Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  And you can see now why the multi-Doctor episodes provide an example of a Branch Line Case. The Doctor’s incarnations interact with each other in the same way as in the Gallifrey-Skaro case. Even in “The Five Doctors” when they attempt to unite their minds to overcome Borusa’s mind control over the Fifth Doctor, they seem to do so as multiple agents working co-operatively, not as a single agent. Unlike the Branch Line case, though, the different selves are quite dissimilar. What they share is most of their memories, their projects, and commitments (saving the universe from evil, defeating enemies such as the Master and the Cybermen, and so forth), and a name. Are these facts enough to make them all the same person?

  Deep Further Facts?

  For Parfit, facts like this are all there really is to it; if I know the degrees to which a person’s memory and character have persisted across time, well, that’s all there is to know. There’s no underlying “deep further fact” (like, say, a soul) that confers identity in the logical sense (p. 309). Each of us is simply more or less psychologically related to selves that existed in the past or will exist in the future—and that means there’s nothing particularly special about those past and future selves being “me” or not. Accordingly, says Parfit, personal identity isn’t what matters in survival.

  Teleportation might not count as the survival of the same person, but it doesn’t seem exactly like (or exactly as bad as) death, either (p. 215). And it’s quite possible that regeneration might be preferable to death, even if the pre- and post-regeneration Doctors aren’t strictly numerically identical in the logical sense. So long as there’s someone with a reasonably good degree of psychological continuity with the previous person, someone to pilot the TARDIS and deal with the occasional Sontaran, then we need-n’t trouble ourselves with unanswerable questions about whether they’re the same self or not. But is that intuitively satisfying? Doesn’t it still seem important that he’s the same person before and after regeneration?

  If we still want to ask questions about whether there’s one, ten, or millions of Doctors (according to some theories, we actually have a vast series of selves that each only last for a matter of seconds), 5 we might turn to Robert Nozick’s Closest Continuer theory. On this theory, to be identical with some former person is just to be the Closest Continuer of that former person. This has a certain plausibility to it: the pre- and post-regeneration Doctors are the same person if, and only if, the properties of the post-regeneration Doctor “stem from, grow out of, are causally dependent on” the pre-regeneration Doctor’s properties, and there’s no other person that stands in a closer (or as close) relationship to the pre-regeneration Doctor.6 But again, there’s clearly no “deep” fact about identity here either.

  In “The Trial of a Timelord” (1986), the nefarious prosecutor known as the Valeyard turns out to be both a distillation of the Doctor’s own dark side and one of his potential future incarnations (“somewhere between your twelfth and thirteenth regeneration,” whatever that might mean), scheming to get control of the Doctor’s remaining regenerations and thus become actualized. Closest Continuer theory would have to say that had he succeeded, the Valeyard would be the Doctor, as his closest surviving continuer, whereas if he’d failed, he wouldn’t be. And many philosophers find that unsatisfying, because it means that personal identity depends upon completely external factors that might have nothing to do with the Doctor at all: had the Valeyard slipped in the shower and died on the morning when he otherwise would certainly have killed the Doctor, that would make it true that he had never been the Doctor.

  Person-Stages, Animals, and Narratives

  Or we could try the Four Dimensionalist approach. According to this theory, what we might call “person-stages” exist at particular times, but persons only exist across time, as the sum of all the person stages .7 So the relation between person-stages and the person that they’re a part of is sort of like the relation between the British Monarch, who in a sense never dies (because there’s always someone we can point to and say, “that’s the British Monarch”), and the various people who’ve held that title, all but one of whom are now dead. So if we’re Four Dimensionalists, the Doctor’s various incarnations can be viewed as person-stages that together make up one person, namely, the Doctor. This looks promising, especially as it fits in with our habit of speaking of different “Doctors,” while still insisting they’re all one person. But there’s the problem: if person-stages are walking, talking, thinking, acting things, things that can talk about themselves and think for themselves, then that implies that when someone acts, there are two actors present: a person-stage and a person. Hence we’d have to say that the Seventh Doctor and the Doctor defeat the gods of Ragnarok (“The Greatest Show in the Galaxy,” 1988-89), or that both the Fourth Doctor and the Doctor simultaneously offer you a jelly baby. And this raises far more problems than it solves. After all, if someone said, “I just met both the American President and Barack Obama,” at a time when Barack Obama is still the American President, you’d think they were either speaking metaphorically or were confused as to who the current President is.

  So what’s left? We could reject neo-Lockeanism altogether and try Animalism, a currently popular theory that a self simply is an animal rather than something that goes along with that animal. Hence I just am this particular human animal, and the Doctor just is this particular Gallifreyan animal. There are several problems with Animalism, not least the lack of agreement as to just what Animalism claims, exactly, but it’s far from clear how an Animalist could account for the huge disruptions in organic continuity between Doctors—not to mention Romana’s apparent ability to adopt a body from another species altogether, as seen in “Destiny of the Daleks” (1979).

