Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  Dick pushes skepticism to dizzying extremes in the novel Ubik. Ubik is one seriously weird book and my favorite Dick novel. There are psychic agencies competing with each other’s Precogs and anti-Precogs. There’s “half-life” in which you can talk to the dead who exist in suspended animation. Even the characters’ outfits are crazy: for example, “fuchsia pedal-pushers, pink yakfur slippers, a snakeskin sleeveless blouse, and a ribbon in his waist-length dyed white hair.”

  Philosophical skepticism appears in full force in the second half of the book. The characters are unsure about almost everything: what year it is, why consumer products are regressing into older products, why the money in their wallets is changing and why people are randomly disintegrating. They don’t even know if they themselves are alive or dead. They receive a message apparently from their dead boss: “ALL OF YOU ARE DEAD. I AM ALIVE.”

  Dick wrote a screenplay for Ubik and a movie is supposed to be on the way. I hope they treat it with care. I’d hate to see Ubik’s wild skepticism domesticated by the Holly-worldview.

  What’s So Bad about Determinism?

  Many people consider a world of determinism and skepticism depressing, but Dick suggests it’s not so bad. People are afraid of determinism and skepticism because they hold the Holly-worldview. Such fears are less reasonable once this worldview loosens its grip on us.

  Dick is a soft determinist, since he thinks freedom and determinism are compatible. In the story, “The Minority Report,” Anderton realizes his action was determined, but he is nonetheless free and responsible, since his action was unconstrained and flowed from his character. This explains why Anderton is untroubled by the fact that he acted exactly as the last Precog predicted. Dick’s point is that we shouldn’t worry about determinism even if the Precogs did exist. He even suggests that if you like what the Adjustment Team is doing, there’s no reason to be upset by their meddling. In making these points, Dick joins a distinguished list of philosophers including the ancient Stoics, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Stuart Mill, and Daniel Dennett. This group has diverse views on other matters, but they all agree with Dick that determinism is nothing much to worry about.

  What’s So Bad about Skepticism?

  Skepticism is usually thought of as a bad thing. Dick’s paranoia, for instance, grows out of his skepticism—you never know when they’re out to get you. Even if you’re not as paranoid as Philip K. Dick, skepticism can make you pretty upset. We like to think of ourselves as people who know things. You’re probably reading this book to learn something about Dick and philosophy, that is, to know more stuff. If skepticism were true, there would be a tragic mismatch between how you think of yourself (someone who knows stuff) and how you really are (someone who knows very little). And that would be almost as upsetting as Dickian paranoia!

  But maybe skepticism isn’t all bad. In Chapter 16 of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Rachael asks Deckard, “Have you ever made love to an android before?” She implores Deckard, “Don’t pause and be philosophical, because from a philosophical standpoint it’s dreary. For us both.” Maybe this dreariness is a result of skepticism, but I’d say it’s a result of the belief that Rachael isn’t a real woman. She tells him not to dwell on it. Dick rarely gives voice to the wisdom of his female characters (genius that he was, he was a pretty sexist writer, more likely to describe a woman’s body than her thoughts). I think Rachael is on to something.

  In modern times skepticism is a problem, but for ancient Greek skeptics such as Sextus Empiricus, skepticism wasn’t a problem. It was the solution. In the ancient world, skepticism was a way of life. The key to happiness is to suspend judgment on philosophical matters, to give up wanting to know those things, since that desire causes mental disturbance. Suspending judgment is like saying, “I neither confirm nor deny those allegations.” In order to suspend judgment, Sextus Empiricus suggests that you find equally powerful arguments for and against a particular view on philosophical topics such as cause and effect, the existence of God, etc. Ancient skeptics would say we should find both the pro and con arguments on whether Deckard is an android or whether the characters in Ubik are alive or dead. Doing so leads to suspension of judgment and ultimately to mental tranquility.

