Philip Dick Archives - James E Hartley

Do you have the right to commit a crime? Odd question, to be sure. One would not think there is much to discuss.

Yet, Philip K. Dick, spun it into a nice story. “Minority Report.”

First things first, let’s set aside the “Living in an Unjust Society” discussion. Whether you have the right to violate unjust laws is itself an interesting discussion topic. For now, let’s focus on more mundane crimes. For example: Do you have the right to murder your neighbor because you don’t like him? That seems like a really easy question to answer.

In the world of “Minority Report,” society has managed to eliminate all such crime by the simple expedient of arresting people before they commit the crimes. Accused of precrime, you will be incarcerated before you actually murder your neighbor. Best of both worlds, right? Your neighbor lives and you are punished for the fact that you would have killed him had society not arrested you before you did so.

The idea of punishments for precrime sends a chill down everyone’s spine—with one exception. Most people are quite happy with the idea of arresting people for plotting to commit a terrorist attack. In that case however, we could describe the crime as plotting to do something. What about arresting people for the precrime that they were going to plot a terrorist attack in the future? Can we arrest people before they actually start plotting? Can we arrest them before they have even thought about joining the plot?

The problem with precrime that you instantly realized is that it seems impossible to know that someone is going to commit a crime in the future. Sure, you may know that someone is violent and hates his neighbor, but is that the same thing as knowing that the neighbor is about to be murdered? Of course not.

The world of “Minority Report” has people who are born with the ability to see the future. Dubbed “precogs,” they are used by the Precrime Division to alert the police that a crime is going to be committed. The police then sweep in and arrest the person before the crime happens. Crime vanishes. Everyone is happy.

Imagine living in that world for a moment. Imagine there was a zero percent chance that any crime would be committed ever again. You can go anywhere you want, never lock your house or your car, and even leave your laptop on the ground next to a park bench and come back later and pick it up. Perfect safety all the time. Sounds nice, right?

It is indeed nice, until you get accused of a precrime. You can protest all you want that you didn’t commit a crime. That is, after all the point. Of course you didn’t commit a crime. You were arrested before you did so. Good luck proving your innocence; how do you prove you would not have committed a crime if you had not been arrested?

“Minority Report” goes one step further. Precogs do not all have simultaneous revelations of the future. So, there are three of them attached to the Precrime Division. An arrest is only made when two of them alert the authorities about an impeding crime. That feature creates the potential for a fascinating puzzle.

Suppose Precog 1 foresees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. Charlie had no idea that he would ever even think about killing Bob. Charlie is alerted to Precog 1’s knowledge of the impending murder, so Charlie immediately decides to leave town so that there is no chance that he will kill Bob. After all, Precog’s 1’s statement about the future does not prevent Charlie from leaving town to make it impossible for the statement to become true.

Precog 2 now sees the future and predicts that Charlie will not kill Bob. After all, since they will be in different places, there is no way for Charlie to kill Bob. Charlie then learns that Precog 2 has seen that he will not kill Bob. This is great news. Since Charlie won’t kill Bob, there is no longer a need to leave town. After all, if Charlie was really going to kill Bob, then Precog 2 would have foreseen it.

Now that Charlie no longer needs to leave town, Precog 3 comes along and sees that Charlie will kill Bob next Tuesday. So, two of the three precogs have now seen that Charlie will kill Bob on Tuesday, and Charlie is arrested.

The questions:
1. Is this fair?
2. Can we legitimately say that any of the precogs have actually seen the future when the future can change depending on Charlie’s decision about whether or not to leave town?
3. Did Precog 1 and Precog 3 actually see the same future?

All of those questions are nice little puzzles set up by the story, but you probably did not have a very difficult time answering any of those questions. Why not? You believe in human agency. You believe that Charlie really does have a decision about whether to kill Bob or not, and that up until the moment of the murder, Charlie could decide not to do so. Because Charlie can decide not to murder Bob, it seems unjust to arrest Charlie for precrime based on some precog’s vision of an unsettled future. Indeed, you think of the world of “Minority Report” as a dystopia. Sure, there is no crime, but the cost to liberty of eliminating that crime is simply too high.

Now, make the problem harder. The reason you don’t like the world of “Minority Report” is because you do not believe your future actions are predetermined. As of now, the future is still not predictable by humans: we do not know the mind of God and we do not have the ability to track all the chemical reactions which will occur in every brain on the planet. So, even if the future is potentially predictable, we cannot do so now. But, what if that changed? Just for a moment, imagine that the future is predictable. What if we could know that if Charlie is not arrested first, he will kill Bob next Tuesday? Absolute certainty; no margin for error at all. Now, can we arrest Charlie for the pre-crime of killing Bob in the future?

