Line #23 Headscratchers/TheInventionOfLying


1	!! PSA: Headscratchers is a place to try and find InUniverse explanations. Try to avoid natter, going too off-topic and/or first person language. If a bullet has something you feel is incorrect, just fix it.
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4	!!! Genetics
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6	* Why does the movie adopt the stance "no lying" mean "love won't exist, and everyone has a perfect understanding of their evolutionary psychology and conciously acts on it?" Love and other emotions may be messy and difficult to measure scientifically, but that doesn't make them "lies". We aren't attracted to people with symmetrical faces or big breasts because those betray good genes; [[ShapedLikeItself we're just find those aesthetically pleasing]].
7	** In such a world, establishing relationships ''initially'' might be difficult -- you could argue that the first "I love you" in a relationship is a lie. (Maybe. If you feel like pushing it.) Also, there ''are'' lots of superficial people who, in our world, lie about their commitment, say they find you beautiful when they don't, etc -- but their automatic filtering from the dating pool by their honesty would only be a ''good'' thing for ultimately finding one's SoulMate (and for those people to motivate themselves to change). Jennifer Garner's character's problems with Gervais's weight and looks, and Rob Lowe's I'm-rich snobbery, are simply their characterizations, not some consequence of "honesty". (Does Gervais think his real-life long-time partner Jane Fallon is being "dishonest" with him for loving him?)
8	*** You'd think that their characters would react differently to their shallowness if there were alternatives in the relationship department. And the climax treats him talking about how he loves her emotionally like it's a big revelation for the characters, if not the whole world.
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10	* They go on and on about genetics, which seems to be about as important as it is in our world, but neither Gervais' character nor Garner's ever bring up the possibility of artificial insemination.
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12	* While everyone says that they choose partners based on genes and financial security, why is Ricky Gervais' character turned down in favor of the other guy? He's even ''wealthier'', and the only genetic "advantage" the other guy has is that he's better-looking.
13	** He was a bastard, but was good looking and had enough money to have their kids be well off. But Ricky Gervais' character was fat and had a snub nose.
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16	!!! Worldbuilding
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18	* In a world where no one had lied until the twenty-first century, and there had (also depending on your view of religion) never been religion of any kind, the ButterflyEffect would have made things radically, radically different.
19	** While, yes, one might think the world would be radically different, there's no concrete evidence that it ''would''. Maybe there are a few differences here and there that we weren't privy to, but they didn't alter the course of history noticeably. Heck, maybe the world depicted just happened to resemble our own but was created by completely different circumstances-- there can be multiple paths to the same solution, after all.
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21	* Why would the people in this world use the Gregorian calendar?
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23	* It seems quite unlikely that computer science, and hence computers, could have gotten started without the concept of "true vs. false", neither of which they have a word for.
24	** Not necessarily. We only call it "true/false" by convention; one could just as easily call it "yes vs. no". In general, most situations you'd call for a Boolean value are basically telling the computer to answer a yes-no question and to do different things based on whether the answer is yes or no.
25	*** Maybe, but Boolean logic was in turn a formalization of the truth values of connectives, that is, how you can tell whether a sentence with "and" in it is true or not based on its parts. If you recreate that whole thing as "would the answer to the question version be yes or no", you've basically replicated "true" vs. "false".
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27	* Additionally, how would this world handle the entire branch of math dealing with "imaginary numbers"?
28	** Stricly speaking, an imaginary number isn't lying. It exists, we just can't write it down in the usual way, and the concept is just so foreign to us that we call it "imaginary".
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30	* When the rival screenwriter tells Mark that his secretary called him an "overweight homosexual", she says that she didn't (instead, she called him a "fat faggot") and the rival says that he stands corrected. However, for the entire rest of the movie, everyone takes every word anyone else utters as completely and unquestionably accurate. No one, upon hearing Mark say something untrue, ever considers the possibility that he's just mistaken. One would expect the bank teller at least to consider the possibility that he's misremembered his account balance and ask if he's positive it was $800 (what's he going to do, lie?) rather than leaping straight to the conclusion that the discrepancy is a computer error.
