Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  Given this, it seems tempting to believe that bodily identity over time consists in being part of a single four-dimensional “worm” in four-dimensional space-time. In other words, it’s tempting to believe that a body at one time is the same body that existed at an earlier time if both are part of the same continuous object. Applying this to regeneration, we might accept that the body that looked like Christopher Eccleston is the same body as the body that looks like David Tennant because there’s spatiotemporal continuity between the two; that is, because the Eccleston body was immediately replaced at exactly the same point in space by the Tennant body. Similarly, we might say that it’s spatiotemporal continuity that provides the sameness of the body that looks like a Krillitane and the body that looks like a headmaster in “School Reunion,” of the mustached body before the Brigadier has his shave and the mustacheless body after his shave, of your body before and after you cut your finger, and so on.

  There’s a tidiness to identifying sameness of body with spatiotemporal continuity and sameness of person with sameness of body. However, there’re also some big problems with this view. Three in particular might strike those who watch enough (or too much) Doctor Who.

  • Firstly, it seems at least conceivable that a person could fail to have any body at all, which would mean that what makes them them can’t be the spatiotemporal continuity of their body.

  • Secondly, it seems at least conceivable that a single person might be made up of spatiotemporally discontinuous parts (that means that they might jump about in time and space a bit—who does that remind you of?).

  • Thirdly, it seems at least conceivable that the same body might be inhabited by different people at different times.

  Let’s look at each of these problems in turn.

  The Problem of People with No Bodies

  Problem One for the spatiotemporal-continuity-of-bodies criterion for personal identity is that it seems at least conceivable that a person might exist with no body. In fact, the Doctor runs across people like that all the time.

  They may have lost everything below the neck, such as the Master’s army of decapitated humans faced by the Tennant Doctor in “Last of the Time Lords” (2007). Alternatively, they may be mere disembodied brains, such as those met by the Hartnell Doctor in “The Keys of Marinus” (1964), or the brain of Morbius, met by the Tom Baker Doctor in, appropriately, “The Brain of Morbius” (1976). Presumably, the Cybermen themselves are essentially human brains in robot shells and, at least during their first appearance with the Hartnell Doctor in “The Tenth Planet” (1966), they see human identity as lasting through a replacement of bodily parts.

  It’s open to the champion of the spatiotemporal continuity view of identity to insist that spatiotemporal continuity of the brain is what’s really important, not the entire body, since it’s the brain that actually does the thinking. However, some poor souls in the Doctor Who universe don’t have any physical form at all. For example, the Refusians met by the Hartnell Doctor in “The Ark” (1966) lost their bodies as a result of an accident, the Great Intelligence met by the Troughton Doctor in “The Abominable Snowmen” (1967) and “The Web of Fear” (1968) likes to live in silver balls but is perfectly capable of floating around bodilessly, the Pertwee Doctor learns that the Time Lord Omega has become nonphysical in “The Three Doctors” (1972), and the Davison Doctor battles the incorporeal snake-spirit “the Mara” in “Kinda” (1982) and “Snakedance” (1983).

  Peripheral cases would include creatures with “bodies” made of energy, like the party-crashing Mandragora Helix fought by the Tom Baker Doctor in “The Masque of Mandragora” (1976) and the television-possessing entity known as “The Wire” fought by the Tennant Doctor in “The Idiot’s Lantern” (2006).

  The Problem of People Who Materialize Out of Nowhere

  A second problem with the spatiotemporal-continuity-of-body view of personal identity is that we can make perfect sense of stories in which people move about in a way that breaks spatiotemporal continuity. In fact, breaking spatiotemporal continuity is what Doctor Who is all about. The Doctor can dematerialize in modern London and rematerialize on the planet Skaro in the far future, or Rome in the ancient past, or even in another dimension. If we were to try to plot his spatiotemporal “worm,” there’d be a jumble of isolated pieces all over the place without connection to each other. For example, there’s going to be a section of “Doctor Worm” that begins suddenly when he lands in Pompeii in 79 A.D. in “The Fires of Pompeii” (2008), without being directly connected to anything that was there in Pompeii before, and ends suddenly when he leaves Pompeii a few days later, without being directly connected to anything that’s still in Pompeii afterwards. Whatever it is that makes this disconnected worm section the same person as the disconnected worm section who adventured in 100,000 B.C. in “An Unearthly Child” (1963), it doesn’t seem to be spatiotemporal continuity.

