"Arrival": The Philosophical Principles of the Cultivation of the Goddess

Arrival

The Philosophical Principles of the Cultivation of the Goddess

—Vulgar Voluntaryism in Arrival

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For this audience who has been raised in the education of dialectical materialism for a long time, he immediately saw through the true face of the film "Arrival": a film about the cultivation of godmothers that promotes pseudoscience, and a distorted socialist spiritual civilization wrapped in sugar-coated cannonballs. building film.

It thinks that it involves a few popular scientific terms, such as non-linear graphics, certain linguistic hypothesis, etc., and it can pretend to be the coat of cognitive science. So people have to find reason for it from linguistics or cognitive thinking. It thought that allowing China to have the right to speak internationally when communicating with aliens could cover up the distortion of the Chinese socialist spiritual civilization construction. You must know that China has always adhered to a pacifist foreign policy, adhered to the communication concept of treating each other sincerely and repaying grievances, and insisted on a harmonious thinking of not being fat when slapped in the face. How could it be so easy to start a war? On the surface, this plot setting is to recognize the strength of the Celestial Dynasty, but in fact it is to show that although China has developed economically, it still does not have the civilized ability to defend the international situation. Neither prudence nor foresight. What's even more ridiculous is that at the end of the film, the heroine used "your wife to give me a dream" to persuade a general of the Celestial Dynasty. The screenwriter really ignores the decades of socialist spiritual civilization construction and dialectical materialism education, thinking that the thinking of the generals of the Celestial Dynasty is still in the feudal era. In fact, it is precisely the thinking of "Arrival" that is essentially still at the stage of superficial theological thinking of secular religions.

In "Arrival", the process of the heroine's transformation by mastering the alien language is a process of becoming like a goddess. It violates the philosophical principle that "matter determines consciousness", and takes "consciousness determines matter" as its philosophical premise, or its philosophical premise belongs to a vulgar voluntarism. This is not to say that the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis mentioned in the film is advocating "consciousness determines matter", which is not at all. Roughly speaking, it seems that the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis holds that the way of thinking is determined by language. Let's assume this hypothesis is correct. The logic of the heroine's transformation in the process of knowing this alien language is that this alien language conveys meaning according to the non-linear development of strokes, and this development method contains the understanding of time, then According to the principle of "language determines the way of thinking", when the heroine masters the language that contains time comprehension, she acquires a temporal way of thinking, so she can see through time and experience the future. The first half of this reasoning belongs to the movie setting, and there is no right or wrong, but the reasoning at the last step is paradoxical and cannot be obtained based on the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis or "language determines the way of thinking". It also requires another key premise, that "consciousness determines matter". A temporal way of thinking and a temporal material process are two different things. Non-linear thinking is one thing, and non-linear space-time is another. To think that an alien non-linear language can connect different time processes is equivalent to thinking that consciousness alone can connect different material processes in practice, or that the will can manipulate matter. However, mastering a temporal way of thinking cannot mean mastering temporal material processes, unless "consciousness determines matter". The latter is not a premise of the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis. In "Language determines the way of thinking", what is discussed is only the relationship between thinking and language in "Material-Thinking-Language". Temporal language may determine temporal thinking, but never temporal matter. It is not scientific logic that can make temporal language determine temporal matter, but goddess logic. The aliens in the film are equivalent to beings from the wizarding world. If the alien language in the film is replaced by spells, then the heroine is equivalent to having barely learned the grammar of a spell. The heroine later became a goddess. This is the general process of godmother cultivation.

In fact, the transformation logic of the goddess in "Arrival" is a bit more radical. In general vulgar voluntarism stories or magical volitional settings, when people say that will move objects, they not only say that those who can move objects have a specific form of will, but also have a content of will. Just like Thinking, or when opening the space-time channel in "Doctor Strange", it is necessary to have the thinking content of the destination in the will to reach the corresponding destination. What we see is that the heroine reluctantly learns the grammar of a spell, and the reason why she says reluctantly is that it is doubtful whether her brain capacity can hold so much information. Even if it could, there is an important distinction—the difference between the form of thinking and the content of thinking—that hinders the heroine's vision of the future. Due to the differentiation of thinking, "matter-mind-language" becomes "matter-consciousness (thought content)-mind form-language", and the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis discusses only the last two of these four items. Arrival, however, seems to think that only a heroine with a non-linear temporal way of thinking can see the future and is therefore more radical than a magical story. Even in magical stories, the will cannot be formalized, but concreted.

