** ASSIGNMENT due 3/10 :

Address one of these two questions in at least 2 paragraphs or, alternately, respond to someone else's posting with comments of your own.

--How could you apply an aspect Berkeley's philosophy to a reading of one of these two stories?

--How could you use a detail from one of these two stories to understand one of Berkeley's claims?

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Jack 

            Well, these two stories have both the typical twist at the end (“Small Town” really has nothing going for it except for the twist shock value). I don’t feel that either of these twists (as twists, as dramatic story defining revelations) fits into a Berkeleyan structure very well. I’m interested to see if anyone else succeeds in crushing them into one. But I do think that the relation in “We Can Remember” between Quail’s erased memories (of ideas) and the deepest longings of his spirit posits an idea-spirit interaction which can be usefully read in contrast to Berkeley. Berkeley doesn’t discuss memory too much, but active remembering seems to me to be a kind of imagination, a creation of ideas which are less vivid than those of reality. The Rekal people will claim that the border between memories and experience is merely a gradient of vividness, and that by “deep implantation of recall” they can provide both the vividness of present reality, and the permanence which experience so evidently lacks. They believe they can invalidate Emerson’s dictum that “Life only avails, not the having lived.”

            On some level, Berkeley would probably agree with their leveling of the imagined idea/real, perceived idea divide. Such a position necessarily reduces them all to idea status; it claims the total substitutability of ideas for real experience; the existence of actual matter is not important, what is important is what ideas the human thinks he has perceived. The problem, according to PKD, is that experience is not merely a series of ideas, but that it can have permanent, extra-idea effects on the spirit.

            Quail dreams of Mars. He dreams of exploring, he dreams of experiencing the strange and wonderful Martian geography and fauna. Apparently, the root of this was his trip there as a government agent. Despite having the memories erased, his soul retains the strong impression his trip made on him, in some deep, ineffaceable way. Same thing with the gerbil-aliens; their memory is apparently the root of his deepest desire, deeper even than naturalizing on Mars. Even without the retention of the specific ideas, experience (of ideas, as a series of perceptions) was able leave its fingerprints on his imagination.

            I’ve kind of skirted the exact relationship of this to Berkeley. That’s largely because discrediting the influence of ideas on spirit is not part of his objective, as looking back, I feel like I may have made it appear. I’ve relied on the suggestion that artificial idea implantation (which Berkeley’s God does on some level) is rejected as a whole in “We Can Remember.” In the case of Quail, Rekal fails, because of the primacy of his real memories. Supposedly, Rekal has succeeded with many others. But I think it is intentional on PKD’s part that he doesn’t dwell on their successes, but rather hints at how McClane is finding their job to consist largely of putting in formulaic memories into the minds of boring people. PKD believes that something is not quite right, that memory implantation, now matter how vivid, is somehow insufficiently authentic to explain and satisfy the human psyche.

            I probably could have said all of the above like this: Berkeley believes that ideas are ideas, though some are more vivid than others. PKD believes that ideas are just ideas, and that real experience has an intangible and ineffaceable effect on the spirit that goes beyond just the ideas and perceptions.

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Sara 

      Both PKD'sdescribe an intrinsic power in the mind/soul. In small town it is as if Berkeley's dsitinction between imagination and sense are destroyed. Here the "I " requires no Spirit to produce ideas- rather the imagination is the production of ideas, and the "mind" doesn'y know its own power, instead is just taken along an almost predestined quality that is found in the imagination itself- thus the reality of ideas we see are not, as berkeley said, produced frm the outside- instead he attributes them to the subconscious. Berkeley necessitates a producer, an "agent", to explain origin of ideas. PKD divides the "i" into two parts- the conscious and the sub-c.  "the mind constructs reality, frames it, creates it".

     But this division becomes ore berkelean in the end, when one minds sub-c constructs, frames, and  creates varitions in another. It suggests the power of one mind over another, like the Spirit in Berkeley. But PKD holds onto the unintentional spirit- one that produces almost mechanically, driven by an innate "psychotic" need to produce, to change, to frame.  

Karena

Bishop George Berkeley acknowledges a supremacy of ideas deriving from the Senses over those deriving from the Imagination.  “The ideas of Sense are more strong, lively, and distinct than those of the Imagination; they have likewise a steadiness, order, and coherence, and are not excited at random . . .” (Berkeley, 9).  In this passage, “excited” is a key word.  Though some type of “excitement” must occur in order for there to be ideas of Sense as well as ideas of Imagination, Berkeley argues that those of Sense leave a deeper impact.  Likewise “coherent,” there seems to be a sense (rationale) inscribed in the Senses.  Like the passing of the baton, an idea doesn’t move without its due cause.  For Berkeley, the Sense (v. Imagination) provides a deeper nudge.