  TARDIS travel might be thought to be a special case because TARDIS flight seems to take place in its own private timeline, giving the crew time to banter, squabble, and explain the plot. However, there are innumerable other cases in Doctor Who in which such travel is instantaneous. In fact, there are examples of this in every era of the television series:• the Hartnell Doctor finds a Dalek transmat (teleport) system in “The Dalek Masterplan” (1965),

  • the Troughton Doctor finds space flight dominated by transmat in “The Seeds of Death” (1969),

  • the Pertwee Doctor faces blobs who teleport people into the heart of a black hole in “The Three Doctors,”

  • the Tom Baker Doctor finds an entire planet that tele-ports around space mining other planets in “The Pirate Planet” (1978),

  • the Davison Doctor learns that a renegade Time Lord is using a time scoop to abduct people from time and space in “The Five Doctors” (1983),

  • the Colin Baker Doctor meets a tyrant who eliminates rebels by teleporting them randomly in time and space by throwing them into the timelash in “Timelash” (1985),10

  • the McCoy Doctor gets teleported to another planet by small cats in “Survival,”

  • the Eccleston Doctor’s companion, Rose, gets teleported to the Dalek flagship in “Bad Wolf” (2005),

  • and the Tennant Doctor gets transported through space and time to the 1960s by the Weeping Angels in “Blink” (2007).

  However outrageous these adventures might be, the stories make sense to us. We understand that the character who steps into a transmat chamber is the same character as the one who instantly steps out of another transmat chamber a million miles away, despite the lack of spatiotemporal continuity. So again, the concept of sameness of person doesn’t seem to require spatiotemporal continuity.

  The Problem of Possession

  A third problem with the spatiotemporal-continuity-of-body account of personal identity is that it seems conceivable that a spatiotemporally continuous body might have different people inhabiting it at different times. In fact, this happens all the time on Doctor Who. In such cases, not only do we have personal identity without spatiotemporal continuity of body, we have spatiotemporal continuity of body without personal identity.

  Perhaps the most impressive example of this is the Tom Baker Doctor’s enemy Eldrad from “The Hand of Fear” (1976), who goes through five bodies in six episodes: first an unseen alien in a spacecraft, then a disembodied hand, then the body of Sarah Jane Smith, then a female body made of rock and finally a male body made of rock. The Master is similarly certain that he can survive a change of bodies and happily steals the body of Nyssa’s father in “The Keeper of Traken” (1981). The Davison Doctor’s companion Tegan positively makes a hobby of having her body possessed by alien entities, being possessed by the Mara in “Kinda” and again in “Snakedance.” Similarly, in “New Earth” (2006), Cassandra possesses the body of both the Tennant Doctor and his companion Rose. (Since Cassandra is just a human being like the rest of us, this is probably the most amazing event in the history of Doctor Wh
o. I can’t work out how she did it. I’ve been trying to possess the neighbors all morning and I’m getting nowhere.)

  It’s worth stressing again here that the argument isn’t that disembodied existence, teleportation, time-travel, possession or any other form of spatiotemporal discontinuity must be possible in real life just because they’re possible on Doctor Who. Rather, the point is that since stories that feature these things are perfectly understandable as stories, spatiotemporal continuity mustn’t be essential to our conception of personal identity. If I tell you that the Doctor found a square circle, or met a married bachelor, or landed on a planet of mammal insects, you’d have no idea what I meant. My statements would make no sense because it’s part of the idea of a circle that it isn’t square, of a bachelor that he isn’t married and of a mammal that it isn’t an insect. On the other hand, if I tell you that the Doctor disappeared from London in his TARDIS and reappeared in New York, or that Omega survived without his body, or that Sarah Jane Smith’s body was possessed by Eldrad, you understand the story I’m telling perfectly well. This suggests that spatiotemporal continuity isn’t part of the concept of personal identity, and so personal identity isn’t a matter of spatiotemporal continuity.

