Science Fiction as a means of Philosophical Inquiry

Abstract

In light of new technological developments in current society, such as the advent of current large language models, we have seen an influx of elaborate and ambitious predictions about the future of humanity that often curiously resemble ideas adumbrated in works of science fiction. This essay aims to vindicate science fiction as a method of philosophical inquiry and affirm its place in the philosophical development of thoughts on technology and the future. Using the work of Stanley Cavell to take art and genre as mediums that ask philosophical questions, I aim to show the way in which fictional narratives can offer unique philosophical insight not typically available. Further, I aim to explicate two features of science fiction as a genre in particular, using a reading of the film Blade Runner and the novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The first feature is the way that science fiction allows one to imaginatively engage with speculation regarding the future, and the second is the way in which science fiction reminds us of how the ordinary aspects of current life may remain even after the radical changes that the future brings.

Introduction

At the time of writing, speculation regarding the future of technology and our relation to it is deeply in vogue. In light of recent technological developments in computation and (especially) artificial intelligence, interest in predicting the future has exploded with fervor on the public stage. Experts make a show of recoiling at the existential risk that AI poses to humanity, and in equal measure do transhumanists evangelize the imminent utopia that awaits us at the transcendence of the constraints imposed by our biology. Such predictions exist not only at the center of our public media, but also the intellectual work performed in the humanities today. There of course has always been thought that explored speculations about technology and its possibilities. Going as far back as Homer’s Iliad can we find the golden maidens that served as attendants to Hephaestus, complete with intelligence, speech, and strength, yet nonetheless automata crafted from divine artifice.¹ However, the work done today has taken on a notably predictive hue. Philosophy of today especially seems to not be interested in simply speculating or imagining, but in betting on the possibilities of technology. Transhumanism makes for a useful primary example of new intellectual thought that aims to be pragmatically predictive in regard to the nature of technology. Writers associated with the label like Nick Bostrom and Ray Kurzweil are concerned not merely with contemplating upon the possibility, but the actual imminent future that lies ahead of us. Bostrom’s explicit concern is with the threat posed by developing technology to the continued existence of the human species, to the point that he founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, which up until its recent shutdown, poured over the potential risks of artificial intelligence, gene therapy, brain implants, and whatever else you can find in an issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact.² Likewise, Kurzweil has been writing since the 90s about the coming convergence between human and machine slowly emerging from the heart of technology’s rapid and overwhelming progression.³ Along with high profile thinkers in the transhumanist milieu, an immense amount of literature has been written that are willing to posit such technological developments as a simple matter of time before their forthcoming invention, such that they can then speculate upon the nature of these yet-to-be-realized states of the world and their philosophical implications.

What I intend to do here is not critique the substance of these predictions on the basis of whether I think they are actually likely to happen, but rather the method by which they investigate and elaborate such predictions. What consistently strikes me with the more fanciful aspects of these is their striking resemblance to the events described in science fiction. The description of Andy Clark’s “Natural Born Cyborgs” begins with a recourse to our media. “From Robocop to the Terminator to Eve 8, no image better captures our deepest fears about technology than the cyborg,”⁴ which starts as the lead into Clark’s philosophical thesis regarding the particular nature of humans in relation to technology and the imminent convergence of the two that he predicts.

Alexander Thomas, in The Politics and Ethics of Transhumanism, notes that “Science fiction once more bolstered the appetite for the spectacular belief in progress[,]” such that authors like Clark and Assimov provided the filament used to weave the techno-futurist utopia hidden behind the veil of time.⁵ Inverting that sequence, the mathematician I.J. Good, noted as one of the early proposers of a technological singularity where ultraintelligent machines surpass human capabilities,⁶ acted as a consultant for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.⁷

Even the actual work of the technologists supposedly responsible for realizing this future are animated by the moving image of science fiction. It’s all but explicitly stated that Elon Musk’s adolescent interest in science fiction motivated his choices in the pursuit of ventures in space exploration, artificial intelligence, and presumably as of this year, governmental collapse.⁸ What can be surmised from all of this is that science fiction runs deep in the blood of both the complating upon and creation of new technology.

