The Art of Knowing Arctor
Instead of looking within to know ourselves, maybe we need to look outside. But how can we do that? We seem stuck inside our own heads, able to look out to observe the world and each other but not the self inside that’s doing the observing. It’s like an eye trying to see itself.
Impossible! Unless, perhaps, you systematically record and scan yourself as Bob Arctor does in A Scanner Darkly. Working as “Fred,” the Substance D narc, Arctor takes on the job of observing himself as a suspect. Scanning devices are implanted in his house and then he looks back over the footage to investigate himself. The relationship between Fred and Bob Arctor is interestingly convoluted, involving philosophical issues concerning self and identity discussed in detail in Richard Feist’s chapter in this volume, but suffice it to say that Arctor becomes fragmented into two personas, Fred the narc and Bob the addict, enabling the former to observe the latter in a detached and evaluative manner. By taking on the Fred persona, Bob becomes able to observe himself in a way that, under ordinary circumstances, seems impossible.
What happens with this twisted scenario, in terms of the pursuit of self-knowledge? Can Arctor expect to gain an objective understanding of himself that he couldn’t have acquired through introspection? In a sense, yes, but as Dick often reveals in his work, the reality of the situation is much more complex and perplexing than we may first realize. In a mix of hope and skeptical despair, Arctor reflects:
What does a scanner see? He asked himself. I mean, really see? Into the head? Down into the heart? Does a passive infrared scanner like they used to use or a cube-type holo-scanner like they use these days, the latest thing, see into me—into us—clearly or darkly? I hope it does, he thought, see clearly, because I can’t any longer these days see into myself. I see only murk. Murk outside; murk inside. I hope, for everyone’s sake, the scanners do better. Because, he thought, if the scanner sees only darkly, the way I myself do, then we are cursed, cursed again and like we have been continually, and we’ll wind up dead this way, knowing very little and getting that little fragment wrong too.
So Arctor would like for the scanner to help him see beyond the murky waters of his own introspection, skeptically suggesting that if it doesn’t help then he, and others too, will lack any genuine self-knowledge. To what extent the scanner helps or fails to help Arctor know himself is something I’ll leave for you to explore by reading the novel, but we can dig in a little further here to see what the implications might be for the rest of us.
Not all of us have the privilege of being split in two and then enabled to see extended audiovisual footage of ourselves, so is there some other way we ordinary folks can achieve the detached perspective that allowed Arctor to observe himself? Consider the brain-scanning technologies (for example, PET and fMRI neuroimaging) that we have developed. Could such devices help us get out of the subjective dark murk of introspection and see ourselves in the clear light of day?
In some cases, at least, I think the answer is clearly yes. Consider again the android-human uncertainty we discussed earlier. No amount of introspection will justifiably reveal to you whether you are an android, but sticking your head in an fMRI and seeing a bunch of synthetic parts buried behind your eye sockets would do the trick: clear evidence that you are in fact an android. But how far can this kind of information go? Can scanning our brains reveal our innermost drives and motivations? Could you, say, spend some time with a PET scanner to figure out whether or not your feelings for another person constitute a deep soul-binding love or a temporary lustful infatuation?
Perhaps not yet, but if we discover what some philosophers and scientists call the “neural correlates” of mental states like enduring love and fleeting lust, then you could indeed figure out which state you were in by a brain scan.
But identifying precise brain states that directly map onto distinct emotional states is easier said than done. Some people question whether it is even possible in principle. Contemporary philosopher Alva Noë, for example, argues in his book Out Of Our Heads that no amount of brain scanning will reveal our mental states because that is simply the wrong place to look. From Noë’s perspective, mental states, including emotions such as love and lust, must be understood in terms of whole biological organisms and their active interaction with the environment, including, crucially, other people. In this sense, perhaps Arctor’s brand of self-scanning, where he observes himself as a whole human in his native habitat of his own home, interacting with other people, may actually have an edge on the more constrained and isolated focus on the brain.
