The decisions we make depend in large part on the experiences and lessons learned from our life experiences and past decisions, or traumas, but are they really our own real memories? Or was it just implanted by aliens overnight?
These experiences and memories seem to have always been there, but we don't know where they came from. But we are constantly affected by them, which is what the aliens in the film want to study: how much our soul and the choices we make are affected by independent memories and experiences. But when the alien is injected into john's memory to judge John's future behavior, each time it makes a different judgment than john's actual behavior. It is also mentioned at the end of the film that because the aliens make decisions based on the decisions that john has made in his memory, but john knows his memory is not real, so he will not be affected by it. But even knowing this, the protagonists are still influenced by "unreal" experiences, such as the love between the heroine and John. Although the heroine said, "I love you, this cannot be faked." But it is obvious that because they have loved each other in their memories, their love in real life is still subtly influenced by memory.
This leads to some deeper issues. Everyone is born with instincts, such as shrinking when something is hot, being afraid of heights, and a few people who have never been exposed to a field but seem to be born with this kind of knowledge, which is called in philosophy "" a priori". The transcendence has always existed, not "obtained" through our "acquired" experience, so its appearance has always been a mystery. For example, many people think that the jumping machine is very scary, but most of them have never done a jumping machine at all. They only make judgments based on their own experience with similar objects such as roller coasters, and think that the jumping machine is higher than other similar things. The speed, the dwell time is even more terrible.
The film even questions the experience of humanity as a whole. When John and the Inspector dug through the wall of the beach poster, behind the wall was not the beach or the sun they had expected in their memory, but a deeper, eerie starry sky with nothing at all—their worldview was completely shattered. exists in false memories. In contrast to the real world, our memory and experience give us the most basic understanding of the world, we know that our earth is round, we have the sun that illuminates the day, we have beaches...but who can be sure of all this is it real? If we are just test subjects, where are we "brought from"? Is it from Shell Beach, or are we simply nowhere and home exists only in false memories?
Where does a priori come from? Are our memories active or passive? Is the world of experience true or false? If the world of experience and memory are false, what are we left with?
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