31	** Perhaps in addition to the inability to lie, people in this world also have better memory like some form of RequiredSecondaryPowers?
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33	* If the Coca-Cola ads are anything like the Coke ad shown, how did it become popular in the first place?
34	** All the other products have adverts just as bad. Plus early on they could have said things like "It's a new drink, it's fizzy and I like the taste of it", or run taste tests and say that x% of people preferred it to some other drink, which might have convinced people to give it a shot. Nowadays pretty much everyone has tried Coke so there's a limit to how much they can say about it-- real life Coke adverts tend to be generic image-based stuff rather than actually telling you anything about the product.
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36	* Why is it that the movie presents imagination as ''lying!?'' There's a huge difference between them.
37	** Not really. Imagination is thinking things which are not true, and if you can think those things, you can conceive of saying them. In order of people to not be able to lie, they must be unable to think untrue things. This also explains why they are so unabashedly ''honest'', they can't imagine causing other people to not know things.
38	*** Which then begs the question of how the hell anything new was created in this world. If you can't imagine a car (which wouldn't be real before it was invented), how can you make one?
39	*** This can be FridgeBrilliance if you consider that most of the consumer products in the film are shown to be boring and unimaginative. The computers, monitors/televisions, stereo equipment... even the office decor. Humanity invented these things out of necessity, without any flair. It's more subtle than the advertisements in the film, which are more prominent in their mundaneness, but it goes along the same concept.
40	*** Maybe everything ever invented was either an accident or physical experimentation? 'I wonder what would happen if I put all these things togrther'?
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42	* For that matter, how would ANYTHING happen? "Take a step forward? But I'm here, not there!" "Put this food in my mouth? But it's not in my mouth!"
43	** You're confusing potential with absolutes. You can do an action, you might simply be unable to visualise it before it happens. Even in the movie, they use qualifying phrases. Mark isn't a "fat homo," but the secretary states that's what she thought was true of him. Inventing new things is about seeing the potential truth. "I think I can use tiny, controlled explosions to create a device capable of moving a carriage without needing horses."
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45	* Not only do people take Mark at face value, the characters will take his world even when it's ''observably'' untrue. It's fine to believe him when his lies are unverifiable, but there are several instances where they choose to believe him over concrete evidence (the Breathalyzer, the bank statement).
46	** It seems that the people of this world not only have no conception of falsehood, they value statements over physical evidence. Like when Gervais' character first discovers lying, he tells his friend that he's not there. The friend, despite the fact that he can clearly see Gervais, believes that Gervais is not there. Perhaps they're more willing to believe that they're mistaken than the person they're talking to.
47	*** Yet this line of reasoning only works with the existence of lying. If, in our world, you knew someone was completely incapable of stating anything but the truth, you would give their statements high credence because you have eliminated a variable in the situation. If you know that everyone only tells the truth, your options are that they are lying or some other mistake has been made. Since it's established that it's impossible they are lying, the only reasonable explanation is that some other mistake has been made.
48	** In the case of the teller, they should notice that the system was just recently down, so maybe it has something to do with that. He also seemed very certain that he has $800 which is quite reassuring. It's possible that the bank did investigate after they check accounts at the end of the month and saw the difference, but he made a lot of money in the meantime and he probably put that money back in the account, so most likely the bank just thought: Oh, this person or this teller made a mistake, we are going to take the difference out of his savings now. No damage done.
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50	* What's on TV? There seems to be lecture films, but besides news, sports, and documentaries, what is on that takes up all the space? It can't be adverts.
51	** Probably just fewer channels.
52	** Haven't you seen how many sports channels there are even in our world?
