Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  From the depraved union of Eve and the rulers, Cain and Abel are born. Lucky for humankind, Adam and Eve have their own children—Seth and Norea—who are not defiled by the alien bloodline of the rulers. In these and other Gnostic writings, Norea is Zoe, and so humanity begins to improve. Seeing their power is again threatened, the rulers decide to flood the Earth and tell only Noah. Next the rulers descend and attempt to rape Norea, telling her to serve them as her mother had. Norea tells the rulers they are living in darkness and that they had not defiled her mother but a clay image of her. The rulers close in on her, but Norea cries out to father-of-the-entirety. An angel appears and saves Norea, telling her and retelling the reader the details of the events of this story.

  In the end, we learn that those who know these things about the spiritual nature of humanity and the illusory nature of matter will become free from death, that which appears only through the deception of the rulers. But this liberation will not take place until the arrival of a savior, the authentic person who will reveal the truth of the existence of the spirit sent by the father-of-the-entirety. If there is a movie version of the Nag Hammadi texts, and it works out anything like adaptations of Dick’s writings, this savior will either be played by Daniel Craig or maybe Keanu Reeves, since he’s already played several saviors.

  Pink Light

  Scholars feel that when Gnostics read and contemplated texts, they believed they entered into a dialogue with the writer, the savior, or a sacred being. Gnostics claim that, in this way, they received the direct and authentic teachings of Jesus, Paul, and others. On the other hand, they believed that inventing one’s own stories is also evidence of gnosis. This is precisely what Dick does in the VALIS trilogy.

  Dick experiences the light of Sophia and reinterprets it his writings. In The Divine Invasion, Dick explains that the intelligent light in the novel is experienced as being pink because that is how the human eye discerns celestial radiance. The Exegesis notes his amusement at the pink light appearing like the color of strawberry ice cream while he was listening to the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever.” He concludes the divine has again manifested in the most mundane, another reference to Gnostic belief.

  Among Dick’s numerous theories about what he experienced through pink light are speculations about messages from three-eyed aliens he saw in a dream; projections from VALIS, a Vast Active Living Intelligence System that is like a satellite in space; and transmissions formed by God through Sophia, bypassing VALIS. Dick sees VALIS as acting like or being Yaldabaoth. That is, VALIS the satellite is not God but is only the ruler over and conveyer of the material realm. In his essay “Cosmogony and Cosmology,” Dick speculates that God created VALIS so that the incorruptible might experience self-reflection. Among his descriptions of what happens to him during the transmissions are the ideas that he is taken over by the spirit of the prophet Elijah, who appears as a character in The Divine Invasion; that he breaks through the illusory screen of time, and realizes that we live in the time of the Acts of the Apostles; and that he is really Thomas, the twin of Jesus.

  Generally, in contrast to orthodox Christians who seek salvation through faith, sacraments, the Bible, and church, Gnostics find salvation through inner experience related to direct divine revelation. The Gnostic Gospel of Thomas says the divine truth inside us will save us from death and suffering caused by the material world, if we bring it out. However, if we do not bring it out it will destroy us. This seems an apt description of Philip K. Dick’s assumption about his pink light visions. He responds by fervently interpreting his visions in hopes of an understanding that will bring salvation from his madness. Madness as ignorance of the divine is a condition shared alike by all humanity and Yaltobaoth. The Gospel of Truth, in the Nag Hammadi Library, describes the human condition as a nightmare in which a man with bloody hands is pursued for murder. He cannot escape until he receives gnosis. In another image in the text, a man is depicted as a mountaineer who has lost his way in the fog. He finds the way out only when he hears his name called. This is said to be like experiencing gnosis. Like the fog, Dick consistently describes ordinary reality as deception, the veil of Maya or “occlusion.” In some of his descriptions this is brought about by a malicious ruler. Herb Asher tells a policeman all this is illusion and that he, the cop, is unaware that he is working for evil. In some of Dick’s versions the ruler is insane. In others, people have an injury and cannot access their own divine knowledge.

  Both On the Origin of the World and The Hypostasis of the Archons say all of the problems with the material world sculpted by Yaltobaoth are in accord with the will of the father-of-the-entirety. At first glance this statement seems to weaken the point of the Gnostic gospels. Why introduce a blind god if we cannot blame it for ignorance? Why would the true god do this?

  Dick gives various answers. In “Cosmogony and Cosmology,” it is for self reflection. In The Divine Invasion, God likes games, but the rulers do not. In VALIS, we are the architects who formed the material universe to see if we could build a labyrinth so elaborate we could not escape. Maybe in the same way Dick wanted to see if he could write a novel so strange not even he could understand it. If these books resulted from exposure to the Nag Hammadi Library imagine what he would have done if he had had access to the Internet!

  Ay, There’s the Wub

  18

  Replicating Morality

  JOHN SULLINS

  I’ve done questionable things.

