“Story of Your Life” critiques the notion of free will by depicting aliens, called heptapods, who experience their entire life simultaneously rather than sequentially from birth to death. Because the heptapods already know what they are going to do, they do not have the ability to make choices. The heptapods’ deterministic viewpoint is embedded in their written language, Heptapod B. In Heptapod B, sentences and even paragraphs can be read instantaneously and in any direction, suggesting that concepts like “end” and “beginning” or “cause” and “effect” are interchangeable. In the science-fictional world of “Story of Your Life,” the ability to experience time as a simultaneity is reflected in Heptapod B. The humans who learn Heptapod B become able, like the heptapods, to remember their futures as well as their past. In so doing, they lose their ability to make choices other than the ones they “remember” making in the future.
Notably, since humans who learn Heptapod B can remember their own futures, this means that they know what will happen to everyone they know as well. For this reason, when Dr. Louise Banks (a linguist who learns Heptapod B) has conversations with humans who don’t know Heptapod B, she compares them to actors who are reading from a script without knowing it. And even though Louise knows from “remembering” the future that she’ll eventually get divorced from her future husband, Gary, and that their daughter will die at a young age, she chooses to pursue a relationship with Gary and have a child with him anyway. Because there is only one possible future, the future that speakers of Heptapod B remember, no one has the ability to exercise free will, to go off-script. In fact, Louise muses that if a person already knows their future, they may actually feel “a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation” to make the very choices that will lead to that known outcome. “Story of Your Life” thus suggests that humans believe they have free will only because of how they experience time, from past to future, and not because they ever have the power to do something other than what they are destined to do.
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Free Will Quotes in Story of Your Life
There’s a joke that I once heard a comedienne tell. It goes like this: “I’m not sure if I’m ready to have children. I asked a friend of mine who has children, ‘Suppose I do have kids. What if when they grow up, they blame me for everything that’s wrong with their lives?’ She laughed and said, ‘What do you mean, if’”
That’s my favorite joke.
The existence of free will meant that we couldn’t know the future. And we knew free will existed because we had direct experience of it. Volition was an intrinsic part of consciousness.
Or was it? What if the experience of knowing the future changed a person? What if it evoked a sense of urgency, a sense of obligation to act precisely as she knew she would?
When you are three, you’ll pull a dishtowel off the kitchen counter and bring that salad bowl down on top of you. I’ll make a grab for it, but I’ll miss. The edge of the bowl will leave you with a cut, on the upper edge of your forehead, that will require a single stitch. Your father and I will hold you, sobbing and stained with Caesar dressing, as we wait in the emergency room for hours.
I reached out and took the bowl from the shelf. The motion didn’t feel like something I was forced to do. Instead, it seemed just as urgent as my rushing to catch the bowl when it falls on you: an instinct that I felt right in following.
Freedom isn’t an illusion; it’s perfectly real in the context of sequential consciousness. Within the context of simultaneous consciousness, freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion; it’s simply a different context, no more or less valid than the other. It’s like that famous optical illusion, the drawing of either an elegant young woman, face turned away from the viewer, or a wart-nosed crone, chin tucked down on her chest. There’s no “correct” interpretation; both are equally valid. But you can’t see both at the same time.