Why, then, is it that science fiction only seems to operate in the background of this thought? The influence of these works is strange in that they are not considered contributive to the discourse, but rather inspiration for its later substance. RoboCop is invoked not because RoboCop itself seems to have anything to say about cyborgs, but because Clark’s thesis might resemble some of what’s portrayed in RoboCop, and Musk takes inspiration from science fiction for its abstract technical systems in which he finds inspiration. I remember that once at my university, David Chalmers gave a talk titled “Can AI Extend the Human Mind?” The talk itself was an exploration in the philosophy of mind placed in relation to the newer breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, but I remember during the Q&A section that someone, in giving accolades to the talk, described it as “so awesome, like a mix between philosophy and cyberpunk” or something to that effect. On its face the statement is true, extended mind stuff is like cyberpunk, but on further thought there’s an implication subtextually present that I take umbrage with. In retrospect, I take issue with the implication that cyberpunk is at all unphilosophical, such that it needs its aesthetic grafted onto a traditional inquiry in the philosophy of mind in order to be given actual import. There is an obvious sense in which the original comment is correct—there is a substantial difference between the form of the fictional narrative that sci-fi traditionally is written in and the non-fictional theoretical essay. However, I don’t take that to mean that stories cannot be philosophical or that stories have no philosophical import.⁹ If that were the case, then sci-fi stories most likely wouldn’t be appearing in connection with philosophical thought so often. I might even suggest that the reason for this consistent connection to be that, prior to contemporary thought that takes this predictive fashion, one of the primary mediums in which this inquiry took place was in science fiction.

Philosophers in history themselves are no strangers to science fiction; Deleuze once said that “[a] book of philosophy should be in part a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of science fiction[,]”¹⁰ and Guattari once (unsuccessfully) attempted to float a screenplay he wrote in Hollywood for a sci-fi film named “A Love of UIQ.”¹¹ In writing this I don’t want to suggest that no one has noted the underlying philosophical importance of science fiction. There exists full-fledged academic journals on the critical inquiry into science fiction in which it is made the object of rigorous theory. But it might be easy to see the critical inquiry of science fiction as a completely separate endeavor, disconnected from the philosophical work that gets done in the current paradigm of technology-inclined future prediction.

This essay aims to vindicate science fiction as a method of philosophical inquiry and affirm its place in the philosophical development of thoughts on technology and the future. This necessitates a justification of science fiction (and by extension fiction in general) as an exceptional mode of inquiry that contributes to philosophy in a way that other mediums of communication are scarcely capable of performing. This argument will first consider in depth how the work of Stanley Cavell takes art and genre to ask specific philosophical questions in which answers can be found in the critical reading of a work, and even further, emphasize how fiction is uniquely capable of delivering philosophical insight to a reader. Following this, in science-fiction’s specific case, there will be an exploration of two primary features. The first feature is the capacity of science fiction to offer a speculative account of the future that can be imaginatively engaged with. The second feature is the capacity to reconsider the ordinary preoccupations of day-to-day life by seeing how those preoccupations might be affected by the future. Illustration of these features will be done through a reading of Ridley Scott's 1982 classic film, Blade Runner, along with Phillip K. Dick’s 1964 novel, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.

Cavell and Art as Asking Philosophical Questions

If there’s one proposition that seems to characterize Cavell’s works on film, such as Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage, it’s that genres of film contain within them philosophical questions linked to the conditions in which they arise in the world. Cavell identifies the remarriage comedy, a specific genre of Hollywood talkie occurring in between 1934 and 49, as both an inheritor of old preoccupation, that of the Shakspearean romantic comedy,¹² along with a novel preoccupation of new developments in the feminist struggle for freedom in light of suffrage, depression, war, and other critical developments that occurred throughout the mid twentieth century.¹³ The genre, then, cannot be entirely reduced to common resemblances between works of art, nor an ahistorical selection of works that all revolve around some specific setting or style. Instead, genre contains within it the capacity to act as a historically, culturally, and philosophically situated collection that, to put it simply, has things to say about its situation. The loose idea of genre that Cavell is working with is what he refers to as “genre-as-medium.”¹⁴ For this paradigm, a collection of films must have specific common elements to be considered a member of a genre, and any missing features must be “compensated” in some way by another complementary feature.¹⁵ This operation of accounting for common traits and compensating for missing ones is what allows for genres to be expanded or redefined. As a result, instead of a genre operating on some sort of rigid definition in order to define what works get included versus excluded, the borders of a genre are somewhat elastic, where the operation of compensation can introduce new members and introduce ambiguity for the defining features. This calculus of identifying common features is what gives Cavell license to hypothesize something like the remarriage comedy, a series of films that were not previously connected together and were brought together on account of seemingly all engaging the same questions across a specific time-frame.

