Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  And even when our senses are not at fault, we still usually get deceived through our senses. Somebody intentionally makes the world appear to us to be different than it actually is. For instance, Quaid disguises himself as a fat lady to fool the immigration officer when he arrives on Mars. (Unfortunately, this deception is uncovered when the robot disguise malfunctions.) Later, he uses a hologram watch to project his image to another location so that Cohaagen’s soldiers will shoot at the image rather than at him. But the extreme case is when the “Adjustment Team” (in the short story that inspired The Adjustment Bureau) actually remakes the world so that what we see today is not what was there yesterday.

  Our senses are not our only sources of information about the world. Much of what we know about the world (in particular, about what happened to us in the past) is based on what we remember. And we can be deceived through our memories as well as through our senses. In fact, quite a few of the deceptions in Dick’s work involve some degree of memory manipulation. In addition to the fake memories that are implanted into Quaid in Total Recall, fake memories are implanted into some of the replicants in Blade Runner. While the replicants from the off-world colonies that Deckard is chasing know that they are replicants, the new models (including Rachel) are given memories of a childhood that never happened so that the Tyrell Corporation “can control them better.” In Impostor, the replicant is a perfect copy of the person it impersonates both mentally and physically (except, of course, for the Centauri U-bomb in his chest).

  And the possibility of our memories being manipulated is actually more worrisome than the possibility of our sense perceptions being manipulated. We need to have all sorts of knowledge in order to navigate safely and effectively through the world. Just to name a few, we need to know where we live, we need to know where we work, and we need to know what things are edible. And almost all of these pieces of knowledge are stored in memory. Thus, it can actually be quite dangerous if our memories are erased or altered.

  The kind of memory manipulation that Quaid undergoes appears to be a science-fiction fantasy, but it’s less distant from reality than you might think. Until very recently, most psychologists (including Eric Kandel, Nobel Laureate in 2000 for his work on memory) did think that experiences get recorded in our brains and that, every time that we remember something, we play back the very same recording. However, it now looks as if human memory is really Read-Write rather than Read-Only. Every time that we pull up a memory to our conscious mind, it gets modified slightly when it is put back in storage. And if someone knows what she’s doing, she can control how that memory is modified. As Karim Nader of McGill University puts it, “for a hundred years, people thought memory was wired into the brain. Instead, we find it can be rewired—you can add false information to it, make it stronger, make it weaker, and possibly even make it disappear.”

  One way to actually manipulate memories is with drugs (an idea that would certainly have appealed to Dick). In an experiment that undercut the old theory of a Read-Only memory, Nader gave laboratory rats a drug that temporarily prevents the formation of new memories. Then he triggered a traumatic memory. (He played a tone that he had trained them to associate with getting a painful electric shock.) Under the old theory, this should not have had any effect on a memory that was already stored in the brains of the rats. However, it actually erased, or at least weakened, the traumatic memory.

  Does directly manipulating memory in this way count as deception? According to some philosophers, in order to deceive someone, you have to expose her to misleading evidence (for example by wearing a disguise or by using a hologram). Causing false beliefs by operating on someone’s brain or by giving her a drug does not count. However, Dick is legitimately concerned with any intentionally caused false beliefs about the way the world is, regardless of how those beliefs were caused. And in any event, we actually do have to worry about our memories being manipulated just with misleading evidence. Psychologists and cognitive scientists have discovered numerous non-invasive techniques for creating “rich false memories.” For instance, the so-called “lost-in-the-mall” technique, which involves “several suggestive interviews filled with misinformation,” leads many subjects to have detailed memories of events (such as being lost in a shopping mall as a child) that did not actually occur.

  Who Deceives Us?

