Nothing Ever Stops Existing

Summary by Krater

This video examines how three narratives—Pauline Oliveros's last breath, Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life, and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five—explore deterministic universes through teleological versus causal understandings of time and memory.

From the video

Answers: How do Devs, Story of Your Life, and Slaughterhouse-Five explore determinism and time?

• Determinism vs free will
• Teleological vs causal time perception
• Deep listening and auditory memory
• Alien language and perception of time
• Quantum mechanics and non-determinism

What it concludes

• Pauline Oliveros exhaled her final breath into a paper bag before her death, which was later preserved as an art installation by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer.
• Charles Babbage argued in the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise that the atmosphere preserves every sound and action ever made, acting as an eternal historian.
• Alex Garland's Devs and Ted Chiang's Story of Your Life present deterministic universes where the future is fixed and every event has a predetermined cause.
• Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five treats time simultaneously, where Billy Pilgrim's unstuckness in time renders cause and effect obsolete.
• Heisenberg and Bohr shattered the classical deterministic view of physics by introducing quantum uncertainty and non-determinism at the subatomic level.