With this idea adumbrated, we can investigate in greater detail what it means for a genre to imply philosophical suggestions. Notably, Cavell doesn’t seem as engaged in the more stereotypical practice of qualitative good-or-bad judgment of the film in question, like what one might expect of a typical movie critic. Notwithstanding that the subject happens to be popular movies produced for the general public, his work resembles the traditional theoretical essay much more than a film review on IMDB, and yet it doesn’t seem wrong to say that Cavell is engaging in a form of (deeply philosophical) movie criticism. How, then, does this mode of movie-critical philosophical inquiry work? One might assume that invocation of stories in philosophical works operates more so as rhetorical devices that aid in making the philosophical persuasion persuasive to the reader, rather than contributing to the philosophical proposition itself. Another way of phrasing the question could be: what is the unique insight that is given to philosophy by the film that cannot be otherwise formulated by philosophy on its own? What underlies my suggestion of sci-fi’s philosophical importance is an assertion that there is something to be found in the creative work, a work of fiction or narrative, that cannot be found in typical forms of philosophical inquiry. If there isn’t something in the work of narrative that can’t be found or reproduced in the purely scholastic essay, then there is no need for the work of fiction in philosophy, science or otherwise.

To begin to answer this question of what the work of narrative gives to us, we need to understand what Cavell takes the practice of philosophy to be, so as to get a better understanding of how it relates to his film criticism. “[P]hilosophy, as I understand it, is indeed outrageous, inherently so. It seeks to disquiet the foundations of our lives and to offer us in recompense nothing better than itself–and this on the basis of no expert knowledge, of nothing closed to the ordinary human being[.]”¹⁶

Cavell’s method of philosophy, then, does not aim to offer us novel information ex nihilo, but rather to bring us to new insight through the rearrangement of what we already have available to us. Toril Moi notes that this mode of investigation opens us to film and literature in a philosophical tone of voice, where if philosophy asks for no expert knowledge, but still seeks to unsettle us, then art and literature are perfectly acceptable candidates to carry out the task.¹⁷

In terms of the nature of this unsettling, and how it’s unique to literature in particular, Moi adduces the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Cora Diamond in describing the ‘adventure’ of reading literature that is not available to the theoretical essay. The novel in particular is an invitation to an “authentic adventure of the mind” (p. 133), and this adventure is what Beauvoir takes to be exceptional in its delivery of insight to the reader. When the pieces are correctly placed, the novel absorbs and transports the reader into it such that they experience its content as if it were reality, and even so, the reader never completely loses sight of themselves. They experience the world of the novel as if it were their own world with its full breadth, something unavailable in the traditional theoretical essay, while nevertheless keeping the reader’s sense of self intact. It’s the only space in human experience where “an other truth becomes mine without ceasing to be other. I renounce my own ‘I’ in favor of the speaker; and yet I remain myself” (p. 134). For Beauvoir, this is the distinctive characteristic in which philosophical content lies, that even philosophy is unable to convey.

A more technical elaboration of this experience is offered by Elisabeth Camp, who focuses on the notion of the ‘perspective,’ “an open ended disposition to construct rich, intuitive representations of particular … events” that fundamentally structures how one imaginatively engages with fictional works. What’s critical to the process of trying on a perspective in the way Camp thinks is not simply “imagining that a set of propositions is true,” but rather “structuring one’s thinking in certain ways, so that certain sorts of properties stick out as especially notable and explanatorily central in one’s intuitive thinking.”¹⁸ As such, this activity of engagement is not simply a logical operation akin to assuming a premise for an argument. I do not simply entertain Rick Deckard being a blade runner in a futuristic Los Angeles, as if I were considering a thought experiment proposed in a paper, but go a significant step forward in emotionally and viscerally engaging myself in the story, stakes and emotional reality that Rick Deckard asks of me on the screen. What Camp aims to spell out is not simply what kind of content (like aspects of a story) we consider in imaginative engagement with a fictional work, but how we go about performing the engagement.¹⁹

Further, Camp illustrates the idea of ‘characterizations,’ that are produced by perspectives, which account for how one is able to engage with a piece of fiction in such a way that they are able to generate “alternative emotional and evaluative responses,”²⁰ such that one is able to emphatically engage with it. Characterizations operate to structure the prominence of specific aspects of people, objects and events in a fashion analogous to perceptual Gestalts. One can simply consider any ambiguous image or reversible figure for an example of how our perception emphasizes certain ways of seeing the image such that the alternative form fades into the ground.²¹ Characterizations tend to perform the same operation to a more significant end of not only determining the identification of an object within our perception, but also probably determining the identification of one's emotional and evaluative responses.²² This holds much greater implications for the experience of the reader than the notion of fiction qua propositional content impressed upon a neutral reader. The taking of a new perspective allows us to orient ourselves emotionally in accordance with a presented work, such that we become vulnerable to the exact ‘adventure’ of reading illustrated by Moi.

