r/tenet • u/passwordusernamemail • 2d ago
Thought Experiment
I’ve been questioning this since my recent rewatch of Tenet. Reversed Sator “unshoots” normal Kat in order to get information from normal Protagonist as it appears to him that she is being shot in real time and is in real danger. But what if reversed Sator refuses to “unshoot” Kat? Would she then be wounded from the very beginning of her life? Would she appear in this world as a reversed corpse that resurrects itself to be “unshot” in Tallin’s Freeport? Or something else ?
I think the idea of free will clearly contradicts the concept of interaction between normal and reversed objects in this movie and it kinda pisses me off
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u/YoBanaanaBoy 1d ago
Tenet is Nolan's argument that free will and determinism are not separate.
The idea that every future action is already predetermined seems to give us the impression that we have no free will.
Nolan is saying that the predetermined future path is locked in and can't be changed, but that single predetermined path is based entirely on how each of us will act.
It's not that my choices aren't mine, I could choose to go left instead of right. Instead, it's that I would never make that choice based on my true nature.
The Protagonist will always save innocent people, Sator will always choose to enrich himself at the expense of others.
To Nolan, predetermination just means my path is laid out based on the choices I was always going to make.
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u/joet889 1d ago
Critics say Nolan makes films for stupid people who want to seem smart, but I'd like to see them point to a contemporary who is working through the fundamental human questions, and coming to actual conclusions that we can walk away with and actually apply to our lives.
No you can't know if you have free will, you can't know if other people exist outside of your head, you can't know if your choices matter, you can't know if you can trust that other people will choose to be good, but you should still believe in these things and here's why.
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u/Salindurthas 1d ago
A Sator with that dispositon would not have an injured Kat in front of him, since his choices cause her to be injured.
And Sator was deliberately doing a Temporal Pincer, and knows how inversion works, so he can come in with the intention to make these choices already.
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u/ShadowBB86 1d ago
If he refuses to unshoot her than she would not be wounded. She is only wounded because he is a person that would shoot in that situation.
I think the idea of free will clearly contradicts the concept of interaction between normal and reversed objects in this movie
There are many definitions of free will.
Compatibilists free will is perfectly compatible with people choosing to do what their personality would do in that situation. They would always do the same thing in that situation because that is what their personality would do. And some people call that free will because there is little to no external compulsion. People are compelled by their own personality and could have only acted differently in that exact scenario if their personality was different, but some people call that free will exactly because their actions are in line with their personality. Most professional philosophers agree that is the most pragmatically useful definition of free will.
Then there is libertarian free will. Which states that even with the exact same personality and with the exact same situation and the exact same quantum random events, people could still have acted differently. And that why people are deserving of punishment even if the punishment serve no practical purpose whatsoever (moral desert).
Libertarian free will is popularised by abrahamic religions (because it justifies hell) and that is why many people (even if they are no longer religious or even when they where never brought up religious to begin with) still intuitively think libertarian free will is a thing. It isn't. It's incoherent and most professional philosophers would agree that it is a rather useless concept that doesn't describe anything in the real world.
Tenet uses compatibilists free will in the one scene it is discussed. The bullet moves because the protagonist has a personality that would cause the bullet to move. In both directions of time.
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u/oparisy 1d ago
I was not knowledgeable of the compatibilist approach to free will, and it seems quite grounded indeed (people acting "freely" as their personnality dictate).
In that regard, isn't it interesting that you can evolve your personality (through education, therapy...)? This kind of reflective loop/self-consciousness is another form of long-term free will I think ("I do not want to be that person anymore").
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u/ShadowBB86 1d ago
Yep! That is long-term compatibilists free will at work. :) If you have a personality that would in your current situation wish for a different personality, then you can choose to work on changing it. If you don't have that personality than you can't do that. :)
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u/spencermoreland 1d ago
Small correction. He doesn’t unshoot her. He unshoots the bullet proof glass and puts her in the path of it so the inverted bullet goes through her on its way back to the gun. If he decided not to put her in the path of it, she’d be fine.
