Saturday, December 04, 2004
comments on the movie mindwalk, from an email thread
shameless email mining for post material ;-)
craig:
Here's the link to the movie
The guy who wrote this movie, Fritjof Capra, also wrote the book the Tao of Physics. Movie is mostly a conversation between a politician, an artist and a physicist. Good brain candy. Thanks to Lou for telling me about this movie. It's out of print and cost upwards of $40 for the used VHS version of it (not on DVD). I found it at the public library :)
me:
i looked over at amazon, and the used vhs was going for over $60 a pop. interesting to poke around the reviews of this flick and the related items that people mention. you learn as much about people as you do the item being reviewed.
craig:
Interesting movie. Mostly a discussion on systems and relationships. Got a little repetitive. Reminded me a lot of that audio book I listened to on Buddism. I think the guy said it best in the end though, healing the universe is an inside job. Ha!
me (there i go again, running off at the mouth fingers):
i guess i'm not as sensitive to "repetitiveness" as you and some other reviewers seems to be. you said the same thing about rand's "for the new intellectual". and the buddhism thing as well ? i think there's more to the phenomena than that description. if you weren't allowed to use that word, or words with similar meaning, what then ? what's the pattern ?
as if healing has anything to do with the universe. as if one could be outside. yeah, it got annoying here and there when capra got too transparent about pushing his agenda. it's not a conversation or dialogue, either. it's a lecture. fine by me. the poet was superfluous, and the politician was simply a device to keep the physicist talking, like dr. who's assistants ("what are you doing now, doctor?" "why, doctor?" "what's that?" etc.). but the setting and film work was just gorgeous. even the cheesey score was fun.
nothing very deep in most of the discussion, but the close temporal juxataposition of more usually disparate concepts was nice to prompt some synergistic mindwandering. the movie was probably more fun for people like me and you, since we bring a much richer familiarity with the concept base to our watching. at least, that's what happened with me. for each simple idea mentioned in the movie, i found myself supplementing it with recollections of my own more far-reaching related mental excursions. the movie was more like an index into a datastore. not sure how newbies would experience it. talk about different realities.
however, there were some serious conceptual fallacies and philosophical misconceptions present, the largest being the presentation of a mechanistic etc. worldview as one that is opposed to a systemic view. pretty naive, and untrue. and their interpretation of the philosophers was somewhat inaccurate as well, but i am less skilled here so can't be as precise. and so it made me wonder if the literary and mystic references were equally as bent. on the other hand, generally speaking, the physics presented seemed accurate, although inconsistent in development (for example, denying "objectness", but then using that metaphor again anyway. but that's what happens with real physicists too). chalk that up to the fact that the author is a physicist, and he falls prey to the same problems as almost all other physicists (or any expert, for that matter) who venture out of their field of expertise without taking precautions.