  Most of the deceptions that Dick describes are the work of conspiracies. A conspiracy is a group of people acting in secret in order to bring about some state of affairs. For instance, Cohaagen does not deceive Quaid by himself. He is simply the head of “The Agency” that controls Mars. Cohaagen’s co-conspirators include Quaid’s “wife” Lori, his “friend” Harry, the cab driver Benny, and even Quaid’s previous self Hauser who claims in the suitcase video to have switched sides. And, of course, The Adjustment Bureau is the quintessential conspiracy.

  Conspiracies often aim at bad ends, such as assassinating public figures, blowing up buildings, or crushing the mutant resistance so as to keep the turbinium flowing for the war effort. But it is important to note that conspiracies, such as the Adjustment Bureau, can also aim to bring about good consequences for the human race with their manipulations. According to the legendary “case worker” Thompson, the Dark Ages and the wars and atrocities of the twentieth century only occurred because the Adjustment Bureau tried letting us make our own decisions for a while.

  Conspiracy theories are certainly popular. Many people believe that there was a conspiracy (possibly involving the CIA or even the Mafia) to assassinate JFK. Other people believe that the United States government destroyed the World Trade Center and attempted to destroy the Pentagon on 9/11 to provide an excuse for invading Iraq. In fact, at one time, Dick himself believed that there was a worldwide Marxist conspiracy involving science-fiction writers, such as Stanislaw Lem.

  Despite their popularity, calling something “a conspiracy theory” is usually a way of dismissing and ridiculing it. But what exactly is wrong with believing in conspiracy theories? After all, the claim that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by a group of Muslim extremists is also a theory about a conspiracy, but given all of the available evidence, it seems quite reasonable to believe this theory.

  Sir Karl Popper thought that it was irrational to believe in the existence of large, sinister, and supposedly extremely powerful, conspiracies because it is so unlikely for such conspiracies to succeed. Popper had what David Coady, in Conspiracy Theories: The Philosophical Debate, calls a “cock-up theory of society” rather than a “conspiracy theory of society.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine that a group of real-life conspirators could successfully carry out the sort of operation that the Adjustment Bureau does. And, in fact, the Adjustment Bureau itself makes at least a few small mistakes. For instance, Harry falls asleep on a park bench and, thus, fails to make sure that David Norris spills coffee on his shirt by 7:05. As a result, David does not have to go home to change his shirt and ends up meeting Elise on the bus, which in turn leads to many further deviations from “the plan.”

  More recently, Brian Keeley has argued that believing in conspiracy theories is irrational in much the same way as Hume argued that believing in miracles is irrational. Unlike claims of miraculous events, conspiracy theories do not require the breaking of the laws of nature. But nevertheless, they are almost always less likely to be true than some alternate explanation of the event in question—at least, they are less likely unless we are willing to engage in extreme skepticism, such as worrying that our spouse is not our spouse, that our friends are not our friends, and even that our memories are not our memories.

  Circles within Circles

  According to Steve Clarke, it’s irrational to believe in conspiracy theories because they are essentially “degenerating research programs.” This term was coined by a colleague of Popper’s, Imre Lakatos, in his work on the philosophy of science. A degenerating scientific research program is one that requires numerous ad hoc modifications in order to save the theory fro
m being proved false. For instance, most of the ancient Greeks and Romans, and medieval Europeans, thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe. But in order to hold this view and still make sense of their astronomical data, they had to accept that planets move in very strange ways (“retrograde motion”). In fact, surprisingly enough, we can actually stick with this geocentric theory, but this ‘degenerating’ model of the universe would get ever stranger as we would have to make numerous ad hoc modifications (“adding epicycles”) to explain our current astronomical data.

  Giovanni Cassini’s model of the apparent motion of Venus, Mars, and the Sun around the Earth. Hey, it could be true! I’ll explain why this has to be correct as soon as you put on this tinfoil hat.

  In the same way, conspiracy theories usually become quite convoluted and implausible as they try to account for the available data. For instance, “truthers” who believe in a US government conspiracy to destroy the Pentagon by missile or controlled demolition have had to come up with more and more additions to their theory in order to explain evidence like the airplane debris at the crash site, the eyewitness reports of the crash, and phone calls made by passengers prior to the crash.