What Does A Scanner See?
Before you install security cameras throughout your home, however, some further philosophical analysis is in order. There is yet another perspective to consider that brings the whole idea of observation itself into question as a basis for knowing yourself, irrespective of whether it takes the form of an Arctor-style home scan, a more focused and localized brain scan, or plain old-fashioned introspection in attempt to discover yourself.
According to the French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, we are conscious beings who freely choose to be what we are, rather than determinate beings whose essence can be observed in the same way that we can observe that, say, water is made of hydrogen and oxygen.
Imagine a gambler who has decided to stop gambling. The day after the resolution, he faces the option of gambling yet again, freely able to choose against his prior decision. To describe the situation as Sartre did in his master work Being and Nothingness, the man is a nothingness that recognizes in anguish the complete inefficacy of his past decision to stop gambling. It’s no use for him to observe his past resolution in deciding whether to see himself as a gambler or non-gambler, as he is entirely free to gamble or not. He must always freely decide again for himself what to be, as he consciously stands before the possibilities he can pursue.
If we answer Arctor’s question from this perspective, we may say that a scanner, when one tries to find oneself with it, sees nothing. It’s hopeless to try to discover oneself in observation because there is nothing to observe besides the conscious freedom to be what one chooses. I can’t trust my observation of myself as an object to tell me who I am because, as Sartre states,
Nothing can ensure me against myself, cut off from the world and from my essence by this nothingness which I am. I have to realize the meaning of the world and of my essence; I make my decision concerning them—without justification and without excuse.
Think of Fred perched before his playback-monitor, watching footage of himself as Arctor in his own home, trying to decipher himself. The absurdity of this situation may reach beyond the bizarreness of the circumstances into the more ordinary hope of knowing oneself through observation. That goal in itself may be deeply problematic. From Sartre’s perspective, trying to know who we are by discerning facts about ourselves is actually a kind of self-deception, where we take ourselves to be something other than what we are—conscious beings, free to be what we choose at any given moment.
Sartre calls this “bad faith,” a refusal to face up to our freedom and responsibility by turning to presumed facts about ourselves in attempt to fall back on a particular determinate identity. So perhaps Arctor’s observation of himself through Fred and his scanner is actually an instance of bad faith, a selfdeceptive maneuver to hide the anguish of his freedom by attributing traits to himself as if they were facts rather than choices. It’s starting to sound as if his murky skepticism about knowing himself might have been warranted after all.
But not so fast. It’s easy to take Sartre’s talk of nothingness, anguish, and bad faith to paint a bleak skeptical picture of ourselves, but that isn’t exactly what he intended. In fact, Sartre sometimes characterized his existentialist outlook as a hopeful recognition of human freedom, optimistic towards the ever-present capacity to shape our own lives anew. The gambler, recall, is in anguish over his conscious ability to gamble or not to gamble, but at the same time he is enti
rely free to be whatever he chooses. This conscious freedom bears a tremendous responsibility but also affords us the opportunity to remake ourselves as we stand before the indeterminate possibilities of our future.
In the author’s note after A Scanner Darkly, Dick enigmatically states “I myself, I am not a character in this novel: I am the novel.” What does he mean by this? In light of Sartre’s optimism towards our freedom to transcend our past and recreate ourselves anew, I’d like to suggest that Dick used the novel as a way of reshaping the trajectory of his life.
As documented in Lawrence Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions, and elsewhere, there are clear autobiographical elements of Dick’s own life in A Scanner Darkly. For instance, he experienced a break-in that prompted a great deal of speculation on his part, including, perhaps most interestingly, the theory that he himself had broken into his own house. This is explored with dramatic effect in A Scanner Darkly, centering on the Fred-Bob split and the implantation of the scanning devices in Bob’s house. Dick also spent some time in a drug rehab center with notable similarities to New Path. In a more general sense, A Scanner Darkly appears to reflect a dark time in Dick’s own life.
