Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  In our final Episode, we take a step back and look at Doctor Who and human culture. Robin Bunce and Deborah Pless, respectively, begin Episode 6 by philosophically examining the cultural underpinnings of Doctor Who. Bunce explains how human evil served as the catalyst for Terry Nation’s creation of the evil Daleks. The Cold War with the threat of nuclear annihilation and the Cuban Missile Crisis set the climate of fear, where people are at the mercy of those in power. The Daleks become the ultimate enemy of the Doctor and humans, threatening, like nuclear bombs, to ex-ter-min-ate all life. It’s Us versus Them; but what’s so scary about Them is that they reflect Us. Pless examines how the turmoil of the twentieth century, particularly in the aftermath of World War II that culminated in Britain’s decline in world power, led toward decolonization and a new era of British politics and multiculturalism. Like the Doctor, who abhors some of the actions of his Time Lord ancestors, but espouses his identity as a Time Lord, Britons could reject the imperial past but espouse British identity. Doctor Who provided a cultural icon and role model for British society.

  Alexander Bertland takes on the battle waged between science and myth. He contends that cultures typically take science to be the dominant force in this battle, but Bertland shows us that myth has an important social and cultural role to play. What’s more, he provides significant examples from Doctor Who that call for a balance between the two, rather than the domination of one over the other. Episode 6 ends with Courtland Lewis’s chapter on Doctor Who’s role in promoting the enterprise of philosophy, which teaches humans to seek truth, challenge themselves, reflect on their lives and relationships with others, and to make the world a better place.

  The book ends with a wonderful collection of quotes from the Doctor and other notable figures from Doctor Who. This portion stands alone as something fans will enjoy reading over and over again, and fans will find themselves considering new and different ways of interpreting and understanding the Doctor’s words of wisdom. And just in case reader-companions need to refresh their memories of episodes and companions in order to get prepared for their local Doctor Who trivia night, we’ve included a time-travel guide and list of companions.

  Allons-y!

  Since Doctor Who and Philosophy is engaged in demonstrating and explaining the various philosophical features of the longest running science fiction show in history, not every episode or idea can be covered in one volume, but you might be surprised by the number that are. Each Doctor is discussed and an impressive number of TV episodes, books, comics, and audios found their way into the volume. We think our reader-companions will be delighted by the wealth of references to some of the most famous of episodes—“The Genesis of the Daleks” (1975) and “Blink”—to some more obscure ones, like “The Happiness Patrol” (1988) and “The Trial of a Time Lord” (1986). However, we wish to warn our reader-companions that the desire for jelly babies and watching (and re-watching) Doctor Who episodes may become (even more) addictive. Join us now in exploring the philosophical world of Doctor Who—a place that may cause you to think, reflect, and wonder about things that you may have never considered before. Take care, be careful, don’t be afraid to venture into new places and meet new people with all the joy and wonder that the Doctor does, and don’t forget your jelly babies!—Allons-y!

  Oh, one more thing, our disclaimers: the editors of this volume are not responsible for sugar shock brought about by overconsumption of jelly babies or injuries incurred by tripping over impossibly long scarves, misuse of sonic screwdrivers, or faulty experimental Transmat devices; nor are we responsible for loss of employment due to an insatiable appetite for Doctor Who episodes.

  Now, Allons-y!

  COURTLAND AND PAULA

  EPISODE 1

  I’m the Doctor. Who?

  Personal Identity and the Doctor

  1

  Just as I Was Getting to Know Me

  PATRICK STOKES

  Poisoned by spectrox toxaemia, having selflessly used the last of the antidote to save his companion, our hero collapses on the floor and says his goodbyes. “I might regenerate, I don’t know . . . feels different this time ...” He begins to hallucinate: visions of his former companions, both living and dead, urge him to fight for life, while his arch-enemy, the Master, gloatingly orders him to die. Then a strange flash of light, and an instant later a vastly different figure, wearing the same clothes but now a couple of sizes too tight, sits bolt upright and surveys his new body. His perplexed companion manages a confused “Doctor?” To which he haughtily replies: “You were expecting someone else?” And we all breathe a sigh of relief that the Doctor has survived yet another brush with death and lives on to fight another day (“The Caves of Androzani,” 1984).

  Or does he? And just who lives on? And what counts as “living on,” exactly?

  As we know, in the Doctor Who universe, a major quirk of Time Lord biology is the capacity to regenerate: to acquire, in times of major physiological trauma, a new body. This can occur up to twelve times, giving each Time Lord a total of thirteen different bodies. Of course, a main character who can simply get a completely new body in times of mortal peril does tend to deflate the dramatic tension somewhat. To compensate, all manner of elaborate plot-points have been built in to keep us guessing each time, such as the mysterious “Watcher” who assists Four’s transition into Five in “Logopolis” (1981), to the “Zero Room” that Five needed to recover in immediately afterwards (“Castrovalva,” 1982), to Six’s post-regenerative derangement (“The Twin Dilemma,” 1984).

