But the only thing that changed his mind was her call from the past, and if she hadn't seen the future when he told her what he needed to hear in the past then she wouldn't have been able to change his mind. It's a pretty clear time paradox that I can only make sense of if humanity is beginning to evolve into some kind of gestalt entity.

And if I had to guess I'd say the idea of free will is left up to interpretation, as it's said that she chose to have a child, even while it was also implied by the aliens that everything was preordained. Both perceptions might be subjectively correct depending on which species you ask, and I don't think the movie made it clear one way or the other.

I think that in the early stages of her experiencing time in a nonlinear fashion, her mind didn't see time as a whole yet. So her mind projected relevant things from the future, which is why I think she had the zero sum game discussion with her daughter when they're looking at the Offer Weapons message.

No I get that. But no matter what order she saw events there should have been no way for her to have information from another human being who would never have given her that information had she not already given him that information that she should never have had in the first place. The only way would be if his past was also becoming her present.

I'm assuming that's what we're still talking about.

As was mentioned earlier, I do think that the language had become very popular by that point in time when he gave her the info. I do think that the type of consciousness in a way was given to them by the heptapods so that the earth will get closer to a collective consciousness than a planet of tribes because of how much of our lives are built around interaction.

But a collective consciousness that includes all of current and future human experience, so that every human still existing by the time that humanity "evolves" will become a permanent part of human consciousness. Right?

If all of that is true I like how they didn't spell it out. It would have felt too expositiony to explain all that, and the people who don't need all that much depth would probably be bored by it, and the people who do care are probably smart enough to figure it out for themselves.

And I wonder how that will include the aliens. We're supposed to save the aliens somehow, and I wonder if that isn't supposed to be merging with THEM in a way that our separate collective experience will somehow affect their own collective consciousness. Much as the merging of ideas throughout human history has expanded and grown the ideas and cultures of specific societies (e.g. like how Middle Eastern culture spurred the Renaissance in Europe.)

If so then it's a clever way to comment on current events while also commenting on human cultural history in general.