Saying “yes” seems wrong. We still have that same aversion to arresting Charlie before he has actually killed Bob. But, saying “No” means that we are consenting to the death of Bob simply because we are too squeamish to arrest Charlie before it happens. Does Charlie have the right to murder Bob before we can arrest Charlie? Do you have the right to commit a crime?

In a world in which the future was perfectly predictable, arresting someone for precrime seems like a moral obligation. Surely it is wrong to stand by and let Bob be murdered if we know with absolute certainty that he will be murdered. On the flip side, if we do not know that Bob will be murdered, it is surely wrong to arrest Charlie because we think he might murder Bob. But, where is the point at which this flips? Is it only in cases of perfect certainty that we are willing to arrest Charlie before he kills Bob? What if we are 99.999% certain that Charlie is going to kill Bob unless we arrest him? Does Charlie have the right to kill Bob because there is a 0.001% chance he won’t do it?

These sorts of puzzles about statistical probability are all around us, by the way. We literally could not act in society without forming guesses about what people might do in the future. “Minority Report” may seem like a pleasant story to read about the problems in a fictional dystopia, but sorting out what precisely is right or wrong in this story has intriguing implications for a whole host of problems in the world both now and in the near future. As the ability to sort through Big Data rises, as you volunteer an endless array of information about your life to Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple, your future is getting a lot more predictable.

The Library of America (that authoritative guide to all things Classic in American Letters) has a three volume set of Philip Dick, the science fiction author from the 1960s and 70s.

UBIK, the fourth novel in the first volume of that set. Having read all four, I must confess to a certain wonder why Dick deserves this All-Star treatment.

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed UBIK. Reading it was a pleasant diversion. Dick writes in a style which is not particularly great, but makes it easy to just go along for the ride. Where is this ride going? That is surely a question worth asking before elevating a book to Great Book status, and it is here that Dick trades in cheap tricks as a substitute for substantive ideas.

UBIK offers up a bewildering array of science fiction tropes, but as it turns out most of them are the literary equivalent of the magician’s trick of waving a hand to divert attention from where the real action is happening. There is an entire story of people with psychic powers and an organization set up to stop people with psychic powers from using those powers. There is a plot of a woman with the ability to change the past, generating a new present—though how she knows what she has done in the new present is totally unexplained and likely internally incoherent. But neither the woman nor the whole psychic power thing matters in the end.

The real story is about half-life—a state which people enter after death in which their conscious self still lives on in a bizarre dream world. Living people have some odd ability to talk with those in half-life, but only at some sort of company which specializes in enabling contact between the living and those whom Miracle Max would call the Almost Dead.

Those Half-life people move along in some sort of odd time which seems to be shorted as they spend more time talking to the living, susceptible to interaction with other Half-life people whose bodies (corpses) are physically close, but sometimes the physically close corpse can take over half-life person’s world or even that person’s channel of communication with the living and if this is making any sense at all, then I am providing clarity where there really isn’t any in the book. And, all this is totally irrelevant to the real story too.

The real story. Our hero may be alive or he may be in half-life and he doesn’t know and we don’t know which either. Indeed, neither our hero nor we have any idea what is going on—until the penultimate scene in which we discover that our hero is, in fact, in half-life and, while there, he has to fight against nefarious evil plans of another half-lifer. Why the plans of an evil half-lifer to do evil things to dead people matters is a bit unclear.

And then we get the final scene in which—ready for mind-blowing conclusion?—we find out that the person who was revealed to still be among the living may be in half-life after all, so maybe that previous conclusion isn’t right after all. The most coherent conclusion would be that everyone is in odd parallel half-lives, but that conclusion isn’t really coherent. Indeed, I suspect there is no coherent storyline in this book.

So, where does that leave us? A pleasant, but totally incoherent story. If that was the aim, it would be one thing. But, I suspect the author has delusions of grandeur here. This book seems designed to make us question the nature of Reality. Are we too living in some sort of half-life state, just imagining we are still among living? It’s the old “How do you know you aren’t a brain in a vat somewhere imagining that all of this is real?” A trippy, unanswerable question? Or, like Samuel Johnson, when faced with an older incarnation of the idea, do we just kick a rock and say, “Philip Dick is refuted thus”?

So, UBIK takes an old philosophical question and converts it into an incoherent science fiction novel. Fine. Reading it is a decent enough way to spend an evening. But the Library of America treatment? There are two more volumes of Philip Dick to go; perhaps the answer lies there.

Tag: Philip Dick

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UBIKuitous Incoherence