  For most people, the idea of a greatly-extended lifespan with bodily regeneration thrown in has something irresistible about it. To the elderly, the sick and the just plain hung-over alike, the idea of getting a totally new body sounds like a pretty sweet deal: complete physical renewal, restored energy and vigor, and, if you’re particularly lucky, the looks of David Tennant (assuming you’re male—though admittedly the non-canonical “The Curse of Fatal Death,” 1999 suggests that mightn’t be mandatory). But philosophers are notoriously unpleasant people, and confronted with something as cool as regeneration, we immediately start asking a whole bunch of annoying questions. So here goes: when the Doctor regenerates, who wakes up, exactly?

  That sounds like a perfectly stupid question with an obvious answer: the Doctor. He simply undergoes a physiological change, albeit a very big, very dramatic one; sort of like an ultra-accelerated, radical form of puberty, complete with the changing voice and temporary awkwardness. But consider what’s happening in a typical regeneration: a bodily organism, on the verge of dying (or, as in the 1996 Doctor Who movie, already dead for several hours), undergoes a complete physical transformation. It’s never made exactly clear whether the atoms in his body are replaced, but for the sake of conforming with known physical laws wherever possible, let’s assume they aren’t. So, some or all of the matter within his body is re-arranged and as a result, the person who wakes up from the regeneration process has a very different appearance and character from his predecessor. His tastes and dress sense alter considerably each time, and his disposition towards the people around him also swings wildly between compassion, amiability, arrogance, and downright manipulativeness. There can even be physiological problems, such as the Fifth Doctor’s gas allergy (“The Caves of Androzani”) that seem specific to the “new” incarnation.

  The question is, what features of the situation we’ve just described count as survival? What allows us to say that the person or self (call it what you will) who undergoes the regeneration is the same as the person who wakes up afterwards? Why can’t we rather say that the pre-regeneration Doctor ceases to exist and is replaced by another person who shares the bulk of the previous person’s memories and concerns? Looked at that way, regeneration isn’t survival at all, but actually a form of death. Yet, Time Lords themselves clearly don’t think of it as death—witness the Master’s decision in “Last of the Time Lords” (2007) to die rather than regenerate, or the Fifth Doctor’s “Is thi
s death?” quoted above. These questions belong to a problem that’s been raging, on this planet at least, for hundreds of years: the infamous Problem of Personal Identity, which William James once described as “the most puzzling puzzle with which psychology has to deal.”1

  The Most Puzzling Puzzle

  Since John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), the puzzle of personal identity has driven more people to the point of insanity than staring into the Untempered Schism. Before Locke, the default assumption in Christendom was that the soul was the bearer of identity, though resurrection was still seen as a bodily process of some sort. With Descartes (1641), the soul found philosophical expression as the res cogitans, the thinking substance that I find myself to be, and which controls my organic body. Locke, however, claimed that the identity of the self was distinct from both the identity of the organism and that of the thinking substance (if it exists). Locke argued that the one person could have multiple successive thinking substances and yet still be the same person; on the other hand, if I somehow had Socrates’s soul, I still wouldn’t necessarily be Socrates. To be the same self—and this was a really radical thing to say at the time—it is neither necessary nor sufficient to have the same soul.

  Yet, Locke went on to claim that if selves aren’t souls, they aren’t bodies either. If a cobbler and a prince somehow swap minds in their sleep, we’d say that the prince wakes up in the cobbler’s body and vice versa, not that the prince wakes up with the mind of a cobbler. 2 What Locke saw is that when we’re confronted with imaginary situations where mind and body come apart like this, our intuition is that personal identity follows the psychological facts rather the physical ones. Drawing on this intuition, modern-day neo-Lockeans have claimed that some form of psychological continuity across time is what constitutes selfhood. To be the same self across time is to have some sort of psychological “relatedness” hold between “person-stages” across time.

  If we buy that, then it seems there’s simply no question about regeneration: the person left immediately after a Time Lord regenerates is the same person who was there beforehand. Admittedly, he’s very different: his height, build, and apparent physical age alter each time. But as we’ve seen, the differences go deeper than that: the Doctor’s psychological disposition, temperament, and tastes all seem to change radically. Indeed, the Doctor’s various “incarnations” have such alarmingly different personalities that when confronted with each other, they each treat each other with barely-disguised contempt. Derek Parfit’s example of the young socialist who imagines with horror the conservative he knows he’ll one day become,3 or the example of a repentant criminal looking back on his former life, mirrors the Doctor’s reaction upon meeting his other incarnations. The Doctor seems so emotionally alienated from the past selves he remembers being that he feels as if he’s not them on some level. “I’m definitely not the man I was” declares a relieved Five after meeting three of his previous incarnations in “The Five Doctors” (1983, an episode I’ll be discussing a lot from here on), the flippant tone barely hiding his distance from the past selves he encounters.