  Alternatively we could drop the strict logical understanding of identity and instead buy into another popular theory, the Narrative Identity thesis. Again, this theory comes in several flavors, offered by thinkers as diverse as Alasdair MacIntyre, Daniel Dennett, and Paul Ricoeur. What Narrative theorists broadly have in common is the claim that selves are (or at least are like) stories: just as the plot unifies all the events in an episode of Doctor Who into a single comprehensible story, so, they claim, a narrative shapes a set of physical, biological, psychological and social facts, spread out across time, into the coherent story of a particular self. What I am is the lead character in one, or more accurately a great many, stories; my “self” is the “center of narrative gravity” where these various stories intersect.

  But again, the multi-Doctor episodes present huge challenges for these theories. What sort of narrative can I tell about myself when I can meet and interact with my former person-stages as if they’re separate “actors” in “my” story, or when former person-stages can apparently be taken out of my time-line (“The Five Doctors”) or threatened with a non-existence that causes me to fade away (“The Two Doctors”)? It’s one thing to be the main character in my own story and a bit player in someone else’s, but how can I be a bit player in my own story?

  A Dead End?

  And so we seem to have come to a halt, even though I clearly haven’t answered the question about whether the Doctor pre- and post-regeneration is the same person. It seems we want to say he’s the same person—we care that the same person survives rather than just that there always be a Doctor—but we haven’t found any theory that can account for even normal human identity, let alone the special features created by regeneration. But the very fact that after trying to disenchant personal identity in the way we have, we still care about the question “Is he still the Doctor?” seems to tell us something. The poisoned Fifth Doctor clearly sees two options before him: death or regeneration. Whatever we might tell him about the objective lack of continuity between him and his successor surely can’t stop this subjective concern for his future self as himself. And perhaps that’s where the answer lies: maybe the Doctor is the Doctor because each incarnation looks upon the others with concern and passion as being itself. Perhaps identity is
n’t a matter of objective continuity—of psychology, physiology, narrative, or whatever—but of some form of subjective attitude, whereby my past and future selves are me because I somehow acknowledge or appropriate them as such. In other words, maybe what makes the Doctor the Doctor is that he continually takes “ownership” of or responsibility for the vastly different bodies and personalities that constitute the career of “the Doctor,” even when they occasionally meet and interact as separate agents. What such a form of subjective appropriation might involve, however, isn’t entirely clear, and there isn’t space here to try to flesh it out.

  So, all I’ve really done here is raised a lot of difficult questions, proposed some possible answers, shown why none of them seems to work, and then gestured vaguely towards where the answer might lie with a frustrating lack of clarity and precision. As I said, philosophers are thoroughly unpleasant people. Still, looking at the paradoxical, mind-bogglingingly “puzzling puzzle” that Locke got us into centuries ago, it’s hard not to think that the Doctor would approve of the confusion.8

  2

  Who Is the Doctor? For That Matter, Who Are You?

  GREG LITTMANN

  In 1966, William Hartnell, the first actor to play the Doctor, retired from the role. At the conclusion of “The Tenth Planet” the Doctor declared “this old body is getting a bit thin” and lay on the TARDIS floor. His features melted away and his face, body and personality changed forever, a process that was to become known as “regeneration.”

  The man who stood up looked and sounded like actor Patrick Troughton, but claimed to be the Doctor. What had happened? Had the Doctor been replaced by someone else or had he just changed form? Companions Ben and Polly weren’t at all sure at the time, but for almost fifty years now, viewers have been asked to accept that what look like eleven different men are really all the same person: the Doctor. But what makes him the same person when so much about him is different each time? In other words, what makes the Doctor the Doctor rather than someone else?

  You might think that tough questions about personal identity are not liable to arise outside of science fiction. However, philosophers have been arguing for many centuries about what constitutes personal identity (that is, about what makes you you) and are still arguing about it passionately to this day.

  The fact that something happens in Doctor Who doesn’t mean that it could happen in real life. No sane person would argue that time travel must be possible because they saw the TARDIS do it on television, or that matter must be able to appear out of nowhere because a normal-sized man turned into a huge scorpion-monster in “The Lazarus Experiment” (2007). However, thinking about imaginary situations can help us realize that there are gaps and inconsistencies in our theories. For example, we might have a theory that it’s always wrong to break a promise, but this theory has trouble standing in the face of the hypothetical question, “What if you had promised someone that you would go out vandalizing cars with them?”

  Fans of Tom Baker will recall that the Doctor uses just such a hypothetical to decide in “Genesis of the Daleks” (1975) that it would be immoral to wipe the Daleks out. As he stands ready to destroy them, he asks whether, if shown a child and told that it would grow up to be a “ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives,” it would be moral to kill that child. He concludes that it wouldn’t be and thus that it wouldn’t be moral to wipe out the Daleks. The fact that nobody is really offering the Doctor a child to kill is beside the point—the hypothetical shows that the Doctor has a contradiction in his beliefs and he changes his views accordingly. Similarly, what we are going to be doing by examining the issue of personal identity through the lens of Doctor Who is not to treat the show as if it were real, but to mine it for hypothetical situations against which we can test the comprehensiveness and consistency of our theories about personal identity.

