Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  I’m very glad about the recent worldwide resurgence of Doctor Who, with Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, and now Matt Smith. Looking back now, I see that together with Star Trek and Lost in Space, Doctor Who helped kindle my life-long interest in science fiction, and my career in metaphysics. But this chapter isn’t about me.

  Instead, I will investigate what counts as personal survival for a Time Lord. Breaking down “personal survival” raises two distinct metaphysical issues: first, what a person is, and second, what survival is.

  Let’s assume for now that survival is persistence, by which I mean the existence of one and the same thing at different times. Personal persistence is the existence of one and the same person at different times. And here on Earth, three basic alternative accounts have been given: body, mind, and soul.

  We’ll examine these in turn, but first, some preliminaries.

  Who’s in a Name?

  Doctor Who isn’t, of course, Doctor Who. (“If he’s a time traveler, why didn’t they call him Doctor When?” my daughter once demanded). Mostly, he’s just “the Doctor.” But for identity purposes, “the Doctor” is problematic, since it’s not a typical proper name. Perhaps it’s a proper name; perhaps it’s a title, as Harriet Jones suggests to the Tenth Doctor; perhaps it’s a definite description. If it’s a title, then it needn’t even contain a veridical description. “The Greatest Show in the Galaxy” (1988) needn’t be the greatest show in the galaxy! If he is a doctor, then at least the description fits, but it doesn’t fit uniquely, at least in many contexts in which it’s used.

  Moreover, if “the Doctor” is a veridical title or description, then correctly applying it to successive regenerations may not reflect numerical identity. Just as two distinct persons can be successive Kings (“The King is dead—long live the King!”), two distinct persons might be successive Doctors. That’s what Harriet Jones suggests. Also, we shouldn’t read too much into the fact that we distinguish the Doctors from each other for certain purposes, for instance by using “the Tenth Doctor.” Sometimes we distinguish Smith the man from Smith the boy.

  So we can’t just read the metaphysics off the name. We need to examine the story.

  What’s the Story?

  Most of us would agree that there’s no Doctor, no TARDIS, and no Gallifrey. Yet I’ve just been writing as if there were, and this isn’t some quirk of mine. We all—not just nerdy sci-fi fans—do this kind of thing, and do it a lot.

  I’ll just assert without argument my view on this: we’re all engaged in a kind of pretense, and when we’re so engaged, we speak as if it were the case that the fictional story is a reliable report. Hence, roughly, what’s true in a story is what would’ve been true had the story been non-fiction.

  A consequence is that there’re many determinate facts about what’s true in a fiction. But interpretation of a fiction is still a very tricky business, bringing in facts about the background (in my view, facts about actuality), and requiring what Kendall Walton has called a “good nose.”

  That’s hard enough, but some fictions are serialized, and get curiouser and curiouser. Doctor Who can be treated as a whole bunch of smaller fictions, a natural lower limit being an episode. But we commonly regard these episodes as summative to make a larger story, the story that’s Doctor Who. It has multiple authors, has gone into hiatus, then returned, and has looked quite different in different versions. Rather like the Doctor himself!

  But not just any Doctor Who story counts, and hence we have the notion of canon. In canonical serialization there is symmetry in dependence between the parts of the story. What’s true in later episodes obviously depends upon what’s true in earlier ones, but in canonical serialization, what’s true in earlier episodes also depends upon what’s true in later ones.

  So, for instance, when the Tenth Doctor tells Rose about the process of regeneration (“Children in Need Mini Episode,” 2005), it’s completely appropriate to regard what he says (given that he’s to be trusted about it) as applying to all the regenerations of all the Doctors. This is most helpful, because I’ll focus especially on the Tenth Doctor.

  (I can’t resist mentioning here one remarkable thing the Tenth Doctor says to Rose. Upon regeneration, he quickly finds a mole in the middle of his back, between his shoulder blades. In the philosophical literature on truth in fiction, the usual example is a popular serialization, the Sherlock Holmes stories of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and one of the noted indeterminacies is that Holmes neither does nor doesn’t have a mole in the middle of his back!)