Dick said (in his 1975 Rolling Stone interview) that A Scanner Darkly was his first novel written without amphetamines. Coupling this with the fact that A Scanner Darkly offers a very critical perspective on drug use, this leads me to wonder whether it might have served as a vehicle for Dick to gain some perspective on his life and reorient himself. Could A Scanner Darkly itself be a work of personal transformation, a way for Dick to detach himself from his past and freely reshape the course of his life? As he wrote A Scanner Darkly, could he, like Sartre’s gambler, have stood towards his past in conscious recognition of his capacity to freely choose what path to take? In light of some additional cases of Dick’s appearance in his own work, which we’ll turn to next, I think we can see that this is quite possibly the case.
Phil Chews the Fat
Towards the beginning of VALIS, we find the sentence “I am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity.” Horselover Fat is indeed a main character in the novel, whose life is depicted and analyzed throughout VALIS, in both the third person and also narrated in the first person. Horselover Fat is also a pseudonym for Dick, and the character portrays multiple aspects of Dick’s real life. Most centrally, it investigates the meaning of visions Dick experienced in 1974, which became a nearly obsessive focus of his later work. He wrote extensively of the visions, offering diverse interpretations of them in VALIS, the colossal and ponderous Exegesis, Radio Free Albemuth (which also includes Phil himself as a character), and elsewhere.
In this massive collection of self-reflective work, Dick entertained a wide variety of theories about his visionary experiences, including (but not at all limited to) Vitamin C overdose, telepathic communication with alien intelligence, reintegration with a past life, and Gnostic Christian revelation. No wonder he needed to get some objectivity through Horselover Fat! For anyone else, reflecting upon yourself through a character named Horselover Fat would be a left-field move, but for Dick it appears to have been a way to bring his experiences down to reality. I say that lightly, of course, as the events Horselover Fat experiences in VALIS are not depictions of tame suburban reality by any means. As you Dick fans will know, the theories Dick considered as explanations of his 2-3-74 experiences formed the plots of many of his later works, which contain some of the most mind-stretching passages he ever wrote.
As a philosopher interested in self-knowledge, I find all of this fascinating. What exactly is Dick up to here? Are the writings contained in these later works an attempt for Dick to sort through his life and gain some knowledge of himself? Is he figuring out who he is through the twisted narratives of A Scanner Darkly, VALIS, and Radio Free Albemuth, engaging in an authentic quest for meaning in his real life, or might he just be pulling all our legs with this hallucinatory phosphene nonsense? Or was he just plain nuts? Maybe a bit of all of these things?
From a critical stance, we might say that Dick’s theorizing about himself is really an instance of bad faith, in the sense that perhaps he was trying to nail down a determinate identity for himself, as an escape from the immense responsibility to choose what to make of himself and his experiences. If this perspective is right, Dick sadly spent the last decade or so of his life digging himself into a vacuous chasm of inauthentic delusion.
I’d like to offer another perspective here, however, turning this misguided critique on its head. In a couple of fascinating and revealing philosophical essays written during the self-reflective turn in Dick’s work that we’ve been exploring, “The Android and the Human” and “Man, Android, and Machine,” Dick directly concerns himself with understanding the nature of authentic humanness. He suggests that what distinguishes humans from androids has nothing to do with what they are composed of and everything to do with how they live their lives and understand themselves. An android, which could in fact be composed of a flesh-and-blood human body, is defined by following a programmatic life plan dictated by external social forces, while an authentic human (which could turn out to be made of synthetic parts) acts spontaneously in a lived reality of one’s own making. In describing the latter state in “Man, Android, and Machine,” Dick writes that
Like a symphony of Beethoven, each of us is unique, and, when this long winter is over, we as new blooms will surprise ourselves and the world around us. What we will do, many of us, is throw off the mere masks that we have worn—masks that were intended to be taken for reality.