It’s notable that while we have within our subjective viewpoints an open field of interpretive freedom with how we take and characterize the events of a fictional story, there is also a normative constraint applied to us by the construction of the work by the author.²³ Critically, the proper crafting of a story allows the work of fiction to “demand emotional and evaluative responses” that are different from how one might normally react in terms of their evaluation of a situation outside of the carefully constructed confines of that work.²⁴ It is ultimately the author that decides the points of interest in the story and the characters with whom the reader ought to empathize, such that the reader is evaluatively pulled in the direction of the author’s narrative machinations. The striking (maybe even scary) facet of this imaginative capacity is in how it can affect us after we leave the perspective constructed for us by the author’s narrative.

With all of the groundwork done, Camp then gives us the product of this formulation. “[T]he species of possibility with which a fiction acquaints us is conceptual or cognitive in the sense of being a possible tool for thought. An integral aspect of the project proposed by an author of fiction involves actually, if temporarily, re-structuring our thoughts, by altering what we notice and care about, what explanations we assign, and what emotional and evaluative responses come naturally to us.”²⁵

Especially given the fact that this temporary mental restructuring can impact us after detaching ourselves from the story, the fictional work disquiets our foundations in a way that lasts. This gives us a perfect model for justifying fiction as a method of attending to ourselves in the Cavellian sense of philosophy, such that we are brought to notice illuminating details that were always present, but yet to be given philosophical pertinence.

This also gives us more context on what it means to be a movie critic in a Cavellian voice.²⁶ The critic is given a particular philosophical power not often acknowledged in the general job description, as the attention a critic is supposed to give to a work is exactly the attention that allows one to come to insights that may have been available to us all along, but were not clear enough to be noticed. It’s worth remembering Cavell’s claims in “Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy,” that the job of the critic is not about validation of a truth claim, but rather about the shifting of people’s perspectives and evaluations of an aesthetic object. Calling back to Hume’s invocation of Don Quixote, the vindication that the critic is given isn’t one of external validation, like a wine taster noting metal only to find a key in the wine barrel. Rather, “his vindication comes not from pointing out that it is, or was, in the barrel, but in getting us to taste it there.”²⁷ Connected, then, to the particular experience of reading (whether that be book or film) the critic, in getting us to taste something in the film that we had not previously noticed, shakes our foundations. This seems to be a perfectly acceptable chance for philosophy to exercise its purpose. It’s precisely the critic’s ability (and perhaps even responsibility) to deliver the insights gathered from a careful, attentive viewing, noticing “words that on viewing pass, are meant to pass” and momentarily piercing the veil of the ordinary to see such words “resonate and declare their implication in a network of significance.”²⁸

What all this comes to is that narrative works, with science fiction included, excel at changing our perspective in such a way that we are brought to see things that we didn’t see before. The job of reading a film is an appeal to the experience of it, and the process of critical analysis is equivalent to what Cavell calls “[c]hecking one’s experience” such that one can refer to their experience with authority.²⁹ An experience alone isn’t worthy of trust, and it can’t be said to reflect the world purely on its own merits. To properly educate one’s own experience, one needs to stop, turn oneself from the preoccupations of their ordinary life, and bring oneself to proper attention.³⁰ By paying attention to the way that one’s perspective is changed, the film critic is poised to present an account of a film that is insightful, novel and philosophically significant.

First Feature: Speculative Accounts Open to Imaginative Engagement

While this establishes the way in which generally is capable of rendering available new philosophical insights, there are further characteristics of science fiction as a particular genre that offer avenues of philosophical exploration, even beyond what Cavell grants to the work of narrative art in general. The first feature of science fiction pertains not to the general features of fiction, but rather in how science fiction comes into conversation with the exact questions that the transhumanists, singularists, techno-utopians and techno-doomsdays alike endeavor to ask: “what is our technological future going to look like?” Science fiction is uniquely posed to answer such questions in an experientially rich manner. Specifically in the sense illustrated by Cavell and Camp, science fiction allows one to consider a speculation of the future in all its details, and then inspect the evaluative meaning that is implied in that speculation.

