Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  The theological version of our problem makes this worry especially vivid. God is supposed to be omniscient, so his knowledge must be infallible. So if God predicts someone will behave in a certain way, that person must indeed behave in that way. Otherwise God would be wrong, and we know he can’t be. But then there aren’t really any options open to that person. There’s only one way he can behave.

  Whether foresight based on prediction is compatible with free will, then, depends on whether foresight is, or can be, certain. If character and circumstance compel certain choices, then foresight can be certain, but there is no free will. On the other hand, if character and circumstance leave options open, then people have free will, but foresight—even God’s foresight—cannot be certain.

  Outside of Time?

  There’s also another way to understand foresight. Some philosophers and theologians, including Boethius and St. Anselm of Canterbury, have suggested that God is “outside of” time. Human beings experience the world in time—some things are in the past, some are present, and some are in the future. At any given moment the only events which are directly observable by us are those which are present at that moment—past events are gone, and future events do not yet exist.

  We find out about past events not by directly observing them, but by relying on some sort of evidence. We dig up fossils; we read old documents; we rely on our memories. We find out about the future not by directly observing it, but by making predictions. We predict that the sun will come up tomorrow, or that the economy will continue to sputter along. But if God is outside of time, he doesn’t experience things as being in the past, present, or future. Everything is, so to speak, all laid out in front of him, so that all he has to do is “look.” Rather than finding out about the past by looking at evidence, or about the future by making predictions, he just looks.

  In other words, God doesn’t really have foreknowledge at all. It looks to us as if God knows things before they happen, but that’s because we’re inside of time and so understand things in terms of past, present, and future. This is not the way things look to God since there’s no “before” and “after” from his perspective. He just sees all the things that happen, all at once.

  This model seems to remove the conflict between foreknowledge and free will. Suppose you are there when Jill buys her ticket for the movie. Because you see her buy the ticket, you know which movie she’s chosen to see. But that you see her make one choice does not mean that she could not have made a different choice. Likewise, God knows which movie Jill is going to see because he “sees” her buy her ticket. If she had made a different choice, he would have seen that instead. But this is consistent with her having free will.

  Prediction, or Sight?

  How should we understand foresight in The Adjustment Bureau and Minority Report?

  Is it prediction, or is it “sight”?

  The “sight” model isn’t really compatible with either story. The first problem is that both the precogs and the agents of the Adjustment Bureau see things that don’t actually happen. Indeed, this is the whole premise of Minority Report. The crimes that the precogs see never occur, because they are prevented before they happen. It is less dramatic in The Adjustment Bureau, but still there is foresight there of things that never actually happen. Indeed, the Adjustment Bureau typically has at least two previsions relevant to each circumstance: what will happen if an adjustment is made, and what will happen if an adjustment is not made. They foresee both what David will do if he stays with Elise, and what he will do if he doesn’t stay with Elise. But only one of these predictions can actually come true.

  Since foresight includes things that never come true, it’s too simple to say that precogs and the Adjusters somehow have access to the already-present future. If they were “seeing” the future, they would be seeing the events that would actually happen, not events that would have happened had they not been prevented. A precog who sees a murder that is then prevented is not seeing the actual future.

  There’s also a second problem. Precogs and Adjusters are not outside of time. Indeed, they are very much in time, making a difference to what happens. Consider a precog who sees a murder. The potential murder comes to the attention of the authorities and the suspect-to-be is arrested. The murder never actually occurs. But since the murder never actually occurs, if the precog were seeing the actual future, she would predict that the murder would not occur. (Or, more likely, she would simply not report a precognition.) But then the suspect-to-be would not be arrested, and the murder would indeed occur. But then of course she would see this, and so would report that a murder was about to occur. But then the suspect would be arrested, and the murder would not occur. And so on indefinitely.

  A sort of loop or oscillation thus results from the idea that the precogs see the actual future. This loop is due to the role that precognitions play in influencing what happens. Indeed, the role they play is to make their own precognitions false. If a precog predicts a particular future, that future won’t happen. So precogs cannot coherently be thought of as seeing the actual future.

  If “sight” doesn’t work as a model for these kinds of foreknowledge, what about the predictive model? This interpretation makes sense of both of the stories. The adjusters in “Adjustment Team” foresee that Mr. Douglas is going to be offered a chance to buy some land but that given his current cautious personality he’s going to turn down the chance. So they “adjust” him so that he is a little braver, a little more of a risk-taker. In the movie, the team understands that meeting Elise will inspire David to give a truly memorable concession speech. They also understand that his political career is in part motivated by a certain emotional neediness which Elise’s presence will do much to satisfy. If he stays in a relationship with Elise, he will lose some of his passion and motivation for politics. Thus the adjusters try and manipulate the circumstances so that David and Elise will meet at a crucial moment but will subsequently lose touch with each other. In both the story and the movie, then, foresight seems to be based on the characters and circumstances of the people involved.

