Doctor Who and Philosophy

by Courtland Lewis

  What makes Leibniz so sure that God’s choice of the actual world is really the best possible? The Doctor has often criticized the Time Lords for their lack of interest in creating more justice in the universe, and for only showing concern when their own interests are at stake. The Doctor’s attitude is in this sense similar to the skeptical reader of Leibniz who doubts how God could’ve wilfully chosen a world full of evils as the best possible. The Time Lords only interfere when the conditions ensuring harmony and diversity in the cosmos are threatened, and excuse the lesser evils for being necessary in this grander scheme. Coincidentally it’s the Doctor who accepts the necessity of evil, rather than the Time Lords, in the “Genesis of the Daleks” (1975), when, against the instructions of the Time Lords, he refuses to prevent the Daleks from coming into being. Clearly, the role of the Time Lords is analogous to Leibniz’s God in the respect of allowing evil in the universe.

  For Leibniz, God can read everything that has been or will be done by passing into the monads as into the pages of a book to determine their sufficient reason. Similarly, as beings standing outside of Time, the Time Lords are able to observe events from across the whole space-time continuum using their space-time visualizers. The Time Lords can also travel forward or backward to any point in space-time in their TARDISes, which aren’t only like windows that can assume any point of view, but also doors that can materialize at any of these points at any time, allowing for the world to be acted upon directly. But wouldn’t this mean that any such action upon the pre-established world would break the Laws of Time?

  Dimensional Transcendentalism and the Principle of Indiscernibles

  The TARDIS is a time-machine/spaceship bigger on the inside and smaller on the outside, or dimensionally transcendental, as the Doctor puts it. Dimensional transcendentalism seems to be compatible with Leibniz’s principle of indiscernibles, according to which there can be no purely external features of things, because things can’t differ from one another by place and time alone.160 Thus, Leibniz thinks it necessary that some internal difference account for their discernibility. Since any one region of space is indiscernible from any other region, space can’t properly exist on its own, so the dimensionally transcendental space in the TARDIS couldn’t exist apart from the Doctor and its other occupants. The relations of quantity and position between the Doctor and his companions inside the TARDIS would be derivable from their innate qualities, even though they appear to be produced by motion. Like time, space is an ideal, innate, and accidental feature of monads, without having any absolute reality in the external world. The Doctor frequently implies that dimensional transcendentalism simply produces an illusory representation of greater space within the TARDIS—Leibniz would go a step further and assert that according to the principle of indiscernibles, this sort of dimensional transcendentalism applies to all forms of perceptual experience.

  While the Doctor often refers to the TARDIS as a machine, he sometimes speaks of it as though it were a living thing. Accordingly, the dimensionally transcendental space in the TARDIS could be derived from its own individual concept. The Doctor refers to the TARDIS as a “she” on many different occasions. It’s as though he were like an embryo inside a womb which could travel through time and space. Is the TARDIS the Doctor’s appurtenance, or is the Doctor an appurtenance of the TARDIS? Since they share a symbiotic relationship, it would seem to be both. Strangely enough, one of Leibniz’s original inspirations for the monad came to him when he was looking through one of the first microscopes at an amoeba. He imagined a monadic vinculum mediating relations of appurtenance with other monads like a cellular membrane mediating the passage of nourishment. The inside of the TARDIS could be understood as the dimensionally transcendental interior of such a monadic vinculum, which would mediate an exchange of information with the space-time continuum.

  The Matrix, Perception, and Pre-Established Harmony

  As part of the Amplified Panatropic Computer Network, the Matrix contains the bio-data extracts of all Time Lords both living and dead, storing their memories and knowledge in an extra-dimensional framework while also receiving input from sensors in all of the TARDISes, such as the Doctor’s. The TARDIS is symbiotically linked to the Doctor, thereby sending the Matrix a continuous stream of information from his experiences. In addition to being a record of the past, or afterlife of deceased Time Lords, it also predicts the future using all of its combined knowledge. It’s a machine which works out the pre-established harmony of the cosmos from the amalgamations of data received from all Time Lords, analogous to Leibniz’s God. However, within the Matrix only confused perceptions and nightmarish hallucinations exist.

  When the Doctor goes inside the Matrix in “The Deadly Assassin” (1976), the hallucinations the Master conjures against him can only be overcome by denying their reality. The Master is like the evil demon of early modern rationalist philosopher René Descartes, challenging the Doctor to suspend his belief in a hallucinatory reality. For Descartes, the possibility of a hallucinatory reality is the ultimate hypothesis guiding his method of doubt, which aims to identify beliefs whose truth can be known for certain. For Leibniz on the other hand, this hallucinatory “reality” is the background of confused perceptions before consciousness is able to form clear perceptions.

