Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  The Lives of Electric Others

  But everything I’ve been arguing buys completely into Deckard’s notion that electric sheep and androids are nothing more than clever simulations with no actual selfhood of their own. When his toad dismayingly proves to be artificial—and Wilbur Mercer is exposed as a paid performer on a stage set—Deckard initially despairs at the pervasive inauthenticity of what little he has left in his world. His nostalgic pastoral impulse to reclaim a lost golden world in which humans and animals engage in reciprocal care and communication (if not communion) has proven unobtainable. In order to cope, he has no option but to reprogram his responses. He must employ a new mode of simulation of his own in order to make his own life meaningful, namely, to make himself believe that what he thought to be lifeless isn’t. In this recognition, his gloom lifts a little in a muted epiphany when he says “The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are.”

  In Blade Runner, Deckard may make a similar realization, ultimately finding more humanity in Roy Batty’s self-sacrifice than in any of the supposedly human beings he finds in Los Angeles, himself included. And when he discovers the origami unicorn that Gaff leaves for him, the glint in his eye might mean more than just hope for Rachael, the replicant he has come to love: namely, he realizes that he, too, might be a replicant himself. And astonishingly enough, he seems okay with that—or, at least, willing to make it work.

  Likewise, in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, instead of having to find redemption in an escape “outside” the realm of technological simulation, Deckard instead comes to accept it: “Mercer isn’t fake . . . unless reality is fake.” Does he now see “through Mercer’s eyes” in an animistic way that invites all beings, electric ones included, into his circle of moral concern? How much Deckard’s response merely demonstrates a grudging concession to the inescapable virtuality of reality, and how much it might represent a genuine acknowledgment of synthetic selfhood ultimately remains unclear.

  Exhausted from his pursuit and his termination of the remaining rogue androids in the novel, he lets his wife program the Penfield Mood Organ to setting number 670, “long deserved peace,” and he finally sleeps—having been programmed to do so. (One has to wonder: does he now dream of electric, or actual sheep?) As he rests, Iran wonders what this new electric toad eats. “Artificial flies, she decided.” She looks up “animal accessories, electric” in the yellow pages, and for Deckard’s toad she orders “one pound of artificial flies that really fly around and buzz, please . . . I want it to work perfectly. My husband is devoted to it.” 6

  Identity Crises

  05

  Just Who and How Many Do You Think You Are?

  RICHARD FEIST

  Dr. Wigan slowly sawed into the bone, looped the ear, forehead and other ear to complete the cut. He pried off the skull cap and peered inside. Half the brain was gone! How could this be? Wigan had known the man now stretched out on the table; lunched with him and heard him recite poetry. Dumbfounded, Wigan thought: this guy had half a brain but a full mind. So, having a full brain must mean having two minds. This disturbing autopsy experience haunted Wigan throughout his days until his turn on the cutting table, December 7th, 1847.

  Wigan’s “1 brain = 2 minds” view died with him. For a century afterwards, most scientists agreed that different parts of the brain had different jobs, but there was only one mind and it was located in the dominant left hemisphere. Although scientists knew that a thick rope of fibers linked the brain’s hemispheres, they didn’t know why. They eventually learned that cutting it lessened the intensity of epileptic seizures, but afterwards splitbrainer patients walked, talked, swam, dressed themselves and played musical instruments just like anyone else.

  By the 1950s and 1960s scientists knew that the right hemisphere controlled the left side of the body and slightly controlled speech whereas the left hemisphere controlled the right side of the body and dominated speech. Scientists also began sending information to one hemisphere at a time. Now the split-brainers behaved bizarrely. Put a concealed object in a split-brainer’s left hand. Ask her what it is. The right hemisphere knows but can’t either talk or send a message to the left. So the left has to guess. Guess wrong, and the right hemisphere makes the face frown. Guess correctly, and the face smiles.

