Could you anyone please answer a couple of questions?

hey made that weird monolithic looking thing to just be a placeholder

I'm glad you picked up on that. Though, in Nolan's defense, I judge that to be one of his affectionate homages to Kubrick.


The Dumpster gives a whole new meaning to "red" states.

"... even those who praised the film on relatively superficial grounds were able to get something of its message. New York was the only really hostile city. Perhaps there is a certain element of the lumpen literati that is so dogmatically atheist and materialist and Earth-bound that it finds the grandeur of space and the myriad mysteries of cosmic intelligence anathema ... I will say that the God concept is at the heart of 2001 but not any traditional, anthropomorphic image of God. I don't believe in any of Earth's monotheistic religions ..."----Kubrick

"I never saw anything metaphysical in it at all ... but that's just me."

That's like saying that the Bible has nothing to do with ... religion.

Metaphysics (on the nature of things, the nature of being, that which pertains to ontology, etc) is what the film is all about. Remove that central aspect, the film's core themes, and it would be a piece of banal, disposable stupidity.

"It was so hardware science fiction I think the metaphysical aspect was unintended,"

It's the other way around.

"and recall that Arthur Clarke was about as concrete science of a guy as you could get."

That's why he spent his life writing fiction? Because he's a 'concrete science' sort of a guy? All science fiction is fundamentally fantasmatic, theological, philosophical, metaphysical, with its standard tropes/techniques (like, say, time travel) the means by which such ideas are explored, imagined. While, for instance, time travel is obviously an empirical impossibility, as an SF trope it enables ideas about time (the nature of time, the passage of time, relations between past, present, future, the influence of history, the materiality of time, etc) to be portrayed and speculated about.

Scientists, ESPECIALLY today's ones, are a profoundly superstitious lot; it's just that they don't know it, they deny this, even as they surround themselves in a plethora of fictions, fantasies, superstitions, and fetishes, LIVE them.

People forget that many of the most well-know scientists in history (back when 'science' was called 'natural philosophy', a particular branch of philosophical enquiry/exploration) were not primarily scientists: Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, Darwin, and numerous others, were actually clergy and/or extremely religious, always battling with themselves, struggling with Doubt, trying to reconcile a myriad of conflicting notions, such as the nature of the empirical, the fictional, the fantasmatic, the religious, the scientific, etc. They were largely 'religious' people who explored the physical, the empirical, from matter to cosmos. There's a complex and paradoxical inter-relation, then, between knowledge provided by the sciences and the assorted beliefs, fictions, fantasies, provided by metaphysics, including pure philosophy, theology, religion, superstitions, and, of course, all the deceptions and lies that frame, mediate, and structure everyone's fictionally-based everyday 'reality'.

Today's scientists are not atheists (nor anyone else for that matter; the idiot who insists he's an 'atheist' is just someone who is ignorant of what he really believes [which is why he is an 'idiot', a fool], is in denial of what he believes, even as he practices every day what he in fact believes [eg all his daily cultural practices and rituals, all of which are based on assorted superstitions and fantasies). Indeed, the first thing that is striking about today's scientists is how their lives are completely surrounded by fantasies of all kinds, including 'science fictional' ones, including all manner of New Ageist neo-paganist obscurantisms, including pseudo-spiritualist and ego-centric delusions, including theological fantasies of 'transcendence', and so on. Indeed, the more 'hard-nosed' empirical their orientation becomes in their 'official' everyday reality, the more they begin to resemble a (pseudo)religious fundamentalist (because they are their mirror image, their flip side), and end up as a nasty bigot spouting deranged hatred (a manifestation of their truth, of their mad superstitions), which is exactly what happened to Richard Dawkins (among many others, it should be noted).



"I thought the monoliths each had their uses ... missions ... purposes."

Purposes? You say this having just claimed that the film had no metaphysical 'intention'? As soon as anyone pre-supposes a purpose to anything, or asks questions as to the purpose of something, anything, they are IN metaphysics, are dealing with metaphysical preoccupations. It is always unavoidable, is what is always uppermost for all humans (if you remove the very notion of Purpose from any human, their entire world collapses, they suffer a breakdown, abject despair, go mad, and/or commit suicide or engage in murderous-suicidal behaviour etc). It's just that insular or naïve empiricists are unaware of all this, are unaware of their - mainly theological, superstitious - beliefs, the very beliefs that structure their entire existence and without which they would go literally insane. Humans always need a purpose in order to live at all (it manifests as what we call Culture), even though the cosmos is without purpose, has no purpose written into it.

"something not of nature related to mathematics"

Mathematics has nothing to do with Nature/Cosmos/World? So you are anti-science, you reject all science? Science is largely BASED on mathematics, and it is its medium, so therefore science has nothing to do with nature, is just a pile of nonsensical babblings and escapist imaginings?

Newton's mathematical formulation, his equations, Einstein's equations, etc, have nothing to do with nature? E=Mc**2 has nothing to do with Nature? Really? Like saying that philosophy has nothing to do with ... ideas?

It is by means of such 'abstract' formulations that we in fact - and paradoxically - gain a 'knowledge in the real', a knowledge about cosmic/natural processes (eg about matter, energy, space-time, etc), even though these equations are purely symbolic, are 'in themselves' meaningless (eg they are not going to tell you how you should live your life, how you should feel, what you should do, what purpose you might give yourself, who or what you 'really' are, or why bother to do anything at all, or what death is, etc; from this perspective, such science is useless, for it is outside of metaphysics even though it is entirely based on it, based on a set of metaphysical assumptions/presuppositions, such as the principle of inertia).

Don't you think you might need to 'revise' your assumptions about ... everything?

"so they made that weird monolithic looking thing to just be a placeholder for something we have to imagine."

How can it be imagined if it is something unimaginable? If it is that which resists all imagining, resists all symbolization, is that which is outside our ability to represent, is the limit, is beyond/outside the symbolic dimension, outside of meaning? That which exceeds the symbolic: The sublime, the Real ... (unknown, outside, external, the void, the nothing ... and the possible, the impossible that becomes potentially possible, the impossible that happens).

Such a 'monolith' (in "2001", not the other Nolan nonsense) is what ENABLES imagining, desiring, thinking, questioning, etc, is that which CAUSES desire, but not a desire to 'imagine' the monolith, but to desire, to see that there is more to things, more to the cosmos, to the world, that just the world itself, just the dreary, banal,'empirical'. Because the 'monolith' as such and in this sense DOES NOT EXIST, but is the Void, the lack, the loss, the excess, that makes us Want, makes us desire, is all that we have repressed about ourselves and the world, is a symbol of the Real, of everything we don't know.

Yes, of course I completely agree, but aren't you actually completely wrong?