Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  Coupled with the altruistic characteristics of Cyber-nature illustrated above, the Doctor’s argument against the Cybermen is itself in major need of an “upgrade.” Cybermen merely achieve what most humans strive for, and they can’t be faulted for that. However, Cybermen can be faulted for the manner in which they act after having achieved a life free from pain and suffering, and since these actions are the cause of their status as “evil,” we must next take a look at them.

  Two New Cyber-Approaches: Enlightenment and a Good Ad-Campaign

  I realize my claim that Cybermen act in an altruistic fashion is controversial, and if Cybermen indiscriminately killed humans merely because they considered them an inferior species, then there’d be no room to mount any sort of defense: they’d simply be genocidal maniacs. However, our examination of their motives and actions shows they’re not. In fact, indiscriminately killing humans would be illogical for them: they’d be endangering the future of their own species by destroying prime Cyber-stock. It’d be like adult humans killing teenagers because they’re irrational—we’d simply be destroying ourselves as a race. The Doctor Who episodes that feature the Cybermen illustrate that they are primarily interested in upgrading humans and increasing their Cyber-population, not merely killing them, even though they’re more than willing to kill humans if they get in the way (as in “Revenge of the Cybermen,” 1975). I suggest that the Cybermen need a new approach to promoting the benefits of upgrading, and this approach requires a new level of philosophical Cyber-enlightenment.

  In the field of medical ethics, autonomy—the freedom and responsibility of individuals to govern themselves—is a central characteristic of the patient-doctor relationship.89 When a patient has to undergo some sort of medical procedure, doctors are required to fully inform patients about their medical condition, treatment options, and possible negative consequences of the medical procedure. The thought behind this is: if patients are fully informed, they’ll be capable of making well-thought out decisions about what medical procedures should or shouldn’t be performed. In this way, the patient’s autonomy is enhanced, and a patient willingly agrees to undergo the prescribed medical procedure.

  What the Cybermen need to do is adopt a similar approach. Cybermen want to perform an invasive medical procedure that has the benefits of prolonged life without pain and suffering, with the side-effects being the pain associated with the procedure and the complete loss of emotions. Cybermen, then, should be thought of as doctors of a sort, who are capable of performing a procedure that promises to “cure” many human ailments. As with many medical procedures, upgrading is painful, but if patients know the risks involved in the procedure, yet desire the final result, and if they’re fully informed about the procedure, they can responsibly choose to be upgraded. If the Cybermen allowed humans to choose whether or not they were upgraded, as humans do when deciding whether or not to undergo a medical procedure, then upgrading might be morally acceptable.

  Like doctors, Cybermen are altruistic in the sense that they really believe they’re helping an inferior species gain a better life by removing the pain and death that the human species itself strives to be rid of. Cybermen, however, unwittingly violate the rights that their converts believe they have, because they rarely, if ever, get the informed consent of converts. Instead, they parentalistically force the conversion process onto others. In other words, Cybermen think they know what’s best for humans, and for the good of humans they force them to become Cybermen. This parentalism is not bad in-itself, but there’s a more morally acceptable way for the Cybermen to act.

  One thing Cybermen could do to combat this “bad press” is to respect the perceived rights of humans to choose not to upgrade. By starting an advertisement campaign aimed at informing the public about the “benefits” of being a Cyberman, and then, offering upgrades to only those willing to undergo the procedure, the Cybermen would avoid violating the autonomy of humans, and therefore, the right to bodily integrity that humans believe they have. This approach would also maximize the good for both Cybermen and humans: Cybermen would’ve helped humans achieve their goals, and upgraded humans will have been willing participants in the procedure. Hence, the upgrades cease to violate the moral principles they used to violate.

  Cybermen have never tried this, but that’s probably because it’d sound pretty far-fetched to them. The simple fact is Cybermen see humans as a weak and inferior species, and until humans mature enough as rational creatures to be capable of reasonably considering the benefits of becoming a Cyberman, then it will be difficult for Cybermen to move beyond their parentalism. Such an advertising campaign, though, will help in the maturation process, and might make for an intriguing Doctor Who episode!

