In the movie The Matrix, a character called "The Oracle" — a middle-aged cookie-baking housewife with an uncanny ability to know the future — tells the protagonist, Neo, "don't worry about the vase." Neo responds, "what vase?" and looks around, accidentally knocking a vase to the floor in the process. After apologising, his first question is how she knew it would happen. The Oracle does not answer the question, but instead tells Neo that what's really going to "bake his noodle" later is the question of whether it would have happened at all if she hadn't mentioned it in the first place.

This foreshadows an important plot point which is very downplayed, and almost totally ignored by Neo himself — a fact which makes me think less of him as a hacker. If the question "baked his noodle" at all, it was a really slow oven.

The point is only raised in passing by the enigmatic and charismatic rebel leader, Morpheus. Morpheus has insisted that Neo is "The One" — a person with super-powerful talent in manipulating The Matrix, but The Oracle ultimately tells Neo that he's not The One. When it transpires that Neo is The One, Morpheus opines that The Oracle told Neo "exactly what he needed to hear".

This relates back to the vase incident in an interesting manner. Let us assume for a moment that Neo would not in fact have broken the vase if The Oracle hadn't mentioned it. This makes her precognition very powerful: not only can she see the inevitable, but also the merely possible, and by selectively telling people about the future — even telling falsehoods about it — she can shape the future.

There's no question, as far as the plot of The Matrix goes, that Neo is The One. The Oracle knew this in intimate detail: she told Morpheus that he would find The One, and Trinity that she would fall in love with The One. This all demonstrates a super-accurate and detailed foreknowledge. Why then lie to Neo, or at least deliberately mislead him into thinking that he wasn't The One?

It's pretty obvious that Neo would not have accepted it as true if The Oracle had told him outright that he was The One, and, as such, being told that he was The One may well have resulted in him failing to recognise his potential. Instead, The Oracle cannily sets him up to both think that he is not The One (and therefore of no special importance), and to understand (truthfully, this time) that he will be forced to choose between saving his own life and the life of Morpheus. This is news he's prepared to accept as possibly true, and when Morpheus is captured by the Agents, Neo sets out to rescue him with the grim determination of a man who knows that he will succeed but ultimately not survive. It is, in the end, the hopelessness of his situation — and his ultimate defeat — which makes him reach down and find his true ability as The One.

Morpheus, it seems, encapsulated a profound insight into a throwaway line: Neo did need to hear an abject falsehood about himself in order to discover the truth. And in her infinite wisdom and foreknowledge, The Oracle was able to see the set of statements which would put Neo on the path to success.

And now that I've told you all this, dear reader, what's really going to bake your noodle (I hope) is my next question. If The Oracle really did have such immense foreknowledge of Neo's actions under all possible circumstances, then did Neo himself really have any free will in doing what he did subsequently? It was her intention, obviously, that Neo discover his abilities as The One, and this he did. Was this a journey that he undertook himself, as master of his own fate? Or was he merely the puppet of The Oracle, doing her will, and treading a path that she had determined for him?

Morpheus asked, "do you believe in fate?" My question is subtler: do you believe that perfect foreknowledge can coexist with free will, or are they mutually exclusive? If The Oracle really did cause Neo to break the vase — if he would not have broken the vase if she didn't mention it — then Neo was right not to believe in Fate. But should he be concerned about free will?

I have an opinion on this, but I'm going to let your noodle bake a while before talking about it.