Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Soul Continuity Rule: If you want to keep track of the person, follow the soul.

  If the Soul Rule is correct, then the wub survives because he transfers his soul to Captain Franco. Hauser survives not because his body is constant, but rather because his soul is constant. Hauser’s soul has the original Hauser memories removed, the Quaid memories implanted, and then some of the original Hauser memories put back.

  Even though Locke uses the soul as the vehicle for transferring the consciousness of the prince to the cobbler, he denies that it is the soul that is the person. Gottfried Leibniz, a German philosopher also writing in the seventeenth century, agrees. Leibniz, in his Discourse on Metaphysics, asks us to suppose that we (our body and soul) could become the King of China on the condition that we forget all of who we were, as if we had been born anew. (This is just an extreme version of the bargain between Jennings and the Rethrick Corporation.) Though the King of China was the richest man in the world, Leibniz rejects this offer. Why? Because, Leibniz answers, even if the body and soul were made the King of China, accepting the offer would be the same “as if he were to be annihilated and a King of China to be created at his place.”

  Likewise, in his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, an eighteenth-century German philosopher, asks us to imagine a group of souls transferring a single mental life from one to an other. How many people are there? Kant claims just one—the single mental life that is transferred from soul to soul.

  Put simply, just as we can imagine switching bodies, we can imagine my consciousness being switched to another soul (Kant’s case), or being left behind (Leibniz’s case). According to the Soul Rule, I stay with my original soul, but our intuitions tell us that I follow my consciousness.

  There is also the practical problem of applying the Soul Rule—how do we follow the soul? We know the wub survives in the captain’s body because the wub continues a private conversation that crewmember Rollins and the wub were having before the captain barged in to shoot the wub. The wub expresses his opinions and beliefs. We see and hear evidence of his mental life. But what evidence do we have that the wub’s soul transferred or whether the wub even has a soul? How could we tell that Hauser has a single soul that is having various psyches implanted and removed from it, rather than having different souls placed in his body and removed?

  The Soul Rule has significant problems of its own, so perhaps we need to switch back to some sort of Combined Rule. But yet another one of Dick’s stories suggests that the Combined Rule won’t work either.

  Future Selves and Imposters

  In the movie Imposter (based on the short story of the same name), Spencer Olham is accused of being an android replica created for nefarious purposes by enemy aliens. Without revealing whether Olham actually is such a replica (in either the movie or the story), let us suppose that he is—the real Olham had his memories transferred to the android and was then killed by the enemy aliens.

  Now consider an alternative story without the aliens. Because Olham is dying he chooses to have his consciousness downloaded into an android replica (a merging of “Mr. Spaceship” and “Beyond Lies the Wub”). He also chooses to omit any memory of the deliberation or decision to download. As a result, after downloading, Olham merely thinks he has recovered from his illness rather than transferred himself to another body.

  Finally, suppose that the process used to transfer Olham’s mental life is identical in both the alien story and the illness story. The stories have the same degree of bodily and mental continuity. In both, Olham’s mental life is transferred from the old organic body to the new android body. Yet in the alternate story the android is Olham’s means of survival, whereas in the original story, the android is an imposter. So Olham survives in one story but dies in the other. Since the stories have the same degree of bodily and mental continuity, according to the Combined Rule, Olham should either survive in both or die in both. Hence, the Combined Rule won’t work in all cases.

  Of course, in the latter scenario Olham chose to survive as an android, whereas in the former he did not. Could this very choice explain or be a part of what is required for one’s own continued existence?

  “Aha! The soul to the rescue,” say advocates of the Soul Rule. The soul, such advocates might claim, goes where we intend it to go. That explains why the aliens’ android is an imposter, but the dying Olham’s android is Olham’s future self.

  But now consider a slight variation on the alternative story. Suppose Olham does not want to be transferred to the android, but is considered so important by the government that they insist he survive. Against his will Olham is forced to undergo the transfer procedure. Olham regains consciousness in a healthy android body and, looking at the lifeless remains of his old organic body, says: “Curses! They moved me against my will!” But if the soul goes where Olham wants it to go, then his soul will still be in the organic body across the room and he should say “Curses! I am dead over there across the room!” which is absurd.

  If the process by which Olham is transferred is the same in all cases, then either the soul, assuming there is one, is transferred in all cases or it is not. Either way, we cannot account for the thought that the alien’s android is an imposter and Olham’s android is his future self. Hence, the Soul Rule will not work here either.

  Selfless?

  None of the Rules accommodates all the various bizarre transformations that occur in Dick’s stories. Should we conclude that Dick had an incoherent conception of personal identity? No more than any of the rest of us. Are we just our bodies? Do we have souls? Is our mental life separable from our bodies or our souls? Philosophers, theologians, and the intellectually curious have been wrestling with the conflicting answers to these questions of personal identity for centuries. The power of Dick’s stories is how easily he brings our conflicting intuitions to light. We easily follow the wub into Captain Franco, but equally easily (okay, not so easily) follow Douglas Quaid’s search for his true memories and his true identity.

