Philip K. Dick and Philosophy

by D. E. Wittkower

  You might think that chance, luck, and accident concern not how the world is in itself, but simply reflect our ignorance. We don’t know how the lottery balls will fall out, but if we knew all their positions, speeds and trajectories, and had a sufficiently powerful computer, we could predict the lottery result with certainty. This was Laplace’s idea. If Laplace and Lewis are right, we’re simply ignorant about how the world will in fact develop. Our ignorance is about which deterministic world we are in, not about how our one world might follow different histories.

  But there is objective chance in this world, and this is highlighted by alternate histories like Dick’s. Consider coincidence. Sometimes you meet someone you know, completely by surprise, in a place you would not both expect to be. It seems to be purely by chance. Nobody planned or arranged the meeting: you just both happened to be there at the same time. (That is what ‘coincidence’ literally means: being in the same ‘happening’.) To take the element of personal freedom out of it, imagine two grains of wheat that happen to end up touching in a huge granary. Grains of wheat have no free will: they go where the forces of nature and the efforts of humanity put them. That these two grains end up in contact, when they may have come from different ends of the country, is coincidence.

  Technically we can say coincidence occurs when two causal chains of events merge which previously had no interaction. Lottery machines are deliberately designed so that what people have put on their lottery slips has no influence on how the balls fall out: any win is a coincidence. My event of choosing these numbers and the machine’s event of selecting these balls belong to different causal chains until I learn of my win and claim my prize.

  Normally coincidence and chance do not make a huge difference to the way things turn out, but occasionally they do. The outcome of a battle may depend on whether a message gets through or whether a general is feeling unwell. Sometimes an inspirational leader is hit by a single bullet. King Charles XII of Sweden and General Stonewall Jackson both died in battle this way. Sometimes an omission rather than an action is crucial. Whether Winston Churchill or Lord Halifax would replace Neville Chamberlain as British Prime Minister in 1940 seems to have turned on Churchill saying nothing to King George VI at a crucial point in their discussion. Halifax would probably have negotiated an armistice with Hitler, and the history of the world would have been very different. Dick’s twist to history lets a bullet from Zangara’s gun deviate just a few inches from its actual trajectory, as could so easily have happened, had Zangara aimed fractionally differently. The significance of the crucial event lies in the magnitude of its consequences: the histories diverge considerably.

  Now I think Dick is right that hinge events can make huge differences to how things turn out. But I do not buy Dick’s hint—or Lewis’s theory—that all the different possible worlds are equally real. Only our world is real.

  Time in the One Real World

  That still does not fix what our one real world is like. Here are four different philosophical positions about that.

  The world might consist of all and only events that actually happen at some time, and the objects involved in these events. These objects exist and events happen at different times, but the world encompasses all of them and simply is. This view is called eternalism.

  According to the second conception, the world changes with time, as ever-new events happen and objects come into and go out of existence. Events are unreal before they happen. Since reality literally grows by the addition of ever more events and things, philosophers calls this the growing block theory of the world in time.

  If, additionally, we take the same view about the past as the growing block theory takes about the future, so that now both the past and the future are taken as unreal, then the world is shrunk so that it contains only what now exists and what happens now. This view is called presentism.

  Finally, the fourth theory says that all possible future events are real, and that as time goes by, events make some of these realities go away, leaving others. This is known as the tree-pruning model. The world is not linear in time but like a branching tree, at each instant many futures branch off. As things happen and time goes by, branches incompatible with what occurs are pruned, and reality shrinks.

  So in 1930 for example, both our world and Dick’s world are real, since it has yet to be determined that Zangara fails to assassinate Roosevelt; by 1934 however Dick’s world had been pruned away, whereas ours still remained among the future branching possibilities.

  It’s often supposed that eternalism, the position that all and only actual events and objects are real, does not allow for chance, coincidence, or freedom of choice. If only what actually happens is real, how can some action or event make a difference to what is real? Surely whatever happens was bound to do so. That is fatalism: history on rails. So those who believe in chance and freedom tend to be drawn to one of the other theories. I think that is wrong: chance and freedom can live alongside eternalism.

  Coincidence plays a role in our individual lives, and therefore in history too. As people progress through life, day upon day, they coincidentally encounter other people, things, end up in places and situations without planning or forethought. I might walk out of my house one morning to find a person collapsed on my doorstep. Maybe she had nothing to do with me and was not seeking out my doorstep rather than anywhere else. How I react to this situation, what I make of it, what chain of events I set in motion upon encountering them is part of my life, and now part of hers.

  From a chance encounter the two lives may become more or less intricately and deeply intertwined. Such can be the beginnings of a good story. Had she not collapsed by chance on my doorstep, none of this would have happened. The coincidence is that it is this person with this history that lands on just this doorstep. What ensues from that, no matter how tightly constrained by our two different natures, would not have arisen without this coincidental encounter. So while our lives are not wholly ruled by chance, chance plays a fair part in them.

  It is all the more so then in history, which is the tapestry created by the interweaving of people, events, places and things, many of them coincidental. So if chance plays any part in people’s lives, which I believe it does, since human history is composed of the lives of all humans, chance plays a part in history. The more powerful and influential a person is or gets to be, the wider the effects of chance events in his or her life. Although Leo Tolstoy thought otherwise, the actions of leaders and other powerful people typically have a bigger effect on history than those of ordinary people, and these effects are magnified by modern technology. When President Truman decided the US would drop atomic bombs on Japan, the result was to kill between 160,000 and 240,000 people and injure or shorten the lives of tens of thousands more, at the same time saving the lives of many hundreds of thousands of others.

  As in the different possible outcomes to Zangara’s shooting, chance and coincidence play a part in determining history, and the more crucial and powerful the people involved, the bigger the differences they make. Yet eternalism can still be the right view about events in time. Nothing in the idea of an event being the outcome of merging two previously unconnected causal chains requires future events to be unreal. While things might develop in one way rather than another, that does not mean we should regard the eliminated possibilities as having the same claim to reality as what actually happens.

  Eternalism has many other advantages as an account of time, because it treats all times democratically as of equal worth. All other accounts of time privilege something called “the present,” which is exalted above all other times as more genuine or real, yet which is not a single time but shifts to each time in turn, one might say “as time goes by.”

  The decision between eternalism or some other account of time cannot be made in detail here, so I am just indicating where I think the best way lies. Eternalism simply takes the sequence of times as given and equally real, leaving open the question whether what happens at
earlier times does or not does determine (make inevitable) what happens later.

  So eternalism can live alongside indeterminism. That means that the world Philip K. Dick describes in The Man in the High Castle has no reality whatsoever, but still things could have happened as he describes. Dick probably would not have agreed. If not, then as a philosopher I pay enough respect to him to say that I think he, as a philosopher, was wrong.

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  27

  Time in Unfixed Are You

  WITTKOWER D.E.

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  Briefings

  28

  “Autofac”

  DAN DINELLO

  Set in a fire-scorched landscape of metallic ash and H-Bomb craters populated by mutated rats, Philip K. Dick’s visionary 1955 short story “AutoFac” centers on human survivors of a nuclear war who battle wartime automatic factories that won’t stop producing now that the war’s over.

  The computerized factories—supplemented by robotic trucks, surveillance cameras, and mobile humanoid robots—over-consume scarce raw materials needed for reconstruction and over-produce useless consumer goods for a population that is now mostly dead. Numerous attempts to assert control of the system have proven futile and pessimism reigns among the humans: “We’re licked, like always,” says one of the survivors. “We humans lose every time.”