Philip K. Dick and Philosophy
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Volume 47
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Philip K. Dick and Philosophy: Do Androids Have Kindred Spirits? (2011) Edited by D.E. Wittkower
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Through a Screen Darkly
01
Hollywood Doesn’t Know Dick
ETHAN MILLS
Some of the biggest Hollywood blockbusters of the last few decades have been based on the work of Philip K. Dick—Blade Runner, Total Recall, Minority Report, The Adjustment Bureau, just to name the biggest and most block-busting of them.
Like many Dick fans, I was dazzled by some of these movies before I ever picked up Dick’s short stories and novels. But when I found the original stories, I noticed something was amiss. I felt like Deckard, Quail, or Anderton: something weird was going on. And it wasn’t just that ‘the book is better than the movie’, as that pretentious friend is always telling you. This wasn’t just a matter of details or minor plot points. Something essential had been lost in translation from print to film.
But what is this “something”? Could there be some Hollywood conspiracy out to get Dick’s loyal readers? Would it be safer to stay in the theater or on my couch enjoying the movies? And who the hell do I think I am, anyway, going around uncovering plots involving dead science-fiction writers and Hollywood studios?
But I couldn’t stop investigating. So I grabbed my trench coat, put on a brooding face, and went in search of my bounty.
My investigation revealed that, since Hollywood began plundering Dick’s work, fans have complained about everything from Deckard’s lack of uncertainty about his humanity in Blade Runner to the sappy nonsense at the end of Minority Report. You might chalk this up to the lameness of studio executives out to make a quick buck, but my investigation has revealed that this reflects a deeper tension between two philosophical views about the human condition.
We Can Conceive It for Ourselves Wholesale
One of these philosophical views is what I call the “Holly-worldview.” Some worldviews give a place for genuine free will, unconstrained by cause and effect, while others decry this as an illusion and claim that human actions—including our decisions, thoughts and feelings—are subject to cause and effect like everything else. Whether your worldview is philosophically well founded or whether it’s the result of false memories implanted by Rekall, Inc., worldviews are like assholes: everyone has one.
According to the Holly-worldview good defeats evil, free will secures the triumph of the human spirit and our heroes discover knowledge of reality and virtue (all before the credits roll). The Holly-worldview says that the universe is a nice place, although you have to defend it against the occasional villain. Movies must have happy endings. Villains must be punished and heroes must learn valuable lessons. It probably wouldn’t hurt, either, if the heroes find true love.
Opposed to this, there’s the Dickian worldview: a universe of paranoia, ignorance, and lack of true freedom. Dick’s heroes think someone’s out to get them. And they’re right. They consider the possibility that everything they think they know is wrong. They only occasionally discover the truth. Dick’s heroes wonder if they make any genuinely free decisions. They accept that they don’t. The Dickian worldview says that the universe is generally hostile to our Hollywood aspirations. A “happy ending” for Dick is often overcoming a small obstacle while coming to accept some inevitable—and possibly depressing—fact about our place in the universe.
My guess (based on meticulous armchair sociology) is that most Americans prefer the Holly-worldview, which explains why Hollywood alters Dick’s original vision. Are there good reasons to support the Holly-worldview or should philosophical bounty hunters retire it? Let’s think about a way to answer that by investigating how Dick challenges two tenets of the Holly-worldview: free will and knowledge.
Free Will at the Box Office
Despite my complaints, I think Minority Report is a pretty cool movie. The cinematography is beautiful. The high-tech stuff is sleek and shiny (Apple products: still cool in 2054!), but there’s enough gritty stuff to seem real. Tom Cruise, despite his antics off-screen, does a great job playing Anderton. Steven Spielberg is the most successful director in Hollywood for good reason. Screenwriters Jon Cohen and Scott Frank added a compelling back-story for Anderton and linked the movie to debates about civil liberties and pre-emptive action going on when the movie was released in 2002.
I’m fine with all that. My complaints are philosophical.
In the short story, “The Minority Report,” the Precogs predict that Anderton will murder Leopold Kaplan, a retired General. Of course, in true Dick fashion, there’s a conspiracy: the military wants to put Precrime out of business. The philosophically interesting part is that there are three minority reports. Each Precog has a slightly different prediction incorporating different data. The last prediction included the data that Anderton knew of the earlier predictions. The first and last Precog predictions said that Anderton would kill Kaplan, which created an illusion of a majority report, although they disagreed about details. Anderton does kill Kaplan exactly as the last Precog vision predicted and he does so fully conscious that he is saving Precrime and preventing a military coup. Anderton is content with this state of affairs and neither he nor his loyal wife complain one bit as he accepts his punishment of exile to the colonies in the outer solar system.