  The pessimist worries that Dick’s explorations show how easily we can split our very selves asunder. The optimist hopes that Dick’s explorations reveal how, with suitable technological advances, we might expand the very possibility of what we can be. But the skeptic doubts that there is anything to be either optimistic or pessimistic about. If we are not bodies or psyches or souls or even combinations, what are we? There are no other options left, so that must mean we are nothing at all!?

  Are we really forced to the conclusion that there are no enduring persons at all? Can we give an answer to this skeptical doubt?

  Is It Live or Is It Memorex?

  The problem may not be that all these intuitions about psyches, bodies, and souls are incoherent. The problem might be that we’re missing some very crucial details in each of these cases.

  How exactly is the alleged transfer of Olham’s psyche from one physical object, his body, to another, the android replica, taking place? Suppose the scientists (or the aliens) take a ‘snapshot’ of Olham’s brain—they record all the current states of his neurons, synapses, and so forth. Assume these details capture all there is to capture about Olham’s psyche. Then they imprint all these details on the android brain. Did Olham get transferred? No. He got copied. The snapshot, we can suppose, does nothing to Olham’s brain but record its current state. Imprinting the details on the android brain does nothing to Olham’s brain or psyche. So Olham’s psyche is still in his brain. But suppose that the process of taking the snapshot fries Olham’s brain. Does he get transferred in that situation? No. He gets destroyed and, at best, a copy of his psyche gets made.

  If Olham wants himself to survive, he needs to get transferred and not just copied. Nor should we confuse transferring and copying. Our banks will let us transfer our money from one account to another, but would object strenuously if we tried to copy our money from one account to another. Transferring the contents of one bookshelf to another requires one set of books. Copying the contents of one booksh
elf on another requires two distinct sets of books. (If you still think copying is good enough for surviving, then ask yourself what happens to Olham if the government imprints his psyche on two separate androids. Does one person somehow survive as two separate people?)

  Similar concerns arise for Douglas Quaid. If Cohaagen merely copied Hauser’s original memories, and then replaced them with the memories and personality of Douglas Quaid, then Hauser’s mental life is not merely disjointed—his friend Cohaagen destroyed it. But if Hauser transfers his psyche out of his body and stores it elsewhere, then again his mental life is not disjointed—he merely leaves his body behind. (Safer, but not foolproof, for Hauser would be to store all his original memories in his brain, but make them inaccessible, until properly unlocked, to the newly implanted Quaid personality. This possibility would bring the movie closer in line with Dick’s original short story.)

  Once we fill in the possible details of what is happening to Olham’s or Hauser’s mental life, the Psyche Rule once again seems the most plausible. Fill in the details one way and it looks like the characters die and get copied (which would account for the aliens’ android being an imposter). Fill in the details another way and the characters survive, but leave their bodies behind (which would account for Olham’s android being a future self).

  What Olham and Hauser need in order to survive is a way to transfer, and not just copy, their psyches. But is that even possible? I don’t know, since I don’t know how our psyches are realized within us. Are they merely composed of arrangements of our neurons? Our entire brains? Or something else entirely?

  Much of the past seventy years of research in psychology and the philosophy of mind has been devoted to trying to understand exactly how this encoding of memories and psyches in human beings actually works. Progress is being made. Much more still needs to be figured out. Until we do, I wouldn’t visit your local Rekall franchise for that virtual trip to Mars.

  07

  Scan Thyself

  JESSE W. BUTLER

  We humans have a wide assortment of beliefs about ourselves, from our individual tastes and preferences to our personality and character; from the intentions behind all the little things we do every day to the overall meaningfulness or meaninglessness of our lives.

  But what do we really know about ourselves? Can we know what we truly are, or instead might our nature be somehow hidden from us? Does each person have private and secure knowledge of her innermost thoughts and motivations, or could most people actually be deluded about themselves, having false images of who they are and mistaken understanding of why they do the things they do?

  But, we might also ask, do we really want to know what makes us tick? What if we turned out to be something horrible, something we couldn’t live with? Might it be better not to know, in that case?

  Philip K. Dick, I’m pretty sure, wanted to know. He inquired into human nature in a dazzling variety of ways, both stretching the bounds of what it could mean to be human and investigating the possible meaning of events in his own life with a vigor and persistence that few can muster, all of which suggests a deep curiosity stemming from the perennial human drive to know oneself.

  The pursuit of self-knowledge is a major theme and inspiration behind much of Dick’s work, from the visions of human possibilities throughout his stories and novels to the 8,000+ page “Exegesis” that he pored over night after night for many years through the end of his life, in attempt to understand the nature and meaning of his own experiences.