There may be objections that the separation between the content of consciousness and the form of thought is only conceptual, not practical. In practice, there is a mutual intention between the content of consciousness and the form of thought. In Arrival, when people see the non-linear symbols of alien discourse, they are not simply exposed to the formal language of the alien, but the specific language. However, another problem is encountered in this way, that is, the amount of information contained in non-linear graphics cannot be protected by the current human thinking organs. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, the female agent trying to gain knowledge of aliens ends up breaking down because she can't handle so much information. In "Arrival", the interpretation of alien characters and symbols is achieved through computer algorithms, not by the heroine showing her intelligence there. It is an exaggeration to say that the heroine has mastered the grammar of that alien symbol, or formalized thinking. In fact, she doesn't do that at all. She only knows some superficial words. You can't expect to grasp the entire contents of Encyclopedia Britannica after knowing English expressions like "who are you" or "where are you from". Even if we could take a step back and think that she was able to get a mind shift by trying to understand alien non-linear symbols, she still wouldn't have the ability to connect actual causal space-time.

Although the logic of the transformation of the goddess in "Arrival" can be said to be vulgar voluntarism at the level of secular religion, it does not come from Christianity alone, but from a hybrid of Eastern and Western secular religions. The word "advent" has a Christian cultural tinge. This advent event, in this film, resulted in a gospel-like symbol brought by the aliens and gave a Caucasian American woman the ability to see the future, or a prophetess. The decree myth of "God said, let there be light" in Christianity endows language with will and can manipulate time and space. The setting in "Arrival" that allows language to transcend matter can be considered to belong to the myth of this decree. On the other hand, the alien language symbol in "Arrival" looks like a freehand circle pictogram like an ink painting. It can therefore be assumed that the vulgar voluntarism here actually has elements of Buddhist-Zen culture as well. The vulgar aspect of this culture is more suitable for the generation of gods and goddesses. It often despises the logic of reality, suspends cause and effect, and recommends a vulgar will. And its suspended causality is often associated with the concept of "reincarnation". Suspended causality promotes the will, and samsara in turn suppresses the will.

There is a conflict between nonlinear and recurrent processes. Only when different events are distributed symmetrically on the time line can there be reincarnation; and only when the events are distributed asymmetrically on the time line can it be non-linear. A non-linear understanding of time does not reverse the one-way nature of time, that is, pointing to the future, so information cannot be passed from the future to the past. But in "Arrival", the heroine gets the information provided by the general of the Celestial Dynasty, which is passed from the future to the past. Perhaps it can be retorted that the nonlinearity in the film is the nonlinearity of language symbols. The time seen by this nonlinearity is no longer unidirectional, but spatialized, and there is no longer a distinction between the future and the past. However, even spatial processes have directions, and moreover, spatialized thinking is one thing, and spatialized processes are another. In any case, a non-linear process cannot explain the plot, only godmother logic.

If the story is understood according to the logic of destiny, and it is not limited to focusing only on the transformation of the heroine as a goddess, then the aliens have much more control over time and space than a goddess. They not only have a non-linear language symbol, But with complete technology, they are the real creatures who master the future. They know how to avoid conflicts with the people of the earth, and they know when they can retreat. Then, at the end of the film, the heroine's act of trying to "save humanity" is completely redundant and self-deceiving. The "gift" provided by the aliens to the earthlings has been delivered, and the earthlings are basically able to gain understanding. But what "Arrival" wants to tell the audience is that the heroine who only knows some alien languages ​​is the key person in mediating the communication between the earth and the aliens, and this character's understanding of the future seems to be better than the alien's understanding of the future It is more valuable; although experts from other countries also understand this alien language, they just do not have the ability to obtain the heroine, or just do not have the humanitarian care of the heroine; the national images of China and Russia seem to remain on red alert She doesn't even understand the non-zero-sum game; the heroine is not a goddess but outperforms the goddess and becomes a hero who saves the overall situation. Moreover, she is from the United States. Earth's hope.

Of course, things have to be viewed dialectically. Pseudoscience also has a scientific side, and philosophical principles are also pseudo-philosophical principles.

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