  Finally, much of the Cybermen’s unwillingness to change their worldview is a result of their dedication to logic as the pinnacle of wisdom, which could be remedied by becoming more enlightened about their own existence and what a dedication to logic implies for Cyber-nature. Logic aids in the pursuit of the meaning of life, it doesn’t provide the meaning of life.90 Cybermen, mistakenly, think a strict adherence to logic, and nothing else, is the meaning of life, and they don’t seem willing to consider the possibility that logic is merely the tool in which higher-beings arrive at different explanations of the good life. For them, the meaning of life is to be free from pain and death, and because of this belief, they’re driven to convert and relieve humans of such things. What the Cybermen need is some Cyber-philosophers or Cyber-psychologists, or maybe Spock, to help them evolve into the enlightened peace-loving beings that the Time Lords claim they’ll become.

  With the nature, beliefs, and motivations of the Cybermen understood, we must engage ourselves with Cybermen in a new way. Instead of fighting them with our fists, guns, and sonic screwdrivers, we need to figure out a way of communicating to them the principle of respect for the autonomy of beings that are, let’s face it, potential Cyber-people. For whatever reason, humans deserve the right to choose life as a Cyberman, free from pain and death, or continued life as a human, with all of our “weaknesses.” This engagement with the Cybermen might force us to change how we treat other (inferior?) species too, which implies that, by carefully understanding Cybermen, not only have we come to understand them better, but we’ve also come to understand ourselves a little better too.91

  EPISODE 4

  Human Beings, You’re Amazing. Apart from That, You’re Completely Mad

  What the Doctor Teaches Us about Existence

  19

  Regeneration and Resurrection

  MICHAEL HAND

  There are certain losses in childhood that stay with you not only because of their aching sadness, but because, even in the throes of despair, you realize they have changed you, become part of you, in a mysterious way enriched and enlarged you. They stay with you because, as well as being the end of something wonderful, they are the beginning of something new and unknown and exhilarating, something whose fascination lies precisely in its contrast with what has gone before. Such is the end of your first romance, the day your family moves from the house you were born in, and the moment it dawns on you that there are problems in life your Mum and Dad can’t help you with. And such is the episode of Doctor Who in which your Doctor regenerates.

  Everyone (by which I mean everyone with access to BBC television and a modicum of taste) has a Doctor they think of as theirs. Your Doctor is the one you hold to be the truest embodiment of the Doctor’s essence and, normally, the one who accompanied you through your formative years. As we learn in the mini-episode “Time Crash” (2007), even the Doctor himself, in one of his later incarnations, thinks of an earlier incarnation as his Doctor. The Tenth Doctor looks back on the Fifth as the point at which he stopped trying to be “old and grumpy and important” and acquired the traits he now thinks of as most centrally his own.

  My Doctor is the Fourth, the Doctor of jelly babies and yoyos and impossibly long scarves. All the Doctor’s incarnations have possessed a
n incorruptible decency and respect for the value of life (notwithstanding momentary aberrations on the parts of the First and Sixth), but in the Fourth Doctor, as portrayed by the magnificent Tom Baker, these qualities are allied with a charm, confidence, and mischievousness unmatched by his predecessors or successors. (the Doctor’s multiple incarnations, of course, overlap roughly but not exactly with portrayals of the character by different actors: not exactly because the First Doctor has been portrayed by at least two actors, and three if you count Peter Cushing in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks—Invasion Earth 2150AD (1966), which you shouldn’t for several reasons, chief among which is his utterance of the abomination: “Hello, I’m Dr. Who.”) The Fourth Doctor saw me through the tricky transitional years from toddler to preteen and represented to me everything in life that seemed worth emulating and aspiring to.

