I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Homunculus and Robot

322 Homunculus and Robot In differentiating between the two creations and their respective scientific traditions in “Homunculus and Robot” (“Homonkulus und Roboter”), Gotthard Günther follows the history of technological no-way know-how not in terms of the new and improved—of immediacy—but through all the mediations adding up not to machine history but to endopsychic allegory. The creation of the homunculus inside a retort or test tube abbreviates the history of the world and mankind by withdrawing time and space from the whole process (though not completely, of course, since the test tube as last retort also takes up its share of space and time). To this extent, these are only the reduced conditions of the experiment. All the rest, the material stages of human development and so on, can be found in place and in process if the experiment is to succeed. But the homunculus is a utopian idea or fictional figure because it proves impossible to recapitulate on fastforward the history of the world all the while leaving out the essential part. One cannot begin at the existential “beginning” because it is metaphysical not physical. The mechanical brain by contrast rests on principles set against those of the metaphysical schema in which the idea of the homunculus is cooked up. The test-tube idea presupposes that life and consciousness are the historical results of being. Physical categories are primary, psychic categories are secondary—and the categories of signification follow only in last and (ontologically) least place. Cybernetically reformulated, we must consider that the classical scientific tradition views pure matter in its originary state as containing no “information.” The originary state is materially allegedly Homunculus and Robot 323 chaos, which represents in itself no signifying links—no “information” in other words. But information is thus the existential form of mind. “If the classical technologist or engineer proceeds then from chaos, he means thereby that in every construction one can only begin ontologically with the physical system of the categories and that it is the scientific task of the constructor or chemist to derive after the fact the lesser categories of the psychic and the logical from the physical foundations of existence both theoretically and practically (chemically)” (196). That the originary state of the world is to be imagined as chaotic is a dogmatic assumption based on a metaphysical concept (“chaos”), which plays its role only in classical traditions of the Western world because classical metaphysics or ontology is fundamentally monistic: only one logicalmetaphysical foundation of the world is admitted, the being of being. In this case, then, the starter position as manifestation of the one cannot contain any “information,” something secondary to the primordial in rank. The world as divine creation (out of chaos) is another way of saying that all information was in the beginning otherworldly and a divine consciousness exclusive not residing in the world itself. All relations of signification transcend reality as divine spirit. It is the task of history to integrate these relations within reality and to give them after the fact the same reality that matter had from the start. The cybernetic view parts company with the classical tradition. What parts as company comes back as crowd: all physical existence contains from the start implicit “information” that can be explicated. The transclassical technologist operates within a triad: technically oriented thought possesses two material dimensions. There is the classical material and then there is the material of the second reality component named “information.” As third party to the dimensions duo, transclassical technology introduces a second system of laws by modulating the mode of effectiveness of classical laws in the course of playing them off against transclassical lawfulness. The alchemical creator of the homunculus in seeking to imitate himself via magical laws that ran their course could only stand by passively watching and waiting for the results. For the cybernetical technologist the creation of a robot brain unfolds as the progressive modulation of classical nonre flexive lawfulness of being through the transclassical lawfulness of reflection of his own ego, which is set up on the former as overdetermination. The resulting mechanical consciousness is therefore an immediate result of human labor—which is not the case with the homunculus. In the test tube 324 Homunculus and Robot nature plays with itself. “In the creation of the electronic brain, however, man gives away his own reflection...