Analysis of Scorsese Movie Silence

Silence is a powerful 2017 film by Martin Scorcese, that pierces deeply into some interesting theological questions. Below is a discussion analyzing some of these points, between a friend and me.




Friend:

Finished it


Wow


Me:

He kept the cross.



Friend:
Yeah


Did his wife.slide it into his hand?


It was such a good movie


Its like Padres came to Japan to "save" the Japanese but the only way to save them was to give up their ego, which is the route to Buddhist salvation


And all the inherent conceptual conflicts between Christianity and Buddhism


Damn



Me:
Yes, but also more importantly than their ego, their spirit, their entire world view


It’s asking much more than taking your life, in a sense



Friend:

Yeah


True




Me:
Because they wanted to die for their beliefs, they did NOT want to live to see their beliefs die




Friend:
Such a beautiful film


Wow


Well put




Me:
But you realize at the end that he did the ultimate sacrifice


He gave up all external signs of his belief, stepped on jesus, to forever go down in history as a heretic. But he kept the cross. He kept his belief in the end


He was the first Protestant, in a sense




Friend:
Ah that's a good point




Me:
External rituals are irrelevant, as long as you stay true to your personal relationship with god


That’s why he heard jesus’ voice at that crucial moment, saying step on me, it’s okay




Friend:
Yeah! And in the end, when Jesus said I was suffering beside you in the silence




Me:
Ugh yes, fuckkkkk


In a sense he did the hardest thing


He could have disbanded his beliefs like Ferreira, or died for his beliefs


But he decided to externally disband them while internally holding on


The ultimate enslavement 2017


I’ll have to hand 2017 over to him tbh


He won that shit




Friend:
Yeah seriously

And yeah I’m assuming he had his wife give it to him

How was that movie not way more popular



Me:
Probably too deep for most


Same with birdman




Friend:
Oh hold up


What if he didn't




Me:
They both had that layered quality, like 6 different layers


Of meaning




Friend:
What if she just gave that to him


Which maybe makes it more beautiful


Like he would never jeopardize her in any way


And he never outwardly showed his faith


But she saw it in him still



Me:

Yeah, good point. They leave it up to the viewer, to add more layers of meaning


Same with birdman. Remember the ending?


There were like 4 ways you could interpret it, and each made it a completely different movie




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
I was always curious whether he kept “silently” blessing kijichiros confessions, even after


Cuz they showed one instance of him doing it silently




Friend:
I think he did




Me:
But at the same time they said the one emperor dude was watching him super closely to the end of his life and saw now Christianity


No*


And he kind of used Japan’s metaphysics against them, the same way they did against him


They were so preoccupied with external signs, so he gave that to him


But he still kind of won, while letting hem win too




Friend:
Yeah!!! You're right!!




Me:
Cuz all they wanted was to write down in history that he showed no external signs and therefore was not Christian


But he totally challenged that


Ahhhhh so many layers!!!




Friend:
Yeah!!!




Me:
The brilliance was, when I first saw it I was like man they broke him, Japanese ego death wins,


But when they show the cross at the very end


It just totally fucks WVERYTHING up


And starts adding all the layers




Friend:
Yeah and I think he thought he wasn't a Christian anymore too



Me:
Still maintaining the top layer, but adding so many more



Friend:
Bc he denounced




Me:
Also cool symbolism: if you watch closely, kijihiro and the other Japanese Christians only partially step on jesus’ face toward the end


Because they are still preoccupied with the externality




Friend:
But him dying with the cross hidden in his hand really showed that he still was, even if he didn't think he was bc of how he externally lived




Me:
But our boy puts his WHOLE foot on there, he don’t give a shit!!!




Friend:
True!




Me:
And that line at the end too: he failed in the eyes of god, or I guess, that’s between him and god.....


Then it shows the cross


AHHHHHHHH. The best.





Friend:
it's such the best one




Me:
Silence moonlight and birdman


Top 3 easily




Friend:
Yeah!