  However, when authors produce non-canonical Doctor Who stories, what’s true in their stories depends upon what’s canonical, but what’s true in the canon does not depend upon what’s true in their stories. Call such non-canonical stories the secondary literature.

  Next, what’s true in the canon doesn’t at all depend upon what’s stated in the tertiary literature, by which I mean the wealth of (often very intelligent) commentary on the canon. And here’s perhaps the most controversial aspect of my claim: no matter how otherwise “authoritative,” the interpretive remarks of an author have no special weight. (I don’t care what J.K. Rowling says now, Dumbledore is not gay unless the way she wrote the story made him so!)

  However, perhaps authors and other creative entities have some say in which stories count as canonical. Steven Moffat, for instance, says in Doctor Who Magazine #389, that “Time Crash” (2007) is canonical—does that make it so? According to the Whoniverse Wiki, “If a story is officially licensed by the BBC as a Doctor Who story, then it counts as canonical.”11 But I doubt that this is sufficient. To be sure, there’s some notion of canon captured by this, but in my view there’s a world of difference between what’s officially endorsed and what’s part of the canon. The Whoniverse account would allow that if the BBC markets a tea-mug bearing a narrative inscription—a very short Doctor Who story—that would count as canonical! In any case, in what follows, I’ll exclude from the canon novels, webcasts, comic books and the like, BBCENDORSED or not. Spin-offs like Torchwood are more plausibly canon, and it’d be harmless to allow them. More importantly, I shall count mini-episodes such as the “Children in Need” special which focuses upon the regeneration from the Ninth to the Tenth Doctor.

  Next, a general point about visual fictions like Doctor Who. In one way they’re more determinate than written fictions, since you can see what some character or place looks like. But lots of indeterminacy remains, and a new interpretive difficulty is introduced: the visual-media conventions of depiction. One aspect of this phenomenon is that screen time isn’t always a good guide to story time. For instance, when the screen fades into black and then into a different, brightly-lit scene—all in a few seconds—we correctly infer that a whole night has passed.

  In deciding what’s true about regeneration, then, we must be cautious when considering questions such as: How long did it take? The tertiary literature on regeneration contains all manner of claims about regeneration based upon a commitment to screen time as guide to story time. I take regeneration time to be largely indeterminate, and so will largely ignore it.

  Finally, a somewhat technical complication arises for a small minority of fictions, and Doctor Who is in this minority. The idea of “changing the past” that’s sometimes employed in Doctor Who is a notion I call ‘annulling the past’ (as in “The Year that Never Was,” 2008); and it’s an incoherent one. You can’t make it both the case and not the case that a particular event occurred, in exactly the same context or sense. Not even a time machine will allow you to do that.

  The complication is that one bit of silliness ought not to infect the whole story. Clearly it’s true in the story that the Doctor is from Gallifrey, and not from Earth. But in classical logic, every proposition whatsoever follows from a contradiction. So to keep a sensible story, we either eliminate the contradiction or else do not permit everything to follow from it. I will assume that this can be done, keeping the world of Doctor Who safe for our inter
pretive purposes.

  What’s in Regeneration?

  According to the story, a Time Lord can regenerate twelve times (the Master’s shenanigans notwithstanding). Not only is this handy for replacing actors, but it permits relatively tragic storylines in which the Doctor is in a fatal condition, such as in “The End of Time” (2009).

  Twelve is an utterly arbitrary limit, and I’d like to see it go permanently by the wayside. (It would be enough to keep the number down that there are significant costs to regeneration in terms of pain, or memory loss, or companion trauma—after all, it’s a bit dodgy.) Perhaps there’s a sneaking suspicion that a regenerated Doctor is, because an imperfect copy, somehow imperfect, corrupt, and the next even more so, until not enough of the original remains?

