I recently brought your attention to the topic of consciousness in literature. I now want to draw your attention to a very ambitious film project – Qualia, the movie. Click here to hear the film’s writer-director, Derek LaPorte and producer, Rukmani Bachal talk about the proposed project. Rukmani tells me:
Qualia deals with the question of the root of consciousness in a very approachable manner. It has been extensively researched by the writer-director, Derek LaPorte, who has taken its key elements and simplified them for the average movie-goer.
It will bring awareness to the audience about the fringes of this science. To those in the know, parts of it will resemble science-fiction, for e.g. the scale they use in the film is capable of weighing down to a yoctogram that currently does not exist. However, those sci-fi elements are possible as soon as a few years down the road and nothing is too far-fetched.
The method described to test dying patients represents a consensus to what would be considered perfect circumstances to conduct such an experiment.
Now there are many ways one can blow $10 on absolute crap – here is an opportunity to back some entrepreneurial folks who want to get beyond the banality of most feature films. If they do secure the requisite funding, the film might well be interesting on a purely entertainment level; it might also be intellectually interesting bringing the somewhat esoteric philosophical debate on qualia to a wider audience, however whimsical the story outline might be:
Greg Jenkins is a neuroscientist and part of a team ‘chasing dragons’ as they conduct an experiment to find the root of consciousness by testing patients at the moment of their deaths.
Hugh Williams, the mastermind, and Jennifer Jenkins, Greg’s wife, form the trio. Greg suffers from seizures which lead to eerie encounters with a ghost and that causes a crisis of faith.
A thrilling, horrifying, mystifying and ultimately joyous drama, Qualia will leave the viewer with a bittersweet sense of hope.