  Self and Memory

  Given these enormous changes in temperament and personality, what sort of psychological connections might hold between pre-and post-regeneration Doctors that would make them the same person? Locke himself isn’t actually much help here; he simply spoke of “sameness of consciousness” across time:For as far as any intelligent Being can repeat the Idea of any past Action with the same Consciousness it has of it at first, and with the same Consciousness it has of any present Action; so far is it the same personal Self. For it is by the Consciousness it has of its present Thoughts and Actions, that it is Self to it Self now, and so will be the same Self, as far as the same Consciousness can extend to Actions past, or to come . . . (An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, p. 336)

  Locke’s Enlightenment successors, at least, all thought they knew what he was talking about here: memory. Insofar as I can (genuinely) remember the events in a person’s life, I am that person. And what’s really amazing is that in “The Five Doctors,” the Doctor himself endorses this “Memory Criterion” view of personal identity. As a mysterious figure, later revealed (spoiler alert!) to be Lord High President Borusa, kidnaps Doctors One through Four from their respective eras, the Fifth Doctor experiences a painful “cosmic angst.” He puts this down to the “loss” of his past: “I’m being diminished, whittled away piece by piece. A man is the sum of his memories, you know, a Time Lord even more so.” Leaving aside the question of why this “cosmic angst” only strikes at one particular moment, it seems the Doctor is siding with Locke on this one. The Doctor is his past selves because he remembers being them; as he can recall “their” experiences, he and “they” are connected across time by memory, in a way that counts as their being the same person.

  Yet even the Memory Criterion—the sonic screwdriver of neo-Lockean identity theorists—won’t get us out of this one. In episodes like “The Three Doctors” (1973), “The Five Doctors,” and “The Two Doctors” (1985) the Doctor interacts with former and future selves who apparently have completely forgotten the dramatic events they are now living through for the second, third, and fifth time (the Fourth Doctor gets stuck).

  You’d think after finding yourself in the Death Zone four times you’d at least remember that Borusa turns out to be the bad guy. And this opens up the Doctor’s “sum of his memories” theory to a serious objection first raised against Locke by the eighteenth-century philosophers Thomas Reid and Joseph Butler. Identity is normally understood, according to classical logic, as a one-to-one relationship: either a and b are the same person, or they aren’t. There’s no in-between. But, says Reid, imagine that a young boy is thrashed for stealing some fruit from an orchard. Years later, he has become a gallant soldier, and captures a flag in battle. Later still, as an old man, he attains the rank of General. Now, the gallant soldier remembers being thrashed as a boy, and the aged General remembers capturing the flag as a young man—but the General no longer remembers the childhood thrashing. But if memory confers identity, that means that the boy is the same person as the soldier, the soldier is the same person as the general, but the general isn’t the same person as the boy.4 And logically, that’s an intolerable violation of the “principle of transitivity”: if a = b and b = c, then a must equal c, and here it doesn’t.

  “The Five Doctors” takes this problem and amplifies it. Despite his normally quite decent personal memory (after all, he remembers things that happened hundreds of years ago), the Doctor apparently doesn’t remember at least the events of this episode from one incarnation to the next. Here it’s not even a question of transitivity: there’s just no continuity of memory between these people. Still, perhaps all this can be explained away; maybe meeting your previous selves somehow wipes parts of your memory. And besides, all modern philosophers who have defended the Memory Criterion view of personal identity have had to try to account for the fact that it seems our identity isn’t destroyed every time we forget where we left our car keys.

  Meeting Yourself

  But identity, as traditionally understood, presents other problems in the multi-Doctor episodes. There’s a pretty good philosophical reason why the First Law of Time prohibits meeting one’s former and future selves: when this occurs, we are faced with multiple, independently-acting selves, who nevertheless all claim to be the same person. And that violates the standard picture of numerical identity as a logical relation, whereby one object can’t be in two places at once and still be the same object.

  When multiple Doctors converge within a single point in time, we have a particularly elaborate version of what Parfit christened a Branch-Line Case (Reasons and Persons, pp. 199-201). Parfit’s idea is this: suppose we have a process for teleporting you from, let’s say, Gallifrey to Skaro. You step into the teleporter on Gallifrey and it records every single bit of information about you: your complete physical makeup, the state and position
of every neuron in your brain, everything. Then it disintegrates you. At exactly that moment, the information is beamed to Skaro, where another machine uses it to create a perfect replica of you out of organic materials. Because your brain has been perfectly recreated, the person who steps out onto the surface of Skaro (presumably being blasted by Daleks moments later, thus teaching that person a valuable lesson about not visiting nuclear wastelands populated entirely by murderous cyborgs) will have all the Gallifrey-person’s memories, up to and including the memory of stepping into the teleporter booth and pressing the “go” button.

  How do we describe this case? Have you been teleported from Gallifrey to Skaro, or have you died and been replaced by a perfect replica on Skaro? Have you survived? Would this be as good as survival, slightly worse, or much worse? Well, now Parfit adds a new twist: suppose that the machine on Gallifrey gives you a few minutes before it disintegrates you, while on Skaro “you” have already been assembled. On Gallifrey you even get to talk to your replica on Skaro via video intercom: you find yourself speaking to someone who looks exactly like you, has all your memories, concerns, quirks, loves, hates, projects and commitments. Yet you’re able to hold a conversation with this person (“Look out for Daleks!”) just as if they’re another person. In this case, the soon-to-be-disintegrated person on Gallifrey constitutes a “Branch Line” of the self.