  Are You Your Body?

  So, back to the question at hand: what constitutes personal identity? That is, what makes you you, what makes the Doctor the Doctor, and what makes anybody else themselves? One natural theory is that personal identity is constituted by bodily identity—that to be the same person is to have the same body. We certainly do use sameness of bodies to identify people. When you meet your friend in the street and say “Hello” you identify this person as your friend by the fact that the body you see looks just like the body your friend has always had.

  So far, so good. But if being the same person is a matter of having the same body, what constitutes having the same body? It can’t be a matter of having a body with exactly the same form, for at least two reasons. Firstly, we can track sameness of body through bodily changes. Viewers of Doctor Who are very familiar with such changes.

  • Most obviously, the Doctor’s body alters its size and shape every time he regenerates.

  • Similarly, the William Hartnell Doctor’s body is turned invisible in “The Celestial Toymaker” (1966),

  • the Patrick Troughton Doctor’s companion Jamie has his body first turned into cardboard and then reshaped with a new face in “The Mind Robber” (1968),

  • the Jon Pertwee Doctor encounters the humanoid Solonians who transform into insect-like creatures in “The Mutants” (1972),

  • the Tom Baker Doctor meets the Rutans who are able to shape-change at will in “The Horror of Fang Rock” (1977),

  • the Colin Baker Doctor’s companion Peri grows feathers in “Vengeance on Varos” (1985),

  • the Sylvester McCoy Doctor’s companion Ace grows cat’s eyes in “Survival” (1989),

  • and, most dramatically of all, the Peter Davison Doctor finds that the Brigadier has shaved off his famous mustache in “Mawdryn Undead” (1983).

  The new series is no less rich in examples, with the David Tennant Doctor meeting shape-changing Krillitane in “School Reunion” (2006), people who have been turned into pig hybrids in “Daleks in Manhattan” (2007), and even a woman who’s transformed into a talking paving slab in “Love and Monsters” (2006).

  In all of these cases, we’re expected to find it intelligible that the person after the transformation is the same person who was there beforehand, despite the change in their bodies. Of course, bodily changes occur in real life too, even if they’re not always as dramatic—we grow old, we gain scars or injuries and, like the Brigadier, we sometimes modify our hair. Unless we accept that every time such a change occurs the old body is gone and a new body appears, we’re going to have to allow that sameness of body over time doesn’t consist in sameness of features over time.

  A second problem with insisting that sameness of body over time consists in sameness of features is that more than one body can have the same set of features. Once again, examples of this are found throughout Doctor Who. Surprisingly often, people turn out to have doubles; for example, the Hartnell Doctor meets his double, the Abbot of Amboise, in sixteenth-century France in “The Massacre” (1964), the Troughton Doctor meets his double, the twenty-first century world-dictator Salamander in “The Enemy of the World” (1967), the Davison Doctor’s companion Nyssa meets her double, Ann Talbot, in 1920s England in “Black Orchid” (1982), and the Colin Baker Doctor just happens to look exactly like the captain of the guard on Gallifrey in “The Invasion of Time” (1978).

  As if that weren’t trouble enough, people are constantly being impersonated by shape-changing aliens, such as when the Troughton Doctor’s companion Polly is impersonated by a Chameleon in “The Faceless Ones” (1967), the Tom Baker Doctor’s companion Harry is impersonated by a Zygon in “Terror of the Zygons” (1975), the Davison Doctor is impersonated by Omega in “Arc of Infinity” (1983), and the Tennant Doctor meets a Krillitane who is impersonating the headmaster of an English school in “School Reunion.” There’s even an entire race of clones in the form of the Sontarans, who definitely don’t take themselves to be the same individual: the Sontaran met by Sarah Jane Smith in “The Sontaran Experiment” (1975) states very clearly that he isn’t Lynx, whom she met in “
The Time Warrior” (1973), but Styre.

  In all of these cases—natural doubles and deliberate copies alike—the viewer is easily able to understand that these aren’t the same person with the same body, but rather two or more different people, despite the fact that their bodies seem to be physically indistinguishable. Similarly, in real life, we can be confronted with twins or doubles and easily understand that these are two bodies and not one, belonging to two people, not one. So again, it seems that being the same body isn’t a matter of having the same form.

  Worms in the Space-Time Continuum

  Let’s take one last stab at finding personal identity through bodily identity. Perhaps we can find sameness of body through tracking continuity of location in time and space. Humans are, after all, four-dimensional worms. No, I don’t mean in Doctor Who, I mean in real life—hear me out.

  Our universe has four dimensions: three spatial dimensions and the dimension of time. We tend to think of our bodies as only being extended in space; they stretch from the tops of our heads to the tips of our feet, from our left side to our right side, and from our back to our front. However, we’re also extended in the fourth dimension, time, stretching from the moment we’re born (or thereabouts) to the time we die. If you could see the entirety of a human life all at once, what you’d see would be something like a worm in space-time, stretching through every place and every time that the person had occupied during their life.9