Without a doubt


Man


That was such a powerful movie


Even how is was shot


Most of the movie is silence or the sounds of nature


But when it's not silent, you almost don't want it to be


Bc the dialogue uncovers or fortells pain


And if it's not dialogue, the silence is broken by suffering


The pit or the cross on the shoreline are the worst ways to die I think


Japanese are fucked up




Me:
Yes!


The surface layer is that the Christians are doing it for their glory, the price is the suffering of others


Which is true


But a lot of the other layers Kind of subvert the Japanese

funny story idea: death

Amir Mazaheripour:

u know what would be a nice read

a guy is about to die

and he’s terrified, because he doesn’t want to vanish into nothingness, it all starts dawning on him towards the end

that everything he ever knew, loved, hoped, is all just about to be…stopped

forever

then he dies, all scared

and he BECOMES the one “mind at large”

there is only one

then he starts laughing and goes “oH YEAH, HAHAHAHA. holy shit, i forgot i was this, and i was just doing an experiment with locality”

“okay, let me dive back in, and this time, NOT get freaked out about death”

but the same thing keeps happening

he keeps diving into local neural systems

and then getting really freaked out about nothingness

and then dying and remembering that this was all an experiment, and laughing

Interesting Physical Problem

so if a system is undergoing simple harmonic motion, you can model its frequency using pi and some intrinsic constants for that system
so for a spring, its root(k/m), divided by 2pi
for an LC system, its root (1/LC), divided by 2pi
but now suppose a human being is willfully moving his index finger between two points a and b in perfect simple harmonic motion
what intrinsic constants do you use to calculate the frequency?
the cool thing about this problem is that there's two planes
the first is based on his subjectivity, so you would say "need the constants pertaining to his contingent brain in order to predict what frequency he will decide to oscillate at, at any time t"
the second plane is a bit more interesting. its like "okay, suppose you both agree on a frequency, say 2 Hz per cycle. still, HOW could you calculate that frequency based on intrinsic constants about the human? surely his bone density, size (kind of the "mass"), muscular elastic coefficients, but you still need more...he is "telling" his muscle fibers how hard to push to achieve a given frequency, so neural signal potentials need to be incorporated as well
so you'd basically model this SHM as perfectly periodic neural pulses at a magnitude A and frequency f to opposing muscle fibers in order to move the finger at a given frequency between two points
but here's the problem: the frequency that you'd be pulsing those neurons would be the same as the index finger! you can't incorporate a "source frequency" term to solve for the frequency of SHM, that's circular, you need to model it in terms of intrinsic constants, divided by 2pi....

so what are the intrinsic constants??

:D

😀

also, a separate side-investigation should concern the origin of the pi term in the frequency of any oscillating system. its like, im just dangling a pendulum here, and suddenly pi is involved? any cyclical motion, any periodic recurrence (the pulsing of an LED)...that's all pi

to me that just means time itself is intricately related to pi, and we don't really know how

people are always telling me how you can never draw a "perfect circle" in reality

but i know someone who can, my dude Father Time

he's ALWAYS drawing that shit

Climate Change Skepticism as an Opportunity for Cultural Shift

had a meditation this morning

was thinking, climate change skepticism is actually a really good opportunity for science, and global culture at large, to make a marked distinction between the truth and technical-sounding jargon

right now they are viewed as one in the same by most laypeople

thats why an argument for global warming and an argument for why the earth is flat are equally compelling to laypeople

its just a bunch of exclusive technical jargon, and that is one of the issues in truth-revealing practices such as science...it is one of the most rigorous and reliable, yet also one of the most exclusive...accessibility was never a focus, and that's led to a national crisis

one solution is education, yeah

but i wonder if there is something else, where we can finally change the language to not be as exclusive and make truths more self-evident

perhaps blockchain?

Mine-ness of Being, groundwork for a New Religion, and musings on electronic properties of materials

1. mineness religion
Let us ask the question of "what have we lost with the end of religion" from a phenomenological perspective. This can specify the question to "What spontaneously occurs during a spiritual interaction? What does one gain from it?" When one prays, repents, meditates, etc, he transitions to an attitude of astonishment, appreciation. I believe this is fundamentally an astonishment at Being itself, and the "mine-ness" of Being.

