Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  It isn’t only the idea of regeneration that shows up this distinction. We’re led to the same conclusion if we reflect on character transformations brought about by religious conversion, on the symptoms of multiple personality disorder, or on personality changes resulting from brain injury, pharmaceutical intervention, or courses of psychotherapy. In these cases, as in the case of regeneration, significant discontinuities of personality do nothing to undermine continuity of identity. We don’t doubt that the virtuous, god-fearing convert of today is still the same person as the vicious, godforsaken unbeliever of yesterday.

  Regeneration, then, is just one of several illustrations of the difference between identity and personality, but one that’s particularly vivid and compelling. If the Doctor can go from formidable, charismatic and decisive to vulnerable, sensitive and uncertain in one tumble from a satellite dish scaffold, there’s no reason why Joe can’t go from sinner to saint in one act of an almighty god.

  It Will Shake Up the Brain Cells a Little

  If identity doesn’t consist in personality, what does it consist in? What is the thing that all the Doctor’s incarnations have in common and by virtue of which they qualify as incarnations of the same person? One plausible answer to this question, and an answer supported by the idea of regeneration, is the body. What makes someone the same person as she was a year ago, even if her personality has changed out of all recognition in that time, is the fact that she still has the same body.

  My claim that the idea of regeneration supports this answer may seem odd. The Doctor’s body, after all, undergoes some very significant changes when he regenerates. The physical differences between successive incarnations are striking, sometimes striking enough to be used to comic effect, as in the encounters between the Second and Third Doctors in “The Three Doctors” (1973) and “The Five Doctors” (1983). Does this count against the suggestion that identity consists in sameness of body?

  No. Regeneration involves bodily changes but not a change of body. The Doctor’s body is reconfigured in the process of genetic reshuffling, but it isn’t replaced. The atoms of which the Doctor is composed immediately before regeneration are the very atoms of which he’s composed immediately after it. It’s precisely this bodily continuity that accounts for our readiness to see the ten Doctors to date as successive incarnations of the same person.

  This is bad news with regard to our second logical worry about life after death, that for most of us resurrection will be prohibited by the unavailability of the stuff of which we’re made. Insofar as regeneration supports the view that identity consists in bodily continuity, it offers no way around this problem. If Joe’s atoms are unavailable for reassembly because they’re needed to reassemble people who lived long before him, it’s difficult to see how Joe could possibly be resurrected from the dead.

  But perhaps we’ve been too hasty here. The Doctor’s body isn’t the only thing he retains through regeneration and therefore not the only possible locus of his identity. He also retains his memories. Each incarnation remembers the actions and experiences of his predecessors, and remembers them as his actions and experiences. He remembers their knowledge and beliefs, their skills and competences, their attachments and loyalties. Could his identity consist, then, in continuity of memory? This possibility holds out the prospect of a solution to the problem of the unavailability of bodies for resurrection, a solution I shall call the ‘replica theory of life after death’.

  But He’s Not You

  The replica theory assumes that the basis of identity is continuity of memory. What makes Joe Joe isn’t his personality or his body, but his memories. A god seeking to resurrect Joe is therefore obliged neither to leave Joe’s personality intact nor to reassemble the parts of his decomposed body. He can create a brand new version of Joe, a replica, composed of different matter and free of all character defects, and simply program the replica with Joe’s memories. Since continuity of memory is sufficient for identity, the heavenly replica counts as the same person as the earthly original, and Joe has been successfully resurrected. This account of life after death certainly avoids the unavailability-of-bodies problem. But will it do? Is continuity of memory really sufficient for identity? A recent episode of Doctor Who sheds some light on the matter.

  In “Journey’s End” (2008), an instantaneous biological metacrisis results in the generation of a replica Doctor. The replica grows from the original Doctor’s severed hand, into which a quantity of unused regeneration energy has earlier been channelled. He has the same appearance as the Doctor, the same memories, knowledge and attachments, and almost the same character (but not quite: he, unlike the Doctor, is prepared to commit genocide against the Daleks). He differs from the Doctor in being part human and having only one heart.

  If the replica theory were sound, we should now be in the odd situation of having to say that the Doctor and the replica are the same person; or at the very least that they’re two individuals with equally strong claims on the Doctor’s identity, equally entitled to whatever the Doctor is due and equally liable for whatever he owes. But we, or at least most of us, have a powerful intuition that it would be wrong to say this. We’re inclined to think of the replica as a new and different person, possessing the Doctor’s memories but not thereby identical with the Doctor.

  Compare this intuition with the one we have about John Smith in the episode “Human Nature” (2007). Pursued across the universe by a deadly foe, the Doctor attempts to evade capture by transforming himself into the human being John Smith, a schoolteacher in early twentieth-century England with a fictional personal history and no recollection (except in his dreams) of his life as the Doctor. Martha is charged with guarding the fob watch in which his Time Lord configuration is stored and ensuring that he transforms back into the Doctor when it’s safe to do so. Despite the fact that he has none of the Doctor’s memories, I think our intuition is to say that John Smith is the Doctor. He and the Doctor are the same person because they have the same body. Our different common-sense judgments about John Smith and the replica suggest that, in practice at least, we favor bodily continuity over continuity of memory as the basis of identity.

