This semester, cruel bastard that I am, I made my Intro to Philosophy students read A Scanner Darkly, and afterwards showed them the movie.*

The rationale for this is that the shifting personality and memories of Bob/Fred/Bruce trigger all sorts of interesting philosophical questions about persistence through time and personal identity, tying in with the personal identity issues discussed in one of the primary texts we're using "Time, Change and Freedom: An Introduction to Metaphysics," which is co-written by Nathan Oaklander and my old WMU professor Quentin Smith.

One entry point into philosophical problems about personal identity comes from noticing the tension between Liebniz's principle of the indiscernibility of identicals (i.e. if X=Y, then for any property P, A has P if and only if Y has P) and the obvious fact that "the same person" gains and loses properties all the time, such that Person A at time T1 will have properties that Person A at time T2 lacks, and vice versa. So how to we justify saying that we are talking about a single self-identical person? If there are certain essential properties that they have to have in common, what are they?

One popular approach, rooted in Locke's memory theory but which has all sorts of updated and tweaked contemporary version, is the "psychological continuity" theory of personal identity whereby the person at T1 counts as "the same person" as the one at T2 if they are tied together by memories of the past, plans for the future, beliefs, desires, etc. There are a lot of different versions of this thesis, in many cases involving modifications motivated by thought experiments about split minds and the like.

E.g. what if a computer exactly replicates my consciousness, but the old me is still walking around? At T2, there are two things that are psychologically continuous with the thing at T1, but if Person B (the one in my body) at Time T2 is identical to Person A at Time T1, and Person B (the AI version) at T2 is identical to Person A at Time T1, then we have a problem. By transitivity, if A=B and B=C, then A=C, and whatever is unclear about personal identity, it seems clear that we're using the terms incorrectly if we say that two different entities walking around at the same time, having different experiences, are literally "identical" to each other. You can get around this by the 'brain theory,' tweaking the psychological continuity thesis to add the condition that the consciousness has to be realized in the same brain that originally caused it.

But wait! What about hypothetical brain-splitting cases, where the two hemispheres of your brain are somehow put in different bodies and able to have full mental lives of their own, each remembering everything you knew before the procedure, etc.? Same problem, but they're both realized in the original brain. Well, you can get around that with the 'non-branching psychological continuity' theory, whereby in cases where two things exist at the same time, each psychologically continuous with the original entity, neither of them count as 'the same person' that existed at T1, and that person has simply ceased to exist. This solves the sticky logical issue, but it seems horribly ad hoc and implausible. After all, on this view, if the guy with the left hemisphere survived the operation but the guy with the right hemisphere didn't, the guy with both at T1 is still alive, but if the body with the right hemisphere survives the operation, he's ceased to exist? That seems, to say the least, counter-intuitive.

On the radical fringe of this family of views is Derek Parfit, a philosophy prof at Oxford who famously argues that the reason it's so hard to come up with necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity is that there's no such thing. What we should be interested in in persistence through time is not identity (which simply doesn't apply, since we're gaining and losing properties) but 'survival.' Billy at T1 and Billy at T2 aren't literally identical but Billy at T2 is Billy at T1's "successor." Since we're no longer talking identity, Parfit thinks it's perfectly OK to have multiple successors walking around at the same time, or in fusion cases to have the same entity be a successor to multiple predecessors, or whatever. This might seem like a pretty dire move, since abandoning the idea that the same people exist at different points in time is a pretty dramatic conceptual shift, but I think Parfit argues that this is actually a good result. If I'm remember Quentin Smith's old lectures right, and if those lectures got Parfit's views right, Parfit argues that the myth of personal identity reinforces selfishness and hierarchical social forms and all sorts of other nasty things, and we're more enlightened and morally and politically better off without it.

In any case, whatever one thinks about all of that, the plot "A Scanner Darkly," where Bob Arctor as a scramble-suit-wearing undercover cop (code name "Fred"), his identity not even known to his immediate superiors, is assigned to spy on himself, and by the end of the book the SFnal drug "Substance D" has scrambled his brains so much that he doesn't even remember that he is the same guy as the Bob Arctor in the holo-scans, and as the dried-out husk of an ex-junky in rehab, re-named Bruce, he doesn't much remember either of his previous personae, offers (I hope) a rich variety of material to get students' minds working about the problems with personal identity and the various psychological continuity-based views about it.

So that's why we read it, and watched the movie. It was the second time I'd watched the movie (I was flat broke in Seattle summer before last when my Clarion-mates went out to see it, so I had to skip it then, but I saw it last year and loved it), and this time (after we'd finished watching it in class) I watched the audio commentary track at home. Unlike the vast majority of DVD commentary tracks, this one was actually worth listening to. The participants in the commentary included Jonathan Lethem and one of Philip K. Dick's daughters, and the whole thing was fascinating. One of the extra features, "One Summer in Austin: The Making of 'A Scanner Darkly,'" was also worth watching, if only to see Winona Rider tell stories about her godfather(Timothy Leary)'s interactions with Dick.

In any case, for the benefit of anyone who hasn't read it, the novel itself is brilliant, one of Dick's best, alternately grimly depressing and hysterically funny, which is a neat trick, and as several people commented in the movie commentary you really get a sense in reading it of how much Phil loved all of these people. If anything, you get the sense that not only are these real people that he knew, but that these are real people who you've known in your life as well, and that makes the whole thing really powerful. The fact that, although it's slightly in the future (it was written in the 70s and nominally set in a version of the 90s that seems to have progressed from the 70s only in that drug laws are even more repressive and invasive than they already really are, that scramble suits have been invented, and that there are now 11 'Planet of the Apes' films as opposed to the original five**....the movie just updates it to a vague "seven years from now") it's made to feel contemporary (or at this point somewhat retro), really adds to that autobiographical intensity.

"Valis" is by far my favorite PKD novel, but this is definitely in the top five.













*Making them read a fun sf book about a bunch of stoners who sit around and have funny conversations might not seem especially cruel, but on the other hand in the extra features on the DVD Winona Rider mentioned that she read the book in preparation for playing 'Donna' in the movie and found it 'the most challenging piece of literature she had ever read.' So...uh...who knows?
**According to Donna's summary, in the eleventh Planet of the Apes movie that was made in the world of 'A Scanner Darkly,' we find out that various influential historical figures, including "Lincoln and Nero" are secretly apes running human history all along. Which makes me wonder if, in this universe, Philip K. Dick became a screenwriter.