  Our judgments about persistence seem to permit a total turnover in bodily composition over time. Our bodies, for instance, are composed now of substantially different cells from, say, ten years ago. Growing up, I often heard it said that we recycle all our body cells in a seven-year period. It seems that isn’t true, but nobody would be particularly worried about it, anyway. If science announced tomorrow that we recycled all our cells in a seven-month period, we aren’t going to conclude that no body persists longer than seven months.

  The interesting question is, why not? The answer is that, for bodily persistence, bodily continuity is important. Suppose that we label a certain body B1, and a certain later body B2. If B2 and B1 share any of the same cells, we say that they overlap, or are connected. Suppose B1 is connected with B2, and B2 is connected with still later B3. It nevertheless is possible that B1 and B3 aren’t connected.

  For instance, in our fantasy of seven-month recycling, suppose B1 and B2 are separated by six months, and B2 and B3 by the same. Though they’re not connected, B1 and B3 are continuous, since there are overlapping chains of connectedness between them. (By analogy, think of how to make a hundred-foot rope from much shorter lengths of string. You have to have overlapping strings!)

  Indeed, once we grant that continuity is enough, it wouldn’t matter if we recycled our cells every seven weeks, or days, or hours, or minutes, or seconds. And given that Time Lord bodies are subject to entropy, too, then presumably we can give the same account of Gallifreyan bodily persistence.

  A problem arises, though, when we get to regeneration. According to the Tenth Doctor, “every single cell” was replaced in his regeneration from the Ninth Doctor (“Children in Need Mini Episode”).

  Again, think of the rope analogy. With no overlap at all between strings, there’s a break in continuity, and at best you’ve two ropes that happen to be laying end-to-end. If there’s not a single cell in common between the Ninth and Tenth Doctors, then it seems that bodily continuity is lost in the process.

  This strongly suggests that Gallifreyans don’t regard bodily continuity as necessary for personal persistence. That leaves two basic alternatives: either they rely upon mental continuity, or upon something else entirely. But is bodily continuity sufficient for bodily persistence? No . . .

  What’s Continuity Without Persistence?

  In “The Christmas Invasion” (2005) the Doctor’s right hand is cut off during his duel with the Sycorax leader. Call the pre-duel Doctor D1, the severed hand D2, and the victorious Doctor D3. Surely D1 and D3 are one and the same Doctor; D2 is a just a bit he left behind, much the way we humans leave skin cells and whatnot all over the planet as we live our lives. But D2 is bodily continuous with D1, since it’s connected with it (it has cells in common with it).

  Let’s call connectedness between an earlier and later body strong if it involves at least fifty percent of the earlier body. And let’s call continuity strong when it consists of overlapping chains of strong connectedness; otherwise it is weak. The example of the Doctor’s hand tells us that weak connectedness isn’t always enough. Is it ever enough? In “Journey’s End” (2008), a whole new body is grown from, among other things, the Doctor’s severed hand, and we’re repeatedly assured that the regrown Doctor is the Doctor.

  Can this be right? Suppose it means that one and the same body is in two places at once. That’s old hat, in a time travel story. There’s at least one way to make simple sense of being in two places at once due to time travel: suppose that a Gallifreyan body is a space-time worm extended in time as well as in space. That is, suppose that it has temporal parts in addition to having spatial parts. Then, there’s no contradiction in two different temporal parts, if the Doctor is in two places at once, any more than there’s a contradiction in his right and left hands being in two different places at once.

  But in “Journey’s End,” it’s not time travel but rather replication that produces the extra body. And it’s doubtful that we can make sense of a single space-time worm that’s multiply located as a result. All in all, it seems better to say that the regrown Doctor’s body isn’t one and the same body as the Doctor’s.

  (By the way, in the same episode, the Doctor calls the Doctor/Donna, “a human being with a Time Lord’s brain.” I take it this isn’t meant literally—Donna seems closer to the mark when she says she has the Doctor’s mind.)

  Where’s the Soul?

  Given that it’s not sameness of body, perhaps there’s some of sort of Doctor essence that explains his persistence through regeneration. One hint in this direction is the weird appearance of the Watcher when the Fourth Doctor regenerates into the Fifth (“Logopolis,” 1981).