  Similarly, the precogs in “The Minority Report” make three separate predictions about whether John Anderton will kill Leopold Kaplan. The predictions differ because they are based on slightly different circumstances. Anderton and Kaplan both find out about the first prediction. This changes their behavior in ways that result in Anderton losing the motivation, which he otherwise would have had, to kill Kaplan. So there’s a second prediction which takes these new circumstances into account. But then each of them finds out about this second prediction. This changes their behavior yet again, such that Anderton again acquires reason to kill Kaplan. Thus the third prediction. In all three cases, the precognitions are based, at least in part, on Anderton’s character. Given certain circumstances, he will be motivated to kill Kaplan. When circumstances change, he will lose that motivation.

  Perfect or Probabilistic?

  The next question is whether these predictions are certain, or merely probabilistic. As we’ve seen, predictive foresight is compatible with free will only if it is probabilistic.

  The assumption in both stories seems to be that precognition is certain. The precrime program is based on the conviction that people are going to commit the crimes that are predicted, not that they might commit these crimes. Arresting people who haven’t yet done anything is already a bit morally problematic; it would be even more so if the predictions were just probabilistic. In “Adjustment Team,” the assumption seems to be that pre-adjusted Mr. Douglas will not buy the land, whereas postadjustment Mr. Douglas will.

  Admittedly, Lisa, Anderton’s wife, does raise some doubts in “The Minority Report” about whether some people might be falsely arrested for crimes that they are not in fact going to commit. Contrary to what we might expect, though, this worry is not based on concerns about free will. Rather, it’s based on the thought that some predictions might be inaccurate because they are not based on all the rel
evant information. In particular, just as Anderton and Kaplan changed their behavior when they found out about the predictions involving them, other people might also have changed their behavior if they had learned about the predictions involving them. So perhaps some of these other people need not have been arrested: perhaps their crimes could have been prevented simply by telling them about the predictions ahead of time.

  Although this is a legitimate worry, it doesn’t tell us anything about free will. It simply reminds us that what someone does depends not just on his character, but on the circumstances he encounters. Predictions, to be accurate, must take all relevant circumstances into account. This is true even for predictions about the natural world: if Mars gets slammed into by a big enough asteroid, its orbit might well change. A prediction which didn’t take the asteroid into account would get Mars’s orbit wrong. But this doesn’t have anything to do with free will.

  The Adjustment Bureau, however, presents the issues quite differently. Most of the work of the adjusters is done by simply tweaking the circumstances that people encounter. The adjusters seem to work on the premise that most people will take the easiest path available to them, so that the way to get a person to do what you want is to make it easy for the person to behave in the ways that you want, and hard for the person to behave in ways that you don’t want. The adjusters don’t want David and Elise to continue their relationship, so they repeatedly put obstacles in their way, hoping to get them to give up. Harry, a member of the Adjustment Bureau, is supposed to make sure that David spills his coffee so that he will miss his bus (and thus miss seeing Elise again). The location of Elise’s dance rehearsal is moved, to make it hard for David to find her.

  But even if this strategy works most of the time, it doesn’t work when it comes to David and Elise. David is persistent: he takes the same bus every day for three years in hopes of encountering Elise again. He goes to some effort to find her after her rehearsal is moved. And David and Elise both go to a lot of trouble, to put it mildly, to avoid the Adjustment Bureau at the end of the movie.

  Their persistence is rewarded. As Harry says, those who “fight” for their free will get it. The suggestion here seems to be that people do have options: they don’t have to follow the path that’s laid out for them. They could always do otherwise. It’s just that most people don’t.

  But the movie is different from the stories, and we can’t necessarily draw any conclusions about what Dick himself intended from what happens in the movie. I suspect that Dick does not intend us to conclude either that we do have free will or that we don’t. It seems more likely that he wants to encourage us to think about the extent to which our behavior is predictable and what this means about our free will.

  Certainly the kind of precognition that occurs in both stories doesn’t have any analogue in the real world, so we can’t simply draw conclusions about the actual world from what happens in the stories. But it’s also true that human behavior is predictable to a large extent, and maybe if we knew more about the relevant causes we could do an even better job of prediction. These issues are still undecided, but are well worth thinking about.

  22

  Total Recall’s Total Rethink

  BENJAMIN HUFF

  In Total Recall, Doug Quaid faces a series of increasingly loaded choices about who he is, and who he will be. Will he be a lowly construction worker, a virtual tourist, a crack government agent who destroys the Martian rebellion, or a hero of the rebellion, fighting for justice?

  As the story unfolds, Quaid is repeatedly invited, pressured, or forced to accept an altered identity. Each time, he is presented with a version of his past, and invited to embrace a matching future. His memory, his past decisions, his desires pull him in different directions, and Quaid has to choose which version of who he was will define who he is. The fate of a planet hangs in the balance, and also the truth about the basis of personal identity and free will.