  In addition to it being irrational to believe in conspiracy theories, Lee Basham claims that it is a bad idea, for purely practical reasons, to believe in such theories. If there really is a secret global conspiracy along the lines of the Adjustment Bureau, there is not a whole lot that we can do about it—and worrying about our lack of control will just make us miserable.

  On the other side, though, David Coady argues that it is a very bad idea to make it a practice to reject conspiracy theories out of hand. People who do so are very easily manipulated by the powers that be. And this is precisely the warning that Dick offers in many of his works. For instance, in the novel Lies, Inc., most of the miserable inhabitants of an overcrowded Earth are convinced by the advertisements of “Trails of Hoffman Limited” that the off-world colony of “Whale’s Mouth” (which suspiciously can only be reached via one-way teleportation devices) is a paradise. Those few skeptics are considered to be “idiots and cranks opposing history.” Of course, as the people of Earth finally discover, “They were right. The cranks. The lunatics, like that guy who wanted to make the eighteen-year trip by interstellar ship.”

  Indeed, sometimes it is the received view, rather than the conspiracy theory, that is the degenerating research program. For instance, the government had to keep adding makeshift excuses in order to maintain the fiction that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. In fact, sometimes so much counterevidence mounts that defenders of the official story, such as Dr. Edgemar, have to take the extreme step of claiming that it was all a dream.

  Self-Deception

  One of the conspirators who deceives Quaid is Quaid himself. In order to infiltrate the mutants and kill their leader Kuato, Hauser has to believe that he really is on the side of the mutants. As Cohaagen explains, “Hauser volunteered to become Doug Quaid. It was the only way to fool the psychics.” Thus, Hauser was following the advice of Friedrich Nietzsche who said in Human, All Too Human,

  with all great deceivers there is a noteworthy occurrence to which they owe their power. In the actual act of deception they are overcome by belief in themselves. Self-deception has to exist if a grand effect is to be produced.

  Whether or not you’re a mutant with psychic capabilities, it’s much harder to detect deception when the deceiver himself is deceived. If a deceiver believes what she is saying, she’s not going to display the signs of stress and anxiety that liars often do. Also, if she believes what she is saying, she does not face the difficulty of trying to keep her stories (the real one and the made-up one) straight. As Nietzsche pointed out, “he who tells a lie seldom realizes what a heavy burden he has assumed; for, in order to maintain a lie, he has to invent twenty more.”

  One person being deceived so that she can more effectively deceive another person is actually a recurring theme in Dick’s work. The replicant in Imposter is made to think that it is not a replicant so that it will have a better chance of carrying out its mission. In A Scanner Darkly, Arctor’s superiors in the police force mislead him about their plans for him so that he will be able to infiltrate a New Path rehabilitation clinic.

  But many philosophers argue that intentional self-deception is a practical impossibility—you can’t just choose to believe something when you know that it’s false. People “deceive themselves” quite often, but in most of these cases, they have no conscious intention to cause themselves to acquire a false belief. Instead, they acquire or maintain a false belief because it benefits them to hold that belief and they can’t bear to be critical of it, even as evidence against it piles up. For instance, people do not consciously set out to deceive themselves about the wonders of Whale’s Mouth “with its fresh air, sunshine, all those cute little animals, and those wondrous buildings THL robots are constructing.” But because it provides the only hope for escaping their miserable lives on Earth, they cling to the official story.

  How Can We Detect Deception?

  Another very realistic concern with deception is found in the Voigt-Kampff test that a Blade Runner uses to identify replicants. A device is aimed at the subject’s eye to detect minute physiological changes, such as “capillary dilation . . . fluctuation of the pupil . . . involuntary dilation of the iris.” The subject is then told stories that are “designed to provoke an emotional response.”