  —ROY BATTY

  Evil, for Philip K. Dick, is almost always embodied by the lack of empathy—the inability to experience the world as another might or to feel the pain in others that one’s own actions may be causing.

  In Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation has been able to mimic, or even surpass, almost every human characteristic except empathy. Testing for proper empathetic response using the Voigt-Kampf machine has become the only reliable way to find replicants that are trying to pass as human. But this is changing; some of the Nexus 6 replicants seem to be evolving a capacity for empathy. As the movie nears its ending the replicants Roy Batty and Rachel both have passed a threshold that even a Blade Runner like Deckard can see has moved them into a kind of parity with humans. Roy Batty has developed a love of life so deep that it extends to his would-be killer and Rachel and Deckard seem to be in love with one another.

  These replicants, though man-made, have become capable of experiencing a deep and meaningful love that is not simply self-serving, and, for this reason, we should regard them as persons in a moral sense (although not in a biological sense). Even though they are machines, they can lay claim to rights and responsibilities that once, perhaps, only humans held. Perversely, many of the human characters in the film seem to be devolving and may be losing the ability to act as moral persons. But what does Dick think gives a human (or a robot, or an alien) moral personhood?

  Beyond Lies the Other

  In the first short story that Philip K. Dick ever published (“Beyond Lies the Wub”), he tells of the fateful encounter between a callous, officious, and brutal spaceship captain and an alien creature called a “wub.” The wub looks like a pig, yet is jovial and life-loving and wishes harm on no one. Despite its foreign and ugly looks, the wub is interested in truth and beauty, literature, the arts, and good food. The Captain, on the other hand, is a mean-spirited militant and the only value he sees in the wub is that it could supply the crew with plenty of fresh meat.

  The wub has telepathic powers that allow it to communicate with the Captain and crew but the Captain refuses to engage in any communication and continues to organize the crew to have the creature slaughtered. Strangely, the wub is not terribly worried about its impending demise.

  As the story progresses we find that the alien is fully capable of understanding the motives of the Captain even better than the Captain does himself but in the face of impending violence, the wub only offers reasoned arguments as to why he should not be eaten, which the Captain duly ignores. The wub’s abi
lity to put himself in the place of another is so strong that it leads to an ending of the encounter that the unimaginative Captain could have never seen coming and a new lease on life for the wub.

  The wub’s extreme empathic nature is his salvation. The wub is not only able to imagine what it is like to be in the place of another, he has the psychic ability to fully become the other. By exchanging minds with the Captain, the wub lives on in the Captain’s body, while the Captain must suffer being killed and eaten, just as he would have done to the wub. Do unto the wub only what you would be willing to experience for yourself.

  In a “Headnote” that Dick wrote for a reprint of this story in 1981, he tells us that “The wub was my idea of a higher life form; it was then and it is now.” The value of empathy and its importance to being “human” is a theme that begins here in his first story and runs throughout his career. If we want to better understand his stories, then we need to understand the deep role that empathy plays in Dick’s philosophical thinking.

  Empathy is a complex subject, but for our purposes here let’s think of it as the ability to see the world from another’s point of view and, additionally, to sympathize with that view. To see the importance of this second condition, consider that a cat cornering a rat must be able to sense what the rat is likely to do to try to escape, and must be one step ahead of those thoughts, or the rat will get away. Even though the cat is, in a way, deducing the options that the rat has and calculating which one the rat is likely to choose, this is in no way empathy. Empathy comes when, in addition to the above thought process, we also feel the same emotions that the rat is undergoing and can feel sorry for the doomed creature. Dick maintained that this was a rare ability in nature and one that only a few entities could possess, and that perhaps the only being that perfectly manifest this capacity is God.

  Towards the end of his career, after his period of very heavy drug use and a deep religious conversion, Dick wrote his Exegesis: a huge collection of notes that contain thoughts on religion and philosophy, critiques of his own work, and comments on world events, all bound together. In a section written in 1978, where he is commenting on his own work, he tries to make sense of the idea, which occurs over and over in his fiction, that we can rediscover our missing moral character:

  Our minds are occluded, deliberately, so that we can’t see the prison world we’re slaves in, which is created by a powerful magician-like evil deity, who, however, is opposed by a mysterious salvific entity which often takes trash forms, and who will restore our lost memories. This entity may even be an old wino.

  This savior entity will be like the wub, easy to dismiss, easy to ignore, but for those who have the ability to see beyond the surface illusion, this being is the one we should try to emulate. When we achieve this, as Dick puts it: “we will cease to be mere reflex machines,” meaning we will quit acting like robots and start acting like true humans. This sounds great until you follow through the troubling logical deduction, that unless you have personally had this revelation, you—and I mean you, dear reader—are nothing but a robot.

