Anyone can make something disappear, but the real trick is to bring it back. There are three steps in any illusion:

• the pledge ( I am going to make this disappear )
• the turn ( how I am going to do it, the act )
• the prestige ( I will bring it back )

Borden and Angier are two magicians excelling in their craft in the movie The Prestige. They at one point performed together wowing the crowd with their tricks. But during one performance something goes wrong, for some reason a wrong knot is tied and Angiers wife is unable to escape her capsule and drowns. Angier is confused (“how could he not know?”) they’ve done this trick many times before. They split their act and go on their separate ways, but with a quest to outdo the other.

The crowd has seen everything that the magicians can do, they want something extraordinary, something that cannot be done, they want the impossible. Borden attempts to perform the bullet catch. A simple trick but a dangerous one. Angier sees right through the act and puts an actual bullet in the muzzle, “which knot did you tie?” a disguised Angier asks. Borden knowing he is going to be shot flinches and loses a couple fingers when Angier shoots him. Angier seeks the secret of the transported man trick. How do you do it? Cutler says its simple you use a double. That’s too easy Angier rebukes, it can’t be that simple. He ends up going to Colorado to find a true wizard Nicholai Tesla, and Telsa builds him the machine to perform the transported man trick.

He is no longer concerned about his lost wife; he is more interested in learning Borden’s secret. How does he do it? In that tank of about 1,510,727,825 molecules of water in which she could not escape, he cannot escape the fact that Borden has bested him.

If you consider the collection of water as one substance, no matter how far you break the collection down the water is water a single substance. Descartes would suggest that two substances are really distinct when each of them can exist apart from the other. Descartes is probably one of the only philosophers that is not an atheist but has faith in God. God exists distinctly from man, and Descartes would argue that there is a dualism between mind and body. They are two parts of a whole but are atomic in their distinct existence. The body has several parts, the hands, the feet, the torso, the head, and everything else. Each feel and sense, however when one senses the mind there are not parts of it coalescing together to make one substance, it is one substance the mind.

Being a mathematician as well as a philosopher Descartes realizes there is truth in math and no doubt. Doubt is contradictory to truth, when Descartes would wonder how he knows things how he believes things to be true he would constantly doubt what is real. Am I real? Cognito ergo sum.

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.