The only logical explanation is that the movie is crap. You were right. :)
Late to the party and all but I just watched this, and I think that this is basically the film version of Greg Egan’s Dust Theory, which in my opinion, is a much more apt description of what happens in this film than the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
Now, Dust Theory, as explained in Egan’s short story, Dust, and his novel Permutation City, begins with the realization that the universe and everything in it, including all of the conscious intelligences inhabiting it, can be expressed as computation. Think of the entire universe as just a very huge computer program, so that every discrete moment in the universe is derived from every discrete state in the program as it runs.
A program of course needs to run on some sort of hardware. Let’s call it the substrate of the universe. However, once you buy the idea that the universe can be expressed as computation, it’s not to imagine that the program actually has some measure of freedom from its substrate. For example, if I, in what I perceive to be the real universe, were to run the software called the Universe on some very powerful hardware, I could run it for a while, and then stop the whole thing only to resume it later. But that universe and its inhabitants would not perceive any pause in their reality even if in the real world, the suspension lasted thousands of years.
Similarly, it does not particularly matter to the Universe, where the location of the substrate is in the real world or its precise nature. I could run the program in one computer in California, pause for a few months, then continue running it in a completely different computer in Shanghai, and so on and on until it was running on a cluster on Alpha Centauri or whatever, and it would still make no difference to the universe and its inhabitants.
So far, we’ve been presuming that each time the program is suspended, its current state is simply saved and then transported to another computer where it is resumed. But why would even this be necessary? After all, each discrete state of the program is nothing but a specific arrangement of the atoms and molecules that make up the processors and memory of its substrate. Since we’ve established that time, location and specific identity of the substrate doesn’t matter, we can assume that somewhere in the real universe, at some indeterminate point in the future, some computer will be put into a state that corresponds to the next discrete moment of our Universe program through pure coincidence even though it and its operators know nothing about our Universe program. And thus our Universe program runs and continues running magically, without the need for any hardware.
Egan actually goes even further than this, stating that arbitrary interactions of matter, i.e. dust, perform computation that is sufficient to sustain everything without even needing dedicated computers. He even states that the directionality of time is irrelevant, so that in our real universe, computation might create state B of our Universe program, and then later create state A, but the Universe and its inhabitants would still experience state A first and then state B.
So what does this have to do with the movie Source Code? Well, in his novel Permutation City, one particular visionary buys into and works out the implications of dust theory. He then sets about collecting copies of software people, create an entire artificial universe for them to live in and collects enough money to rent computing capacity to run everything but for only a few moments. He reasons that this is all that is needed to kickstart the new universe as dust theory will ensure that it keeps on running and thereby guaranteeing immortality and a safe haven for the software people who backed his project.
And I think this is exactly what happens in the film. The Source Code project sets up each new fork of the universe by initially running it inside Jake’s brain but once the eight minutes are up, each fork takes on a life of its own and just keeps on running. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
I mentioned permutation city earlier. My one bug bear with his dust theory is that each ‘frame’ doesn’t need to be temporally in order. I can’t quite accept that.
Figures that someone on QT3 would have spotted the connection before me. Good call! I’m not sure what to think about the time out of order thing. I used to think the way you do, but nowadays I’m leaning why not.
I regard Permutation City as a reductio ad absurdum argument against the possibility of simulating consciousness with a computer program.
Cool, Necrothread.
Novels have been typed about the whole “hey, the original guy dies at the end, and Jake G. replaces him, so it’s not so happy an ending.” But there are further ramifications, because we just don’t know dogshit about this guy Jake replaced.
Ok, so he’s a teacher. How is a military pilot going to just sink into a teacher’s life? What if the original guy (was it Sean?) is married, and was just flirting with the girl for a little something on the side? What if he was gay? What if he has canceraids? What about Sean’s entire family - parents, siblings, maybe kids?
What if he’s actually a Russian spy? Awkward!
The real question here is why would anyone name themselves ass pennies. That’s just uncomfortable on so many levels.
Tim, allow me to fill another gap in your cultural knowledge: behold the Upright Citizens Brigade.
-Tom
Hahaha, Good lord. One more thing I would not have known had I not spent my time reading these forums.
And it’s free!
I remember really, really liking this movie when I saw it, thinking it was one of the best Sci-Fi movies I had seen in some time. I need to see it again to see if it stands up.