  How to Tell if You Are Really Just a Robot

  Spence Olham has a big problem in Imposter. He started his day trying to decide how he was going to deal with life’s little problems such as where he might like to take a well-earned vacation. But by the end of the day he would be running for his life, running from his former friends and co-workers, a public enemy distrusted even by his own wife. Everyone is convinced that Olham is a robot, cleverly designed by the alien species that is at war with the Earth, a robot designed to copy Olham in every way so that it can use his identity to gain access to the secret defense project Olham is working on and then detonate a powerful nuclear bomb that is hidden deep inside the robot’s body. Everyone is convinced of this, except Olham himself.

  Olhams’s dilemma is similar to other Dick characters, such as Rachel in the movie Blade Runner who thinks of herself as a human but learns that she may be a replicant, or Garson Poole, the protagonist in one of Dick’s most frightening short stories, “The Electric Ant,” who after an accident wakes up in a hospital to find that not only has he been disfigured by the accident, but that the operation to save his life has also uncovered the fact that he is (and has always been) an electric ant; a cyborg who is part biological and part machine.

  The character Garson Poole is in many ways strikingly similar to Dick himself. Dick often wrote himself into his stories and novels, and if we accept Poole’s story as being somewhat autobiographical, we can see how seriously Dick wants us to take the notion that we may have mechanical or artificial drives that cause us to think and behave the way we do. In the story, Poole starts experimenting with his own programming and small changes start to show up in his subjective reality—how he sees the world. His experiments on himself get more and more drastic until he runs the risk of self-destruction. Poole does this in order to find out once and for all the truth of his being.

  Poole’s search for meaning was chillingly re-enacted by Dick himself in the decades of experimental drug use that followed the writing of this story. This wild hunt for truth and clarity did not lead to any self-revelation, it led only to an untimely death on the eve of his greatest success as a writer, as his stories and novels became hot commodities as film adaptations.

  The ultimate tragedy of this is that Dick had already spelled out a much more self-affirming and healthy way to assure yourself of your true human nature though the experience of empathetic love. Dick was an avid reader of philosophy and he used his fiction as a kind of philosophical laboratory where he could tease out the implications of various philosophical ideas. One of the philosophical ideas he returns to again and again is agape.

  ‘Agape’ is a funny-sounding word that is used in ancient and medieval philosophy to refer to a special kind of spontaneous love. This is a love that is much more than simple passion or sexual attraction. Agape is a binding love felt when the lover unconditionally accepts the beloved, even if the beloved does not merit the attention. It can refer to the love felt in healthy families, or in the brotherly love displayed when one helps strangers. The greatest examples are found in Christian theology, where agape is used to describe the kind of love God has for his creation. For our purposes here, we need not get caught up in the nuances of the philosophy of love. But we do need to realize that when Dick speaks of empathy, he means something like agape.

  Dick is not convinced that robots will be able to experience this special kind of empathy. Oh sure, they will be able to pretend to care. They will be cleverly programmed to act as if they love, but he believes that they will never be able to experience it as a fellow human might. They may greet you when you come home, say the right things when you are depressed, help you in areas they are programmed to be helpful in. But in each of these cases they have a reason to love, namely that they are programmed to do so. They will never just spontaneously recognize others as worthy of love and empathy. You are a robot if you cannot experience empathy.

  Can a Blade Runner Love a Robot?

  When it comes to the movie Blade Runner, we can notice a distinct point of departure from the vision that Dick had in his book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Dick’s vision of the world in the book is actually much darker and more depressing than the already damp and dreary environs of the film. In 1968, many years before the film we know went into production, Dick wrote some notes on how this book might be turned into a film. The actual film, as it was eventually written and produced, focuses on the character played by Harrison Ford—Rick Deckard. But Dick was actually unsure if the film should focus on Rick Deckard or Jack Isadore.

  You may be scratching your head, because even the biggest fan of Blade Runner would be hard-pressed to find any character named Jack Isadore in the film. The film-makers changed most of the details about Isadore, and then renamed him J.F. Sebastian. Be that as it may, Dick saw one of the main points of the story as an exploration of whether the naïve love that Sebastian/Isadore has
for the replicants is justified, or whether Deckard is correct in believing that the replicants are just vicious killing machines that must be destroyed.

  The way Dick saw it, the story is more of a tragedy, as Sebastian/Isadore loses his innocence when the gritty realism of Deckard proves to be correct. In the book, Isadore is confronted by the innate cruelty of the replicants while he watches as they cut the legs off of a spider out of boredom, an act whose brutality is compounded by the fact that living non-human creatures, such as the spider, are now very rare on the dying polluted Earth of the future. This ends Isadore’s fascination with the replicants and causes him to help in their eventual demise at the hand of Deckard. Dick also feels that Deckard’s resolve to destroy the final three replicants that are holed up in Isadore’s apartment is strengthened by his sexual encounter with the replicant Rachael Rosen. Dick explains this in his “Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

  Isn’t this, the sexual union between Rick Deckard and Rachael Rosen—isn’t it the summa of falsity and mechanical motions carried out minus any real feeling, as we understand the word? Feeling on each of their parts. Does in fact her mental—and physical—coldness numb the male, the human man, into an echo of it?