Source Code *spoilers here*

Just watched Source Code at the cinema - entertaining and pretty exciting. Bit cheesy at times, but the hotness of Jake made up for it. However, I didn’t get the ending. It wasn’t as complicated as Inception. In fact, it was pretty straightforward until the end. Looked it up on wikipedia and apparently it has to do with something called quantum immortality where by if one dies in a reality, it is possible to live in another reality and this process is triggered by a shift in space-time continuum.

I’ve never been very good at working out time travel related sci-fi - something like the Time Traveller’s Wife stumped me for a while after the 1st read - so I am a little tedious in working it out. My understanding of time continuum is similar to the one Doc explains to Marty in Back to the Future: time as this river flow with us swept in it; i.e. reality is explored as something linked to our actions but as an objective externality shared by many.

In SC, things are a bit different. Reality is expressed as memory/consciousness. One dead guy’s 8min residual consciousness produces a reality that is parallel and distinct to another dead guy’s 8 min residual consciousness. So there is no objective reality since you cannot prove that your reality is exactly the same as your mate’s reality. In other words, reality - the sum of space + time - is less of a space-time continuum and more of a continuum amongst many other continuums; a kind of simultaneous, cotemporaneous, plural, multi-dimensional mish-mash of the result of many people’s consciousnesses producing realities that will never meet.

Erm, it’s something like this. I’m not really sure. I did read a New Scientist article about the problem with the question of whether artificial intelligence - robots - have consciousness is that it is impossible to prove one is not the only conscious being amongst a world of zombies.

mind boggling.

So SC is not the traditional kind of time travel like in Back to the Future - however, Jake was kind of travelling across time because he was travelling across different consciousnesses. He was going from one continuum to the next. Or that he created a whole new time-space continuum - reality - that emerged from the sum of his consciousness + another guy’s consciousness?

Bowie’s kid is damn clever.