  Another is in “Human Nature” (2007), when the Doctor uses the Chameleon Arch, which “rewrites my biology—literally changes every single cell in my body. I’ve set it to human.” It also gives the Doctor in the person of John Smith amnesia, so that he doesn’t remember being the Doctor.

  It’s tempting to think that this is a case where neither body nor mind persists. So, if it’s a case of personal persistence nonetheless, something else is implicated—call it the soul. Perhaps it’s better to call it a soul pellet, to distinguish it from a common postulation that the mind and soul are one.

  There’s a long tradition of belief in soul pellets here on Earth, so maybe there is on Gallifrey, too. Part of the motivation comes from Leibniz’s Law, which tells us that if A and B are numerically identical, it can’t be true that A has some property that B lacks (or vice versa). It follows that difference in properties entails numerical distinctness. But, think of all the properties you now have that you didn’t have when you were five years old. You’re bigger, stronger, hairier. You have all sorts of beliefs that you earlier lacked. So you’re bodily different, and mentally different. So how can it still be you?

  The temptation is to think that all these changes are associated with some underlying, unchanging thing that is the real you: the soul pellet. If the Doctor has—is—a soul pellet, then he could persist without continuity of body or mind. He could be John Smith, even if John Smith has a distinct body and a distinct mind. The problem is, he could be anyone at all, and we wouldn’t know it. The only ways we normally have of identifying and re-identifying persons is through bodily and mental evidence. Of course, John Smith looks like the Doctor, but as we saw with the regrown Doctor, that’s not enough for persistence. Soul pellets, even if they existed, simply wouldn’t help.

  The case of the Watcher is more difficult. The Watcher seems to have a distinct body. In any case, it suffers from the same problem as a soul pellet. If the Doctor is the Watcher, and the Watcher can be somewhere else, how do we ever know we have the Doctor?

  What Do You Have in Mind?

  That leaves us one remaining option—personal persistence essentially involves the mind, and this is surely what Gallifreyans believe. When Rose demands of the Tenth Doctor that he bring back the real Doctor, he says, “It’s still me.” “You can’t be,” Rose replies. “Then how could I remember this: the very first word I ever said to you? Trapped in that cellar, surrounded by shop-window dummies, ooh—such a long time ago? I took your hand, I said one word—just one word. I said, Run!”

  In
“The Christmas Invasion,” the Tenth Doctor is challenged by the Prime Minister in almost identical words. The Doctor tells her: “Harriet Jones—we were trapped in Downing Street, and the one thing that scared you wasn’t the aliens, it wasn’t the war—it was the thought of your mother being on her own.”

  Both Rose and Harriet Jones take this evidence to override the contrary evidence from his bodily appearance. When the Tenth Doctor recalls things that only the Doctor would know, they (perhaps too readily—since they have both experienced enough weirdness) accept that he is the Doctor.

  The view that persistence of persons depends upon memory was proposed in 1690 by John Locke.12 Locke is generally taken to have proposed that a later person A is identical with an earlier person B if and only if A remembers being B.

  Note that we’re using memory in a restricted way here, assuming that memory is factive, meaning you can’t remember something that didn’t actually happen. (Of course, you can seem to remember it.) Locke’s memory criterion characterizes personal identity in terms of mental connectedness, and his critic Thomas Reid quickly pointed out the problem we noted above for bodily connectedness: it is possible for A to remember being B, and B remember being C, but A not remember being C.13 This is especially likely in a case of normal forgetting, where an old man might remember being a young man, but not being a young boy.

  That would be like the case of bodily disconnection we considered earlier. But in the case of mental connection, a different kind of case is disconcertingly common: amnesia, like that of John Smith. Smith doesn’t remember being the earlier Doctor, so by Locke’s account he isn’t the Doctor. But the later Doctor remembers being Smith (he seems to retain memories of who Joan is, who the Family of Blood are, and so on), so he is Smith. And the later Doctor remembers being the earlier Doctor, so he is the earlier Doctor. That can’t be right.