There's an experiment which has been popularly held to discredit free will. Brain activity of subjects shows a very distinct pattern (the Bereitschaftspotential) several seconds ahead of the time before they commit to a decision to press a button. I've argued that there's no way to know when their conscious decision is actually made, and that a "decision" without consequences isn't much of a decision at all and so doesn't need much or any conscious choice. Neither do I think that predictability - e.g. having known preferences - discredits free will either. That someone could I guess I might prefer to see a movie about space werewolves than play a round of golf doesn't in any way mean I didn't have a free choice. And I'd add the habitual behaviour can make it very difficult to distinguish conscious choices, i.e. when you mean to turn left, say, but turn right out of habit instead.
But there may be an even simpler explanation for this particular experimental case - a somewhat subtle and interesting variation on the classic fallacy of correlation not being causation.
To decide when to tap their fingers, the participants simply acted whenever the moment struck them. Those spontaneous moments, Schurger reasoned, must have coincided with the haphazard ebb and flow of the participants’ brain activity. They would have been more likely to tap their fingers when their motor system happened to be closer to a threshold for movement initiation.
This would not imply, as Libet had thought, that people’s brains “decide” to move their fingers before they know it. Hardly. Rather, it would mean that the noisy activity in people’s brains sometimes happens to tip the scale if there’s nothing else to base a choice on, saving us from endless indecision when faced with an arbitrary task. The Bereitschaftspotential would be the rising part of the brain fluctuations that tend to coincide with the decisions. This is a highly specific situation, not a general case for all, or even many, choices.
In a new study under review... researchers repeated a version of Libet’s experiment. To avoid unintentionally cherry-picking brain noise, they included a control condition in which people didn’t move at all. An artificial-intelligence classifier allowed them to find at what point brain activity in the two conditions diverged. If Libet was right, that should have happened at 500 milliseconds before the movement. But the algorithm couldn’t tell any difference until about only 150 milliseconds before the movement, the time people reported making decisions in Libet’s original experiment.
In other words, people’s subjective experience of a decision—what Libet’s study seemed to suggest was just an illusion—appeared to match the actual moment their brains showed them making a decision.
So in this particular case, it appears that the actual and subjective moment of decision coincide. In that other study claiming to predict decisions from MRI scans 10 seconds ahead of time, prediction accuracy is only about 60%. It still seems to me that this gives no grounds for claiming you even know if the decision is truly made, short of actually pressing the button. Even that would be tricky : suppose you were to decide at the last second not to press it but the signal from your brain to stop your finger wasn't fast enough ?
This doesn't mean that we do or don't have free will, of course, but I think determining that by monitoring the brain is going to be at best much more difficult than the earlier experiments suggested. I suspect it's fundamentally impossible to objectively measure what is in inherently subjective experience.
For decades, a landmark brain study fed speculation about whether we control our own actions. It seems to have made a classic mistake. The death of free will began with thousands of finger taps. In 1964, two German scientists monitored the electrical activity of a dozen people's brains.
Per Ardua Ad Astra - through struggle, the stars - is the motto of the Royal Air Force. Brad Pitt certainly gets some adversity to struggle with in this movie, but the main problem is that no-one has any idea why.
I saw this in 4DX, which is totally inaccurate. The image is very much two dimensional, while the accompanying extra effects (strobe lighting, wind, air jets, and of course the seat movement) wouldn't classify as a dimension by even the most diehard pseuodscientist. So it really should have been called 2DX, but apparently it wasn't. Ah well.
Anyway, the plot of the movies a bit like this. Having survived Aragorn's timely death and developed a niche fetish for doomed astronauts, Liv Tyler has become somewhat vaguely estranged from latest husband Brad Pitt. The US Space Force get wind of this and decide to lend a hand, so they send Pitt off to make contact with his long-lost dad. Along the way he encounters bandits on the Moon, vicious space monkeys, and he murders a bunch of people for no good reason. It only takes him 3 months to get to Neptune* where his dad is blasting the inner Solar System with radiation because Fuck You Earth, or something. Then be physically hurls dear old dad off into deep space, blows up the space station, and returns home to a heroes' welcome and a no longer estranged Liv Tyler. Everyone cheerfully forgets about the bit where he murders a bunch of people and they all live happily ever after.
*One wonders why no-one bothered sending any other missions given that dad Tommy Lee Jones - alien hunter - has been radio silent for 16 years at this point. Did they just keep putting it off ? Did they forget about him and suddenly remember ?
I swear I'm not making this up.
It's a thoroughly strange film that doesn't quite know what it wants to be, except perhaps Gravity with Brad Pitt instead of George Clooney and space monkeys in place of an actual plot. The remarkable thing in that for the first third of the film or so it quite expertly pulls the wool over the audience's eyes and comes across as having huge potential. The cinematography is excellent and it's brilliantly understated. The score conveys a sense of seriousness to the visually impressive on-screen antics as Pitt falls off a collapsing antenna and then has a car chase on the Moon. It feels like there's a bigger point to the whole thing and that we're going to get a very satisfying emotional finish. Perhaps Jones' aliens will show up and give us a nice moral message or something.
But they don't. By the time we get to the Norwegian (and therefore viking) space monkeys, the mask slips and it's pretty clear the movie has no idea what the hell is going on. Surrealism ? No no, it's just bad writing. There's this space station sending out a distress call so they go and investigate. Turns out there are escaped research primates on board who are none too happy, and they try and bite poor Brad Pitt in the face but don't, so he runs back to the spaceship and flies off. The only consequence is that they kill the captain so Pitt gets to be in charge, but that's it.
Why are there space monkeys anyway ? Why is it a Norwegian space station, of all countries ? Where are the bodies of the crew - did the monkeys eat them ? Nobody feels the need to explain this. Like the car chase on the Moon, it's a lot of fun to watch, but ultimately it doesn't advance the plot in the slightest.
The lunar car chase thing happens because Pitt has to take a rocket first from Earth and then to the Moon and finally to Mars, but the military rockets are on the far side of the Moon so there's a bit of driving involved. Why they couldn't (a) take a small rocket around to the other side or (b) take an armoured vehicle, knowing there are Moon bandits about, or (c) why are people fighting over resources given that humanity has opened up the wealth of the Solar System anyway ? It's both completely unnecessary and makes no sense. But it's nice to look at.
So, for that matter, is the fact that Pitt has to go to Mars to send a transmission to Jones. Thing is, it's a laser-based communication system so there won't be any radio frequency interference to worry about : he'd have been better off staying on the Moon - which no atmosphere - than dusty old Mars. The Mars sequence has some nice Blade Runner style cinematics, but why does the transmission need to be in an anechoic chamber ? He's just speaking into a desktop microphone - just shut the door and tell everyone you're recording.
Then, when no response is received, the Space Force decide that Pitt isn't required on the mission to Neptune to stop Jones, so he boards the ship anyway and somehow manages to kill everyone. I'm not quite sure exactly how that happens, but it does.
From this point on the film was largely rescued by the 4DX, which has hitherto been making a very strange but occasionally good film excellent. Watching Pitt climb over the edge of the antenna at the start and having the seat tilt forward is great fun. Feeling the seat rumble during the driving sequences works well, as does the slow rotation during the floaty zero-g shots. It's a fun gimmick, but it does add something. Lots of fun and very silly - well worth trying out.
The first third or so of the film comes across as a potential masterpiece. The middle section becomes a broken mass of high quality set pieces with no underlying structure and a strange mixture of the serious and the silly. Alas, the final section of the movie is saved only by the 4DX. It becomes needlessly slow and grim and Jones' central mission of looking for aliens becomes a minor side issue. Jones' has apparently become a murdering psychopath, but is totally indifferent to the sudden arrival of his estranged son. We learn next to nothing about his alien-finding mission or what drove him to become a murderous maniac. It's not even clear if what follows between them is conflict or reconciliation. We get plenty of per ardua but absolutely no ad astra - as usual, the opportunity to tell us something really interesting, to try and unify the science with the humanism, is completely wasted.
Arguably the strangest part of the movie is the final scene, in which Pitt describes how he's reunited with his wife and everything's fine again. He doesn't even have any bad dreams. WELL WHY THE HELL NOT, BRAD, YOU MURDERED A BUNCH OF PEOPLE ! It makes sense enough that Space Command would cover up their two darlings actually turning out to be murdering bastards, but not that Pitt's character wouldn't come back traumatised. It's established from the word go that this is a guy who remains cool under immense pressure, but we also get a sense of him being deeply troubled by... something, which is then resolved, somehow. By him fighting space monkeys and hurling his father off into deep space, apparently. Yes, because fighting monkeys and hurling your father to his death in deep space are well-known ways of dealing with a traumatic childhood. Ho hum.
Overall, I give this movie 6/10. As long as you don't think too hard, the first third - maybe even two thirds - are very enjoyable. But in the end, Ad Astra is no more than a bunch of excellent, visually impressive set pieces strung together with the narrative consistency of wet haddock. It's not awful - it's just really weird. It could have been boosted to 7/10 with an alternative title such as, "Brad Pitt Is In A Car Chase On The Moon" or perhaps simply, "Brad Pitt And The Space Monkeys". A missed opportunity indeed.