  As a monad, the Doctor undergoes a natural series of changes involving a plurality of affections and relations which become differentiated by degrees, confusedly represented by perception. Desire, or what Leibniz calls appetition, produces the change or passage from one perception to another. For something to be rendered discernible, attention towards it must first be desired. It’s only through the force of his appetition that the Doctor is able to deny the hallucinations of the Matrix. Apperception is only given to the Doctor when he becomes conscious of the perceptions his appetition produces a change in, or when he’s conscious of where desire focuses his attention. The Matrix denies him such reflective knowledge of apperception in both “The Deadly Assassin” and “The Invasion of Time,” though under different circumstances. In the former, it results from the evil demon’s temptations; in the latter, it results from a sort of divine fury.

  All Engin can observe through the Matrix while the Doctor is connected to it is the workings of the machine from the outside, and not the Doctor’s actual hallucinatory perceptions (“The Deadly Assassin”). According to Leibniz, observing the Doctor’s hallucinatory perceptions would be impossible, since they’re contained within his thinking monad and the monads are windowless. Leibniz uses the example of a machine similar to the Matrix to show how the variety of our perceptions is something which is produced from within ourselves: Suppose that there were a machine so constructed as to produce thought, feeling, and perception, we could imagine it increased in size while retaining the same proportions, so that one might enter as one might a mill. On going inside we should only see the parts impinging upon one another; we should not see anything which would explain a perception. The explanation of perception must therefore be sought in a simple substance, and not in a compound or a machine. (p. 181)

  Rather than discovering sufficient reason from the godly point of view internal to the Matrix, the Time Lords regress to a state of confused perception when exposed to the Matrix. There’s nothing in the framework of the Matrix itself which explains their confused perceptions—the explanation for the perceptions can only come from the monads experiencing them. Each Time Lord’s perceptions are fused into the Matrix and generate its own internal perceptions, but there’s no pre-established harmony between their perceptions. This doesn’t stop the Matrix from calculating the pre-established harmony of the cosmos, however.

  The Incompossible Valeyard

  The Doctor we’re familiar with is good, though we are confronted with an evil Doctor in “The Trial of a Time Lord.” This appears to be a contradictory state of affairs, however, if we consider the worlds in which these Doctors act, we find that the good Doctor and the evil Doctor aren’t merely contradicto
ry, but incompossible (self-contradictory concepts incapable of being formed at the same time).

  In “The Trial of a Time Lord,” the Doctor attempts to convince the High Council of Time Lords that the evidence being presented against him, via the Matrix, doesn’t match the events as he remembers them. The Valeyard, or learned court prosecutor and presenter of the evidence, complicates the problem even further when it’s revealed that he’s himself a future incarnation of the Doctor, or amalgamation of the darker sides of his nature, somewhere between his Twelfth and final incarnations. The evidence extracted from the Matrix is incompossible with the Doctor, but perhaps compossible with the Valeyard. The Valeyard’s timeline could have diverged from the Doctor’s right before the events which are presented as evidence for the trial, leaving him prosecuting the Doctor for the crimes done by his own past self.

  According to sufficient reason, if each individual concept contains all of the events which that individual will undergo as its predicates, then how could the Doctor and the Valeyard both have the same individual concept? The singularity of their individual concept would have to be cut from its prolongation in the events which distinguish them.161 To make sense of this, we’d need to speak generally of a Doctor, instead of the particular Doctor who does good or evil. The Doctor in general wouldn’t yet belong to any definite world. Through the prolongation of his singularities into events, and the convergence of its series with those of other monads, a world which includes them all is rendered compossible. Worlds become incompossible when series of events diverge, as the series of events converging on the Valeyard’s world might have in relation to the series of events converging on the Doctor’s world.

  According to the principle of indiscernibles, neither time nor space can be taken to be constitutive of innate qualities any more than they can be taken to be purely external features of the world. Rather, they’re contingent derivations of innate qualities, like the singularities which prolong themselves in events. When the Master describes the Valeyard as an amalgamation of the darker sides of the Doctor’s nature, we still don’t know if the Valeyard is any particular future incarnation of the Doctor. He’s a future Doctor in general while his historical continuity with the Doctor remains indefinite, but also, perhaps, an evil Doctor in particular for acting treacherously against the Doctor at his trial. The Valeyard is promised by the High Council of Time Lords the remainder of the Doctor’s regenerations, in exchange for finding him guilty, which would paradoxically cancel him from existence before allowing him to relive more than half of his regeneration cycle. These “darker sides” of the Doctor’s nature could be interpreted as being not only evil in particular, but also obscure in general.

  The last adventure to be shown as evidence at the Doctor’s trial is actually one which hasn’t yet taken place from the Doctor’s point of view. If the Doctor were found guilty, then this adventure would become incompossible with his timeline and would not take place, leaving him convicted for things which he never had a chance to do (but which the Valeyard perhaps had already done). But if he wasn’t found guilty, this would leave the Doctor with foreknowledge of his own future. Assuming this isn’t normal, even for Time Lords, wouldn’t it create a paradox? How could the events play themselves out as the Matrix had predicted?

