Hacking the Brain: Duncan Jones’s Source Code
Hacking the Brain: Duncan Jones’s Source Code

Summary/Abstract: The paper concentrates on the new representations of human consciousness in digital cinema which reflect contemporary culture’s fixation on the cerebral. As digital cinema’s divorce from the photographic base has allowed to produce virtual worlds, many of them are situated literally in the protagonist’s mind. The new representations of consciousness in film tap into philosophical and scientific notions of time and temporality as well as into the discoveries of neuroscience and quantum physics. Some of these discoveries represented in film offer the possibility of release from the restrictions of the physical body, which can be exemplified by Duncan Jones’s Source Code (2011). In the film the protagonist’s consciousness is repeatedly transferred to another man’s body locked in the past segment of space-time, in which he splits into a multiplicity of selves. This provokes the question: is the protagonist’s personhood continued after the transfer of consciousness? To answer that, one needs to take into account the bodily-continuity theory and the psychological continuity theory of personal identity, yet they can only partly be applied to Source Code because they rely on the classical notion of linear time. As technoculture has triggered a radical redefinition of space and time, what follows is the need for a reformulation of the understanding of human identity. The essay explores the film’s designation of personal identity, applicable to the information age.

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