Just Finished Reading: Terminator and Philosophy – I’ll be Back, therefore I Am edited by Richard Brown and Kevin S Decker

I am, as most of you will know, a huge fan of the Terminator ‘franchise’ of movies and TV series. So it will come as no surprise that I jumped at the opportunity to read about some of the ideas behind James Cameron’s original ideas and their offspring. Of course many of these ideas are deeply philosophical – if not exactly anything particularly original. The most obvious point brought up in the movies is about machine intelligence. As Reese explain in the first movie regarding Skynet – “They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence and decided our future in a micro-second” – or words to that effect. So there are several articles about that aspect. My particular favourite however are those dealing with the other major aspect: Time travel and the possibility of changing the past (or the future) which, quite naturally, leads on to discussions of fate and free will. Some of the temporal mechanics is rather mind-bending and I did have to slow things down and read a few passages more than once – but it all made sense in the end. The two things to remember of course is that ‘Judgement Day is inevitable’ – though it can seemingly be delayed – and no matter how many killer robots (or protectors) you send back you can’t seem to change things very much or for very long. Tagged on to all this is the obvious question of where exactly are these Terminators coming from? Does that mean that the future already exists in some form or other? Surely it must if the cyborgs live there, right? Also, rather than repeatedly failing to stop its own destruction at the hands of humanity, does Skynet merely create other worlds and other timelines where different versions of itself sends back robots into our world? As John Conner said in the last movie: ‘This isn’t the future my mother warned me about’. Is that because of the meddling of Skynet (and the Resistance) in The Sarah Conner Chronicles?

I do love thinking about all this sort of thing. If you are as sad as me in that respect then this book is most definitely you. If you read it carefully you might even find out why we cry (cringe worthy moment par excellence!) Highly recommended but, be warned, it might make you watch all four films back-to-back like I did last weekend……..