In fact, this is precisely what Descartes argues in his “Sixth Meditation”:

“And since the ideas perceived by the senses were much more vivid and emphatic, and in their own way more distinct, than any of my ideas that I deliberately and knowingly formed by myself in my meditations, or that I found engraved upon my memory, it seemed impossible that they should proceed from myself” (Descartes, 53).

Sensations prevail ‘self-formed’ thought for Descartes, as they are more “vivid” and “emphatic” in nature.  In this regard, we have Berkeley and Descartes on the same boat, but I’ve found a moment in “We Can Remember” in which it seems that Philip K. Dick sees it differently.

Senses, which are inextricably bound in corporeality, isn’t privileged here as Berkeley might have us argue.  While Quail is communicating in and out of his thoughts with the cops, PKD doesn’t let Quail move as an assassin until he actively remembers that he was trained at all.  “His memory had been brought back almost entirely, now.  And he fully understood the officer’s tension.  ‘On Mars,’ Quail said hoarsely, ‘I killed a man.  After getting past fifteen bodyguards.  Some armed with sneaky-pete guns, the way you are.’  He had been trained, by Interplan, over a five year period to be an assassin.  A professional killer.  He knew ways to take out armed adversaries . . . such as these two officers; and the one with the ear-receiver knew it, too” (Dick, 169).  Little by little, Quail considers his status as if in some process of discovery.  In this case, Quail doesn’t even think about his training until he recognizes a nervousness in the first cop.  At this, I first wondered, “Shouldn’t his training have been physically intuitive?”  Quail’s body has been conditioned to respond to peril a certain way.  Does he need to consciously remember that he’s been formally trained for five years as an assassin in order to finally respond as an assassin would?  In this way, PKD doesn’t seem to identify a distinction between the body and mind.  The implications of one cannot exist without the other.  But that doesn’t seem very practical -- for me, for Descartes, and even for Berkeley.

My immediate confusion with Quail’s ‘stumbled-upon’-type revelation might have something to do with my association of his condition with Jason Bourne of The Bourne Identity.  In one particular moment in the film, Bourne is trying to figure why he wields such a pedantic identification impulse and doesn’t yet know who he is.

Jason Bourne: Who has a safety deposit box full of... money and six passports and a gun? Who has a bank account number in their hip? I come in here, and the first thing I'm doing is I'm catching the sightlines and looking for an exit.

Marie: I see the exit sign, too, I'm not worried. I mean, you were shot. People do all kinds of weird and amazing stuff when they are scared.

Jason Bourne: I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself. I know the best place to look for a gun is the cab of the gray truck outside, and at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?

Bourne can do all these things, while he understands them to be meticulous, but the reason is altogether stifled by an unconsciousness.  This is an example of a body functioning almost in spite of the brain (like Spock!).  While PKD’s Quail doesn’t necessarily fail to physically operate without consciousness, his physical skills are only revealed alongside a conscious brain activity.  Of course, it isn’t until Quail realizes his skills that he even has to defend himself from the two cops.

My argument at this point is that Berkeley might rewrite this story to have Quail immediately respond to a physical attack without knowing, like Bourne, where those skills came from.  The Sense would more distinctly precede the Imagination.

PKD and Berkeley

KJA

The PKD story (We Can Remember It For You) has more in common with Descartes's deceiving demon than it does Berkeley's Principles with whom it shares a much less obvious conception of what it means to conceive and what is, or WHEN is memory. I'll skirt the Descartes discussion and focus on Berkeley and PKD.
    Memory, for Douglas Quail, is a discontinuous sequence that is rarely if ever found intact, but which should be. It is should be capable of being accessed in toto. The belief is founded on an idea of a time-abiding world out there all around. Time trembles with objects and these we inherit by remembrance. Quail would like to have a section of time inserted into and over another past time he has actually lived through- his life. Once inserted and remembered he attempts to assure himself that he won't remember that in the past he'd never lived through the  memory of Mars.
    Memory for Berkeley may as well be in all cases conceived as existing solely in itself without reference to any absurd reality in itself existing apart from memory. All memory  is convenient agreement between fellows binding them socially to the necessary evil that is language. Language that trades in ready-to-hand abstractions.
    For any given person (compound abstraction), memory in the Principles is selective, additive, manipulative, and disinherited. If as Borges posits conceiving and experiencing (or vice versa) leaves in Berkeley for the possibility of a perfect concurrence of ideas between the two than by Berkeley's own logic they are identical phenomena of the Mind. It invalidates the idea of Time itself, or what it represents, which makes memory as a mode of thinking a contradiction. If there's no time there is no memory and perhaps it goes the other way as well.
    Quail's problem is that unlike for Berkeley there is the possibility of upending all illusions and this possibility resides paradoxically in the implantation of a manufactured illusion.