive visions in their sleep. These
predominately consisted of nightmares of murders being committed
and the terrified children would wake screaming in the night or be
found clawing away at the wal paper in some corner of their rooms.
Hineman and her colleagues discovered that these dreams were
precognitive, in other words, that the murders they concerned took
place after being foreseen by the children. She admits that, together
with Lamar Burgess, she turned these children into test subjects –
guinea pigs – and the fact that most of them died before the age of
twelve may be on account of what was done to them to develop the
supposedly “perfect” system of Precrime.
As in the case of the optical recognition system, the holographic
video projections, public advertisements that personal y address
individual shoppers, animated cereal boxes, the virtual re
ality parlor where brain-scanning interfaces allow a customer to indulge their
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fantasies in a full-body suit, and the multi-plane highways for maglev smart cars, real scientific research by P.K.D. and Spielberg lies behind the film’s depiction of precogs. It is that kind of empirical research that William James believed would bring about the next scientific
revolution, what he called Psychical Research and what has since
come to be widely known as Parapsychology. Parapsychologists use
the umbrel a term “psi” to refer to both extrasensory perception and
psychokinesis (formerly known as telekinesis) in all of their various
types. In particular, Dick’s story and Spielberg’s film adaptation of it draw on five discoveries of parapsychological research: precognitive
clairvoyance or remote viewing of the future, enhanced ESP in the
dream state, the especial y strong psychic bond between twins,
childhood trauma as a catalyst of psi ability, and the superior psi
abilities of females in general.
Of all of the psi abilities studied by parapsychologists since the
days when James and his colleagues at the S.P.R. pioneered the field,
the ones for which there is the most overwhelmingly affirmative
statistical evidence are the ones that Minority Report combines. One of them is to know about future events before they happen and in
cases where ordinary inferences are not possible, formal y known
as precognition. The other is clairvoyance, also known as “remote
viewing” or seeing and describing things happening somewhere at a
distance without the use of the five known senses.
In the 1970s, in an effort to keep apace with a similar project in
the Soviet Union, Russel Targ and Harold Puthoff, two physicists
with high security clearances at the Stanford Research Institute
developed a remote viewing program on contract for the Central
Intelligence Agency and the US Department of Defense, one
which was used operational y throughout the 1980s for a variety
of intelligence and military operations – including antiterrorism
and hostage rescue. Targ and Puthoff’s book Mind Reach gives an overview of the SRI research program and discusses some of its
declassified operational successes. Since the disbanding of the unit
at the end of the Cold War, a number of other remote viewers have
also written books about their experiences in the program. Some
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have founded private enterprises offering remote viewing services
to Fortune 500 corporations. The dean of the Engineering and
Applied Sciences school at Princeton University, Robert Jahn, ran
precognition experiments from 1979 to 2003, replicating some of
SRI’s work on remote viewing and combining this together with
precognition in a more rigorously testable way than SRI had done.
Statistical meta-analyses of thirty years of data from the PEAR
program reveal astronomical odds against chance being responsible
for the results, which have since been replicated at a number of
other universities. These results have been reported in scientific
journals including Foundations of Physics. In the late 1980s, Jahn
also co-authored a book on the PEAR program with his research
assistant, Brenda J. Dunne, under the title Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World.
During the 1960s, Dr. Montague Ullman and Dr. Stanley
Krippner at the Maimonides Medical Center in New York City
headed a project researching extrasensory perception in the dream
state. Their results were first published in the 1973 book Dream
Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception.
Ullman and Krippner developed a protocol to test whether a sender
could telepathical y transmit certain images to a receiver who is
spatial y isolated from the former and who is in a dream state. They
found replicable experimental evidence for the fairly old hypothesis
advocated by major thinkers such as Schelling and Hegel in the 19th
century that psychical ability is strongest in the dream state. The
researchers at the Maimonides Center also found strong laboratory
evidence for precognitive dreams, which appear to be the most
common type of ESP experienced by the average person. Remember
that the precogs in Minority Report are artificial y kept in a perpetual state of a sleep that is not too deep.