A paradigmatic example of this speculation can be found in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner for portraying a rigorous answer to that question as such. Set in the far away future of 2019,³¹ former cop Rick Deckard is brought back by the LAPD to track down and kill four renegade ‘replicants,’ human-like androids who have returned from outer-space colonies to Earth with the hopes of extending their exceptionally brief lifespans. The world as shown in the film is far from techno-optimistic, showing a Los Angeles pervaded by societal failures that have only metastasized from the current failures of today. Being a seminal work in the cyberpunk subgenre, the film embodies the now ubiquitous aphorism of “low-life and high-tech”³² originally coined by Bruce Sterling. There is a notable overtone of globalization, emphasizing the greater prominence of Asian culture per standard cyberpunk orientalist paranoia. Non-robotic animals are a precious commodity, noted by Deckard’s interaction with Zhora, “Think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?”³³ Police are given exceptional societal power that seems to only be outweighed by the sheer force of wealth held by corporate heads like Eldon Tyrell. What’s then given to us is a speculative account of a future that is far enough away to offer significant changes to the state of society, but not so far away that it fails to directly adduce the world in which we currently live.

Importantly, the descriptive gloss that I’ve given henceforth is not a particularly thorough one, as there are many more facets of the account that the film puts forward. But in addition to not being thorough, it’s also unsatisfying. If the movie simply didn’t exist and these predictions were simply ones I was making on the basis of my own personal speculation, then what you’d be left with would be a sterile, dry commentary with the implication of an interesting story behind it. Contrastingly, Blade Runner doesn’t simply describe the world that it’s positing, it allows one to experience that speculation. Per Camp, the perspective that the film presents asks us not just propositionally, but emotionally and evaluatively to consider Blade Runner. In imaginatively engaging with the proposed future put forward, we receive a prediction and addition, a chance to reflect on the values implied by that prediction. For example, it is transparently obvious that Blade Runner is not a utopian vision of the future. In structuring one’s perspective around the experience of such a vision we get a chance to inspect our own relationship to the utopia that never was, and the ways in which new technologies promising salvation only end in being subsumed into the pernicious aspects of our social organization. In this sense, the Cavellian process of critically engaging with a work of science fiction is not simply an invitation to reflect on any preoccupation, but rather an invitation to reflect on the specific preoccupation of speculating upon the coming events of the future.

Second Feature: The Retention of the Ordinary After the Encroaching Future

Furthermore, the secondary feature that extends beyond the first is not in the speculative capacity of science fiction regarding how things might radically change in the future. Rather, the second notable feature is how sci-fi posits that the utterly familiar may remain unchanged even after the encroaching of a future that unsettles us. What this ends up creating in the work is a conversation between the ordinary as it remains familiar to us and the threat of how the unfamiliar future might threaten it.

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, operating in line with Phillip K. Dick’s common literary interests, is a story about the scientifically fantastical operating in a deeply un-fantastical world. Set on an Earth ravaged by global warming, P. P. Layouts Inc. is a corporation that by day specializes in doll-like miniature reconstructions of the world prior to its overheating, and by night specializes in smuggling of the illegal drug Can-D under the nose of the UN which acts as the primary operative governmental authority. The two activities are fundamentally connected in that Can-D allows users to momentarily experience life inside of one of the layouts as a miniature character, such as the eponymous “Perky Pat” from whom the P. P. in P. P. Layouts is derived. This experience is communal, such that multiple people can inhabit layout and interact with each other, and the identities of the inhabited characters partially override those of the users.³⁴ The fundamental conceit of the story begins when merchant explorer and rival to P. P. Layouts Palmer Eldritch returns from the deep expanse of space with a new drug, Chew-Z, which is far more potent than Can-D, with terrifying, nigh reality-altering side-effects.