In Spielberg’s movie, Minority Report, Anderton’s supposed to ki
ll some random guy named Leo Crow. Anderton steals one of the Precogs, Agatha. When Anderton goes to interrogate Crow, Agatha tells Anderton, “You still have a choice. The others never saw their future.” Crow claims he murdered Anderton’s son six years earlier, which drives Anderton to want to murder Crow. There was no minority report. He is going to kill Crow. Agatha feebly gasps, “You can choose.” Anderton doesn’t kill Crow after all in an apparent triumph of free will (human dignity is saved later when Anderton gets Precrime shut down).
The Adjustment Bureau involves a similar shift from story to film. In Dick’s story, “Adjustment Team,” an employee at a real estate company, Ed Fletcher, learns that our lives are “adjusted” by a team of shadowy men (and at least one shadowy dog). When the team catches him, Fletcher agrees that these adjustments are all for the greater good and says he won’t tell anyone about the Adjustment Team. They let him go and even send a fake vacuum-cleaner salesman to distract his wife from asking questions about where he’s been.
In George Nolfi’s movie, The Adjustment Bureau, a politician named David Norris (Matt Damon) learns about a group of guys in Mad Men outfits who continually change the course of events to go according to the Plan (unfortunately, no dogs are involved). Things get supernatural when it turns out that the Adjustment Bureau employees may be angels who work for the Chairman, a ridiculously thinly disguised metaphor for God. Things get Hollywood when an Adjustment Bureau employee named Harry (Anthony Mackie) helps David and Elise (Emily Blunt) to be together even though it goes against the Plan. Their love teaches the Chairman a lesson, whereupon they are granted freedom from the Adjustment Bureau’s meddling in a triumph for both romance and free will.
In each case, the short story exemplifies the Dickian worldview, in which real free will is doubtful, while the movie insists on the Holly-worldview in which the heroes’ free will secures our human dignity. Maybe the screenwriters thought the original stories were too hard to tell in movie form, but I suspect a clash between the Dickian worldview and the Holly-worldview is the real culprit. The Dickian worldview wouldn’t work in a Hollywood movie (meaning less box office revenue). This isn’t just an economic matter, but a philosophical point. People don’t like their belief in free will questioned. But why not? And why on Earth (or Mars) would Dick question something as obvious as free will?
Determinism’s Bounty on Free Will
Dick’s doubts stem from a view known as determinism. Determinism is frequently and incorrectly confused with fate, or the idea that some beings (usually supernatural) are controlling your life. The movie, The Adjustment Bureau, is really about fate, since the Chairman dispatches men with magic Moleskine notebooks to tinker with our lives. The movie is a mess, philosophically speaking, but it seems as if humans have free will that angels continually work to circumvent.
On the other hand, determinism is a non-supernatural theory that says that, given the way things are now, there is only one possible future. The story, “Adjustment Team,” is determinist: if they make certain adjustments, then the consequences they predict will necessarily occur. They’re not quashing the free will we would otherwise have as in the movie, they’re setting up the “if ” side of an “if-then” sentence.
Another way to explain determinism is that every event in the universe is determined by the laws of nature. This makes sense. Stuff doesn’t just randomly happen. It follows a predictable order. If it didn’t, science—and even more sadly, science fiction—would be a waste of time. If John Anderton didn’t think the laws of physics were regular enough that the force created by igniting gunpowder would cause a bullet to fly out of the barrel of his gun, he wouldn’t have bothered to want to shoot anybody.
Where things get weird is applying determinism to every event in the universe, even human actions. Anderton’s actions are events in the universe (aren’t they?). Suppose you knew everything about Anderton: his past, his current brain states, his tendencies, what he ate for lunch, and so forth. If you knew all that, couldn’t you predict his actions? Don’t we predict each other’s actions all the time?
You might say that our predictions aren’t always correct, but a determinist would reply that this is due to a lack of knowledge. We’re talking about reality here. Just because we don’t know what the causes are doesn’t mean they’re not there. If hypothetically you could know everything about Anderton and predict his actions like a Precog, doesn’t it make sense that his actions are the inevitable result of the sum total of all the causes leading up to those actions? Why would you think he could have done otherwise? Where is there room for this mysterious “freedom”? Think carefully about these questions. I promise if you really understand determinism, it will blow your mind.