  So when, in the final scene of the final episode of “Logopolis” (1981), the Fourth Doctor plunges from the scaffold of the Pharos Project satellite dish, merges with the Watcher and regenerates into the Fifth, my sense of loss was palpable and overwhelming. I suffered, I think, an embryonic form of bereavement. But there was, too, an undeniable thrill of anticipation, an awareness that a new age was dawning and an openness to the possibility that it might be just as extraordinary, in its own way, as the one on which the sun was setting. The face of the Fifth Doctor gradually becomes visible, a smile spreads across his lips, and he props himself up on his elbows to see what’s going on; and the world changes forever.

  Regeneration, then, is an immensely powerful dramatic device. It is key to the enduring appeal of Doctor Who, and to its vice-like grip on the imaginations of those who love it. And regeneration is also an idea of significant philosophical interest. Specifically, it’s an idea that can help us with the question of the logical possibility of life after death.

  Not Impossible ... Just a Bit Unlikely

  Belief in some form of life after death is very common in the religions of the world, and for good reason. Suppose it’s true that there is a god (or a pantheon of gods), intimately concerned for the welfare of human beings and possessed of mighty supernatural powers. Such a god couldn’t fail to be moved by the appalling and pointless suffering, unjustly distributed goods, unpunished cruelties and unrewarded kindnesses characteristic of life as we know it. So it’s fair to expect that he will, at some point, intervene in human affairs to right wrongs, remedy ills, and reward virtue. He can’t do this merely by transforming the conditions of life on earth for some future generation, or even for the present one, because this would leave out of account the agonies and injustices suffered by previous generations. What’s needed is the establishment of a heavenly realm in which the dead are given new life, human nature is perfected, and health, happiness and justice are enjoyed by all. Life after death is therefore strongly implied by the existence of a benevolent deity.

  Since almost everyone who believes in an afterlife also believes in a god of some sort, the fact that coming back from the dead contravenes the laws of nature isn’t especially troubling. Gods, after all, are in the business of working miracles; that they aren’t bound by the laws of nature is just what’s meant by saying that their powers are supernatural. What is, or should be, troubling to believers in an afterlife is the suggestion that their belief may contravene the laws of logic, that life after death may be logically as well as scientifically impossible.

  The problem, in a nutshell, is whether it makes sense to suppose that the Joe Bloggs who will live eternally in heaven could really be the same person as the Joe Bloggs who currently lives next door to me. There are at least two reasons for thinking he couldn’t. First, one of the things we know about the afterlife (in the form suggested by belief in a god) is that human nature will be perfected: those who populate it won’t harm one another, won’t pursue their interests at one another’s expense and won’t suffer injustices at one another’s hands. At present, however, my neighbor Joe is some way off perfection. Although a jovial fellow, he’s hard-living and hedonistic, gives little thought to the consequences of his actions and is largely insensitive to the feelings of others. His life is geared to pleasures of the flesh, dominated by basic instincts and unreflective desires, and he frequently, albeit inadvertently, upsets, fails and disappoints the people who care about him. He is, in short, the sort of person one hopes not to be approached by for a character reference. No doubt an all-powerful god could change Joe from the person he is now into a person fit for heaven: but this, one is tempted to say, would be to turn him into someone else. A Joe purged of his flaws, it seems, would no longer be Joe.

  Second, when Joe dies, the atoms of which he’s now composed will be dispersed through the biosphere, perhaps by burial and decomposition, perhaps by cremation and the scattering of ashes. In itself, the dispersal of atoms may not be an insurmountable problem: we can readily imagine a god gathering up Joe’s parts and putting him together again. The real difficulty is that many of Joe’s atoms are likely, in due course, to find their way into the bodies of other people. Hamlet famously and gruesomely describes one of the myriad ways in which organic matter passes from one person to the next:HAMLET: A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

  KING: What dost thou mean by this?