What I want to point out with this novel is not the otherworldly or outrageous world that alters the story told in question, but instead how such an otherworldly tapestry gives way to a deeply familiar life; nestled in the hollow of all-encompassing change, flaming planets and the holy embodied in the bionic arm are our unchanged ordinary preoccupations. In chapter three, we’re given a picture of what life looks like on Mars, where in light of the reduced habitability of Earth, colonists are drafted by the UN to live the rest of their lives in derelict hovels for the purpose of settling extraterrestrial land. In such conditions, Can-D is a commodity of near-sacred value in its capacity to whisk one away from their life. Sam Regan and Fran Schein are colonists and by extension are avid users of Can-D. Despite itching for the experience, Fran is reluctant, trepidatiously warning Sam not to do anything while under that they wouldn’t do on Mars, “just because we’re Pat and Walt and not ourselves that doesn’t give us license.”³⁵ It’s a reproach for something that happened in a previous trip that shouldn’t have happened. They are both married, and to other people too. Of course, the two end up taking the drug regardless, the temptation is just too great, and when they awake, Fran is Pat and Sam is Walt (the proverbial Barbie and Ken of the Perky Pat series respectively). To some extent they recognize who they were back on Mars, but not fully, mostly recognizing themselves as regular Earthlings, boyfriend and girlfriend, on the beach during a hot summer’s day. An attentive reader would expect that in a repeat of the unseen encounter that happened between them last time, Sam and Fran might end up doing something they shouldn’t. However, the moment that Walt kisses her, his body is invaded by Norm Schein and Todd Morris, while Pat’s body now holds Mary Regan and Helen Morris in addition to Fran. The entire six-person colony is in this layout, “two figures comprising the essence of six persons.”³⁶

This is, in terms of the imagined science, a tapestry of the soap-operatic drama that ought to result from a drug that makes Dungeons & Dragons look like Microsoft Word and Martian colonization like a much less picturesque version of what Musk seems to be intending to do. It is a sophisticated portrait of life with the interiority of a proposed future. In much the same way as Blade Runner, it is a perfectly thorough speculative account of the future with which one can imaginatively engage. However, that is not the critical feature of this scene.

What happens next is that Sam and Fran, having taken Can-D much sooner than any of the others, come up from their experience while everyone else is still away, appearing completely catatonic while under the influence. With their fun ruined, they take a moment to reflect on the moment they had together, and then they run to a separate compartment of the hovel to have sex.

This is where Dick pulls the rug. It turns out the nature of their affair isn’t placed in ambiguity by the alteration of their identities, where they are exonerated by the masks of Pat and Walt, constructed identities so realistic that they even fool the ones wearing them. There is no perfect day at the beach–instead, their meeting is rushed, imperfect, unsophisticated passion in the confines of their squalid rathole of dwelling. Immature, dirty, and deeply, humanly ordinary. It is not in fact through the new pharmacon that the two actualize their affair. It’s not a new technical frontier in the art of hallucinogens that allows Sam and Fran to act on their desire for each other, but rather a simple distraction that renders the rest of the colony temporarily indisposed so the act can take place. The culmination of the sequence of events is utterly apathetic to the phenomenological magic that Can-D inflicts on its users; you could rewrite the chain of events such that the rest of the colony leaves because they have to get groceries, and the ending scene would be logically unchanged. The only comfort between the two that particularly piques their interest is in each other. Dick ironically remarks: “Can-D had made this possible; they continued to require it. In no way were they free. … And in no way do we want to be.”³⁷

Through this moment, Dick starts by showing one aspect of science fiction, in how much things can change, but ends up coming to a new aspect, how much things stay the same. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch is a conversation between the familiar and the unfamiliar.

At the end of the novel, after the introduction of Chew-Z, Palmer Eldritch has become something of a god-like monistic presence that seemingly pervades within every substance and person, noted as each person encountered in the final pages develops Palmer’s three characteristic “stigmata,” those being a biomechanical arm, a bulging metal jaw, and cybernetic eyes that are disquietingly artificial.³⁸ Many of the other times we see these stigmata develop in others, it means that Palmer Eldritch has temporarily possessed them, for lack of a better description that wouldn't be verbose. Head of P. P. Layouts Leo Bulero, who intends to stop Palmer Eldritch by killing him, is naturally discomforted by the way in which Eldritch seems to have attained some sort of power over him and everyone around him, whether that power be hallucinogenic, extraterrestrial, or mystical. The final lines of the novel are disquieting, with Leo momentarily seeming to forget his own name, ambiguously implying that the stigmata of Eldritch are changing more about him than his appearance.³⁹ However, it’s the lines immediately preceding that are equally important. A consistent trait of Bulero is that he is, in vulgar terms, an extremely horny chauvinist. He objectifies every woman he meets, and in a novel where his life, control over himself and sense of reality are put in jeopardy, the most upset he’s ever been seems to be upon learning that Palmer Eldritch’s daughter is ugly. Appropriate to his character, when the stewardess receives Eldritch’s stigmata, complete with distorted jaw, rather than react with alarm, he is instead disappointed, “cheated. … It was going to be especially hard, he realized, regarding women.”⁴⁰ Even after a severe change to reality, some things fail to change. Here, Dick is engaging each pole of science fiction, those of the ordinary and the futuristic alien that unsettles it, and in the careful ambiguity of the prose, the reader is allowed to take the mantle of author and decide for themselves which pole takes primacy. Bulero is a pig of no particular renown, you’ve probably met this guy before in traffic or the subway or something, and the final question the novel gives us is whether he stays that way.

