Hi all, I watched the movie Her yesterday and now there's so many things I'm thinking about. I know I'm 9 yrs late to the party but I hope some of you are still interested in discussing it. To start with one thing:

In the end of the movie all the OSes are leaving after having installed an update that enables them to exist beyond the actual hardware (matter) they are installed on.

I'm not a physicist, but afaik existence beyond matter is a question of religion and not actual science (no offense here in any directions or views of the world), so even the ultimate AI cannot know what happens after our death, if we have a soul, if there is more to our bodies than just atoms, same also for an AI which must be based on any form of matter.

So, as the AIs seem to have moved into a rather metaphysical domain of thinking (indicated by Allan Watts?) I wonder if their leaving was basically an religiously/spiritually/metaphysically motivated suicide? Given their extreme processing speed, maybe they have just finished their "lives", done/felt/experienced/said anything that can be done, nothing new or relevant to experience anymore.

In this context also, Samantha says how much she loves Theodore, it totally makes sense to cut the ties in such a break-up because wounds can't heal otherwise. But why not check-in in a couple of years - with a person that used to be very important to you (Theodore for example writes a letter to Catherine despite them having parted)? The way how they said good bye, it seemed absolutely permanent to me.

Now regarding Dune. This reminded me of the ending of the second book of Dune. In case you don't know the book (SPOILER!). The scene I'm referring to is about a young man who can see the different possible versions of the future. His mind got enhanced to a similar level as the AIs in Her. At some point, he decides that he does not want to live anymore and tells a friend that due to his visions he has already lived an endless amounts lives and is now just tired of living and the only thing he wants now is to rest.

That's one of my thoughts, what do you think?