  An important section at the end of Leibniz’s Theodicy quotes a long passage from medieval Italian humanist Laurentius Valla’s Dialogue on Free Will, in which Sextus Tarquinius visits Apollo, seeking divine foreknowledge of his life, only to hear that he’ll be a traitor to his country. Leibniz continues the story with Sextus visiting Jupiter to complain about his fate, only to be told not to return to Rome and to renounce any hope of attaining its crown.162 He refuses to leave. Meanwhile, Jupiter instructs Theodorus, a High Priest curious about Sextus’ fate, to visit his daughter Pallas. Pallas shows Theodorus an immense pyramid with an apex but no base, made up of infinite halls, each containing a possible world in which Sextus’ life plays itself out differently.

  Leibniz uses Theodorus in place of Sextus to get around the problem which the Doctor is faced with after seeing his possible future adventure with the Vervoids. Some of the lower halls in the pyramid portray a happy and noble Sextus, while the most beautiful hall at the apex portrays the Sextus who rapes Lucretia, deemed the best possible world because it brings about the beginning of the Roman Republic. The base of this dimensionally transcendental pyramid descends infinitely and is paradoxically bottomless, since there can be no worst possible world, though Leibniz’s goal is to show the infinite possibilities of human freedom. Did the Doctor’s adventure with the Vervoids come from the most beautiful hall or from one of these lower halls?

  Considering the inconsistency of the Matrix with the Doctor’s timeline in the adventures presented as evidence in the trial against the Doctor, one’s future may not be as deterministic as the Time Lords believe; it shows alternate events are possible. In a similar vein, Leibniz disagreed with Valla’s attempt to show how divine foreknowledge of beings in existence could not impair freedom. Instead of associating Jupiter with an even more deterministic divine providence as Valla had, Leibniz associates Jupiter’s daughter Pallas with knowledge of simple intelligence, which embraces all of the possible.

  While Leibniz doesn’t deny divine foreknowledge and God’s choosing of the best possible world, he nonetheless emphasizes the importance of knowledge of simple intelligence and possibility as that which grounds human freedom. Sextus could have left Rome, but his ambition prevented him from making this sacrifice. Likewise, the Doctor could’ve let the Vervoids live to reach Earth, but he defends his future decision to kill them off—as the best possible, albeit with an anthropocentric bias. Whether the events play themselves out as envisioned by the Matrix is not explored, though it would have presented some interesting problems for the question of free will had it been.

  By the end of “The Trial of a Time Lord,” it’s revealed that secret knowledge was being exported from the Matrix to outside civilizations all along, and that the tampering suspected by the Doctor had been done to cover up the details of this smuggling, which actually figured in the first of the adventures presented as evidence. Perhaps the evidence wasn’t tampered with at all, but was the mysterious fate of the extracted knowledge which caused the ripples in the space-time continuum, simultaneously giving existence to the Valeyard and creating a compossible world in which the Doctor was implicated in smuggling. If so, then the Matrix would cease to carry out its godly role in determining the future by choosing the best possible world to actualize, as Leibniz claimed his God did. Instead, it allowed for many incompossible worlds to exist at the same time, just as the Chinese philosopher-architect Ts’ui Pên claims in Jorge Luis Borges’s short story, “The Garden of Forking Paths”:He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging, and parallel times. This web of time—the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries—embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in others yet both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom. 163

  Was the Valeyard such an error or phantom, or was the intersection of his strand with the Doctor’s actually a matter of the calculated purpose? Ts’ui Pên’s garden admittedly has more in common with the Matrix than does Leibniz’s bottomless pyramid of infinite halls, since the conditions of paradox are internal to its very working. The Valeyard would never appear in a world of pre-established harmony, but in a world of forking paths where incompossibles paradoxically communicate through the Matrix; he’s right at home.

  The Odd Thought of Doctor Who

  Leibniz was interested in science fiction. In one of his most curious texts, An Odd Thought Concerning a New Sor
t of Exhibition, Leibniz envisions an Academy of games to which people would flock to experience an exotic variety of educational wonders and amusements.164 Among the exhibits, there would be such things as games of cards and dice, magic lanterns, detachable moving pictures of very unusual and grotesque objects, representations of charity and cruelty, friendly disputes, simulated war games, experiments on water, air, and vacuum, exotic animals, instruments that play themselves, comedies of all nations and trades, ridiculous styles, speaking trumpets, adding machines, magnets, and all sorts of other things. In other words, Leibniz’s Academy would include some of the most characteristic features of Doctor Who.

  Leibniz’s expectation that such an Academy would promote the advancement of knowledge and morality is echoed in the very notion of Doctor Who as an educational program. While Leibniz may have sought to uncover reason and order behind everything, he also valued experiences of wonder and dizzying confusion enough to imagine an institution for creative learning founded upon such principles. His “odd thought” is indeed the very substance of Doctor Who.

  EPISODE 6

  Lots of Planets Have a North!

  Human and Time Lord Culture