THIS IS NUMBER 1000 BABY!
This theory was written by the brilliant "Andrew Smith" of 4815162342.com
Enjoy!
This is work-in-progress; there is more to come and hopefully some pictures also. I'll try to make this brief:
It is said that before a person dies, one's life flashes before one's eyes. As a passenger jet crashes to earth, there are hundreds of lives being re-lived in an instant.
The black box is a device in the tail of a plane that records. It records audio from the cockpit - frantic radio transmissions and the prayers of the pilots. It records continuously, overwriting itself, and captures the last 100 minutes or so. Here, it is a metaphor for Lost.
This theory suggests: all those last-second memories were recorded; and the 'survivors' of the plane crash are the memories of the deceased. They are not in purgatory, they are not ghosts, they are walking/talking memories suspended in fields of electricity.
At the moment of impact: all those sysnapses firing... all those electronic impulses... all those adrenalin-fuelled memories... all of them recorded. And replayed on a loop of magnetic tape (running time: 108 minutes). If the tape stops, they stop.
John Locke the philosopher:
"For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and 'tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being: And as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person..." (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding). Personal identity is defined and created by memory. Every passenger on that plane is 'lost', that is: dead; but their memories persist artificially. Every episode defines a character further through flashbacks; each memory describes them more fully to us. The symbolic eye shot tells us that the following flashback belongs to that character, that they are recalling what defines their identity, but also that is from their viewpoint. They believe they survived even though they suspect that that is impossible.
They are defined by their own memory, but they also define each other with their memories: the one reason Locke can now walk is that no-one remembered him being unable to walk - no-one saw his wheelchair because he was carried onto the plane before anybody else and his wheelchair was stowed. The collective assumption was that he was able to walk. And so: he could. On one occasion, his own memory that he WAS disabled crept back in and he lost the ability; he is literally dependent on Faith.
Many things on the island are re-constructed from the memories of the survivors. Re-constructed memories include: Kate's horse, Jack's dad, Eko's brother, a couple of polar bears. Other things are not re-constructed from memories: Dharma is real and its people are aware of the transient nature of the Losties. It was the Dharma Initiative that created the possibility of making memory real. Is our consciousness merely the sum of our experiences? In the case of the Losties: yes. They - and the freakier things on the island - are created and sustained in an artificially generated field that makes reality subservient to memory.
Which leads us to the young... if the Losties have this [localised] power to define their surroundings through memory, what power could the young or newly-born possess? Walt and Aaron are special because they are less constrained by a perception of what is possible. Aaron has not yet experienced the idea that fire can burn skin; in which case, fire would not burn his skin. Aaron could be anything he wants; and, with the wrong guidance, could do a great deal of harm to the world, hence the dire warning from Claire's psychic. Walt has similar power, but, because of his age, may not be as powerful - he is constrained by the memory of limitations, such as "I can't fly like Superman, even if I jump up and down on a trampoline on Bondi Beach in Oz".
There are many literary and film references in Lost. Most recently there is Henry Gale; he belongs in the Wizard of Oz and, of course, Return To Oz. In both of these stories, Dorothy Gale enters a sort of parallel world: it has the truth of the real world but is dream-like, populated with almost recognizable faces, but covered in silver paint or straw. As with dreams, the films are peppered with elements of Dorothy's real world - you've seen it, you know what I mean. The inverse is true of Lost; these people are like dreams, moving through a real landscape, making real some elements from their memory or imagination.
Slightly deeper into that reference: in Return to Oz, Dorothy is [rightly] institutionalised. She is given electro-convulsive treatment. Dr Worley shows her the machine:
Dorothy: "Will it hurt?"
Dr Worley: "No! No, no, no, no. It just manages electrical current. Now, your aunt already knows that we are at the dawn of a new age. In just two months, it will be the year 1900. A new century. The twentieth century. A century of... electricity [switches on his table lamp]. The brain itself is an electrical machine. It's nothing but a machine. When it malfunctions - a blow to the head, for example - then the brain produces useless excess currents. These excess currents are our dreams and delusions. And we have found out that sometimes the brain malfunctions. Just like the dreams that you have, Dorothy. Now we have the means to control these excess currents."
Unfortunately, she survives, but a creature is produced from the experience of the machine: Tik Tok - a clockwork copper - made from electricity - as are all the characters of Oz: reconstructed from memories. This is the way with Lost - things made from memory.
The Wizard of Oz was made by MGM; the rights were bought by Walt Disney and they made Return to Oz (directed by Walter Murch running time: 108 minutes). Walt, dog, electricity, 108 minutes. I shouldn't read too much into this particular reference, but seeing as this is a forum for theorists and nutjobs: in the 4th minute, Dorothy discovers the Oz key; in the 8th minute, the Oz key is in Dr Worley's hands as he explains about the brain being a controllable electrical machine; in the 15th and 16th minutes, she is being transported to the machine by what appears to be a pair of twins - and treatment begins; in the 23rd minute, she arrives (wakes up) in Oz; in the 42nd minute, the evil Princess Mombi inserts a key into a cabinet, says, "I think number 4 will do for this afternoon." and promptly replaces her head with a new one.
Libby questions Claire's recollection, in this most recent episode, suspecting she is mixing experiences on the island with other memories. The 'infected' are those that lose cohesion - their memories fade or become confused, they mingle with others' memories, creating fake memories where people meet that never actually met and, for beings that are comprised of memory, this is fatal. Rousseau and her crew also died; their memories also took on their own lives, but, over time, they became 'infected'. The symptoms were those of madness, as reality and memory fused; they - and others like them - went mad.
'Dharma', as has been noted elsewhere, is that state of being where the individual is stripped of almost everything. This is truly the state in which the Losties find themselves.
The Black Fog is metallic particles suspended in an electromagnetic field [as outlined in the Ultimate Theory]. This was an early triumph for Dharma in suspending a consciousness [albeit a basic one] in a field; it read Eko and saw what he was: the sum of his memories...and then read those memories/him. The 'monster' is different but uses the same technology; it works on tapping into the Losties' most terrifying memory and re-creating it. For Rose it was something that happened to her back home - something terrible to do with the railway. For Locke, it was the moment he lost his ability to walk; but the horror was lost on him - because he could now walk - that memory lost its power to scare. It is different for different people - it is the abyss that stares back.
There's more to add and hopefully some pictures, but we're going out tonight. Feel free to demolish this one in the meantime.