  HAMLET: Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.92

  The stuff of which we’re made is the stuff of which others have been made before us and still others will be made after us. This means that, when the time comes for Joe’s parts to be reassembled in heaven, a good number of them will already be spoken for. This doesn’t rule out the possibility of a god creating a replica of Joe, using different, unspoken-for matter, but a newly-created replica of Joe, however exact, isn’t easily thought of as the same person as the Joe who died. The problem of the unavailability of Joe’s atoms is, again, logical rather than practical: it just doesn’t make sense to say that a god might simultaneously reassemble several decomposed human beings who were successively made of the very same stuff.

  This is the philosophical problem. How might the idea of regeneration, as encountered in Doctor Who, help us with it?

  I Was Dead Too Long This Time

  Perhaps the first question that comes to mind is: Does regeneration involve death? Do the successive incarnations of the Doctor represent actual cases of life after death, or just analogues of it?

  This is a vexed question in Doctor Who lore. Most of the Doctor’s regenerations to date give little support to the suggestion that the process involves death. In the regeneration scene closest to my heart, the Fourth Doctor declares “It’s the end”: but this could as easily refer to the end of a chapter in the Doctor’s life as to the end of life itself. In “Planet of the Spiders” (1974), the Third Doctor gives every appearance of having died, but K’anpo assures Sarah that “He is not dead.” And the Second Doctor, in “The Power of the Daleks” (1966), compares his regeneration from the First to the metamorphosis of caterpillars into butterflies, implying an unbroken continuation of life. But there’s one regeneration that gives powerful support to the death hypothesis: that of the Seventh Doctor into the Eighth in “Doctor Who: The TV Movie” (1996).

  Following an emergency landing in San Francisco in December 1999, the Seventh Doctor steps out of the TARDIS into the midst of a gun battle and is immediately shot in the chest. Badly wounded, he’s rushed to hospital and into the operating theater. The cardiologist who operates on him, Dr. Grace Holloway, is understandably unfamiliar with Time Lord physiology, and the procedure doesn’t go according to plan. The Doctor goes into seizure, flatlines, and is pronounced dead at 10:03 P.M. His body is taken down to the morgue and stored in the refrigerator. Sometime after 1:00 A.M., his corpse is reanimated and he regenerates.

  A little later, the Eighth Doctor offers Grace the following explanation for his befuddled state of mind: “I was dead too long this time. The anaesthetic almost destr
oyed the regenerative process.” This explanation not only confirms that the Doctor was indeed dead for the three plus hours prior to his regeneration, but also clearly implies that regeneration always involves death, albeit usually for a shorter period of time.

  It may be, then, that regeneration is a literal form of resurrection: the Doctor comes back from the dead each time he regenerates. But the relevance of regeneration to our philosophical problem doesn’t depend on acceptance of this view. What’s important about regeneration, for our present purposes, is what it tells us about how much change a person can undergo while still remaining the same person. Whether the radical transformation of the regenerative process involves an actual dying and rising, or just something analogous to one, is by the by.

  A Dandy and a Clown

  Consider now the first of our logical worries about the preservation of identity between this life and next. The worry, you’ll recall, was that Joe, a man of many flaws, must be made flawless as a condition of his entry to heaven, and that this seems to require his becoming a different person. The idea of regeneration helps us to see that this worry is unfounded.

  The Doctor’s incarnations are very different from one another. They differ in height, weight, age and appearance; and, crucially, they differ in personality. The First Doctor is irascible and cantankerous, yet at the same time benevolent and avuncular; the Second is playful and puckish, mercurial and cunning; the Third is commanding and aristocratic, a daredevil and a dandy; and so on. Yet despite the wide variation in the Doctor’s personalities, we have no difficulty in accepting that they belong to successive incarnations of the same person. The Doctor’s identity, the thing that all his incarnations have in common and by virtue of which they qualify as incarnations of the Doctor, can’t reside in his personality, for his personality has changed dramatically on ten occasions. Identity must therefore be logically distinct from personality.