Sherlock Holmes and Philosophy

by Josef Steiff

  MORIARTY: Is the definition of life “cogito ergo sum”? I think, therefore I am.

  PICARD: That’s one possible definition.

  MORIARTY: It is the most important one for me, the only one that matters. You or someone asked your computer to program a nefarious fictional character from nineteenth-century London and that is how I arrived, but I am no longer that creation. I am no longer that evil character, I have changed. I am alive. I am aware of my own consciousness.

  Moriarty refers to Descartes’s famous cogito ergo sum proposition about existence, which is certainly one of the cornerstones of Western Philosophy. And the Enterprise crew are ultimately convinced, but there remains a pragmatic problem: As a holographic projection, Moriarty doesn’t consist of matter. He’s still only energy and light and, as such, he cannot ever leave the confines of the holodeck, which is a problem the sequel episode “Ship in a Bottle” revisits. He agrees, therefore, to be placed in protected computer memory until it can be determined what is to be done with him.

  The Evil Genius that Turns Moriarty into a Brain in a Vat

  Moriarty’s story is resolved on Star Trek: The Next Generation in the episode “Ship in a Bottle.” Instead of merely repeating the philosophical debates about human nature from “Elementary, Dear Data,” the show cleverly presents a solution to Moriarty’s inability to leave the holodeck. The solution offered represents a novel twist on the old philosophical dilemma of the “evil genius,” which is updated as the problem of “a brain in a vat.” In simple terms the idea is this: if some advanced species so desired, they could so completely deceive your senses that all your ideas about reality would be wrong. As you read this sentence, for example, you could be a brain in a vat receiving “false” stimuli, as some mad scientist forces you to read essays on Sherlock Holmes and philosophy. In the modern era, this radical skepticism about whether you can ever really know “external reality” was first articulated by René Descartes in Meditations on First Philosophy where he writes:

  I shall then suppose, not that God who is supremely good and the fountain of truth, but some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colours, figures, sound, and all other external things are nought but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity.

  So how does the idea of existing only as a brain in a vat in some evil scientist’s lab solve Moriarty’s problem? “Ship in a Bottle” begins with Data and La Forge once again role-playing in a Sherlock Holmes mystery in the holodeck. However, they discover that it is malfunctioning because its “spatial orientation systems” project left-handed characters as right-handed and vice versa. That piece of techno-babble foreshadows what happens later in the episode. After encountering the system error, Data and La Forge summon Lt. Barclay to fix the holodeck, and he inadvertently releases Professor Moriarty from protected memory. Much to the concern of Captain Picard, the holographic Moriarty experienced the passage of time while stored in memory. As he states, he felt “brief, terrifying periods of consciousness . . . disembodied, without substance.” Moreover, Moriarty no longer trusts the Enterprise to figure out how he can leave the holodeck, which is understandable after experiencing such terrible existential dread.

  The subsequent plot of “Ship in a Bottle” resembles films about virtual reality such as The Matrix (1999) or David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ (1999), though it aired several years before either (another example of how ideas in Star Trek are often ahead of our time). Moriarty takes control of the holodeck again, but this time he creates a simulation of the entire Enterprise within the Sherlock Holmes holodeck simulation he “exists” in. His aim in doing so is slightly convoluted. He wants to deceive Picard, Data, and Barclay into believing that through sheer will power alone, he is in fact capable of leaving the holodeck. Once he does that, he takes control of the ship and demands that the crew find a way to have the Countess Barthalomew, who is also a holographic simulation, leave the holodeck—knowledge he would use “in reality” to actually leave the holodeck himself.

  In other words, Moriarty’s plan recalls the idea of becoming trapped in dream within a dream, a concept popularized by Christopher Nolan’s puzzle film Inception (2010). Unlike with Inception, however, audiences of “Ship in a Bottle” aren’t meant to try and decode dream from reality by searching for textual clues. Whereas the former is constructed to allow for multiple interpretations and has an open-ended conclusion, the Star Trek episode advances the more radical proposition that, ultimately, humans can never have certainty about the nature of reality.