  I think there were similar skeptics in ancient India such as Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi (although my interpretations here are controversial among people who study Indian philosophy). Like their Greek counterparts, Nāgārjuna and Jayarāśi thought the key to happiness was to give up wanting to know the answers to philosophical questions.

  But they were a little more radical. Instead of using equally powerful arguments to suspend judgment, they used philosophy to uproot the very impulse to do philosophy. They did this by demonstrating that all answers to a philosophical question lead to unwanted consequences such as internal contradictions. They used this method, for example, to point out the inherent flaws in theories advocated by philosophers in ancient India about the means of knowledge. Nāgārjuna was a Buddhist who saw this as leading to non-attachment to philosophical views (even Buddhist views). Jayarāśi was a nonreligious philosopher who thought he could destroy any philosophical basis of religion in order to live a happy, down-to-earth sort of life. They would agree that when it comes to Deckard’s humanity or the alive-or-dead? issue of Ubik, you should find contradictions in all theories on the matter. By doing so, you’ll stop worrying about it.

  Greek and Indian skeptics see their philosophical practice as part of a way of life. Most Dick fans are bothered by questions such as whether Anderton has free will or whether Deckard is an android. But ancient skeptics would use their arguments to get us to stop trying to believe anything about these and other philosophical issues. They want to replace all the angst, worry and dogmatic attachment that philosophy can create with a bemused shrug. Greek skeptics describe it like this: imagine the puzzling feeling you would have if asked about whether the number of stars in the sky is odd or even, and then try to cultivate that feeling about every philosophical issue. The way of life described by skeptics in ancient Greece and India is very strange. I couldn’t do it all the time. Few people could. Nonetheless, the lesson of ancient skepticism is that sometimes the best way to stop worrying is to stop wanting what you worry about.

  A Happy Ending?

  Dick didn’t think skepticism was a way of life, but he provides some of what we need to deal with our fears. We can take his paranoia and fear as cathartic (even if he didn’t). Once we get over it, we just might be better off. Determinism may be true. We may not know some of the things we want to know. But this isn’t much to worry about after all.

  I should come clean and say that neither Dick’s nor my investigations have discovered any definitive answers on these issues. I doubt anybody will solve the problems of skepticism and freedom versus determinism anytime soon, but Dick’s philosophical journeys help us face our fears to tackle these questions in an honest and open way. Good philosophy, like good science fiction, rarely gives us the answers we want. It usually leads to more questions. But maybe a little philosophical bounty hunting can retire a few of our unfounded fears.

  02

  A Quintessence of Dust

  ROSS BARHAM

  Ask any self-respecting SFer, ‘What’s a replicant?’, and straight off they’ll be able to tell you that it’s a genetically engineered android created for slave labor by the Tyrell Corporation. Now, what’s remarkable about this isn’t so much that they’ll all have seen Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner—I mean, who hasn’t? Rather, it’s that such a concise response can tell us so much. Look at it this way: if we divide up the information in terms of the four Aristotelian types of ‘cause’, we get the following:

  1. Efficient Cause—replicants are genetically engineered by technicians working for the Tyrell Corporation;

  2. Material Cause—replicants consist of bio-mechanical matter;

  3. Formal Cause—replicants are modeled on humans and designed by the Tyrell Corporatio
n; and,

  4. Final Cause—replicants are intended to closely resemble humans for the purpose of slave labor.

  And yet if you were to ask, ‘What makes us human?’, you’ll find that only the first three categories are readily answerable (and then, mostly only thanks to recent advances in science):

  1. Efficient Cause—individual humans are created as a result of procreation by human parents, whereas human beings collectively evolved from ancestral species via a combination of random genetic mutations and adaptive natural selection;

  2. Material Cause—humans consist of biochemical matter (mainly water);

  3. Formal Cause—humans are formed anatomically according to the blueprint of their inherited DNA.

  When it comes to the fourth way of enquiring after what it is to be human—what is our point or purpose?—the answer is not at all clear. But it is and remains one of the central questions of philosophy. What’s more, it’s also the central theme to both the movie Blade Runner and the Philip K Dick novel on which it was based, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? These two iconic works give us quite distinct visions of a futuristic bounty hunter, Rick Deckard, grappling with his conscience as he sets about ‘retiring’ a handful of replicants that have gone rogue. But each offers us something important and profound both about what it is to be a human . . . and what it’s not.