From this perspective, we can see Dick’s exploratory theorization about himself not as self-deceived construction of false masks but rather as a playful openness towards the freedom he had to make himself into whatever he chose. In “The Android and the Human,” Dick states that “Reality, to me, is not so much something you perceive, but something you make. You create it more rapidly than it creates you.” As I understand it, this resonates with Sartre’s optimism towards human freedom and the ever-new opportunity it affords us to choose what we are.
Dick never committed himself to one of his theories about himself. As his friends and lovers attest, he was an ever-playful trickster, always improvising in a way that escaped a determinate settled role. He playfully toyed with various conceptions of himself in his writings, without letting any one of them become his fixed android program. In that sense, then, perhaps Dick’s wild speculations about himself were his way of knowing he is not an android.
What’s yours?
08
Human or Machine, Does It Mind or Matter?
GEORGE TESCHNER AND PATRICK GRACE
When Rachael returns to Deckard’s apartment a second time, she sits down at a piano and begins to play. She says to Deckard, “I did not know whether I could play. I do not know whether it is me or Tyrell’s niece.” Deckard sits close to her on the piano bench, looks into her eyes and says, “You play beautifully.”
This is the first time in Blade Runner that the distinction between human and replicant blurs for Deckard. He leans over and softly kisses Rachael. She gets up and runs to leave the apartment. He bars the door and forcefully grabs and stops her. Slow romantic music plays on the soundtrack. He says to her, “Say, ‘kiss me’. Say, ‘I want you’.”
Is this the programming of a machine? Shaken and tearyeyed, she repeats his words. Is it “she” who repeats the words, or “it” that repeats the words? In the passion of the moment, the distinction between what is human and what is a simulation disappears.
Don’t Think about It
The script by Hampton and Fancher is even more graphic. Rachael becomes excited; her breath comes faster and deeper. The action is described as a “magnetic, palpable energy growing up between them.” In Dick’s novel, Rachael asks Deckard whether he has ever made love to an android. He has not, but he says he had been told “if you think too much, if you reflect on what you’re doing—then y
ou can’t go on.” Typically throughout the novel, what is said of androids is also true of humans. Thinking about the sex act “too much,” whether by a human or an android, inhibits the physiological response. Rachael says that it is “dreary” if one pauses and gets “philosophical” about it. She says to Deckard, “don’t think about it, just do it”—good advice in either case.
Whether Rachael is actually experiencing desire and emotion is idle speculation against the intensity of the action. Deckard’s earlier remark, “Replicants are like any other machine,” is contradicted, not in theory, but in practice. The particulars of real life’s passions, decisions, and actions—the existential—trumps questions about the difference between the human and the non-human when the non-human fully simulates the human. The distinction between the real and the simulated is pointless where there is no observable difference. This is the position of the Turing Test, which the Voight-Kampff test is modeled after.
Alan Turing was one of the first thinkers to raise the question of whether a machine can think. In the “Turing Test,” a human judge carries on a natural language conversation with a human and a machine. If the judge cannot tell which is human and which is machine, the machine passes the test. In order to keep the test simple, the conversation is limited to text-only communication.
Turing originally proposed the test in order to replace the “meaningless” question, “Can machines think?” with one that could be decided by observable behavior. “Can machines think?” is meaningless for Turing because there is no way of observing third-person consciousness. The only way to decide whether someone or something has a mental life is to base it on behavior. The Turing Test is explicitly behavioral: it tests how the subject acts, which from the point of view of philosophical positivism is the only way in which the term “thinking” could have meaning. Positivism rejects as meaningless anything that cannot be traced back to what is empirically observable. Questions about whether machines can think or feel are dismissed as unverifiable metaphysical nonsense. If a machine acts intelligently then we are warranted in saying that it is intelligent. This applies to humans as well, since inner mental life in either case is unobservable.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 10