  Memory and the Brain-Butchers

  As the movie opens, Quaid is a construction worker in a new town, with a steady job, a nice apartment, and a gorgeous, loving wife. What more would he want? He remembers their wedding, falling in love, and eight years together. Yet somehow this past and this present are not enough to make him feel himself—to make him feel free. He wants to go to Mars.

  When Quaid goes to Rekall, Inc. for a (virtual) trip to Mars, it turns out that he really isn’t himself. When Lori tells him so, he argues with her, but there is no arguing with the people trying to kill him. To be free, Quaid has to reclaim his identity.

  A man on the phone offers him a piece of his past—“This is the suitcase you gave me”—so Quaid goes to pick it up. The video inside seems to be a message from himself saying, “Get your ass to Mars.” At the Hilton there he confirms he is the one who wrote the note on the flyer, so he goes to the Last Resort. After a setback with his old girlfriend Melina, he gets her to take him to Kuato, but Kuato has a different plan in mind.

  Kuato asks, “What do you want, Mr. Quaid?”

  Quaid responds, “The same as you, to remember.”

  “But, why?”

  “To be myself again,” says Quaid.

  But Kuato sets him straight: “You are what you do. A man is defined by his action, not his memory.”

  Was Kuato right? John Locke suggests that what defines a person’s identity, and makes him the same person from one day to the next, is his memory. This is natural enough, and Quaid takes this approach at first. Locke probably didn’t think about the possibility of a memory implant, though, nor were the people trying to kill Quaid waiting around to see what he might or might not remember. Even without fancy equipment, we do a pretty good job of obscuring, revising, distorting, or just plain losing our memories all the time. If that weren’t enough, Quaid’s situation seems like pretty good evidence that Locke is wrong. But what could it mean to be defined by one’s actions? Here is one approach.

  Owning Your Actions, Owning Your Past

  According to a traditional conception of free will, a person is acting freely, and his actions are his own, when he is the cause of his own action—in Aristotle’s words, when the action “has its origin in the agent himself” (Nicomachean Ethics, III.1). On this model, to determine if an action belongs to us, we need to trace its history and confirm whether its cause lies in ourselves. If you shoot a gun at a window, you are the cause of its breaking. We could say that the gun shoots the bullet, and the bullet breaks the window, but you are the one who chose to pull the trigger and started the chain of causes. The life Quaid was living with Lori, working construction, is not a life he chose. It looks more like a mental prison, invented to render him harmless. What did Quaid choose?

  To settle this question, of course, requires that a person has a definite identity that we can trace the causes of an action to. Initially, Quaid’s strategy is to find out his true past. Then he will know what he is doing, and what he needs to do. If he is an agent who has joined the rebellion, like the video says, then he needs to get back in touch with them and deliver the information that will sink Cohaagen.

  Quaid doesn’t have a lot to go on, but apparently Hauser has arranged for him to have a few key pieces of the story, just enough for him to act. Hauser knew his memory could be (would be?) wiped, so he set up a plan to find his way back to Mars and the rebels, even with only Quaid’s memories. He prepared the suitcase, the credits, the video, the note at the hotel. When Quaid follows the plan Hauser laid out, then, he has picked up the chain of causes and is following through on the decision he made before, as Hauser. If a man is defined by his actions, then perhaps by doing this Quaid is becoming himself again, even if he can’t remember making those decisions. Is that the way to become free?

  To say who or what is the cause of an action, though, assumes that there is a unique answer—that a chain of causes can have a beginning. We generally take it for granted that we are free, and that we, other people, and other things too can start a chain of causes in motion.
If we take this assumption seriously, we get something like Aristotle’s picture of how the world works.

  Aristotle supposes that everything has a nature, meaning an internal source of motion and activity. The five elements are natural: air and fire rise up spontaneously, and water and earth go down, unless something constrains them. The stars and planets, made of ether, revolve in circles eternally—ether’s natural motion. Living things also have a nature: fish swim, birds fly, and flowers bloom, under their own power. There are as many sources of motion in the universe as there are natural beings or things. The distinctive “motion” of a human is more subtle, but just as clearly defined—humans act by a combination of thought and desire called decision. Your wife doesn’t want to go to Mars, for example, so you go to Rekall instead. For a human, then, to be free is to perform actions that you originated, through decision.

  Now, things don’t only move by themselves; they are often moved by other things. You identify a target and pull the trigger. The trigger isn’t moving naturally, of course; it is moved by your finger. So, the trigger is not the origin of action; you are. When the bullet flies out of the barrel, it’s the gasses from the burning powder that push it. If you shoot out a window, and people start flying through it, that is not their natural motion; it is the motion of the air, blowing them out. Their flying out, then, is a case of unfree action. Shooting at someone in front of a window, and sending people flying through it, or not, would be your decision; an expression of your freedom. Let’s go with not. When Quaid is acting on the decisions that he himself made, then, he is acting as himself, and he is free.