Lucy-A Tale of Living Data

What are we, really?  That is the question ultimately asked in the new film Lucy, written and directed by French director Luc Bessen.  What are we really?  Wrestling with the "hard problem", "what is consciousness", Lucy coyly suggests an answer revealed by the adventures of the titular character.  Initially starting out as a girl who has bad choices in boyfriends, she ends up being a drug mule for some shady Asian organized crime types.  But this new stuff ends up getting inadvertently released into her system in doses far bigger than intended. And, rather than killing her, she begins to change.  Her brain is "accelerated" and begins using more and more of its potential.  This not only has the effect of making her smarter, her mind and body begin to work faster.  She begins developing powers of various kinds, at first physically improved, but becomes sublime as apparent control over spacetime.  However, she also feels her humanity is slipping away.  Eventually, she reaches out to Professor Samuel Norton (Morgan Freeman), a cutting edge neurologist, for some guidance.  After a certain point, she's in unknown territory, even for him.

I'm not going to tell you how it all ends, of course.  But this is one mad, wild ride.  Some have made hay of its improbable "science", but like most protests, it misses the point, as the movie is less about rigorous scientific accuracy and more about an ongoing cinematic thought experiment.  What if you could accelerate a person like that?  What would happen?  There have been similar explorations.  Cinematically, it would be Bradley Cooper's character in Limitless, but really, a closer approximation would be Dr. Manhattan from Alan Moore's The Watchmen.  For those who don't know, Manhattan is a scientist who was involved in an accident which utterly transforms him into something post human.  He seems to lose touch with his humanity and his ability to "feel", to connect, though we find out later, some capacity does indeed seem to still be there.  Likewise with Lucy.  She believes herself slipping away, but there are moments where it does seem something human is still there nonetheless.  However, the film does seem to take the opinion on the question on "What are we?", in that it seems to assert we are all "living data" somehow sentient, that consciousness is an emergent property from information itself and that our highest evolved form will be as pure information.

Not sure I buy that.  I think the "soul", which is what we are really talking about, is something far more sublime and profound than that, and probably is above and beyond mere data crunching.

Still, it is an interesting though.

Mad, a bit daring, different.  Lucy is a thinker's summer science fiction actioner.