  Our unease about regarding the replica as the Doctor is shared and articulated by Rose in “Journey’s End.” The Daleks defeated and the stolen earth returned to its solar system, the Doctor takes Rose back to the parallel universe that has become her home and entrusts the replica to her care. His intention, apparently, is that the unconsummated and largely unspoken love affair between Rose and him should now be fully realized between Rose and the replica. As it dawns on Rose what the Doctor has in mind, she puts up some resistance:DOCTOR: (to replica) You were born in battle, full of blood and anger and revenge. (to Rose) Remind you of someone? That’s me, when we first met. And you made me better. Now you can do the same for him.

  ROSE: But he’s not you.

  DOCTOR: He needs you. That’s very me ...

  ROSE: But, it’s still not right, because the Doctor is still you.

  Rose feels that the replica isn’t the man she fell in love with. He may share the Doctor’s appearance, personality, and memories, and he may love her as deeply and sincerely as the Doctor loves her, but he is nevertheless a different person. The man she loves is the person about to leave in the TARDIS with Donna. Although Rose is eventually persuaded (perhaps a little too easily) to accept the replica as a substitute for the Doctor, with the bonus that, being part human, he’ll grow old and die with her, it’s still with profound sadness that she gazes at the dematerializing TARDIS and bids the Doctor a silent farewell.

  Can we rationally defend the view that the replica isn’t the Doctor? Intuition is all well and good, but perhaps it’s mere prejudice that disinclines us to accept the identity of replicas with the originals whose memories they share (a kind of replicaphobia, if you will). Why shouldn’t we be willing to say that replicas are the people they replicate? One reason is that many of the memories of replicas are, in an importan
t sense, false memories. It’s tempting to say that they’re false because they’re the memories of other people, but this won’t quite do because it begs the question: the replica theory denies precisely that those replicated are ‘other people’. But we can make a similar point without begging the question. All of our actions and experiences involve our bodies in some way, and to remember them as our actions and experiences is to remember them as involving our bodies. But if we’re replicas, our bodies were not involved in the actions and experiences we remember as involving them; and to that extent the memories are false.

  This element of falsity in the memories of replicas gives some rational support to the intuition that replicas and originals aren’t the same people. But it doesn’t quite clinch the case. Determined defenders of the replica theory can bite the bullet here: they can accept that the personal memories of replicas are false but insist that this is irrelevant to the question of identity. What makes replicas and originals the same people is the fact that their memories are subjectively identical. The difference only appears when one considers the memories objectively, when one asks how truly they represent the remembered events. And this, replica theorists can assert, has no bearing on the matter.

  The replica theory therefore offers one route, though not a very promising one, by which believers in life after death can escape the unavailability-of-bodies problem. But it’s not the only route open to them. One contemporary philosopher, Peter van Inwagen, has suggested a different way out of the problem, and one that’s compatible with the view that identity consists in bodily continuity.

  Here They Are ... Ready to Outsit Eternity

  The unavailability-of-bodies problem looks insurmountable if we assume that the god intending to resurrect the dead only arrives on the scene at the end of the world, by which time the same atoms have been components of many human bodies. But what if, rather than waiting in the wings until the final act, this god has been busy throughout the course of human history, harvesting and storing bodies in readiness for resurrection at the appointed time?

  This is the possibility van Inwagen invites us to consider.93 Perhaps what happens is that, at the moment of death, our bodies are removed from the biosphere and immediately replaced with different ones. Or perhaps it’s not our whole bodies that are removed and replaced, but just our brains and central nervous systems, or whatever organs are necessary for our still being ourselves in the next life. The bodies that are dispersed through the biosphere, by burial and decomposition or cremation and the scattering of ashes, are not our bodies, but mere simulacra. Our bodies are safe in the care of a god who will miraculously preserve them until the day of resurrection.

  Van Inwagen’s theory has come in for a bit of flak. His critics have remarked disparagingly on the way it casts the resurrecting god in the role of cosmic cryonicist, deep freezing corpses until he’s ready to defrost and revive them. The suggestion is that the practice of cryonics is somehow disreputable, primitive or unethical, so it would be beneath an all-powerful god to resort to quasicryonic methods. But little is offered to substantiate this suggestion. What precisely is objectionable about the idea of a god guaranteeing the availability of our bodies for resurrection by removing and preserving them? The Doctor, at least, sees cryonics in a rather more positive light. When, in “The Ark in Space” (1975), he finds the last survivors of the human race cryonically frozen aboard the space station Nerva, it prompts him to offer one of his most moving tributes to humanity:Homo sapiens. What an inventive, invincible species. It’s only a few million years since they crawled up out of the mud and learned to walk. Puny, defenceless bipeds. They’ve survived flood, famine and plague. They’ve survived cosmic wars and holocausts. Now, here they are, out among the stars, waiting to begin a new life, ready to outsit eternity. They’re indomitable. Indomitable.