Like cheese, determinism comes in hard and soft varieties. Hard determinists rule out freedom and moral responsibility. If you weren’t in control of your choices, but rather your choices were caused by everything from your brain states to the bad noodles you ate, you’re no better off than an android with false memories. You’re not really in control, so blaming or praising you in any moral sense would be like blaming the sands of Mars for being red.
Soft determinists, on the other hand, think determinism and freedom are compatible (hence, they’re also called compatiblilists). David Hume, for example, points out that if we didn’t predict people’s behavior, the very idea of laws would be ridiculous. If we didn’t think stop signs would cause people to stop, why have them? If Precrime laws didn’t stop murder, how would Anderton have a job?
Soft determinists think our usual notion of free will is unnecessarily bizarre. You don’t need free actions to spring from some uncaused cause. This is actually a pretty mysterious idea. What’s the difference between an uncaused cause and stuff just randomly happening? We don’t say that a computer running a random number generator is free. You don’t want your decisions to be random, you want them to be yours. The soft determinist alternative says that a free action has the right kind of cause: it is unconstrained and flows from your character. Anderton’s choice to run was caused, but it wasn’t caused by someone else, it was caused by Anderton’s character (meaning his general tendencies as a person). His character was in turn caused by lots of things. No uncaused cause is needed.
Most people besides philosophers seem to think that we need the traditional idea of free will to secure the basis of morality and human dignity, making determinism a big threat. I disagree. I think soft determinism gives us all the freedom we really need. More people would agree with me if they read Philip K. Dick carefully enough. I’ll give some reasons for all this later, but first let’s look at another aspect of the Dickian worldview.
Skepticism for Fun and Profit
Philosophical skepticism starts with a simple question: How do you know stuff you think you know? How do you know other people—or androids—have minds? How do you know the world exists outside your mind? How can you tell real memories from fake ones, real people from androids? The idea that you don’t know the answers to such questions is called philosophical skepticism. The Holly-worldview says that we can know the answers. But Dick has his doubts.
Blade Runner is an awesome movie. It was groundbreaking in its day and it’s still amazing thirty years later. As with Minority Report, my complaints are philosophical.
In the US theatrical cut, there’s a happy ending in which Deckard drives into the countryside with Rachael. There’s little indication that it’s possible Deckard could be a replicant. How un-Dickian.
The existence of the Director’s Cut (1992) and Final Cut (2007) indicates that director Ridley Scott wasn’t happy either. He removed the happy ending and added a weird unicorn dream sequence, which many people—including Scott himself—see as an indication that Deckard is really a replicant. The closest we get to anything explicit is when Rachael asks Deckard if he’s taken the Voigt-Kampff test himself, but he’s asleep and doesn’t hear her.
On the other hand, Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
, quite explicitly raises the question of whether Deckard might be an android. In Chapter 9, the android Luba Luft tells Deckard directly, “You must be an android.” She presses the issue asking if his memories of taking the Voigt-Kampff test are false or if he could be an android who killed a human and took his place. He explicitly denies all this and refuses to take the test, leaving the question of his humanity unresolved not only for readers but for himself. Nonetheless, most people think the novel supports the idea that Deckard is human, since he’s eventually able to feel empathy for living creatures. This is something androids apparently can’t do, as when the android Pris remorselessly mutilates a spider.
I’m not so easily convinced. Once Luft brings up the android possibility so explicitly, there’s no way to rule it out. This is why philosophical skepticism is such a problem: any evidence you appeal to can be called into question. Sure, Deckard can feel empathy, but how do we know he’s not a new model of empathic android? Sure, he thinks he can tell a Nexus-6 from a human with the Voight-Kampff test, but does he really know that this test itself is accurate? Give all the evidence you want. Some smug skeptic will give you reason to doubt that it’s evidence at all. This leaves us with an inability to know one way or the other whether Deckard is human or android.
Unlike most people, I think the novel is more properly skeptical than even the Director’s or Final Cuts. Scott obviously wants us to believe that Deckard really is a replicant, thus giving an answer to the question of whether Deckard is a replicant. On the other hand, Dick brings up both the android and the human possibilities in such a way that any possible evidence is entirely compatible with both possibilities. The question of whether Deckard is human or android can’t really be answered by any evidence, not by origami unicorns and not by empathy boxes. The inability to give any satisfactory answer is what skepticism is all about.