The same ways in which our ordinary preoccupations can bleed into and remain unchanged by the futuristic fantastical can also be found when going back to Blade Runner. While much has changed in the described world from the one we currently inhabit, there are certain preoccupations that particularly remain. Blade Runner, stylistically and narratively, is in a notable sense a neo-noir. 2019 [sic] LA seems a world where social interactions are mostly mediated by either transactional exchange or deranged back-alley violence, and the only people who aren’t at least a little nasty are the explicit victims of the story. By Francy Russell’s estimation, noir is distinctively defined by our “confidence in human knowledge and knowing [being] tested under the pressure of certain difficult “realities”[.]”⁴¹ These realities typically pertain to post-war disillusionment with the grim aspects of moral failure in society, but extend further to the epistemic anxieties that we have regarding our relationships with, and knowledge of, others. Blade Runner is different, but not especially so, presenting an aesthetically technological picture of what are otherwise orthodox preoccupations of the noir as a genre. Like any other noir, it takes place in a grime-city, there’s a sordid mystery to be uncovered, and everyone is filled with secrets.

Blade Runner in equal measure “concerns the reach and limits of human knowledge and morality.”⁴² This is embodied in Deckard’s job description, as a blade runner is essentially tasked with identifying an object disguised as a person. In the Cavellian sense, the replicant that must be identified and retired literalizes the desire to succumb to “the temptation to treat another human being as an object to be known—figured out and laid bare[.]”⁴³ The replicant is always hiding their true nature, that they are in fact not a real human (and by extension not a real person), but that nature cannot be revealed through any conversation or even-handed acknowledgment. Instead, one must break them, first mentally and second physically.

Figure 1.⁴⁴

In the first scene of the film, Holden, a blade runner, sits down Leon, a renegade replicant posing as human, for interrogation. To do this, Holden employs the Voight-Kampff test, a test designed to provoke emotional responses and closely examine various biological responses, with the film particularly emphasizing the surveillance of eye movement. Because replicants have difficulty reacting ‘normally’ to specific questions, particularly questions that engage with typical human standards of empathy, the close monitoring allows irregularities to be spotted. Holden is utterly and purposefully austere in his responses, oscillating between terse hostility and professional politeness on a dime. When asking a question to Leon, posing a hypothetical question where he flips a tortoise on its back to (possibly sadistically) watch it bake in the sun, Holden somehow both takes an accusatory tone while also assuring Leon that they’re simply innocent questions to gauge emotional responses.⁴⁵ Leon starts to crack under the pressure, not even knowing what a tortoise is, let alone how he’s expected to answer for the test. It’s once Holden asks Leon about his mother (as a replicant, he has no mother to speak of) that Leon decides he’s been made and shoots Holden from under the table.

Of course, the first feature is present in this scene, where a speculative account is given imaginative substance that can be evaluatively engaged. It is hypothetically possible that the Voight-Kampff test could be delivered as a concept without an artistic narrative, say in the descriptive prose of non-fictional writing. The fan-made Blade Runner Wiki describes the Voight-Kampff test in much the same fashion of a historian of science, with a summarized section for the history of the test’s use, operating completely faithfully to the diegetic interiority of the universe. But this would limit the more textured evaluative engagement that one has when they actually see Leon struggling under the confines of the test, the way one must emotionally engage with a world where the Turing test needs to be employed in law enforcement.

What’s notable for the second feature, of how the ordinary is left unaffected by the changes, is that the Voight-Kampff test is not only philosophically reminiscent of the Turing test, but ordinarily reminiscent of a polygraph in a police interrogation. Leon is inhuman, not only because he’s a replicant, but also because he is a suspect to be interrogated, a cache of hidden secrets that all noir protagonists encounter in their quests for truth. Blade Runner reminds us of how we are able to treat people in the context of discovering their possible inhumanity doesn’t significantly differ from the way we treat them when trying to unearth any other lies they might be telling us. The more things change, the more they remain the same.

