Phil Conners, the charismatic weatherman from Pittsburg has an annual assignment, to visit the small town of Punxsutawney and forecast the potential of an early spring alongside another weatherman named Phil, Phil the groundhog. Not really feeling it, Conners goes through the motions and is somewhat smarmy in his demeanor towards the people of Punxsutawney and basically can’t wait to leave.
However the next day, Phil is stuck in a time loop in the movie Groundhog Day. He is able to see the day unfold each day and all the events are the same. When he wakes up to start the day, he is already aware of the sequence of events that are going to take place. With this knowledge he has the ability to take chance out of the equation because he knows exactly what is going to happen before it does, that’s a good skill to have. Except he discovers Rita.
He thinks he can figure her out, give the responses to her inquiries or provide the right sort of image of what persona makes him up that will attract her to him. But she’s no dummy, she is more than what Phil thinks she is, and he soon realizes that she is just what he has been missing.
Each day that Phil goes through the day could be considered a “slide” so to speak of the collection of events that make up the experience. Since he is stuck in the day, his permutations of what can happen are static, they will happen the same each time, where he can manipulate the outcome of the circumstance because he knows what will happen, and if he does not get the result he desires, he can wait till the next day where he wakes up in bed hearing the same Sonny Bono song “I got you babe”.
Henri Bergson studied the consciousness of experience and presented his concept of la durée, duration ( le voyage n’est jamais terminé, il change de décor ). He studied on the continental side of philosophy and argued against Kant that humans do in fact have free will in this reality of space and time. Opposed to Wittgenstein’s take that the world is the case, and we are predestined to find meaning with use of understanding by making things as simple as they can. The complex are just composed of the simple, if we understand the simple than we can understand the complex. To understand we must refine our language.
Russel said this pertaining to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus:
“The first requisite of an ideal language would be that there should be one name for every simple, and never the same name for two different simples. A name is a simple symbol in the sense that it has no parts which are themselves symbols. In a logically perfect language nothing that is not simple will have a simple symbol.”
But life is not a single frame nor is it simple, life is a permutation of many frames and many possibilities. It is a pool of potential and each cause and effect ripples into more cause and effect until it propagates to its destiny. I’d like to think that IF in fact we do recycle our essence, our being, our soul in a karma sense, then I would have to believe that eventually our energy will once again meet its destiny.
Author: admin
Obviously my interests include philosophy. I think thinking and thought are the beginning of every great thing. It’s how we understand and perceive the world. Periodically I’ll change things up and blog about something math or computer science related or even a blog about mythology. I am not political, trendy, or savvy, but I do like a good story. That is why I try and find a movie clip that hints or encompasses what I want to blog about. Sometimes the relevance is there, sometimes it’s a reach and I just really love the movie that I put in the post. The intent and purpose of my blog is to make you think, make me think and together our thoughts can be shared in a collection of material.