Throughout history and in the folklore of many cultures it is
reported that twins, especial y identical twins, share a psychic bond
that is so strong that, for example, if one suffers an injury the other will feel it in the very same limb even if he is at a great distance
and not in any form of sensory communication with his brother.
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Sometimes the two will break a leg, the same leg, in precisely the
same spot, at exactly the same time. Remember that the two male
precogs, Arthur and Daschel, are identical twins. In his book Twin
Telepathy, the Brazilian parapsychologist Guy Lyon Playfair collects
and discusses many cases concerning this psychic bond between
twin siblings. The elite scientific establishment of Nazi Germany was
intensely interested parapsychological phenomena in general and it
appears that better understanding ESP was one of the motivations for
the experiments carried out on identical twins in the concentration
camps.
This brings us to another rather grim subject, the connection
between Psi ability and traumatic experiences – especial y in
childhood. The precogs in Minority Report were those who survived from among a much larger group of extremely traumatized children,
many of whom died from the agonizing terror that they suffered
first on account of their precognitive nightmares and then at the
hands of the experiments that Hineman and Burgess subjected
them to in order to develop Precrime. Jeffrey J. Kripal, the Newton
Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religion and former chair of
the Religious Studies Department at Rice University in Texas, has
written about this in a couple of his books as well as in a recent
article. He first broached the subject in the concluding chapter of
The Serpent’s Gift, where he discusses the real-world basis for the kind of teenagers with superpowers that we see in the X-Men,
and he returns to the subject in Mutants and Mystics. Kripal raises questions about whether the sterile and relatively mechanical
approach of laboratory parapsychologists will ever be able to
produce the kind of macro-scale psi abilities that are occasional y
displayed by extraordinary individuals in the course of ordinary
life. He notes that the individuals at the center of such paranormal
activity are often young persons, especial y adolescents, dealing with some form of trauma.
More often than not, they are also female. The greatest mediums
of the 19th century, especial y so-called “physical mediums” capable
of producing dramatic telekinetic phenomena, were women. One
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of them, Eusapia Pal adino, features prominently in the History
of Spiritualism written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the mystery
wri
ter who invented Sherlock Holmes and after whom the precog
Arthur is named. Unfortunately, suffering from performance anxiety
and caving into the expectations of their audience, some of them
occasional y cheated and in the eyes of skeptics, this discredited the many cases where careful scientific researchers observed legitimate
displays of their talents. One female medium that was never caught
cheating was Ms. Piper, the woman that William James considered
his “white crow” – the single gifted person who more than any other
convinced him of the reality of psi. Hineman’s claim that, natural y,
the most gifted of the precogs is a female reflects this real history of female dominance in Psi.
The witch hunts throughout medieval times and as late as the
1600s in places such as Salem probably have some correlation to
the fact that women, on average, are more psychical y gifted than
men. This dark history is al uded to in Minority Report, in one of many instances where religious concerns are set in tension with
the scientific approach to the Precrime program that Anderton is
initial y inclined to take. Toward the end of the film, when Lara
catches Lamar Burgess inadvertently admitting that he knows about
how Ann Lively was “drowned”, there is something suggestive of the
Puritans about how the light is shining behind Max von Sydow’s
head to accentuate certain elements of his features, taken together
with the accent in his voice when he says “We’ll talk about this later.
Perhaps tomorrow, I’ll come by the cottage.” One is subtly reminded
of The Scarlet Letter or The Crucible. During the epoch of the witch burnings, Sarah Marks may have been condemned to death as an
adulteress. Instead, in the 2054 time frame of the film, whose secular value system is basical y an extension of our own today, her husband
is arrested while her wife is still in bed with her illicit lover. As
her husband is “haloed”, this protected adulteress is consoled and
counseled by the police. The “halo” used by Precrime to immobilize
and eventual y incarcerate potential perpetrators is, of course, itself one of many references to religious ideas and symbolism in the
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film. One particularly clever reference to this religious symbol is
Anderton’s sarcastical y spoken remark to Burgess during their final
confrontation, “You’ll rot in hell with a halo, but people will still
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