Hacker Cinema
Next
2007 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Lee Tamahori
Las Vegas showroom magician Cris Johnson has a secret which torments him: he can see a few minutes into the future. Sick of the examinations he underwent as a child and the interest of the government and medical establishment in his power, he lies low under an assumed name in Vegas, performing cheap tricks and living off small-time gambling "winnings." But when a terrorist group threatens to detonate a nuclear device in Los Angeles, government agent Callie Ferris must use all her wiles to capture Cris and convince him to help her stop the cataclysm.
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> Can’t remember another adaptation with such a striking difference from the original.
Are we talking in general, or just PKD?
Next - with Nicholas Cage - was a film I actually enjoyed, but is a far cry from The Golden Man (short story).
I read an anecdote after Ex Machina came out about the 'freaky alternative ending' that wasn't used, which felt like a nod to the Golden Man:
"... So in that scene, what used to happen is you’d see her talking, and you wouldn’t hear, but all of a sudden it would cut to her point of view. And her point of view is completely alien to ours. There’s no actual sound; you’d just see pulses and recognitions, and all sorts of crazy stuff ..."
Congratulations, you've nailed down the Culture's biggest quandary in one sentence. The best answer I can give you is "good question." The best answer Banks could give you is spread out over an award-winning series of nine books, so it's probably worth a look.
For starters, Minds are fully aware of how big a deal mind reading is, and virtually never actually do it. A situation has to be ethically ridiculous before a Mind will even begin to consider it, we're talking "this person was brainwashed into hiding a nuke on the puppy daycare planet and we can't find it" sort of situations. This somewhat changes the question: "If the Mind could read your thoughts and predict your future actions, but hasn't, what does it mean to... " Again, the best answer I can give you is "good question." I suppose it's worth pointing out that if the mere possibility is enough to deprive you of free will, your universe is totally deterministic, the Mind doesn't have free will either, and you're all in the same boat. The Mind doesn't meaningfully have any "control" over you, since nobody has control over anything. The realization that you don't posses free will won't help you gain free will since that realization was itself inevitable and the actions you take as a result are too.
Further, if you know the Mind can perfectly predict your future actions when they scan your brain, does that change how you'll act? What if they scan your brain in secret and don't tell you so you don't know when their prediction was formed? I'm going to take an example from a source I'm sure we're all familiar with: the 2007 film Next, starring Nicolas Cage. The premise is that Mr. Cage's character can observe his own future for the next two minutes. The big caveat is that it only gives him a highly useful idea of what the future is probably like and not a faultless prediction. By the time he's done looking, the future has changed because he looked at it. The end result is that he never actually knows the future. His power is subject to the "observer effect:" the act of detecting the future caused it to change, so he only knows what the future would have been at the moment he used his ability. From then on, the actual future is different, and the only way to know how it changed is to use his ability again, which will yet again change the future. A simpler but less Cage-tastic example is detecting electrons. You can observe when photons interact with the electron, but the electron's path was altered by the photon, so good luck figuring out where it is now. You could wait for it to interact with another photon, but that will cause... and so on. Perhaps the Mind shooting a bunch of futuristic radio waves or whatever inside your skull alters your thinky bits, and the very act of detecting your mental state alters your mental state. The Mind will then extrapolate from data that was outdated by the very act of producing it, and his prediction will be wrong. How wrong? Wrong enough to matter philosophically? "Good question."
That sounds like the movie Next.
Though I've often found if you want a sense of the original, mostly imagine a book based on the complete opposite message of the film.
Spoilers...
In Minority Report (film), the protagonist does everything to save one innocent abused by the state. In the book, well, let's just say if you want a perfect society you've got to break a few eggs.
In Paycheck (film), he sides with government regulators to stop a corrupt corporation. In Paycheck (book) he sides with a corrupt corporation to take down the government.
In The Golden Man, the government hunts a powerful and dangerous mutant. In Next, the powerful mutant sides with the government to stop terrorists.
I know Dick wasn't in favor of killing cops or corrupt corporations or hunting down people who are different, but the best thing about all of those stories is that they put the protagonists in these sort of awful lifeboat ethics dilemmas, dilemmas that are apparently far too interesting to waste on film audiences.
Another movie analogy would be Next. Cris Johnson can see two minutes into the future and redo anything that has a bad outcome.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_(2007_film)