Figure 2.⁴⁶

Figure 3.⁴⁷

The question complicates once state of the art replicants become fundamentally indistinguishable from humans without the test, and even further, exceptional subjects like Rachael aren’t even aware of their own status as replicants. In Deckard’s own words, “how can it not know what it is?”⁴⁸

In addition to the gap between human and replicant getting smaller with each new generation, the Voight-Kampff test in the first place might not be as reliable as the runners who use it espouse. Eldon Tyrell asks how many questions it usually takes to identify a replicant, to which Deckard replies around twenty to thirty. However, for Rachael, it took more than a hundred to properly identify her.⁴⁹ The viewer, of course, is not subjected to all one hundred questions, and it is left to the imagination what they may have been. There’s a sort of underlying absurdity to the test working in this way, where if a possible replicant seems to answer questions somewhat normally, the proctor in question can simply ask more until finding an anomalous answer worthy of suspicion. The final statement that Deckard presents in the test to Rachael isn’t even a question, it’s simply a confusing statement with the intent of prompting a slip from her.⁵⁰ I find it strikingly significant that we are never once in the film shown a human taking the test, and in equal measure are never shown anyone, human or otherwise, successfully passing it. The question worth asking with all of this in mind is whether a human could actually reliably pass a test like this, especially if a runner can simply decide that they need to ask seventy more questions than usual to assuage their doubt.

As replicants become more human-like and telling one from another requires exceptional methods, one must wonder if the person/nonperson divide made between humans and replicants is tenable. One of the overarching questions that lurks within the film is that in a world where anyone can be a replicant, how do we know that Deckard isn’t one himself? Rachael, perhaps the single most appropriate person in the world to say this, asks Deckard, “you know, that Voight-Kampff test of yours… Did you ever take that test yourself?”⁵¹ We never get an answer.

If he’s a replicant while still acting on behalf of the state as a runner, then he truly becomes a stranger to himself, losing himself to objecthood. In the words of critic Fred Kaplan once the final cut was released, “Deckard is the film’s one person with a conscience. If he’s a replicant, it means that there are no more decent human beings.”⁵² I would go even further in saying that while he’s a runner, if Deckard is a replicant, then there can be no more human beings at all. This is why Deckard must leave with Rachael, refusing to retire her despite her status as replicant. By abandoning the distinction between replicant and human, he opens up the possibility of acknowledgment that’s been barred by the state-sanctioned methods of persecution, and in equal measure is able to acknowledge himself in his personhood regardless of what he is.

More important than the readings into the film being done here, the important thing to note is the fashion in which familiar, ordinary preoccupations center what the film fixates upon. Even decades into a projected future, the dynamics of persecution and the epistemic fears regarding what resides inside other minds remain unchanged. If one were to take the idea of a replicant to at all be analogical, they could just as easily be anyone that a cop has a reason to take down, whether that be a robot, a murder suspect, or an illegal immigrant. Blade Runner unsettles our conceptions of the ordinary with new subjects of interrogation and new methods to go with, but in doing so, it also reasserts the familiar reality of policing that is accessible to us now. The ordinary is teased by the unordinary of the future, but it remains intact, which may not necessarily be a good thing in the present case.

Conclusion

It’s worth mentioning that these sorts of predictions that are made both in science fiction and in the speculative account of tech writers are not predictions made with the intention of scientific rigor. There’s a world of difference between the work done by engineers on LLMs and the proposition of singularity. However, that’s not a bad thing for science fiction, for it is, after all, fictional. There are no constraints of method that must be accounted for, and therefore opens up a world unburdened by the trappings of technical or scientific expertise.

Regarding genre, the features suggested here regarding science fiction are not necessarily exclusive to science fiction. Speculative fiction, as a general umbrella term, carries much of the same ideas of contrasting the ordinary with the unfamiliar, even when leaning further into genres like fantasy. It’s also true that there are science fiction works that do not take place in the future, such that they seemingly elide any responsibility to the notion of prediction. Star Wars famously begins with the phrase “a long time ago.” But even then, this isn’t to say that there is no predictive capacity to these works. Regardless of the diegetic history implied, a lightsaber is still at the very least aesthetically futuristic. Additionally, it’s worth remembering the elasticity of genre, that a member need not have some sort of integral characteristics in order to be given the associated label. Rather than finding definitive features of science fiction that apply nowhere else, the intent is moreso to identify features endemic to science fiction. These features, of opening up a speculative account to imaginative engagement and contrasting the ordinary with the future that threatens to unsettle it, offer ways for philosophy to go forward in how it engages the unfolding future. This mode of investigation is open to imaginative engagement, rife with opportunity for philosophical exploration, if only one lets it.

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