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54	* The idea that "no such thing as lying" = "people say whatever is on their mind". Omission does not necessarily mean lying.
55	** Many ''would'' classify a willing omission as a lie of omission.
56	** There have been many headscratchers on how exactly this world works, but consider this: a lot of things in society today are artificial things such as social norms, essentially just people agreeing what is acceptable and what isn't. In ancient times, people could have been truthful yet kept their mouths shut, but those who came to power, as a cover for their insecurities, ridiculed their enemies with brutal honesty based on their exterior features as hitting their internal ones is damn near impossible. And so this practice of insulting based on exterior features evolved to the point that being anything but brutually honest on the exterior features is deemed silly or weird. Consider the park scene when they were examining people where Mark was able to get Anna to forego her brutal honesty based on crude initial observations and examine the possibilities one could see in closer examination. Her honesty there is a benign honesty that is not harmful, not assuming that first impressions were always correct, but still something that she can accept saying, unlike when she gets confused by Mark saying that he made things up at the end.
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58	* For the Coke commercial, the actor takes a drink and says it's too sweet. Why didn't Coke just find an actor who ''didn't'' think it was too sweet? You ''are'' permitted an opinion in this world.
59	** Perhaps they simply couldn't find anyone who thought that? Coke's a fairly sweet drink, after all, and they presumably had a limited time to cast and produce it.
60	** It would constitute lying by omission somewhere along the line. Recording the commercial over until they got one that was purely positive would require them choosing to withhold information-- which, as we see from many points in the film, people simply don't do, even if it makes them (or, less personally, the company for which they work) look bad.
61	** Even saying that Coke is too sweet wouldn't send people flocking to Pepsi, since Pepsi is even sweeter than Coke.
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63	* Mark was the one who "brought the words of the man in the sky" to the people. It's ''his image'' on the stained glass in the "church" and the necklace of the "clergyman". Yet he's sitting pretty far back in the pews. Wouldn't you think he'd be given a better spot, or asked to officiate?
64	** No, because Brad hates his guts and would never willingly give the fat guy with a stubby nose a position of power over him at any time. Brad only accepted him there because he was a close friend to Anna and there was no way in his mind Anna would pick Mark over him, so there was no reason to not let him come, and seeing the wedding would hurt Mark once more.
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66	* Are there no insane people in this world? If everyone was so gullible that they'd believe anything anyone told them, despite all evidence to the contrary, you'd think schizophrenia would be a dangerous memetic disorder here.
67	** Maybe every day, people have to go through the "Lord, Liar, Lunatic" trilemma for every person who says something that doesn't fit their perception of reality? But for them, it's a dilemma, since "Liar" is a literally unthinkable option. Thus, the symptoms of schizophrenia are a memetic condition (believing false things from sources that seem sane), and schizophrenia itself is still biological (generating false beliefs and evangelizing them), but it's normally fairly easy for them to tell the difference between insane people and people who are telling unexpected truths?
68	** Considering that whatever causes this world's humans to not be able to lie is seemingly biological, and Gervais' character is a mutant - the only people who can lie are Mark and Mark's son - maybe the condition that causes schizophrenia doesn't exist either.
69	** We do see the equivalent of a crazy man ranting on the sidewalk; however, none of what he says is inaccurate per se (he screams that "we're all animals" and that "this isn't natural" then launches into a series of rhetorical questions about civilized behavior). The implication seems to be that not only is lying impossible in this world, but also delusion.
70	*** Given that that man was well dressed and clean shaven, he could just be a normal worker going through this world's equivalent of a bad work day where a bunch of nihilistic thoughts become easy to accept as true.
71	** The fact that people accept Mark’s outlandish claims unquestioningly pretty much implies they’re unfamiliar with the concept of a delusional insane person.
72	** At one point in the film there’s a radio discussion about if Bellison were simply hearing voices in his head or if the Man in the Sky were speaking through him.

Context Headscratchers / TheInventionOfLying