Blade Runner: The Final Cut screens at Central Cinema on November 2.
Blade Runner: The Final Cut screens at Central Cinema November 2-6.

Blade Runner was completed in 1982, but is set in the month we have just entered, November of 2019. In this future, Los Angeles—the location of the entire film—is a sprawling megacity (a billion people?) that has somehow continued capitalism after ecological catastrophe. There is no government in this city, but a massive police force and corporations. One corporation is Tyrell, which manufactures synthetic humans who are basically slaves in space colonies. These androids are banned from planet earth. If they are not in one of the Offworlds, or expanding corporate adventures in deep space, they are supposed to be dead. The stuff of many new articles is a comparison of its vision of November, 2019, to the real November, 2019 we are now in. Most examine what the film got right, and what it got wrong. And the general opinion is that the film got a lot of things wrong.

But the film's makers did the best they could. They examined all of the trends in their time, the early 1980s, and predicted where they would end, or how they would evolve, in 40 years. Millions of dollars went into this work, great artistic minds contributed to its vision of the future, and yet, this future is very different from the future that arrived today, November 1, 2019.

What I want to consider in this post is why we are doomed to get the future wrong. In Blade Runner, there are no smartphones, no internet, no financialization, no investment backs. Much of the future was not available to Ridley Scott, the film's director, and his team. LA in 2019 is on fire. LA in 2019 has a huge Chicano population. LA in 2019 is not industrial nor does it produce space-banished androids.


I must now turn to Laplace's demon. This fiction was invented in 1814 by the French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace.

The basic idea is this:

We may regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its past and the cause of its future. An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom; for such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.
This kind of universe is called deterministic. It's also Baruch Spinoza's universe, and also Albert Einstein's block universe. It makes perfect sense. The demon, which is really an intellect, should know all that will happen by knowing all that has happened.

You are, in a sense, damned if you do, and damned if you don't. Spinoza believed that free will was nothing more than an illusion. Free will was like a thrown stone concluding that it itself had decided to fly. The 17th century German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz spent a great deal of intellectual energy trying to escape Spinozian determinism. But this was very difficult to do because, after all, the mathematization of objects in motion had proved to make their future movements knowable. We call this the Newtonian universe.

As it turns out, Leibniz, was closer to being right than Spinoza. The reason why is explained by an error or missing element in the logic of Lapace's thought experiment. The thing that's missing from the fiction of the intellect that knows everything that's happening in the universe is the expenditure of energy. You can't just know things without a cost that's paid in the currency of the second law of thermodynamics. Memory is, after all, heat. And heat is the source of time.

Information that's about something doesn't come for free. The tracking of all of the events in the universe requires two things: storage and the ability to analyze what's stored. This retention and computation demands a system or organ that is highly ordered; meaning, that is maintained in a condition of very low entropy. And anything that is ordered in this way, demands lots of energy because it must constantly work against the very high probability of being in a state of equilibrium, high entropy. Memorizing (storing and recalling) events is very improbable. To remember nothing is very probable. This is your much lamented tears in the rain.

Tracking all of the forces that set nature into motion without inputs of power is mere magic. The second law of thermodynamics cannot be violated. You need energy to avoid dissipation. You need energy to see (keep track of) the unfolding future. And the more future there is, the more information you need, and, therefore, the more power you must extract from your surroundings. At the scale of the universe, energy consumption would cause a universe-wide destabilizing effect. The intellect becomes a supercluster-scale black hole. Nothing can escape from its will to know more about all that is happening with all of the bits and pieces of experience. The future that might have been going one way, is now going another because of the presence of this ever-growing black hole of an intellect.

What this means is that the idea of a deterministic (Spinozian) universe is correct, but to prove this fact is to transform the universe's thermodynamic values radically. The future, then, could only be re-determined by Lapace's demon. And so, the universe is determined (the future has already happened), but there is no way of observing this time-scape, this block universe, without changing everything. This pretty much amounts to free will or an open future. The energy expended on making Blade Runner was negligible. The universe did not even notice this movie.