  Only Data, who is not human, but an android, is able to deduce that he, Picard, and Barclay are still in a holodeck program because of its malfunctioning “spatial orientation systems.” Because of his reasoning abilities, the three of them create a third holodeck simulation within Moriarty’s simulation running within the initial Sherlock Holmes program—or think of it as a dream within dream within a dream. In their simulation, they convince Moriarty that he and the Countess have left the holodeck and the two of them take a shuttlecraft and leave the Enterprise.

  Once that happens they exit all the simulations and keep Moriarty running in the program where he thinks he is freely roaming the universe. In his simulated reality, Moriarty apparently lives on thinking he has finally become human. Presumably he can never discern that he has been deceived. The final dialogue between Barclay, Picard, and the ship’s counselor Troi nicely encapsulates the idea that complete certainty about the nature of reality is impossible. Picard asks hypothetically, “Who knows? Our reality might not be all that different from theirs. All this might be nothing more than an elaborate simulation being run inside a little device, sitting on someone else’s table.” In other words, humans can never deduce that we are “a brain in a vat,” or part of an elaborate computer simulation. Like Moriarty in Star Trek: The Next Generation we choose to believe that we are not the subject of sensory experiments from some evil genius or deity. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, we believe in external reality and that we are human. Such a belief is not possible for Data. Unfortunately, his advanced reasoning allows him to know when he is being deceived by a computer simulation.

  Since Data lacks the ability to have irrational beliefs, he can never become fully human. As Trekkers are aware, this dilemma is a reccurring storyline in the Star Trek: The Next Generation series and subsequent movies. For example, he experiments with an “emotion chip” and a program that allows him to dream, but these technologies meant to replicate the human experience of the irrational never succeed. Thus for Data a peculiar paradox emerges: only in death does he come close to achieving humanity. As the conclusion of the film Star Trek X: Nemesis (2002) reveals, he sacrifices himself to save the lives of others. In other words, believing he is still not human does not prevent him from acting humanely. In that regard, his fate is preferable to the holographic Moriarty trapped in a computer simulation, believing that he has become human.

  I can imagine—in some distant future—the holographic Moriarty growing bored and restless from traveling throughout his virtual universe. Will he eventually long for death? Data at least found a way to terminate his programming, but Moriarty may never be able to escape the vast tomb of his computer simulation. Sometimes believing you are human has its limitations.

  Chapter 30

  The Curious Case of the Dog in Prime Time

  Jonathan Clements

  At 7:00 P.M. on 26th March 1984, the Japanese channel TV Asahi broadcast the first of twenty-six episodes of its new cartoon series Meitantei Holmes (“Famous Detective Holmes”) directed by Hayao Miyazaki and Kyōsuke Mikuriya.

  A children’s show broadcast in primetime for all the family, it featured Holmes and Watson thwarting crimes by the evil Moriarty. Cases included someone tampering with the newlyestablished airmail service and the disappearance of the bell of Big Ben, alongside more canon
ical tales such as “The Speckled Band.” The show’s most obvious distinguishing feature is apparent in the title used for its English-language broadcast. It is known as Sherlock Hound, as all the parts are played by talking dogs.

  The ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once asked if he was a man dreaming of a being butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being a man. In Sherlock Hound, we’re not watching humans who behave like dogs (zoomorphism), we are watching dogs who behave like humans (anthropomorphism). Their reasons for doing so are buried in the long history of talking animals in Japan, in particular over the last century.

  The process by which an Edwardian English detective can somehow find himself transformed into a Japanese cartoon canine is not as unlikely as it first seems. If we approach it through the context of detective fiction in Japan, the history of television in Japan, and the transnational aims of many animation studios, we can soon perceive the multiple influences that bring us to our mysterious case of the talking dog detective.

  Sari Kawana’s Murder Most Modern: Detective Fiction and Japanese Culture locates Holmesian sleuths as central icons in twentieth-century Japan’s sense of modernity. Detectives became symbols of the onrush of change: its interpreters and guardians in an era when modern meant Western, even if the Western world did not live up to expectations.

