Cinema could be an interesting medium to explore paraconsistent logic, Russell’s paradox, Žižek’s Non-All, etc. Words alone make it difficult to express the implications of true contradictions or dialectics qua metaphysics, especially the psychological implications, but a film could use cinematography and soundtrack to communicate aspects which mere words cannot.

I could see this being done in something grounded, like a biopic of Kurt Gödel, or something fantastical, like a science fiction movie about someone breaking into the “code of the universe” and trying (and probably failing) to fix the bugs.

The Office: Jonesy-Fordy Browny-Barcelona
Our plucky hero, Smith, spends his time at work daydreaming about achieving not merely true beliefs, and not merely justified true beliefs, but actual 24-carat, government approved, genuine knowledge about his coworkers. One day a genie named ‘Ed’ appears to tell him that he will grant him three wishes, and a better parking spot, if he can come up with one thing that he knows, really knows, about his coworkers’ transportation choices and current locations (it has to combine the two). Smith has heaps of evidence (portrayed in endless flashback scenes) that one of his coworkers, Jones, owns a Ford. He also knows that another coworker, Brown (whose violent backstory is filled in with many slow-motion gruesome fight scenes) is currently on vacation. Ed reminds Smith that the information in his piece of knowledge has to be specific (it can’t merely be ‘Brown isn’t here’). Smith glumly realizes that he has no idea where Brown has chosen to vacation. He is about to resign himself to failure, when he recalls taking introduction to logic in college (more backstory, involving scenes of Smith attempting to sing a madrigal at a fraternity party while accompanying himself on a guitar, only to have the guitar snatched away and smashed into small pieces by a popular seventh-year senior, and then vowing to himself that, if he ever gets offered three wishes by a genie, one of them will be to have his guitar restored to perfect condition, and another will be to force the guitar smasher to listen to his sung recitals of every Elizabethan love song ever composed, while staring at a beer keg that is forever an inch beyond his grasp). He remembers that any proposition whatever, yes any!, can be disjoined with a true proposition to construct another true proposition (montage scene of the young Smith, still heartbroken from the loss of his beloved guitar, struggling to understand addition, repeatedly failing, but finally, to the accompaniment of suitably triumphal music–either the Hallelujah Chorus or the Teddy Bears’ Picnic–succeeding and tearfully embracing his wizened old logic professor). All is not lost, thinks Smith (hopeful John Williamsy music, summoning images of plucky Rebels turning the tables on the Evil Empire). He plucks a location out of thin air (fantasy sequence of locations floating around Smith’s head, waggling their mountains, valleys, and peninsulas at him invitingly: Smith narrows his choice down to Boston, Barcelona, and Brest-Litovsk, all of whom whisper in his ear, promising him various rewards, such as never having to clean the coffee pot, that no red-blooded office worker could resist. Barcelona secures his favor with an offer of a key to the middle-management restroom (2-ply toilet paper!)). Having secured his location proposition, Smith almost falls at the final hurdle when his recollection of the name of the logical rule, ‘addition’, prompts him to first construct the proposition ‘Jones owns a Ford and Brown is in Barcelona’, which he writes on a post-it note. Slow-motion scene of Smith handing the note to Ed, with plenty of ominous music playing. Finally, in another, emotion-drenched flashback, we see the wizened professor, who looks a lot like Ed, writing ‘P and Q’ on the blackboard, erasing the ‘and’ (to the accompaniment of the screeching effects from Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels), writing in ‘or’ instead, and pointing his stick of chalk directly at Smith (the camera). Back to the present, Smith pulls the post-it away from Ed’s outstretched hand at the last second, hastily crosses out the ‘and’ and replaces it with ‘or’. Triumphant music plays over a fantasy scene of Smith running up the steps of the Philadelphia Public Something-or-Other and waving his arms in the air. Cut to close-up of Ed’s face as he reads the post-it note, with a sly, evil smile forming, while the music slows and gets progressively more and more out of tune. Ed explains that, while Smith’s belief is true, and justified, it isn’t knowledge. How can this be, howls Smith, still standing at the top of the steps of that place in Philadelphia. Ed explains that Jones doesn’t own a Ford after all, and demonstrates, by means of more tedious flashbacks, how Smith’s evidence was in fact misleading. However, the disjunction is true, because Brown just happens to be in Barcelona (a few blood-soaked scenes of Brown getting into fights over the question of whether Lionel Messi or Christiano Ronaldo is the better player, and whether white sangria should really count as sangria). Smith makes one last attempt to get at least two wishes granted, by Meatloafing the (bat out of) hell out of the office karaoke machine with his own off-key rendition of ‘Two out of Three Ain’t Bad’. Ed just shakes his head sadly, and disappears in a poof of smoke as Jones, in the next room, wonders aloud how many coins he has in his pocket (setting things up nicely for the sequel). The final scene is of Smith in the future, lying in an alley surrounded by bottles of cheap vodka and white sangria, and covered in his own vomit. He has clearly never recovered from his abject failure to know. The closing credits play to the accompaniment of the Meatloaf classic, altered to that the crucial line becomes ‘two out of three is bad, it really is bad’.

Utilitarianism vs. deontology, is killing always wrong. (Kinda what Batman is)

Or something on all the Omni’s of god. Can he make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it? Is he capable of evil? If so, is he not all good? But if he can’t, then he’s not all powerful

A league of villains called the “-isms” is fracturing society for their own benefit. A band of Philosophers and their historian sidekicks are the only ones who can stop them.

A sci-fi drama about the first human to acquire a prosthetic brain through a soritical process of neuron replacement (e.g., to prevent the onset of some disease). The protagonist struggles with the ensuing philosophical questions, and, soon enough, their sanity. Eventually, convinced of the merits of functionalism, they regain a sense of normalcy. But the film ends with a twist: it is revealed that the old neurons have been used to reconstruct the original brain, a la Hobbes’s version of Theseus.

Another story: emergentist radicals attempt to bring a malevolent God into existence, by selectively destroying/rearranging matter until it instantiates a complex mind (think Block’s “Chinese Nation”). We follow a detective, as they uncover the plot and try to stop it before it’s too late. Once again, the film ends with false optimism: the cultists finish their terrorist acts and are dismayed to see no evidence of success—until, seemingly at random, people begin to drop dead.

(I like pessimistic twist endings.)

The Utility Monster:

A cosmic horror descends upon earth to torture and feed off the suffering of its inhabitants. Our heroes descend into the monster’s lair only to discover that it’s being protected by thousands of cultists who are willingly torturing themselves for the monster’s pleasure.

It turns out that all of them have previously tried to kill the monster, but before they do so, the monster let’s them experience a single second of the pleasure it receives from someone’s suffering. The pleasure is so mindblowingly indescribable that all those who previously sought to kill the monster now come to believe that the world would be better if they tortured themselves for the rest of their lives for the monster’s benefit.

Our heroes too get a chance to kill the monster, but not before they get to experience it’s pleasures. Will they kill it and end humanity’s suffering? Should they kill it? Find out in The Utility Monster.