  Sometimes the hemispheres duke it out. Put a concealed object, like a pipe, in a split-brainer’s left hand. Take it away. Ask him to write with his left hand what he was holding. The right hemisphere will struggle to write “P” and “I”. But the left interferes, changes the “I” to an “E” and writes “PENCIL.” The left sees the word’s beginning and completes it, much like Google’s predictive text or your cellphone’s autocomplete. Then the right counter-autocompletes the left, erases “PENCIL” and draws a pipe. Notice that the hemispheres autocomplete each other differently. The left autocompletes conceptually, linguistically, while the right autocompletes visually, pictorially. A splitbrain monkey’s hands can, if each one grabs the same snack simultaneously, get into a tug of war.

  During the 1960s Dr. Joseph Bogen resurrected Wigan’s 1 brain = 2 minds view. Do we each have two minds deep inside us? Absolutely, says Bogen. Do we believe that we are each a single mind, a single self? Absolutely, says Bogen, who then argues that this belief is not serious evidence; it’s just a mistaken belief. So, continues Bogen, it’s time to grow up. Get over yourself and embrace your inner selves.

  Dick’s A Scanner Darkly draws deeply upon Bogen’s research. Several passages from Bogen’s writings appear, although Dick’s characters don’t quote Bogen. Instead, Dick drops Bogen quotations smack in the middle of their sentences. It’s an unexpected voice from nowhere. “What,” the reader asks, “is going on here? Where did this Bogen-stuff come from?” Experiencing a voice from out of the blue gives the reader an idea as to what’s heading towards the main character, Bob Arctor.

  Arctor’s self explodes because everything that holds it together disintegrates. He wears a special suit that disguises his appearance, assumes another name (Fred), relentlessly spies on himself, and alters his perception of his self through a brain-splitting drug, Substance D. Arctor’s self splits into different parts, which start bickering. The Arctor-parts eventually form two persons, Bob and Fred, who at first recognize each other but soon see each other as completely separate persons. Quite often Arctor isn’t even sure who he is and, stranger still, how many he is.

  The User Illusion

  Shift now to a scene where doctors quiz Fred, an undercover narcotics officer. They know that Fred plays the junkie and frequently ingests brain-splitting Substance D. One doctor lays a lined card on the table, starts to question Fred, but Dick interrupts him with a Bogen quotation:

  “Within the apparently meaningless lines is a familiar object that we would all recognize. You are to tell me what the . . .

  Item. In July 1969, Joseph E. Bogen published his revolutionary article “The Other Side of the Brain: An Appositional Mind.” In this article he quoted an obscure Dr. A.L. Wigan, who in 1844 wrote:

  The mind is essentially dual, like the organs by which it is exercised. This idea has presented itself to me, and I have dwelt on it for more than a quarter of a century, without being able to find a single valid or plausible objection. I believe myself then able to prove—(1 ) That each cerebrum is a distinct and perfect whole as an organ of thought. (2) That a separate and distinct process of thinking or ratiocination may be carried on in each cerebrum simultaneously.

  In his article, Bogen concluded:

  I believe [with Wigan] that each of us has two minds in one person. There is a host of detail to be marshaled in this case. But we must eventually confront directly the principal resistance to the Wigan view: that is, the subjective feeling possessed by each of us that we are One. This inner conviction of Oneness is a most cherished opinion of Western man . . .

  . . . object is and point to it in the total field.”

  It’s easy to find philosophers su
pporting this view of the oneness of the self. Modern philosophy’s founder, René Descartes, said that the mind has no parts; it’s clearly “one and entire.” For Descartes, our self (who and what it is, and how many) is so easy to know that it’s difficult—even insane—to deny our knowledge of it. After all, we directly know our self. But external stuff, carburetors and computers, are so difficult to know that it’s easy to deny our knowledge of them. We know external things indirectly. You need ideas in your mind to know external things. Ideas are like mental pictures. You know your dog through your idea of your dog. But your idea could easily be wrong—even completely misleading. Your idea right now of this book could suddenly vanish as your alarm clock wakes you up. Descartes says that it’s a clear and clean world inside the mind but messy and unclear outside. Dick flips Descartes and says that it’s insidemessy and outside-clear.

