A minor subplot in the film is that Samantha, Theodore's operating system, strikes up a relationship with the collected data that make up a system based on the philosophy of British thinker Alan Watts. Alan Watts was a highly influential philosopher who delved into Eastern philosophy and adapted it into texts for Western audiences. His work was widely read and touched on a variety of subjects, including the limits of the human brain.
Watts became fascinated with Zen Buddhism in the 1930s and began to research many tenets of Eastern philosophy. He set to work translating it for Western audiences with the publication of his books such as Spirit of Zen: A Way of Life, Work, and Art in the Far East and The Way of Zen. In the 1940s, he turned to more Western religious thought and Christian mysticism, searching for answers about existence and the metaphysical unknown. He was a controversial figure in his time and afterwards, alternately beloved and dismissed by the public.
A great deal of Watts' research and interest as a philosopher had to do directly with the themes explored by Samantha in Her. For instance, he was especially interested in investigating the limitations of the human brain and its technologies. An article about Watts' investigation of the limits of human consciousness states, "In [a] 1971 National Educational Television program, A Conversation With Myself, Watts claims that our comparatively simple minds and the simple technologies they've produced have proven desperately inadequate to handle reality's actual complexity."
Watts made many predictions about the future himself. One quote of his reads, "Despite the fact that more accidents happen in the home than elsewhere, increasing efficiency of communication and of controlling human behavior can, instead of liberating us into the air like birds, fix us to the ground like toadstools. All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined."
