In the film, Minority Report, the forever-questioned
notion of free will versus fate is played out a number of ways. In addition
to fate being a large portion of the movie, fate being an invisible
force that encompasses our actions and consequences, free will is also
a portion that suggests fate is determination of the way things go is
not always necessarily imbedded into stone. As for Spielberg, his position
is clearly that even though fate has its influence free will in the
end is a turning point for fate to take a new turn. Imagine that, knowing
your future is a tunnel, by the end you have a road that you choose.
However, if fate is a deepened pathway that a person is inevitably befallen
to adhere to, that person should have it all in his control to alter
fate. Another question of fate is if fate is true, under what circumstances
are our paths and choice choosen? Does every little action or cognition
have fate to thank for what happen? This is how I feel that fate is
not truly in effect. Of course though in the free will notion it is
true that every choice we make has its ultimate culmination or effect
consequence. To understand this process I would like to make gesticulations
on a number of examples. Lets take a child whose parents both decided
to drink all through their and their kid's life. If their child decided
to drink at a young age the likelihood that the kid would become an
alcoholic is more than that of a child whose parents did not drink.
That would seem like fate except that the parents made that choice to
drink. Take race for example, a child is born into certain ethnic background
solely because the parents decided that there separate or same race
would be given to their offspring. In light of these cases people might
not have as much control as they thought. However, their precedents
had plenty of control in those consequences. Making choices also have
their own way of locking into an inevitable course. If you plant flowers
or plants and decide to take care of them, they will grow into whatever
they may have been on the packet. Yet would they have been there if
that person decided not to plant them? Of course not, unless someone
else had made the choices to grow and nurture the exact same plant in
the exact same place. In this light I would like to give fate a better
definition, all choices at all times being completely free will, will
have their own hidden paths or channel. Meaning that all choices may
or may not have their desired or undesired effects but they will unfold
certain paths to which choice was chosen.
In Spielberg's film, he does uncover the possibility of changing fate
will free will. By knowing you or someone else's fate you can alter
the future to your own liking. This is exactly the Pre-Crimes purpose.
The Pre-Cogs unveil the future while the Pre-Crime technician's work
to stop this future from happening by interfering with the "crime-scene".
Throughout the movie it appears that if one person has an idea of his
future, he has the ability to alter that seems embedded in stone. So
if one were capable of seeing all, then he or she would be able to make
just decisions and judgments to their advantage. When people speak of
thinking before you act, that is just another hint that even if a person
might be locked into an evitable future that one has the ability to
think of what consequences can occur due to specific actions. Being
locked into the sometimes inevitable will not always be the final say.
Sometimes it is for the better of us, sometimes the worst decision we
could have ever chosen. Take if form me, there are all kinds of ups
and downs, I try to save my ups for later. "Later is greater, by
far." I might not be the only one who said this, but I aim for
this.
By: Justin V.