  In a Mirror, Darkly

  While lying in bed, Arctor asks whether anyone really knows his own motives. No, he concludes. But if you don’t know what you want, do you really know who you are? If your friends and family stopped calling you by name, stopped recognizing you, no doubt you’d become unsure of your identity. Maybe you’d try out new identities. And while you’re at it, play dress-up and go for an important job.

  You put on a bishop’s robe and miter, he pondered, and walk around in that, and people bow and genuflect and like that, and try to kiss your ring, if not your ass, and pretty soon you’re a bishop. So to speak. What is identity? He asked himself. Where does the act end? Nobody knows.

  The problem of identity is an oldie for philosophers. Suppose that a ship comes into port once a month for repairs. Each time you replace a part, save the old part. Eventually the ship has all new parts. Now combine all the old parts into another ship and you’ll have two ships. Which is the original ship?

  You say that you’re the same person as the baby in your mom’s photos. But what links your current self to your babyself? Your body constantly grows new cells and loses old ones. So you might not have any matter in common with your babyself. I’m sure that your mom misses baby-you, but I doubt that she saved your former cells and has reassembled baby-you.

  What gives the “self ”—whatever (and however many) it is—its continuity, if any? Dick agrees with philosophers John Locke, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, who think that none of this is clear. But Arctor’s musings hint that the outside world plays a big role in shaping who and what a self is. So it seems that the “inner world” is, in Nietzsche’s words, “full of phantoms and will-o’-the-wisps.”

  How many Bob Arctors are there? A weird and fucked up thought. Two that I can think of, he thought. The one called Fred, who will be watching the other one, called Bob. The same person. Or is it? Is Fred actually the same as Bob? Does anybody know? I would know, if anyone did, because I’m the only person in the world that knows that Fred is Bob Arctor. But, he thought, who am I? Which one of them is me?

  John Locke asked what made up the self and linked it together at different times. He said that it’s not matter, but memories. But Locke backpedals a little. He doesn’t conclude that a self is just a collection of memories; rather, the self is a “thinking, intelligent being.” A self can consider itself as the “same thinking thing, in different times and places.” For Locke, there is real unity to the self.

  Locke and Descartes both clung to the view of a self that has feelings, thoughts, memories and so on. But David Hume bit the bullet, went further and demanded evidence for existence of the self that possesses memories. Look deeply into your mind and you’ll only find sensations of colours, smells, tastes, temperatures and so on—but no self that has them. Your supposed “self ” is just a bundle that rolls along picking up new memories and sensations while losing others.

  Two hundred years before Bogen, Hume asserted that there is no single thinking thing. But why do we mistakenly believe that we have a self that gains and loses memories? Hume says that we think about the identity of our self over time like how we think about mountains. We incorrectly think that a mountain, which constantly changes, remains the same over time because the changes are tiny and easily overlooked by us. The same goes for our supposed self. In the end, thinking that we have a self and that it is the same self over time is a delusion, but a perfectly normal and inescapable delusion.

  You Don’t Always Get Along

  You probably get why some call Hume’s discussion of personal identity the most upsetting and controversial passages in European philosophy. For Hume the mind is like a little republic, full of citizens, but without a ‘universal citizen’. Even Hume-the-person is upset with Hume-the-philosopher. To paraphrase:

  Person-Hume:

  I can’t believe Philosopher-Hume’s view that there’s no self. But I can’t say where he went wrong!

  Philosopher-Hume:

  Don’t worry; belief formation is not a rational process. It’s perfectly natural that you have this internal conflict. It’s perfectly natural that you can’t help but mistakenly believe that you are a self. Everything will be fine—go play pool, drink beer, and you’ll forget all about this crazy philosophy.