  The divine cryonicist theory, then, offers a solution to the unavailability-of-bodies problem that doesn’t require abandonment of the bodily continuity view of identity, thus putting to rest the second and more difficult of our logical worries about life after death.

  To show that something is logically possible isn’t, of course, to show that it’s true, or is likely to be true, or can reasonably be thought to be true. The hypothesis of an afterlife-promising god can’t be dismissed on the grounds that the afterlife promised is logically impossible; but there may be other good reasons to dismiss it, or no good reason for advancing it in the first place. On the question of the existence of a god, the Doctor has scrupulously refrained from passing judgment for almost half a century; in this, as in so much else, I shall follow his example.

  20

  And, Before I Go ...

  PAUL DAWSON

  When the Doctor regenerates, does he die? If not, what survives the process?

  Regeneration is unsettling for Doctor Who fans. I cried when the Third Doctor regenerated (“Planet of the Spiders,” 1974), and was moved again, over thirty years later, as the Ninth Doctor give way to the Tenth (“The Parting of the Ways,” 2005), and the Tenth to the Eleventh (“The End of Time,” 2010). Maybe ten-year-old me just didn’t understand what was happening; but why should the adult me be saddened by the regenerations of 2005 and 2010? The Ninth Doctor described regeneration as a “sort of way of cheating death,” so why worry?

  You’re My Replacements

  One common view is that regeneration instantaneously changes the Doctor’s appearance and, to a lesser extent, personality. This assumes that one subject, the Doctor, persists through such changes—that the Doctor is the same individual on both sides of the regeneration. But this is questionable. The newly regenerated Second Doctor refers to his predecessor in the third person, while the departing Ninth Doctor tells Rose that he won’t see her again, and speaks of himself in the past tense, seeming far from sure that whatever emerges on the other side of the process will be him. And the Doctor’s own uncertainty is even clearer when, so to speak, “one Doctor” encounters “other Doctors.” The First Doctor refers to the Second and Third Doctors as his replacements, for example (“The Three Doctors,” 1973).

  Is it possible, then, that the different Doctors are not the same individual at all? Perhaps the “old Doctor” does die, before the “new Doctor” takes his place.

  Let’s analyze this possibility using two philosophical notions. First, a designator is any word or phrase used to pick out something. “Davros” is a designator, as is “the creator of the Daleks.” The difference between them is that the first is a proper name, and the second is a definite description. Second, a possible world is any complete state of affairs that’s logically possible—any way that it’s logically possible for the world to be. The actual world, given its actuality, is of course logically possible, but some philosophers think there’s an infinity of other possible worlds. For example, since it’s logically possible that Britain has a President rather than a Prime Minister (“The Age of Steel,” 2006), there’s a possible world in which Britain has a President.

  According to philosopher Saul Kripke, proper names pick out the same individual in all possible worlds containing that individual, while definite descriptions pick out different individuals in different possible worlds. Proper names are therefore rigid designators, while definite descriptions are non-rigid designators. Thus the proper name “William Shakespeare” picks out William Shakespeare in all possible worlds which include that individual (including worlds in which that individual isn’t named “William Shakespeare”), whereas the definite description “The author of Love’s Labour’s Lost,” while it picks out Shakespeare in the actual world, picks out Christopher Marlowe in some other possible world.

  So, a rigid designator, such as proper name, seeks out the same individual in all possible worlds, whereas a non-rigid designator, such as a definite description, takes a given role to all possible worlds, and discovers whoever or whatever occupies that role in each of them. In the actual world the definite description “the Prime Minister of the UK in 2010”
finds David Cameron, but in another possible world, it finds Gordon Brown, because he might have won the 2010 General Election. In yet another possible world, this description designates Harriet Jones, MP for Flydale North. (Yes, we know who she is.) And in some possible worlds, nothing fits this role. In Pete Tyler’s World—the parallel world which 94 becomes home to Rose and Jackie Tyler—the UK has a President rather than a Prime Minister.

  Is “the Doctor” rigid or non-rigid? Does it pick out the same individual wherever that individual is to be found, or designate a role or a job that different individuals might occupy at different times and in different places? As I said, at times even the Doctor seems unsure of the answer. Focusing on the dialogue quoted above, it’s plausible to interpret the Ninth Doctor as worrying about just who’s going to replace him—to inherit his job. Later, the Tenth Doctor tells Wilf that after regeneration “some new man goes sauntering away” (“The End of Time”).

  Regarding “the Doctor” as non-rigid also explains our curious practice of talking in terms of the First Doctor, the Second Doctor, and so on. This sounds like “the First President of the United States,” “the Second President of the United States”—that is, like talking about different occupants of the same role. And if we ask how the First Doctor has one heart (“The Edge of Destruction,” 1964), while the others have two, how the Seventh Doctor is more than a Time Lord (“Remembrance of the Daleks,” 1988), while the Eighth Doctor is half-human (the TV Movie), and so on, a “non-rigid designator theorist” might answer that the First Doctor is human, and all subsequent occupants of the role designated by the definite description “the Doctor” are regular Time Lords, apart from the Seventh and the Eighth.