Philip K. Dick and Westworld
(This piece begins with some personal reflections, the main point I want to make follows the heading “Man, Android and Machine” below).
Intro
One of the first ever non-fiction books I bought was Explorations of the Marvellous, edited by Peter Nicholls (1978, previously published as Science Fiction at Large, 1976). It was a collection of essays by speakers at the 1975 Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) festival on science/speculative fiction. I bought it around 1982. I had been reading science fiction since at least the mid-1970s — I remember a school classmate bringing in exciting-looking books with painted sfnal landscapes, especially the EE “Doc” Smith covers beautifully airbrushed by Chris Foss:
I bought these up like candy, quickly moving on to his other series. It was only when I got the SF Encyclopedia that I found out that Doc Smith had died in 1965. This was my first literary disappointment and a lesson in the duplicities of text.
From the inside front cover it looks like I got it an an sf shop in Liverpool when I was there at uni, but if I remember rightly there was a second-hand bookshop in the student union (or somewhere) where I more probably picked it up. Anyway, it was 50p (half off!).
It featured essays given as talks at the ICA by many luminaries of the sf world including Ursula Le Guin, John Brunner, Alan Garner, Tom Disch and Philip K. Dick. There are three great pieces here, namely those by Le Guin (talking on “Mrs Brown and Science Fiction”) Alan Garner (a very personal piece explaining how what he called psychological “engrams” lead him to write his fiction) and that by PKD, called “Man, Android and Machine.”
Here’s how PKD opens his piece:
“Sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands…” This essay is now well-known but it must have come as something of a shock to Nicholls when he received it. There’s much more in the same vein. PKD was invited by Nicholls in October of 1974, just a few months after the infamous “2–3–74” events (see The Selected Letters of Philip K. Dick, 1974, Oct. 22 letter to PN). He was offered £70 plus airfare.
Dick was very flattered by this invitation (remember this was well before he became well known towards the end of his life). At about the same time (Oct ’74) he was due to be interviewed by his friend Paul Williams for Rolling Stone magazine, when his retelling of these experiences, and his high-wire imaginative riffs would bring him much public attention. However, this was not actually published until November 1975. Dick was also suffering from a dislocated shoulder (fortunately for Dick historians as it meant that he recorded some of his musings onto cassette tape, which were later distributed as part of the PKD Newsletter — very interesting to hear his late-night musings on a sequel to Man in the High Castle).
He wrote to his daughter Laura Leslie (née Dick), later the trustee of the PKD Estate (and now a sales consultant for Hewlett-Packard) that month, apparently trying to cheer her up about her life in school (she was 14 at the time). He noted he’d never done very well in school but “in March of next year they’re flying me to London to give a lecture” and “they’re talking in France about giving me a Nobel Prize” PKD, Letters, Oct. 29 1974).
Unfortunately Dick never went. He did look forward to speaking to Ursula Le Guin (who he was in frequent contact with, exchanging many letters). In one letter to Le Guin he wrote “the lovely lady of s-f; that is how I think of you” (Letter, March 5, 1975). He said he was ill with the flu/high blood pressure but most likely he just bottled out. He also remarked in the same letter, “we do not dream; we are dreamed” getting at some of his bicameral/bilateral mind obsessions (and see below for comparison to Lacan).
Dick was working through his experiences, and much of this made it into his talk in this book, as well as his later “Metz Speech” in 1977 and of course his now infamous Exegesis, and especially his novels Valis and The Divine Invasion. This was also the time he was writing the “Dear Claudia” letters (which at one point were on the market for about $1200 each; or you can read [some of] them in the Selected Letters 1974, 1975 etc., if you want to buy those books on Amazon).
Man, Android and Machine
There are two points in Dick’s essay that I want to highlight here for their possible interest. I’m not claiming that these ideas are right, just that they’re suggestive of ways of thinking, and relate to concerns we have today around robots and around the role of machine learning/AI. One has to be quite parsimonious with PKD given that he liked to explore ideas to destruction, and wasn’t afraid to (at least temporarily) entertain quite odd ideas. OK, very odd (but just as odd as say Lacan).
The first is the idea that:
The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living towards reification, and at the same time a reciprocal entry into animation by the mechanical. We hold now no pure categories of the living versus the non-living…I say: one day we will have millions of hybrid entities which have a foot in both worlds at once. (p. 202.)
Later:
thing-ness is what we must get away from, in regarding ourselves and in considering life. By more modern views we are overlapping fields, all of us, animals included, planets included (p. 214)
Here is the Internet of Things and the cyborg hybrid. Not so much a division between human and posthuman/more than-human as a conglomeration, an assemblage or becoming. Of course now we have Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti to help us think this through, but it would be nice to acknowledge that PKD was thinking about these things decades before they did. Perhaps only Deleuze was there at the time.
Second, and even more provocative is Dick’s idea of living information, or what he calls logos, or the living AI, fictionalized in his book Valis as Vast Active Living Intelligence System. This is a standard sfnal idea, ie that machines reach consciousness, or more generally something that is artificial becomes alive (the golem, by having the word “truth” or one of the names of God inserted in its mouth; Frankenstein’s monster; Terminator, RUR…). Dick explored it in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) through the “Voigt-Kampff” empathy test (presumably the Leningrad psychiatrist “Lurie Kampff” mentioned in the book [p. 38] is a reference to Alex Luria who worked with Lev Vygotsky) which only humans could pass; similarly Alan Turing derived the Turing Test.
Information has, then, become alive, with a collective mind of its own independent of our brains (p. 215)
OK one last comment on Lacan. One of his most quoted statements is that “Man’s desire is the desire of the Other” (eg., see Seminar X, p. 22). this works very well with PKD’s phrase that we do not dream, but rather we are dreamed. Especially remembering the role dreaming has in psychoanalysis!