  Person-Hume:

  This isn’t over yet, Philosopher-Hume!

  Sadly, the two Humes never came to an agreement. So, there you have it: one of the greatest philosophers in history fought with himself and concluded that the mind has normal, inescapable delusions about itself and irrationally forms its beliefs—no wonder Dick loved philosophy so much and incorporated it into his books! Were David Hume alive today, he could have starred in the movie version of A Scanner Darkly. Step aside Keanu Reeves.

  Even better is that Hume ripped off his freaky “city in your head” view from Plato, who said much the same thing thousands of years earlier. Take that Bogen! Before considering Plato, let’s dip back into A Scanner Darkly, where the doctors grill Fred. One asks if he experiences any “cross-chatter.” Basically, if the left hemisphere quiets down, the right will pipe up. What’s this like? The doctor explains:

  Thoughts not your own. As if another person or mind were thinking. But different from the way you would think. Even foreign words that you don’t know. That it’s learned from peripheral perception sometime during your lifetime.

  There are two really cool things here. First, that there’s another person thinking inside you and you’re hearing it. Second, this other person thinks in a foreign language. As you learn things, you think that you’re aware of everything you’re learning, but no, the other mind is also learning. There are parallel streams of learning happening in your head.

  Plato compared the mind to a city and the unbalanced mind to civil strife. In Plato’s Republic, his mouthy mouthpiece Socrates describes how your mind is really a community of three minds. This was a big hit in European thought. You’ve probably heard about the Christian Trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Not to be outdone, Sigmund Freud put forth a three-part view of the mind: Id, Ego and Super-Ego. For Plato, one mind is primarily where your desires come from, the other is primarily your emotional mind, and the third is primarily your scientific, reasoning mind. Each mind desires, reasons and has a bit of a temper. Your reasoning mind is far more reasonable than the others and your desiring mind has stronger desires than do the others and so on.

  Socrates thought that we constantly experience cross-chatter between our mental citizens. Suppose that on a hot summer day you desire a cold beer. You know that you shouldn’t indulge because you must pick mom up at the airport. You both desire and refuse the beer. But the exact same thing cannot simultaneously desire and refuse the beer. In such situations we often say “I am torn on this” or “I am of two minds on this.” Socrates takes this seriously. It’s not just a way of talking. There’s a clash within you and you are in fact, at war with yourself. You had better do the right thing: avoid the beer, and get mom. Look, she did the best she could with you three. Don’t blame mommy if you can’t play nice together.

  Indeed, our mental citizens often s
quabble. Socrates tells the story of Leontius, who came across a pile of dead bodies and was both thoroughly disgusted and intrigued. As with a good train wreck, Leontius couldn’t look away. He relented, screaming at himself, “Look for yourselves, you evil wretches!” The emotional part was peeved with the desiring part. However, Socrates says, the emotional and desiring parts agree that in order to live a good life, overall, it is best to let the rational part run the show.

  The Outer Workings of the Mind

  We’ve seen that Dick thinks that the inside of the mind is a mess, now what about the outside? Here things are just as bizarre, but Immanuel Kant can help us out. Like Dick, Kant flips Descartes’s view and says that we indirectly perceive the self and directly perceive external objects.

  This is crazy, you might think. Maybe—but it still could be true. Dick and Kant both insist that reality is not independent of our minds; our minds play a role in its construction. This dependence of reality on our minds is weirdly but effectively captured by the movie’s animation. Richard Linklater shot the scenes with regular film, but then employed a technique called “rotoscoping.” The film looks like a live-action comic book. It is often difficult to tell exactly which parts of a given scene are purely animated and what is “really” live action. Again, this merely reflects Dick’s and Kant’s view that “reality” is in many ways a construction of our minds, but not a total construction. The real problem is to figure out what we construct of reality and what is really there.