  The V-K test is essentially a version of the famous Turing Test. In the early days of electronic computers, Alan Turing was trying to get clear about when we could say that a machine can think, and he proposed the following criterion: An examiner submits a series of questions remotely to a computer and to a human. If the examiner cannot determine, based on their written responses, which one is the computer, then we should say that the computer has intelligence. Thus, in order to pass the Turing Test, a computer would have to deceive the examiner into thinking that it is human.

  This test was originally just a thought experiment, but it has now moved from science fiction into everyday life. Admittedly, we don’t have to worry about catching replicants in real life, but we do have to worry about machines pretending to be humans. Certain computer programs, such as websites that let people rate news articles or websites that sell tickets to rock concerts, can be manipulated by other computer programs. So, in order to avoid such manipulation, anyone or anything that visits these websites has to take a version of the Turing Test. In fact, you have almost certainly taken this test yourself. It is called CAPTCHA (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). You are shown a series of squiggly letters and you have to type in what you see (a task that computers are not yet able to perform).

  Are you really a human? Take this test and see.

  The V-K test is also quite similar to real lie-detection technology, such as the polygraph. When people lie, they get nervous. For instance, while Dr. Edgemar is trying to convince Quaid that his trip to Mars is all a dream (“I’m quite serious. You’re not here, and neither am I”), a drop of sweat runs down his brow. This is what makes Quaid realize that Edgemar is lying to him. So, polygraphs and the V-K test are both designed to detect physiological indicators of stress and anxiety, such as perspiration and increased blood pressure (“capillary dilation”). Of course, there is a sense in which the V-K test is actually the exact opposite of a standard polygraph. With a polygraph, stress and anxiety are taken to be indications of deception. But with the V-K test, the lack of emotion is the clue that the subject is pretending to be human.

  But Dick’s characters do not always (or even typically) use fancy machines to detect deception. They detect deception pretty much the same way that most of us do. We do not usually discover that someone is lying to us because we see that their heart is pounding or that they are sweating. When we catch someone lying to us, it’s typically because what they say does not fit with we already know or
with what we later find out. This is how Rachmael ben Applebaum discovers that a video of happy crowds on Whale’s Mouth is a hoax. (“This audtrack is continuous, running over and over again.... it’s a fake.”) In fact, even in the case of Dr. Edgemar, the fact that he’s nervous is not what tips Quaid off to the truth—it’s the implication of his nervousness. Whether or not he’s lying, it just does not make sense that someone “artificially implanted” into a dream would be nervous about getting shot, and it’s that fact that implies that he must be lying. As the great detective Sherlock Holmes put it, “we must look for consistency. Where there is a want of it we must suspect deception.”

  16

  The Blob Necessitates

  MATTHEW McCALL

  What the hell is VALIS about? Well, for one thing, it’s about the fuzzy line between delusions, reality, and psychological wellbeing—Horselover Fat, Dick’s author surrogate, suffers from a series of traumatic events and mental breakdowns all the while receiving metaphysical revelations from a pink beam.

  In the midst of such mayhem Dick also manages to provide us with an unnerving insight into the suicidal mind, a mindset that Dick frequently suffered through during the later years of his life. On a deeper level, it’s about the interplay between metaphysics and emotions, arguably the signature theme of Dick’s career.

  Dick is on record as saying “Of all the metaphysical systems in philosophy I feel the greatest affinity for that of Spinoza, with his dictum, “Deus sive substantia sive natura”; to me this sums up everything (viz: “God i.e. reality i.e. nature.”)” So it’s no surprise that the world of VALIS has much in common with the metaphysics of Baruch Spinoza, one of the seventeenth century’s most prominent philosophers. What may be of some surprise, though, is that Spinoza can save Fat from his turmoil, for Fat’s metaphysics has Spinoza-like implications that supply the groundwork for his path toward emotional liberation. And this path begins with that pink beam, and with blobs.