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Emmanuel Kant quite famously explored the capabilities of human reasoning and pointed out the great error of man; the propensity to allow our curiosity to move us towards questions that our limited human understanding can never answer. Worse still is our consistent response is to act upon a mere guess of what we think is true. I think therefore I am is not enough; we must know why we think; what caused us to think; and of course what will happen when we stop thinking. In other words; why do we exist? Is there a god? What happens in death?
Our failures to answer these questions have spurned an almost obsessive addiction to uncover every knowable fact in the universe. Everything must have an answer. I secretly think that we think the more questions we answer, the further we get to answering these big questions. I wont say I am above my fellow man, I want to know this stuff also, but maybe these things will never be discovered, maybe they can’t
The Monolith in Stanly Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey has that feel, it can’t be understood, but that doesn’t stop us from moving in some random direction. What I mean is that it may actually be doing nothing, but just the presence of an unknowable thing forces our “evolution”. Curiosity brings us out of our dogmatic slumber.
The monkeys in this film are just hanging out, they are just living life. Bam! Something that isn’t part of familiar life appears, what is it they all wonder? No one has a clue, but apparently there is more to life than there was before. Time to test these new limits of life. Turns out there is more to life than just bananas, a lot more. The bone sailing through the air suddenly turning into a spaceship, this symbolizes our transformation from a primitive ape to sophisticated thinkers.
I don’t really buy that idea that we have advanced much, because it’s impossible to prove that our life today is superior to that of the apes, past or present. The reporter asked the question, does HAL have real emotions? I don’t know is the only answer, because that’s all we ever really know. The unmovable slightly majestic Monolith may be instructing us to voyage to Jupiter for whatever reason, but when was the last time you took advice from a rock?
I mean its slightly ridicules to believe that this black slab of something caused any sort of evolution in our thinking. We want to believe that there are answers. We want to believe something will instruct us, but why should that be the case? It’s just as likely, and impossible to prove otherwise that it’s all just random chaos. We just reach different stages of life, no better no worse, no rhyme or reason.
I don’t really buy that idea that we have advanced much, because it’s impossible to prove that our life today is superior to that of the apes, past or present. The reporter asked the question, does HAL have real emotions? I don’t know is the only answer, because that’s all we ever really know. The unmovable slightly majestic Monolith may be instructing us to voyage to Jupiter for whatever reason, but when was the last time you took advice from a rock?
Small tangent, I loved the soundtrack to this film. In the vacuum of cold dark space, my mind waltzed from one idea to the next in tune of some uplifting classical music. It felt almost like unhinged madness. The great cosmic joke would be to pair eternal darkness with elevator music.
Space Odyssey has plot that really is impossible to take entirely seriously, but yet not so far fetched that I would rule it out of the realm of possibilities. I digress, but I fear that I find that this Monolith is sort of in on the joke against humanity. I mean how silly would a supposedly intelligent race have to be in order to follow a telegraph from a big rock? So desperate are we for answers, that we ignore the possibility that maybe we should just be satisfied with our life as it stands. In this way the Monolith can be like religion, it’s something that supposedly has answers, and answers are what we humans want. We want the answers so bad that we often ignore reason to the point of a crusade, a holocaust, a space odyssey. We don’t know what’s going to really happen but we are curious, and that’s enough to act.