Lovers of Sophia

by Jason Reza Jorjani

  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