The Shifting Realities of PK Dick by Philip K. Dick & Lawrence Sutin

Author:Philip K. Dick & Lawrence Sutin [Dick, Philip K. & Sutin, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0679747877
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 1994-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

“The Android and the Human” (1972)

IT is the tendency of the so-called primitive mind to animate its environment. Modern depth psychology has requested us for years to withdraw these anthropomorphic projections from what is actually inanimate reality, to introject—that is, bring back into our own heads—the living quality that we, in ignorance, cast out onto the inert things surrounding us. Such introjection is said to be the mark of true maturity in the individual, and the authentic mark of civilization in contrast to mere social culture, such as one finds in a tribe. A native of Africa is said to view his surroundings as pulsing with a purpose, a life, that is actually within himself; once these childish projections are withdrawn, he sees that the world is dead and that life resides solely within himself. When he reaches this sophisticated point he is said to be either mature or sane. Or scientific. But one wonders: Has he not also, in this process, reified—that is, made into a thing—other people? Stones and rocks and trees may now be inanimate for him, but what about his friends? Has he now made them into stones, too?

This is, really, a psychological problem. And its solution, I think, is of less importance in any case than one might think, because, within the past decade, we have seen a trend not anticipated by our earnest psychologists—or by anyone else—that dwarfs that issue; our environment, and I mean our man-made world of machines, artificial constructs, computers, electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic components—all of this is in fact beginning more and more to possess what the earnest psychologists fear the primitive sees in his environment: animation. In a very real sense our environment is becoming alive, or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentally analogous to ourselves. Cybernetics, a valuable recent scientific discipline, articulated by the late Norbert Wiener, saw valid comparisons between the behavior of machines and humans—with the view that a study of machines would yield valuable insights into the nature of our own behavior. By studying what goes wrong with a machine—for example, when two mutually exclusive tropisms function simultaneously in one of Grey Walter’s synthetic turtles, producing fascinatingly intricate behavior in the befuddled turtles—one learns, perhaps, a new, more fruitful insight into what [in] humans was previously called “neurotic” behavior. But suppose the use of this analogy is turned the other way. Suppose—and I don’t believe Wiener anticipated this—suppose a study of ourselves, our own nature, enables us to gain insight into the now extraordinary complex functioning and malfunctioning of mechanical and electronic constructs? In other words—and this is what I wish to stress in what I am saying here—it is now possible that we can learn about the artificial external environment around us, how it behaves, why, what it is up to, by analogizing from what we know about ourselves.

Machines are becoming more human, so to speak—at least in the sense that, as Wiener indicated, some meaningful comparison exists between human and mechanical behavior.

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