Terminator and Philosophy: I'll Be Back, Therefore I Am

I found out about this series in my Philosophy class (the professor wrote a chapter in a different book), and I thought it looked interesting. It is. Very. The essays are divided into categories, like "Life After Humanity and Artificial Intelligence" and "The Ethics of Termination." Some of the essays are funny, some (not too many) almost require an advanced degree to understand (mostly the one on ambiguity). This book raised some interesting questions, that's for sure. Who knew that John Connor's entire existence was a paradox? Overall, great read.

I purchased this book shortly after seeing Terminator: Salvation because I was looking for a stimulating examination of the time travel dilemma presented in the Terminator film narrative as well as a good philosophical discourse about machines and theories of conscious thought and artificial intelligence. This book is a compilation of essays written by several different authors that explore and debate several philosophical ideas as they are applicable to the Terminator films and provide several direct examples and quotes from the films as their basis of rational argument which are often very interesting, provocative and enjoyable to read. My biggest criticism with the text occurs in section 3 entitled "Changing The Past" in which the authors attempt to debate how the plot in the Terminator films simply could not have happened because of two main metaphysical arguments they conjecture. The first called "The Bad Timing Problem" which argues that Kyle Reese goes back in time through the Time Displacement device shortly after the Arnold T-800 Terminator and that he could not have stopped him because the T-800 would have gone back first, terminated Sarah Connor, and therefore instantaneously changed the future and Reese would no longer have existed to go back because of the so-called "Butterfly Effect" in which changes to the past are rippled throughout time. To demonstrate this they use an example of a shiny new nail which if dropped into a temporal displacement field and having traveled back 100 years into the past would instantaneously appear to be old and rusted (because of entropy and the second law of thermodynamics) using what they describe as "time compression" which is similar to Bill and Ted spontaneously willing an object to appear out of thin air as long as they remember to remind themselves to send the objects back to themselves at that precise moment in time later on. However, the mere fact that John Connor exists and Kyle Reese goes back is proof positive that Skynet had failed its objective. Similar to the Grandfather Paradox in Back to the Future in which Marty will be erased from existence and disappear from the photograph if he doesn't get his parents to meet which would not happen according to the Novikov self-consistency principal because even if his parents didn't meet, a divergence in the spacetime continuum would have occurred relative to the original timeline that Marty came from and he would continue exist, just not be born, in an alternate timeline and the photograph would remain unchanged. The second argument these authors conjecture is what they call the "Who Is Your Daddy?" argument. According to this argument, John Connor exists and sends Kyle Reese, his father, back to impregnate Sarah Connor so that he can exist. According to their argument this ontological paradox is an improbability that would require history to either repeat itself several times or require the convergence of 3 separate parallel timelines in whic