HERE'S AN IDEA

HERE’S AN IDEA

I was reading the last recorded interview with Philip K Dick, the science fiction writer, and he was talking about an idea of his and how he owned that idea and if anyone else used that idea they’d have to ask his permission and if they didn’t then there would be attorneys to deal with. I think he was just goofing around and not being really serious, but I thought it worth thinking about.

The idea in question was one he floated in a very early story of his and then in the book that led to the film ‘Bladerunner’. The idea was that an android could exist and not know it was an android, think it was a human being. It is an idea that surfaces in many science fiction novels and in several films, too. But Philip K Dick claims it for his own and says he was the first to come up with that idea, citing the early date of his story as proof. Most of his other ideas he says are a rehash of ideas that were already out there.

I don’t know much about Philip K Dick but reading the last recorded interviews I did find out that he had a serious interest and more than a passing familiarity with philosophy and he made particular reference to Descartes somewhere which I remember being quite impressed with when I read it because Descartes was something I studied when I was a boy at university. And then I got to thinking, putting the pieces of my thinking together.

Descartes, in his bold attempt to arrive at some certainty of knowledge, asked the question (near the end of his quest) how do we know that our thoughts are our thoughts, how do we know that we are not a character in the dream or the mind of an all powerful all knowing being - God? In other words, how do we know that we are actually living human beings. It is a big moment in Descartes’ investigations and one that if ignored could bring his whole ‘I think, therefore I am’ conclusion tumbling down like a house of cards, and in a way Descartes seriously dodges the question by leaning on a ‘truth’ that for him, in the time and place and culture that he lived, was incontrovertible: God is good and not a deceiving God, so we cannot be deceived in thinking we are what we are.

Setting aside the weakness this brings to Descartes’ whole argument (more than a weakness, for it makes nonsense of his ‘Cogito ergo sum’) is this not the very same question that Philip K Dick’s android is about when it believes it is what it seems to be, namely human? At the very least, it is a version of the same idea, an asking of the same question: how do I know that I am really what I think I am?

So, it turns out that the idea is not in any real sense original, and nor is it something that can be said to be owned by any one person. It is an old idea in new clothes. In Dick’s own words, it is a ‘rehash’. And nothing wrong with that, I think, but it does throw again this whole ownership of ideas thing into question, and makes of it an absurdity, and leaves me once again thinking that ideas, because of their cultural roots, cannot be in any reasonable sense owned, that they inevitably owe something to something else. It also begs the question of what originality is precisely when we are talking ideas. What would an original idea look like if it was stripped of the novel way it was expressed, the particular voice of the writer for example, the particular words used? Would we discover that in fact very few ideas can be said to be in any meaningful way original?

And that is probably one reason why copyright law protects the particular expression of an idea (the particular words used and the specific order given to those words) but not the idea itself – it makes no sense to even think that an idea can be something that can be protected in the way that your real estate (property) can be protected. Thomas Jefferson, who was one of the first to look at Intellectual Property and the need for laws to govern this area of creativity, understood the difference. IP law was instituted to help remunerate the ‘innovators’ for the work that they do and by such fairness to encourage such innovation, but it was never intended that IP law would make ideas things that could not pass from one person to another freely. To think that it could or should do that is patently absurd and certainly not desirable if you have any understanding of what ideas are and how everything we say do and think is influenced by ideas that are not our own. Plagiarism, it seems to me, is to do with infringing this ‘copyright law’ and using another writer’s words and passing those words off as one’s own. Using someone else’s ideas is not the same and the precedents for doing this are many, from such giants as Chaucer and Shakespeare to Nabakov and T S Eliot, and everything in between and after and before.

People who hold no original thought (and actually I might mean everyone when I say that!) use the word 'plagiarism' with no real understanding of what that entails. Their ideas are not only second hand (as are all ideas?) and shallow, but their thinking is also second rate. For a most sensible view on the subject you could do a lot worse than read Malcolm Gladwell's essay 'Something Borrowed' or Jonathan Lethem's essay (online somewhere) 'The Ecstasy of Influence'. Both of these essays do justice to what plagiarism is and is not. But then finding them and reading them requires more effort than not, so easier to think you know what plagiarism is, relying on that second rate thinking we all do. It's your choice. Go search them out- read them and think about what they say - you might just have your mind opened.