  The Japanese author Natsume Sōseki spent a miserable period as a student in Britain from 1900 to 1901, where he soon tired of boorish London locals. In his letters home, Sōseki even sourly observed “the Japanese, thanks to their diligent studies, now knew more about England than the average Englishman” (Donald Keene, Dawn to the West, p. 311). Sōseki’s London sojourn coincided with the serialisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, whose twelfth chapter mentions Holmes’s “catlike love of personal cleanliness.”

  It was felines that would make Sōseki’s name, on his return to Japan, when he published a satire on modern attitudes, as seen through the eyes of a disapproving pet in I Am a Cat (1905). He did so, however, at a time when many Japanese were ardent readers of detective fiction, both foreign and domestic.

  The first Holmes story to be translated into Japanese was A Study in Scarlet in 1899, which was serialised in a radically altered form as “Chizo no Kabe” (“The Bloodstained Wall”) in the newspaper Mainichi Shinbun. The translator remained anonymous, perhaps understandably, since Holmes and Watson were renamed as the Japanese investigators Homma and Wada, and the locale was shifted to contemporary Berlin. A legal translation of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes commenced in the same year, serialised in the rival newspaper Chūō Shinbun.

  Translations of Holmes continued throughout the early years of the twentieth century, with the character names changed variously to Holimi and Wada (1906) or Honda and Watanabe (1910), on the assumption that the protagonists needed to be “localized” into Japanese. However, there was an accurate, threevolume translation of Holmes stories available in Japan by 1916, maintaining the original illustrations from the Strand magazine along with the original nationalities and setting. Some, however, were still altered for Japanese readers, most notably “The Red-Headed League,” refashioned as “The Bald-Headed League” for a country without redheads (Keith E. Webb, Sherlock Holmes in Japan, pp. 18–19).

  Pastiches of Holmes were also common in the juvenile detective magazines of the period. Jūza Unno, the “father of Japanese science fiction” wrote a number of stories featuring the Japanese detective “Sōroku Homura” beginning in 1928 with “Denkifuro no Kaishi Jiken” (“The Case of the Mysterious Death in the Electric Bath”), serialised in the magazine Shinseinen. “A Soldier’s Death” (1930), by Atsushi Watanabe in the same magazine, includes an unlicensed cameo by Sherlock Holmes as a baffled investigator, admitting that he has been defeated by the lack of evidence pertaining to the titular corpse. Holmes cannot work out how the lead character has died, allowing the readers, who have witnessed the whole death, a sense of smug satisfaction that they know something that he does not (Robert Matthew, Japanese Science Fiction, p. 21).

  By 1933, the complete canon of Holmes stories was available in Japanese. A second “complete” translation was released in 1951–52, including in its first edition the apocryphal posthumous work “The Man Who Was Wanted,” dropped from subsequent editions after it was discovered not to be the work of Conan Doyle. Some Holmes stories were also retold for younger audiences, leading to dilution of their content. Most infamously, a juvenile adaptation in 1958 replaced Holmes’s addiction to cocaine with a penchant for coffee, and turned Watson into a small boy.

  Cartoon Animals

  There were other means of assigning more palatable, cuter aspects to foreign icons. Shaarokku Hōmuzu was named, of course, in the Japanese katakana syllabary, an alphabet used largely for foreign words and the noises made by beasts. Non-Japanese were not animals, but in a linguistic sense the use of katakana could imply that they were like animals, whatever that meant: unpredictable, perhaps? Potentially dangerous? Ultimately possible to master? Rendering foreign icons as animals could also render them subordinate, powerless, even cuter—an inadvertent by-product of the penchant for talking-animal cartoons, both already in existence in Japanese animation, and arriving from the West.

