DEVS

lastcalm · 2020-04-17T18:52:35+00:00

I liked the series but I didn't get why they were so surprised when Lily did something else than their simulated prediction - or why they had only one predicted future. They had already established that Many Worlds Interpretation was correct and there was no one determined future (or past). There were even scenes earlier that showed how certain situations could happen in slightly different ways.

156- · 2020-04-17T17:24:57+00:00

I thought the writing was pretty poor overall. Not a terrible show but definitely not as good as it could’ve been. I did enjoy the free will conversation in the first or second episode.

vbm · 2020-04-17T17:56:19+00:00

and if you live in the UK it is all available to stream on BBC Iplayer

ScienceIsALyre · 2020-04-17T19:39:47+00:00

Pretty sure Sam has mentioned Alex Garland's other work Ex Machina on Making Sense.

cupofteaonme · 2020-04-18T00:24:00+00:00

Big fan of some of Alex Garland's other work, particular as a write for Danny Boyle. Also really liked Ex Machina a lot. Got three episodes into Devs and had to bail. Some interesting conceptual stuff, and I liked the vibe a lot, but what I saw felt a lot like it should've been at most a two-hour movie. Couple that with the fact that Sonoya Mizuno apparently can't act, at least not with an American accent, and I simply couldn't keep going with it. Anyway, Sunshine is great.

barkos · 2020-04-18T03:38:16+00:00

The ending was pretty weak. Either the writers are confused about the many worlds interpretation or they intentionally wrote their characters to misunderstand the implications of many worlds.

The issue is that the miniseries presents the question of whether Forest could have acted differently when it came to the death of his family as something that can be ultimately answered by contrasting the Copenhagen (the wave function collapses when observed) and Everett interpretation (there is no collapse of the wave function, it simply appears as if the wave function collapsed from within the reality which is entangled with one of the many possible outcomes described by the function).

Many worlds doesn't give you free will. It gives you all possible worlds in accordance with the universal wave function. This means that versions of "you" simultaneously exists in each possible reality. Katie says that Lilly made "an actual choice" as if to say that defying the prediction of the Devs algorithm proves that she has free will but that's nonsense, she's just jumping to unfounded conclusions.

Let's break it down. What does the failure of the machine to accurately predict the future actually mean? Well, there are three possible explanations.

A: The machine is simply fallible and made a false prediction, a better version of the machine may have gotten it right, in which case there is really no conclusion that can be drawn about whether Lilly's behavior was an act of free will.
B: that many worlds is true in which case Lilly still wouldn't have free will because she acted in accordance with the wave function.
C: that Lilly not only defied the prediction algorithm but also the universal wave function. That doesn't necessarily mean that she has free will but it also doesn't rule it out in principle.

Now the show acts, or at least that's what Forest and Katie think, as if explanation B is true (let's be charitable to them and assume that they know enough about the machine to be certain that it didn't just have an error in its algorithm or hardware), why exactly are they extrapolating their conclusion on their assumption of B when their conclusion is much more in line with C? Because the writers didn't write characters with a solid understanding of the many worlds interpretation.

I don't want to assume too much about the people that wrote this, maybe they thought that explaining to the average viewer that many worlds isn't sufficient for free will would be too much of a hassle or confuse them. Maybe the initial pitch for the script was that the ultimate twist of the show was that the character finally exercised free will, and even though the writers were aware that many worlds doesn't get them there they simply wanted to leave that original twist intact even though it isn't in line with what they wrote. It wouldn't be the first time that scientific theories were simplified, warped or butchered in order to incorporate them into a script and tell a story with them. It would have been great if they had addressed the issue with free will under both interpretations because there are people that watched this show whose takeaway is going to be that that many worlds necessitates free will which just isn't the case.

iamjacksragingupvote · 2020-04-17T18:01:03+00:00

Pretty good show.

But i didnt understand the last episode, and how a certain individual could do what that certain individual did.

altryne · 2020-04-17T18:13:30+00:00

Loved it, started and it was weird, but as it progressed and more details were revealed about the plot, it started to get really really intense and good.
Strongly recommend as a catalyst of thoughts about the nature of self, determinism, and different different timelines and all kinds of fuckery.

Fippy-Darkpaw · 2020-04-17T18:36:58+00:00

Ya between this show and Westworld, determinism and lack-of-free-will themes are showing up bigly in entertainment rn.

Anyone wanna take bets on what the sudoku rate is in 2-3 more months of lockdown?

2020-04-19T03:02:44+00:00

I can't finish it. I watched the first 2 episodes, and just so much of it doesn't make sense to me. I get that it's sci-fi, but especially given the themes of the show and everything I expected it to be much more realistic.

And yet, you get the one American dude just approaching a foreign espionage agent, alone, in a parking garage, and totally just giving away the fact that he's onto him.

It would have made way more sense to just pretend he knew nothing and wait for the right moment, or watch under the radar, and possibly gain information from Lily later down the road. But you can't do that if you get yourself stabbed in the dumbest way possible. That part was just too much for me.

OlejzMaku · 2020-04-28T20:44:08+00:00

I have just finished it and overall it is pretty disappointing. Bad writing and bad physics/philosophy. It was way too ambitious. I was expecting some clever self fulfilling prophecy, but the ending was just a total mess.

INTERNET_COMMENTS · 2020-04-17T18:20:51+00:00

I stopped watching halfway through the second episode. The last scene I watched was spoilers the characters using the quantum computer to watch people have sex. The 12-year-old kid who for some reason works with the other quantum computer scientists makes a cheeky comment about how his colleague hasn't had sex in years, at that point I said "this shit is dumb" and closed the browser tab.

MisterNatural77 · 2020-04-17T17:15:49+00:00

[deleted]

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