  Are You Your Memories?

  If we don’t accept the spatiotemporal continuity model, in what else might we try to find personal identity? One possibility is that we find it in memory. For instance, we might declare that to be you is simply a matter of having your memories. That’d certainly handle a lot of the problem cases we’ve looked at above.

  The David Tennant Doctor might not look like the original William Hartnell Doctor, but as we saw in “The Fires of Pompeii,” he still remembers that, as the Hartnell Doctor, he was responsible for the burning of Rome in “The Romans” (1965). In “The City of Death” (1979), the Tom Baker Doctor who steps out of his TARDIS in Renaissance Italy is spatiotemporally discontinuous with the Doctor who stepped into his TARDIS in modern Paris, but he still remembers boarding in Paris with the intention of traveling back through time. Similarly, the bodiless Omega remembers all too clearly being the bodied Omega who was abandoned by the ungrateful Time Lords, and Eldrad, in all his/her bodies, remembers all too clearly being the Eldrad who was exiled by the ungrateful Kastrians. What’s more, the memory criterion seems to be (at least sometimes) endorsed by the Doctor himself. After all, in “The Five Doctors,” the Davison Doctor tells his companion Tegan “a man is the sum of his memories you know, a Time Lord even more so,” while in “The Planet of the Ood” (2008), the Tennant Doctor tells his companion Donna, “memory and emotions ... without it, you wouldn’t be Donna.” Then again, the Doctor told us in “The Dalek Invasion of Earth” (1964) that Earth is the only planet with magnetic poles, so let’s not just take his word for anything.

  In fact, there are significant problems with the memory account of personal identity too, and the Doctor should know about them because plenty of problem cases pop up in his adventures. Most obviously, sometimes people lose their memory but remain the same person. For example, the Tom Baker Doctor has the memory of his time as president of Gallifrey wiped at the end of “The Invasion of Time” (1978), but remains the same person who was president. Similarly, the Tennant Doctor has the memory of his entire life wiped so that he can pretend to be human in “Human Nature” and “The Family of Blood” (both 2007), but is still the same character.

  As if that weren’t complication enough, it also seems to be possible to gain someone else’s memories without really being them. For example, the Chameleons gain the memories of the Troughton Doctor’s companion Polly in “The Faceless Ones,” Eldrad gains the memories of the Tom Baker Doctor’s companion Sarah Jane Smith in “The Hand of Fear,” while the Daleks plunder the memories of the Davison Doctor himself in “Resurrection of the Daleks” (1984). Yet despite this memory stealing, the Chameleons don’t become Polly, Eldrad doesn’t become Sarah Jane Smith, and the Daleks don’t all become the Doctor.

  Are You Your Personality?

  It might be argued that the memory criterion is right in spirit, but simply doesn’t go far enough in demanding mental similarity. In all the examples I’ve given, the original owner of the memories is very psychologically different from the recipient of the memories, even after the memories are stolen. Polly cared about saving the Earth and being fashionable, while the Chameleons who had her memories cared about conquering the Earth and was unconcerned with fashion. Sarah Jane Smith never had much ambition to wage war across the galaxy, which wasn’t true of Eldrad even after s/he took Sarah’s memories. Similarly, even when the Daleks had taken the Doctor’s memories, they still had very non-Doctorish priorities, preferring the extermination of all other life forms to traveling the universe in a police box.

  Would we be more inclined to believe, for instance, that Eldrad had become Sarah Jane Smith if Eldrad now valued everything that Sarah Jane Smith valued and believed everything that Sarah Jane Smith believed? We probably would be more inclined, but at least two problems remain even if we demand very close psychological similarity.