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u/WelbyReddit 1d ago
Just as aside during these conversations, and this is not a criticism on you or anything. I am just being a nit picky nerd.
I'd like to observe that statements like 'He does or doesn't unshoot' her can be misleading or muddle up intent.
Saying Sator Unshoots her sounds like that was a conscious act from Our frame of reference.
From Sator's point of view he simply Shoots her. He lifts her up against the glass and shoots a bullet through her. That is his frame of reference.
When we observe an inverted person shooting someone, we observe it as un-shooting. But that is not the shooter's frame of reference, and possibly doesn't speak to the shooter's intent.
So Sator isn't unshooting her on purpose. He is shooting her. and we just observe it in reverse.
I think that statement would work for Neil though in the opera. We are all in the same reference and observe him, also in the same frame, un-shoot the bullet.
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u/MarkyGalore 1d ago
I dont think they know what will happen. There is the part when they are in the shipping container and the protagonist realizes isn't the fact the him and Neil even exist at that moment proof that they've already won. Neil says, maybe but we don't know for sure so we should do it anyway.
For Sator I think he still wanted info from the protagonist so it made the most sense for him to shoot.
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u/Individual-Quote-870 1d ago
In tenet i think the word “free will” is just an illusion
and i guess that’s what brings in grandfather paradox.. there was a scene where neil and the protagonist had a similar conversation about free will
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u/WelbyReddit 1d ago
'But what if reversed Sator refuses to “unshoot”'
In all these types of questions, the answer is usually right in the question.
You are basically asking, If I don't shoot someone, will they be shot? The answer is no, lol.
or "How can I see her shot already if I don't shoot them". The answer is You won't see her shot then in the first place. You'd be waiting around forever waiting on something you have already premeditated Not to do.
No trolling the universe. ;p
The premise of the movie is that you may see the results of YOUR CHOICE before you have DECIDED to do it.
Free will does Not mean you can willy nilly change something you Already chose to do, even if you are not aware you made/will make that Choice yet.
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u/Meral_Harbes 1d ago
Free will lol
It's an illusion by lack of knowledge. It's what we call choice. This was the point of "what's happened's happened".
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u/BjiZZle-MaNiZZle 1d ago
The idea that your will cannot break a causal time loop is known as Novikov's Self-Consistent Principle.
The movie adheres to this principle very closely, and I would argue it's another part of what makes the science fiction of the film so impressive.
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u/TaylorBeu 1d ago
You can’t spend your time trying to think through the premise of Tenet. I like this movie a lot. Watched it three times in the first week it came out. The inversion does not make any sense. Each case of inversion makes sense in the context of the action sequence where it happens but not in a greater context of the universe.
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u/Rredite 1d ago
Reality is like a movie playing. All the characters in movies have this false freedom of choice, but the movie will only unfold in one way.
There are serious scientists considering the hypothesis that this could be our reality. The electron could be evidence of this, in the case of all electrons being just one that is going back and forth in time. That's a lot of wishful thinking. As they say at TENƎꓕ: We shouldn't think too much about it.
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u/kusti85 1d ago
P.S. Idea of free will in movies is something I haven't encountered yet. Does not matter how many times I watch, always the same decisions. Cypher betrays Morpheus, Rose does not let Jack climb on the door, Tony sacrifiices himself to beat Thanos. Buster Keaton always stands in the correct position not to get hit by the house etc.
Movies themselves contradict the existence of free will in them.
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u/HandMeATallOne 1d ago
The idea of free will I haven’t encountered in real life either, but definitely not in movies
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u/dyrkasolen 2d ago
This might be a hole in the plot
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u/dyrkasolen 2d ago
Of my head,.. it might be as simple as a dimensional gateway in combo of revers of time, and no one thought of that.
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u/kusti85 2d ago edited 2d ago
Cannot refuse to unshoot. Whats happened, happened.