Whether approached through appealing to a superior deity that put your soul in here, or focusing on presence itself, these practices approach this fundamental astonishment at Being itself--why am I something rather than nothing....okay, my thoughts are objective consequences of objective processes, but why am I....IN this one, at this time, or said differently, why am I in this one? I could have never existed, but I just SHOWED UP in this one? Why couldn't I just never exist and then some other "self" was in this one? Who made this decision? Its the only one I'll ever get?

This is the type of "holy mood" one gets in when thinking about mineness, which religion so excellently centralized society around. And it's a nice mood. We lost that when God died, and we can occasionally still get in it here and there, maybe with some sort of deep scientific appreciation of the world, or just really pondering the chain of "holy" questions above. But we can't invoke it at the collective scale through some conceptual holy figure and organized cultural practice...everything has to be literal now, otherwise it's meaningless, and as the mineness of Being is a literal self-evident fact that we already know, there's nothing left to do, deal with it on your own time, awkward.
and so cultural practices are organized around literal stuff like resources, which probably became necessary with population increase. so what do we do?

memes? idk




2. why valence electron wavefunction delocalized?

the electrons in the valence band are localized in the bonds between the atoms in the lattice. so when we draw the wavefunction of a valence electron, and it's a wave throughout the lattice spaced relative to the atoms, why is it delocalized at all? Shouldn't it just have one peak, by some atom?

Westworld Commentary on Religion

In season 1 of Westworld, around episode 3/4, there is a scene in which Hector is speaking with Maeve about the religion of the spiritual natives. And he’s sort of describing their situation in a cryptic, indirect way. “this life is hell, the gods are in the other realm controlling us,” stuff like that.

What's interesting here is that in isolation, this sounds like random spiritual babble, but its actually true! It's just true in a way that they can't know based on their range of experiences.

The implication for me here is, what if that’s also the function of our religion, for our existence. A cryptic formula of what’s going on, but not too specific, because we can’t know all the details (our nervous systems leave us with a limited sensory horizon). And then scientists take it super literally in order to "disprove it," not realizing that they've completely missed the deeper truth by approaching the language the wrong way.

This is my perspective on religion in general, so seeing it manifest in Westworld was rather exciting.

Some Scattered Thoughts on Season 2 Episode 4 of Black Mirror

I would write this into a cohesive post but am in a bit of a crunch, so hopefully these can serve as helpful notes for someone who would like to write a thoughtpiece on this. Feel free to take, just happy to get these ideas out. I bolded the parts in particular that I thought could be nice aphorisms from the episode:



I saw ep 4 of black mirror, a truly beautiful revealing of the importance of death in the human story. with a presentist mode of existence, and the important characteristic ability that we have to "forget" (a la Nietzsche), would we really want to keep going, if we had the chance? easy to say yes now, hard to know what you'd say then.
this was the first good episode this season for me,
the importance of life's ephemeral glow.
her decision to stay with the girl into eternity was so much more heartbreaking than the option to die and preserve the meaning she lived
cheating death does not evade nothingness, if anything, it emphasizes it
sartre would have loved that episode
we live with this paradoxical yearning to both escape death and experience a type of meaning that transcends life. this episode sort of demonstrates that we can't have both, in a really beautiful way.
singularity is bullshit, technology can't "solve" existentialism.

Conversation with a friend:
i had to like, think for a while just to reconcile the emotional disturbance it left me with
thats a sign of a good ep

yeah
It's so creative, even as a premise, then to build that world, build the characters so that we care about them, and then introduce a conflict and meaningful resolution
All in 90 mins

Yes! How could they do so much in so little time!
High maintenance also is good at this in its own way
Like you know so much about everyone so quickly, from so little

Character driven plot development

But this black mirror had this kubrick-esque quality
Where even at the end, during the supposedly happy ending, you can't help but feel there is something deeply disturbing about all this when you're looking at those circulating lights at the very end
Similar type of discomfort u get during the outro to 2001 odyssey

Just like, not readily explainable, but you know there's something

This is what Heidegger called "working art"