  Show Me What You’re Made Of

  In philosophy we like to treat everything as systematically as possible. So a common approach when attempting to address the fourth and ‘final’ cause of what it is to be human is to offer an exhaustive list of all the characteristics that are seemingly unique to us as a species. This is a method we also picked up from Aristotle. He felt that if a thing has a final cause then it should be identifiable by the fact that it is unique to it. So, as far as Aristotle could tell, the purpose of humans is to live a life according to reason, because it seemed to him that only we are capable of reasoning.

  Since Aristotle’s time, numerous contenders have been suggested as being equally significant to what essentially it is to be human. Some of the more promising prospects include: rationality, agency, morality and love. Buckets of ink have been spilt over the centuries both in defense and criticism of these concepts, but the film Blade Runner in particular takes a different and rather unique tack (and not only for using celluloid rather than ink); Blade Runner dramatically pits man against replicant—one-by-one rejecting these various contenders for what essentially makes us human.

  Blade Runner plainly shows rationality as failing to meet the grade for what makes us human. Roy Batty, the leader of the rogue replicants, easily checkmates the designer of his ‘brain’ (or CPU) at a game of chess, and later even taunts Deckard for acting irrationally under pressure. Nor does agency seem to make the final cut: from the very outset of the film, the replicants have an agenda of their own that wasn’t programmed into them by the Tyrell Corporation, simply by virtue of the fact that they have rebelled from their off-world enslavement.

  The question of morality is a more subtle matter, for as Captain Bryant—Deckard’s supervisor—explains:

  The replicants were designed to copy human beings in every way except their emotions. The designers reckoned that after a few years they might develop their own emotional responses. You know, hate, love, fear, anger, envy.

  But while the rogue replicants are certainly emotional and empathetic, these basic building blocks of morality definitely haven’t come together to make android saints: Leon’s brutal shooting of Deckard’s predecessor, Holden, is an obvious case in point. Rather, Blade Runner makes what philosophers call a reductio ad absurdum, to show that if morality was the defining trait of humans, then Deckard—the film’s ostensibly human protagonist—might not then be fully ‘human’ because of the morally ambiguous nature of ‘retirement’ as perhaps just a euphemism for murder. Again, Roy jeers at Deckard: “I thought you were supposed to be good. Aren’t you the good man?”

  And finally, although Blade Runner is in many ways a typical Hollywood love story with many parallels to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (boy meets girl; girl turns out to be an enemy robot; boy sacrifices everything for girl even though their fate is ultimately doomed . . .), the movie nonetheless pulls back from fully endorsing this much celebrated and almost sacrosanct human capacity for love. Firstly, with respect to Deckard and Rachael’s relationship, the question is never whether she can love him, but whether he can truly love her; as Gaff—the police officer seemingly assigned to supervise Deckard’s progress—puts it: “It’s too bad she won’t live, but then again, who does?” And secondly, although Roy and Pris are seemingly in love with one another, when Roy sincerely mourns Pris’s retirement by kissing her softly on the lips, her tongue is initially seen to protrude from her mouth, but afterwards has retracted; such a gratuitous detail cannot but distract and alienate the audience from fully endorsing love as sufficient for humanity.

  Have You Ever Retired a Human by Mistake?