  One problem is that it seems possible for two people to have the same psychological characteristics. For example, even if Eldrad were to take on Sarah Jane’s entire personality, that wouldn’t get rid of the organism that the Doctor has always called “Sarah Jane,” the one that isn’t blue and glittery and is wearing overalls. Could they both really be Sarah Jane Smith? I don’t think so and a hypothetical case might make clear why. What if you knew that you were going to be executed by the Daleks tomorrow, but the Doctor told you, “Don’t worry! I happen to know that Eldrad copied your entire personality yesterday, so now Eldrad is you! So even though the Daleks are going to exterminate you tomorrow morning, you’ll survive after all, since Eldrad is you and Eldrad will still be alive.”

  Would you be satisfied by this state of affairs or would you object: “Wait! Eldrad isn’t me! I’m me, and when the Daleks exterminate me tomorrow, I won’t have survived at all. Eldrad will have lived but I’ll be dead!” That’s certainly the sort of objection that I’d make, only more pitifully. But if we’re right when we make this protestation, then having our personality isn’t enough for being us, and we must keep looking if we want to find the secret of personal identity.

  A second problem with the view that personal identity consists in close psychological similarity is that people can change personality dramatically over the course of their lives. Mundane examples might include middle-aged businesspeople who suddenly drop out of the rat-race to find themselves, or wild party animals who turn to religion. Examples from Doctor Who would include Mavic Chen from the Hartnell adventure “The Dalek Masterplan,” who decides to side with the Daleks after a lifetime of serving humanity, or Stein from the Davison adventure “Resurrection of the Daleks,” who decides to side with humanity after a lifetime of serving the Daleks.

  The most dramatic example from the new series would be from the Tennant adventure “The Last of the Time Lords,” in which it is revealed that after many lifetimes of evil, the Master has just spent a lifetime of gentle goodness in the persona of Professor Yana, only to turn once again to a life of evil. Professor Yana is psychologically nothing like the Master fans have grown to know since he first faced off against the Pertwee Doctor in “Terror of the Autons” (1971), but the entire story hinges on our understanding that it is indeed the same character. It looks then, as if personal identity may not rely on psychological similarity either.

  Doctor Who and the Ultimate Answer

  Confused yet? We’ve only scratched the surface of the problem. You’ll easily come up with a huge number of new philosophical problems regarding personal identity just by watching the Tom Baker stories “Robot” (1974), “The Ark in Space” (1975), “The Planet of Evil” (1975), “The Android Invasion” (1975), “The Seeds of Doom” (1976), “The Face of Evil” (1977), “The Talons of Weng-Chiang” (1977), “The Invisible Enemy” (1977), “The Leisure Hive” (1980), “Meglos”
(1980) and “Logopolis” (1981), none of which we got to above. The eras of other Doctors are almost equally fruitful.

  So, what’s the answer? In what does personal identity consist? There’s no single answer that all philosophers agree on. Some philosophers support views we discussed earlier, believing that there are replies to the objections I raised, while other philosophers have opinions that there just wasn’t space to include. I’ve got my opinion, of course, but arguing for it here would take us way off topic.

  My point here isn’t to try to sell you on what I think, but to help you appreciate the problems so that you can make up your own mind. And, of course, to make as many Doctor Who references as possible. In that spirit, I bid you to go forth and explore and hunt for the truth, and who knows, like the Doctor in “The Two Doctors” (1985), “The Three Doctors,” and “The Five Doctors,” you just might find yourself. Or, like the Doctor in “The Happiness Patrol” (1988), you might find a massive robot made of licorice. Who can say?

  3

  Who’s Who on Gallifrey

  RICHARD HANLEY

  Although I grew up mostly in Australia, I grew up mostly British. And if you grew up British in the 1960s, you grew up with Doctor Who. Not being into Doctor Who would’ve been like not being into cricket! I watched the show religiously, played at being a Dalek under a upside-down laundry basket, got all cranky when they replaced Willliam Hartnell with Patrick Troughton, watched it less religiously for a while, and then resumed my obsession when John Pertwee came along (though he wasn’t in color in Australia). Tom Baker was even better (and definitely in color), but then after him ...