  As I see it, this places Dick within a long tradition in philosophy that is concerned with the pursuit, possibility, and value of knowing ourselves. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, inspired by the command to “know thyself ” inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, emphasized self-knowledge as essential to living a good life and pursued authentic understanding of himself to what some saw as a bitter and unnecessary end. Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, sought self-knowledge only to find that the self itself is an illusion at the root of all suffering. René Descartes’s confidence in his knowledge of himself as an immaterial being was the foundation of his entire philosophy. And Philip K. Dick, too, inquired into the nature of the human self, in both general and deeply personal ways that permeated his life and work.

  Does this mean that Dick should go down in history with the likes of Socrates, Buddha, and Descartes? Well, that really isn’t for me to decide, but looking at self-knowledge through the lens offered by Dick offers some relevant, fascinating, and potentially illuminating insight into the topic. Let’s start with a hypothetical inquiry that places us within the world of one of Dick’s most famous and influential works, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, eventually winding our way towards Dick’s own pursuit of self-knowledge in some of his later novels, in which he himself appears as characters in his own work.

  How Do You Know You’re Not an Android?

  Imagine yourself in a world cohabited by both androids and humans, such as the one in which Rick Deckard lives as a bounty hunter whose job is to hunt down the andys and take them out. Suppose further that, like Deckard, you fancy yourself to be a flesh-and-blood human being, with real experiences, feelings, memories and, perhaps most significantly, real thoughts about yourself as a living person. You haven’t taken a Voigt-Kampff test, nor have you subjected yourself to a painful bone marrow analysis, but then why would you need to do that? You have experienced yourself as a human being your entire life. Isn’t your experience of being a human proof enough that you aren’t an andy?

  If you think like René Descartes, then your answer might very well be, yes it is! In fact, you might think that you actually have the best proof you could possibly have, much better than any external test. Descartes, as you may know, is famous for his ‘cogito’ argument, frequently summarized with the quote “I think, therefore I am.” From this perspective, we privately know ourselves in a clear, transparent, and absolutely secure manner, unlike the messy and fallible knowledge we may or may not acquire about the outside world. Mirroring this reasoning, you know by the very fact that you are consciously thinking that you are a genuine human being, and no mere mindless mechanical android that only mimics human actions while the lights inside are really all off, so to speak. For you, the lights are on, and that’s all you need to know that you are a real living human being.

  But there’s a problem lurking here. Descartes concluded on the basis of his awareness of his own thoughts that he must be an immaterial thing whose essence is thought—a soul, entirely distinct from a physical thing like an animal or a machine, composed of mere matter. In fact, Descartes presents the ‘cogito’ argument in his Meditations just after throwing the existence of the entirety of physical reality into doubt, including his own body.

  But what about the possibility that he could actually be made of matter but is, nonetheless, thinking? Even if Descartes can be granted full confidence in his knowledge of his own thoughts, how exactly does he know that he is not in fact a thoroughly physical being, whose thoughts and experiences come about through physical processes, such as the complex electrochemical activity of the brain? The answer is that he doesn’t know. Beneath the veil of his own thoughts and experiences, Descartes may just be his physical body after all. This is something that Descartes simply cannot rule out as a possibility on the basis of his own introspection alone.

  My purpose here isn’t to criticize Descartes’s defense of immaterial souls. My purpose is to question how Descartes can draw any justifiable conclusions about his underlying nature on the basis of his own introspection. Inner observation may disclose one’s thoughts to oneself, but it does not reveal whether those thoughts themselves take place in an immaterial soul, a bundle of neurons, or a computer.

  Getting back to the android case, how can you rule out the possibility that you are actually an android, merely on the basis of your seemingly-human experiences? The fact of the matter is that you simply can’t. You cannot know, from your own experience alone, whether
or not an android can experience the same introspective thought processes as a human being. Just as Descartes cannot justifiably conclude that he’s an immaterial thinking being on the basis of his experience of thought, you simply can’t rule out the possibility that you’re an android by the fact that you are having what you take to be real human experiences. At a minimum, you’d need to have some further reasons for believing that androids don’t have human-like experiences, which is something you’d have to acquire from facts about the outside world rather than your own introspection. It looks as if you’re going to have to go take that V-K test after all.

  So introspection isn’t the secure foundation that Descartes thought it was, as we can see from within the Dickian dilemma of figuring out whether you’re a human or an android. This skepticism of introspection isn’t new, however. For instance, the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume stated in his Treatise of Human Nature:

  For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe any thing but the perception.

  Hume’s point is that all we get from the experience of introspection is experience itself, and not anything that reveals to us what causes or underlies our experience. Experience could be produced by a human brain, an immaterial soul, or, in your case in particular, the silicon chip lodged deep inside your synthetic skull, but the window that introspection provides doesn’t peer that far.