I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Materialism, Idealism, and Cybernetics

279 Materialism, Idealism, and Cybernetics As indicated in “Introjection,” Gotthard Günther is our spokesperson for the philosophical cathexis of the coordinates of science fiction, largely because John W. Campbell commissioned occasional interventions by him for popularist publication in the 1950s in the States. But we’ll begin with his more recognizably or properly published work, which stands behind the U.S. articles addressed to the readership of American science fiction. Under the title I’ve borrowed above, which in The Consciousness of Machines (Das Bewusstsein der Maschinen) is Part 3, Günther lets roll a genealogy of mankind’s new self-relationship via technology. All the dualisms in a row, as old as the great civilizations, were deepened and heightened in scientific thought from the Greeks through Hegel. In Hegel we run up against a decisive complication with the terrible twos. There are, it turns out, two dualisms, one involving the contents of conscious thought, the other concerning the processes of reflection that manipulate those contents . Their interaction or collaboration burdens thought with difficulties that cannot be overcome. Our consciousness doesn’t hold an unequivocally determined, selfidentical objective content of consciousnss—except via differentiation of this content from all other possible contents. This distinction separates the one from the other and thereby establishes dualism of content. To think and to move about among dualistically separated-out conceptions are synonymous acts. The second type of dualism arises because reflection offers us constantly the choice between the monistic and the dualistic form of thought and, as the history of philosophy shows, we are incapable of deciding, once and for all, for the one over the other. It is the fundamental trait of 280 Materialism, Idealism, and Cybernetics reflection that it can step back from its decision-making, wash its hands of it all, and cast it in doubt. For Descartes, famously, this is the metaphysical reality of the subject. We cannot doubt that we doubt. The two dualisms of classical thought are, one, dualism of being and, two, dualism of sense. The latter includes, as complete phenomenon of reflection, its own opposite, namely monism. In Hegel we begin to observe the progressive interplay of both dualities. Thus a third temporally extended duality emerges from the former process, the duality between the first content duality and the second form duality. With The Phenomenology of Spirit we part company with history conceived as the history of human consciousness that culminated in its own reflection. Thanks to cybernetics , left and right Hegelianisms are no longer the only reception of a philosophical intervention that couldn’t have asked for more obdurate resistance . By systematically attempting to transfer processes of consciousness in analogical form to machines, cybernetics takes seriously Hegel’s idea that reflection is an actual or real process. Since Hegel, nothing is wrong anymore, only one-sided—but as such it is true, that is, as a moment in what is true. Hegel however failed to render reflection itself (as living process independent of its fixation on a specific object) the starting point of his thought. This his left and right wings demonstrated . But Hegel’s logic commences with a careful symmetry between form and substance. Being and nothing are empty placeholders for the opposition between subject and object. It’s an interchange without the award or reward of advantage and preferential status. But that means that Hegelian logic starts out with a complete metaphysical equivalency of spirit and matter. Form and substance are logically the same. Hegel attempts to render the process of reflection that we experience as thought independent of the vantage point of an experiencing individual subject, of a finite mind. The effort would require man’s abandonment of the isolation of his private subjectivity, which is where he runs up against the one-sided wall of his reflection. That the epistemological problem of the incommensurability of thinking and acting can act as link between our subjectivity and the world gives a clue as to how to give up our isolation. Doubt about reality of the external world is a constitutional quality of reflection locked up inside subjective consciousness. The skepticism regarding reality is dissolved in action. By reaching toward and grasping things, we convince ourselves that the things outside us exist. That the thing that we technically manipulate, work on, and change should exist only by our acts of consciousness is, practically speaking, meaningless. The will to...