  Blade Runner then clearly takes a negative approach to the question of what it is to be human—telling us what it’s not, rather than what it is. The point it makes is that many of the individual attributes and characteristics that we take to be essential to our humanity, while perhaps necessary, nevertheless fall short of being sufficient. This is a sentiment shared also by contemporary Australian philosopher, Raimond Gaita. He argues that philosophers have long been misguided in hoping that we might ever successfully settle what is essential to being human using the blackboard-list style of method recommended by Aristotle some two millennia ago. Rather, Gaita claims that no other concept or concepts could ever successfully recapture what is essential to a ‘human’. He illustrates this point with an example of a racist woman that he knows personally (here called ‘M’):

  M unhesitatingly attributes to the Vietnamese all that makes up the raw material for philosophical accounts of morality. She knows that the Vietnamese are persons according to most accounts of that concept. No doubt crosses her mind that they are self-conscious, rational, with thoughts and feelings, and are able to reflect critically on their desires, thoughts and feelings.1

  And yet, as Gaita points outs, unfortunately M remains a racist nonetheless. In light of “how little these theories achieve,” then, Gaita concludes that ‘human’ ought to be regarded as an irreducible concept, and in doing so, tips his hat to French philosopher Simone Weil, who wrote, while working for the Resistance in Nazi-occupied France:

  There exists an obligation towards every human being for the sole reason that he or she is a human being, without any other condition requiring to be fulfilled, and even without any recognition of such an obligation on the part of the individual involved.2

  That is to say, a human—any human—is deserving of our moral respect, no matter how smart, free, moral or loving they happen to be (or not to be). But while Blade Runner endorses this view only implicitly, there are a number of instances in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that more explicitly emphasize the significance of the concept ‘human being’. For instance, the character of J.R. Isidore is a ‘chickenhead’, meaning that the radioactive dust that blankets Earth has deteriorated his intelligence, and his social standing along with it. Isidore, however, is fortunate enough to have retained employment: “his gloomy, gothic boss accepted him as human and this he appreciated.” His boss is able to see past society’s prejudice against chickenheads; he realizes that being human is not a simple matter of intelligence. Further, when Deckard vidphones the office after having retired almost all of the rogue replicants, his secretary informs him:

  “Inspector Bryant has been trying to get a hold of you. I think he’s turning your name over to Chief Cutter for a citation. Because you retired those six—”

  “I know what I did,” he said.

  By cutting her off at this point—before she refers to the retired replicants as ‘androids’ (or worse, ‘skin-jobs’)—Deckard implies that, like it or not, he has come to view the
moral standing of the androids in a new light. He doesn’t go so far as to call them ‘human’ as such, but it is nevertheless suggested that he no longer considers the line separating us from them as so clearly demarcated: “So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and android constructs,” Deckard reflects.

  But to say that ‘human’ is an irreducible concept is not merely to say ‘a human is a human is a human is a human, and that’s all there is to it’, for, while the reductive analytic approach of identifying necessary and sufficient conditions may not have succeeded, the philosophical fields of phenomenology and existentialism have other ways to productively explore what we mean by even an irreducible concept such as ‘human’ appears to be. Indeed, many of these are in keeping with the methods and strengths of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for while Dick may not have written typical academic philosophical works, nonetheless the world, characters, situations, and imagined zeitgeist his writing evokes all speak volumes about what makes us human.

  The Lung-less, All-Penetrating Masterful World-Silence

  German philosopher Martin Heidegger, wrote in his essay, “The Question Concerning Technology,” that technology is a double-edged sword, with both the power to save, but also the danger of potentially alienating us from the world, each other, and ultimately even our own selves. The imagined reality of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? illustrates this to perfection: a handful of humans are virtually the only remaining life form on Earth; their emotional lives are selfselectively controlled by mood organs, and their spiritual needs are artificially assuaged by “black empathy boxes”; an inane TV host named Buster Friendly is the only source of culture; animals are bought from out of catalogues; a blanket of pollution that was initially made in the service of progress has long since made the planet inhospitable; the entire enterprise of human civilization appears to have critically failed. These factors—disturbing enough by themselves—all coalesce to produce in the Earth’s few remaining inhabitants, a profound and alienating awareness of the everencroaching, yawning, “silence of the world.” As Deckard’s desolate wife confides in him: