Pay Now, Live Later
The key science-fiction idea in the story “The Minority Report” is a radical form of technology that enables law enforcement bodies to take action to prevent a crime before it is actually committed. So the prisons are full of people who have not yet committed a crime. In both versions of Minority Report precognition is an extrasensory process because the precogs are said to be endowed with a special ability that allows them access to the future, but the story and the film differ in the kind of knowledge that the precogs have.
The visual medium of the film lends itself to a visual representation of the future that is lived through by the precog. The precog, in a way, is there, immersed in this future time, and sees it all as it happens. In the original story the knowledge that the precogs provide is less precise, more akin to snippets or extracts of the future that requires analysis based on present knowledge before it becomes useful. Bergson’s philosophy of time can explain the difference in approach.
Bergson is most famous for arguing that we have falsely represented time as a spatial line that passes from the past into the future and can be easily measured. We measure time in this kind of way everyday, where the regularity and uniformity of calendars and clocks lead us to think of one hour as much the same as another. The hours, seconds, and days marked on a timeline are always equal. Bergson argues that time is something more than this: it is something we experience and live through. Each segment of time cannot be separated from what we’re doing. There is a difference between the hour spent waiting for the bus and the hour spent playing video games—one passes faster than the other.
Bergson says that time is real; that we live time, and that to live time is something fundamentally different from passing through time viewed as a sequence of events on a timeline or the minute marks on a clock. We do not simply look at time but stand in the middle of it, looking forward to future and looking backward to the past. The past is more than a collection of past events, for it is always active, filling us with ideas and driving us forward. In contrast, the future is there in front of us, uncertain and open to change. The past, in the form of memory, is always overlapping the present and directing our action towards an uncertain future. In this idea of lived time, the future and past are always with us in the present, mixing together in our consciousness, and it is because the past remains (endures) in the present, that Bergson chooses to call time by another name, duration (durée).
This has implications for how we imagine the future, many of which Bergson examines in “The Possible and the Real” (1920). First of all, Bergson argues that every moment is completely new and cannot be foreseen—quite a radical idea that does not sit easily with common techniques for imagining the future, including prediction.
We’re all familiar with science and its fabulous statements about what will happen. It can plot the movement of planets and, not quite so successfully, the weather. Science fiction also predicts the future, some of which comes true, such as H.G. Wells’s predictions concerning wireless communication or William Gibson on virtual reality. How can Bergson claim that the future is unforeseeable if science can produce models predicting what will happen and SF can speculate on future societies and technologies?
To demonstrate his point, Bergson uses a simple thought experiment. Philosophers favor thought experiments because they do not require equipment and nor do they have to leave their comfy armchairs. In this, they have much in common with SF writers. As he sits comfortably, Bergson imagines what will happen when he attends an upcoming reunion. He knows who will be there and where they will sit, as well as the topic of conversation.
Bergson brings the future into the present just through the use of his imagination. However, the reunion does not happen exactly how he imagined it. The exact flow of the conversation is different, as is the appearance, behaviour, gestures and seating of the participants. It is so different that Bergson compares the future, as it actually occurs, to the unique work of an artist—we can easily enough imagine a picture of some lady with folded hands and a vague smile, but our imagination would never produce the Mona Lisa in its unique specificity. Nor could we paint the Mona Lisa, unless we had actually lived the life of Da Vinci. This does not mean that Bergson rejects speculation about the future. What Bergson’s theory of time claims is that we do not truly know the future as if we were living it. When Bergson goes to the actual reunion, rather than visiting it in his imagination, he is not only aware of all the details, he is also caught up in the flow of events.
I Can Predict What You (Don’t) Do Next Summer
The word that Bergson often uses when talking about the future is the French word imprévisible which has two meanings in English: unforeseeable and unpredictable. Both are concepts that can be used to analyse the different ways that precognition is represented in the short story “The Minority Report” and its film adaptation.
In the short story, the precogs give little information, just the name of the suspect and victim, the location of the crime and other such details. Nor are we told how they produce “prophecies” except to say that they have an expanded “esplobe.” The precogs are not talked about kindly by the founder of Precrime, John Anderton, who refers to them as “monkeys” (see no evil) or “idiots.” They sit in chairs babbling away about future events without actually understanding what they see or the moral implications. It is the police investigators who work out what is relevant:
Every incoherent utterance, every random syllable, was analyzed, compared, reassembled in the form of visual symbols, transcribed on conventional punchcards, and ejected into various coded slots. The analytical machinery was recording prophecies, and as the three precog idiots talked, the machinery carefully listened.
With this quaint image of punchcards and lots of visible wiring, we should not forget that science fiction is always written from the perspective of current technology. The SF world that Dick imagines might be in the future but there is no passing through our present—no screens, YouTube or SMS here. It’s all about the rantings of the precogs which are translated into data analyzed by a set of computers. The computers test these babblings to determine whether or not they make sense, and if they do, they can be used to predict a crime and secure a pre-emptive arrest.
To say that something is predictable means that we see the future only in terms of what we know now. For example, astronomy can plot the movement of a meteor because it knows the current mass, the amount of momentum it has and the direction it is heading in. But scientists do not know everything about an event and therefore prediction in most branches of science involves using statistics—working out what is most likely to happen. If you wanted to predict a crime, it would involve knowing the personality of a would-be criminal, who they hang out with and their haunts. From this knowledge the scientist could say that it looks likely that they will engage in criminal activity, and preventing crime is a matter of keeping an eye on them. In this case precrime involves working out what someone might do and making sure they don’t do it—a practice that is becoming increasingly common with governments trying to prevent terrorist attacks.
In “The Possible and the Real,” Bergson has an unusual take on prediction. It is not about knowing the future, stating what will be, but about knowing what can’t happen. The problem is that we too easily move from the negative statement of the “not impossible” to the positive term, “possible,” without addressing the shift. To say that something is “not impossible” is another way of saying that it is more-or-less likely. In predicting an event we do not have a clear image of what will happen but rather impose limits so that we can rule out what definitely will not happen. Bergson uses the metaphor of a gate to describe how the future is predicted: “If you close the gate you know no one will cross the road; it does not follow that you can predict who will cross the road when you open it.”
In the short story, the precogs might receive their information about the future through supernatural means—but the analys
is of the information requires a form of reality testing. A lot of the names and dates are thrown away by the Precrime investigators because they do not fit the world as they see it. They are “closing the gate” on what cannot be in order to find out what will be. This testing and analysis of data sets limits on the future to work out what is predictable or most likely. You can’t arrest someone just on a hunch.
In removing all the impossible predictions, we’re left with a possible future. But this possible future is still an abstraction based on particular limitations on what is known in the present. It is about stripping back time to a very limited set of events. Consequently Bergson argues that we should not confuse a possible event with a real event. The possible is not a faint image of the real waiting to be realised or an idea awaiting substance but in Precrime, this is exactly what happens.
There are many arrests based upon the investigators’ analysis of the precogs’ future predictions—removing the impossible to create the possible—but nobody really knows if the any of the supposed criminals will actually commit the crime. These alleged criminals have not actually lived the time of the crime or the time leading up to it. If they did, would they actually fulfil the prophecy of Precrime? If someone knew about the accusation in advance, as Anderton does when he is accused of murder, would they commit the crime? Bergson’s theory of time warns us that ever-changing memory and knowledge creates infinite minor and major variations in behavior and therefore a possible future is never the same as an actual future.
Living in the Time of the Crime
In the film adaptation we’re introduced to the precogs through a crime of passion where one of the victims, Sarah Marks, is shown in close-up with an expression of horror on her face. She’s aware that she’s about to be killed by her husband, Howard Marks, who has just discovered his wife in bed with a lover. As viewers we are actually present at the crime, seeing the face of the victim and wondering what will happen next. The camera then moves from a close-up of Sarah Marks’s face to an extreme close-up of her dilated pupil that clearly shows the terror she feels. This is followed by a segue to the clear, watery, blue eye of the precog Agatha (Samantha Morton). The camera then zooms out to reveal Agatha’s face who utters, in a distant, echoey voice, “murder.”
Here the process of precognition is very different to the short story. What we see are images of the soon-to-be-committed murder followed by Agatha’s startled expression. We know that it is the precog’s vision of the future, where she is immersed in the scene of the crime and consequently has empathy with the victim. The precog Agatha sees what will happen. She is a witness to a crime that is yet to be committed.
In the film adaptation, the facts about the crime are always given a visual form. After Agatha’s vision we are shown the principal investigator, John Anderton (Tom Cruise) actively interpreting a collection of moving images to ascertain the location of the crime. He is like a film editor piecing together film rushes. The crimes are shown using flash-forwards and are more than just names and locations given by the babbling precogs in the short story. Here precognition is about the foreseeable rather than the predictable. There is no process of reasoning, no analytic machinery connecting the present to the future—the future is presented in all its detail but just requires a bit of editing to piece together the events. We see the face of the killer, the terror of the victim, the color of the wallpaper. The precogs, and the audience, are able to live in the time of the crime.
Always Invest in the Future
Philip K. Dick’s short story “Paycheck” has also been made into a film directed by John Woo and stars another of Hollywood’s heroes, Ben Affleck. Like Minority Report, both the film and story explore philosophical issues about how to imagine and precognize the future.
In “Paycheck,” the hero Jennings is employed for a large sum of money as an engineer on condition that when the job is finished his memory will be wiped. He has no idea where he worked or what he did during this time, so he has effectively lost a couple of years of his life. When fronting up for his pay, he is given a cloth sack full of objects rather than the payment he expected. He is not very happy about losing his pay but he is informed that it was his own decision and is shown a form with his signature on to prove it. He grudgingly accepts the evidence and leaves the office.
He is soon picked up by the police and realizes that his inability to account for the past couple of years could lead to trouble. So he decides to escape police custody and find out where he worked and what he did. While locked up Jennings realizes that one of the objects, a piece of wire, can be used to break the electronic door and allow him to escape. The police pursue him and he jumps onto a bus and when confronted by the robot ticket inspector, he is able to pull a bus token out of the bag. It is at this stage that Jennings realises that the bag given by his past self—the one whose actions are erased from Jennings’s memory—provides objects that will help him solve future problems. The items are more valuable than the money he would have received.
We find out later that past-Jennings, referred to in the story as he by the present Jennings, was working on a time machine that could see into the future and remove objects from it. There is a “mirror” that provides an image of the future, a bit like the screens in the Minority Report film, and a “scoop” to pick objects out of the future world and bring them into the present (this being a significant difference from the movie). This doubling up of characters could be confusing but the reader, and the viewer of the film, only has to follow the life of the present Jennings. Past-Jennings only really appears through the objects he has left behind.
Summarizing the Future
What would Bergson have to say about Dick’s representation of time? Bergson argues that while we are acting, actually living in time, the future is unforeseeable. It is only when we stop or reflect upon it, in other words, look into the past, that the future is imagined as a possibility. The possible futures are mirror images of what we think has happened in the past.
Imagine that you’re about to go for a job interview. You are asked to review the whole of your past education and working life, which is presented in the form of a curriculum vitae. This “course of life” is a summary of what you have done and it also becomes the means through which you imagine the future. In the actual job interview, you speak of your future in terms of how it is defined by the past, how each of your qualities and past actions will determine your suitability for the new job. All the good bits of your life are brought together, just like on your Facebook page. As Bergson says in Time and Free Will:
Thus, when we call to mind the past, i.e. a series of deeds done, we always shorten it, without however distorting the nature of the event which interests us. The reason is that we know it already; for the psychic state, when it reaches the end of the progress which constitutes its very existence, becomes a thing which one can picture to oneself all at once.
In “Paycheck,” when Jennings leaves the office with his bag of trinkets, the future is open. But when he breaks out of the police station, Jennings asks himself why he has this piece of wire at this time. He starts to reflect on his past and think about a possible future. But the piece of wire could have been used in any electronic door and at any time. Maybe it is just luck.
However, as soon as he steps onto the bus and pulls out his bus token, which is his only chance to escape and occurs only at one time, the gate of possibility starts to narrow and the future becomes certain. Suddenly Jennings is “filled with a strange elation” because his future, present and past all come together in the form of a plan constructed by past-Jennings. Jennings is happy to fulfil his future as his past self imagined it but this raises the same question as does “The Minority Report”: if we are aware of what will happen, will this change our future actions?
The Paycheck film and story differ in this regard; Jennings in Dick’s story is always excited about his planned, possible future. The Jennings of the film, however, finds out that the planned futur
e world will end with an atomic bomb and decides to sabotage that future in order to continue to live in the present (which does not prevent him from using a lotto ticket left by past-Jennings). As in the film Minority Report, images of the future are always competing with images from the present. The viewer is asked in each film to work out how the inevitable future can be challenged by the actions of the main character.
After jumping on the bus, the whole of Jennings’s past comes together as a “thing.” It is a summary of key events in his life as his future self imagines it, that is, a curriculum vitae sent back from the future. Everything is constructed in terms of a possible future, where the objects in the sack determine what he will have done. When he breaks into the research facility he expects that his code key will open the door to the time scoop. He imagines that this action is determined by his past self. It does not work on that particular door, much to Jennings’s surprise, but it does work on another, just in time for another escape.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 29