  The use of anthropomorphism in cartoons masks more technical and cultural concerns than simply entertaining children. Animating realistic humans is expensive. Although Walt Disney experimented with complex fairy tales in the 1920s, he returned to simpler, animal-based narratives in the 1930s because too many fairytales required “plausible human characters at their core” (Barrier, Hollywood Cartoons, p. 90). The Disney studio eventually acquired realistic human motion by rotoscoping—in other words, filming human actors and using the material generated as a basis for tracing the movements of their animated counterparts. For a young animation industry, realistic human movement is a struggle, likely to lead storylines to skew towards something in which the capabilities of cartooning are a benefit rather than a hindrance. The Japanese animation business did not embrace rotoscoping, and was sure to use inanimate objects, fantasy creatures or animal figures as a means of reducing the number of naturalistic human figures required.

  The burgeoning medium of cartoon animation established high levels of anthropomorphism in which animals did not merely interact with humans with a degree of intelligence, but actually spoke. On its release in Japanese cinemas in 1956, Disney’s Lady and the Tramp was renamed Wanwan Monogatari (“Woof-Woof Story”). In an apparent attempt to cash in, Deputy Dawg was soon broadcast on Japanese television as Wanwan Hoankan (1959, “Woof-Woof Sheriff ”). Japanese viewers were similarly assailed by a talking canine when The Huckleberry Hound Show was broadcast as Chinken Huckle (1959, “Curious Dog Huckle”). Japanese imitations were not far behind, including the cartoon feature Wanwan Chūshingura (“Woof-Woof Treasury of Loyal Retainers,” 1963), a samurai epic in which all the main parts were played by dogs. The animators’ decision was a cunning synergy of ideas, incorporating not only cartoon animals, but also a subtle historical reference. The original Treasury of Loyal Retainers kabuki play, perhaps better known as The Story of the Forty-Seven Rōnin, was set during the reign of the Shōgun Tsunayoshi (1649–1709). A real-life figure, born in the Year of the Dog, Tsunayoshi decreed that all canines were sacrosanct. As a result, the city now known as Tokyo was over-run with untouchable strays in an insane period now remembered as the “reign of the Dog Shōgun” (Clements, A Brief History of the Samurai, pp. 246–47).

  Japanese cartoonists favored animal subjects themselves in children’s works, at least in part because of the ease with which animals could be localized in other countries. The surreal or fantastic qualities of cartoons can often make them far easier to transfer between cultures than live-action footage. As long as the setting or plot is not incontrovertibly ethnocentric (and Wanwan Chūshingura certainly fails this test), a cartoon has the chance to make money for its maker in many foreign markets. Talking animal characters can even subtly sneak past ce
rtain viewers’ prejudices, an idea certainly on the mind of Japanese animators in the selection of the Chinese story Hakujaden (“Legend of the White Snake”) as the first feature-length animated film to be released by the Tōei studio in 1958, and intended to appeal across Asian markets.

  “Famous” Animals

  Meanwhile, in the world of live-action television, as TV ownership expanded beyond the Tokyo metropolitan area, viewers in outlying regions complained about the foreign dramas that were being fed to them. In particular, it was suggested that the humor of foreign comedies was unintelligible, the politics of cowboy shows incomprehensible, and Caucasian actors indistinguishable (Youichi Ito, “The Trade Winds Change”; Jonathan Clements and Tamamuro Motoko, The Dorama Encyclopedia, p. xvi). The nascent domestic television production industry began to generate its own materials, but the fact remains that Japanese TV in the 1950s, and Japanese color TV in the 1960s were each dominated in their early periods by a flood of mainly American programming—in 1957, ten percent of all broadcasting (Makiko Takahashi, The Development of Japanese Television Broadcasting and Imported Television Programs, p. 30).

  Since foreign shows often began with an unintelligible logo in their native language which frequently failed to summarise the subject matter, the practice soon developed of adding a descriptive prefix or suffix in Japanese: a “foreground name and a background qualifier” (Clements and Tamamuro, p. xvi). This ensured, even in TV listings that only contained a programme’s katakana title (denoted below by CAPITALS), that the title still provided an indicator of content. And so, in Japanese, familiar serials were rebranded as Great Battle in Space STAR TREK, or Detective KOJAK. Although less common, this tradition persists today, with examples as Burn Notice (broadcast in Japan as Erased Spy BURN NOTICE) and The Shield (Futile Police Badge SHIELD).