Erik Davis/Do Androids Dream... Course
10 Oct 2026 - 11 Oct 2026
- aliases: DADoES
- A Weirdosphere course Welcome to Weirdosphere taught by Erik Davis
Why am I here, what do I hope to get out of it
- Relates to personhood and the more general AI debates going on. Yes that's the ticket. Everyone is being forced to answer questions about whether AIs are conscious, whether they are hostile, or fake, and what it means for humanity and or basic being. None of the deep thinkers really have answers, and it is sure plausible that you will get better handles on the questions by reading Dick than various AI gurus, promoters, and alarmists.
Earlier
- Omniorthogonal: Do Androids Dream of Electric Justice?
- This is from 2009, since then the right has become more explicitly anti-empathy, eg with Gad Saad's book aimed at it.
L1
- themes: animals, androids
- humans with android like qualities (schizoid, detached, un-empathetic)
- near-others.
- empathy, mercerism
- Why are we here? Good question, its not academic
- Dick is just so relevant for toda
- Dick as prophet,. Whether it was supernatural or juect being tuned into what was going on "Just below the surface".
- reading closely, interacting with the text (yep)
- riff on larger crisis: crisis of the subject
- Deckard ≡ Descartes. Meditations, 1642
- hyperbolic doubt
- reality as created by some evil demon. paranoid.
- is this specifically an accurate summary of early descartes, answer briefly Ask Claude
- Two issues with the summary:
- Date is wrong.
- The Meditations was published in 1641, not 1642.
- "Paranoid" mischaracterizes the argument.
- The evil demon thought experiment is not meant to suggest the demon's actual existence, but rather to test whether any belief can withstand such radical doubt.
- It is a deliberate methodological tool, not an expression of paranoia.
- By imagining total deception, Descartes aims to strip away all uncertain knowledge until he reaches something indubitable — the cogito.
- The "reality created by an evil demon" framing is broadly accurate, but the purpose is epistemic method, not paranoia.
- I haven't read descartes so I wonder how accurate this is.
- Ask Claude
- There are two things to address here: the date, and the substance of the equivalence.
The Date: 1641, not 1642
- The date cited is slightly off.
- The Meditations on First Philosophy was first published in Latin in 1641.
- The year 1642 is not wrong in a trivial sense though —
- the second edition was published in 1642, and includes a response by the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin.
- So "1642" refers to the second edition, not the first publication.
The Deckard ≡ Descartes Connection: How Accurate Is It?
- The connection is well-established and intentional, operating on multiple levels:
- 1. The Name
- Descartes' most famous quote is repeated by one of the replicants in Blade Runner: "I think, therefore I am." And if that isn't enough proof of the connection, consider the names: Descartes and Deckard.
- 2. The Cogito in the Film
- Deckard's name points to the idea of experience, as it sounds like the Anglicized surname of René Descartes, whose Meditations on First Philosophy lays experience at the foundation of all knowledge. Pris confirms this connection when she says, "I think, Sebastian, therefore I am," citing the famous first step in Descartes' epistemological journey.
- 3. Descartes Actually Anticipated the Replicant Problem
- Philosopher Andrew Norris points out that Descartes suspected there might someday be a need for a test of whether something was human or machine. "If there were machines bearing images of our bodies, and capable of imitating our actions as far as it is morally possible, there would still remain two most certain tests whereby to know that they were not therefore really men," Descartes wrote.
- The Voight-Kampff test in Blade Runner is essentially a cinematic version of this.
- 4. Doubt as the Central Theme
- Whereas doubt is the first step towards knowing reality in Descartes' Meditations, in Blade Runner doubt for Replicants is the first step to knowing that they are not real. Consciousness does not bring one to fulfillment but to a greater sense of emptiness and horror — the Replicant's memories are fabricated; his life is programmed by man rather than by God (who is the Ultimate Reality for Descartes).
- 5. The Irony of the Equivalence The Descartes of the Meditations uses doubt to arrive at certainty of his own existence (cogito ergo sum).
- The Meditations is characterized by Descartes's use of methodic doubt — a systematic procedure of rejecting as though false all types of belief in which one has ever been, or could ever be, deceived.
- Deckard's arc inverts this: his doubt leads not to certainty but to the possibility that he himself may not be human, undermining the very cogito the film references.
- Summary: The equivalence is accurate and intentional — Philip K. Dick embedded it in the source novel, and Ridley Scott recognized it. The one factual error in the claim is the date: it should be 1641, not 1642 (unless specifically referring to the second edition).
- Descartes dualist solution: rex extensia, and the mind. Pineal gland. Not that rationalist, he was a rosicrucian and otherways weird.
- Everybody hates Descartes, scientists and new age people equally.
- Self-constitution with language. An abyss inside of us without coherent contact. We never fully grasp ourselves.
- Zizek mention. What is it that moves us most about the androids? They have been implated with stories about themselves that are totally false. The moment when they realize that they are the most human.
- Subject of enunciation. Mediation. Being outside the story, being in a non-linguistic state of cognition.
- Movie vs book
- Book portrays androids somewhat more negatively, more alien
- Gods as first AIs. "near others" seems to be a term of art. Mentions Sherlock Holmes, my favorite example of living fictions. Part of our imaginative capabilites. Personhood projected on AI. Stuck in half-projected, half-critical state (he is articulating exactly what I've been thinking).
- "The paranoid SF story is in the whole game from the get-go". (44:00 or so)
- Making fun of nerds, not that they don't deserve it.
- Wrestling with the boundaries of the human
L2
- empathy vs compassion
- mentioned some anti-empathy books but not Gaad Saad.
- "emerging robot kin"
- Focusing on animals
- ethics vs morality
- morality is like a code
- ethics is subtler, "what you do in a situation where the moral certainties are unavailable or conflicting". More situational, which can mean more dodgy
- Animals as another near-human non-human
- Gray Walter! tortoises
- Intelligence can be found in non-humans and may be moving away from humans
- quantum computing? Should have talked about gen-ai-writing-detection, em-dashes etc
- Buber mention (big in the 60s)
Empathy is an unstable, technologized boundary in DADoES that doesn't fall along the good/bad, human/nonhuman polarity.
- >In DADoES, empathy is an unstable, slippery benchmark that leads to a blurring of the predator/prey relationship, and Dick runs us down a number of inversions, reversals, ironies with regard to its integrity as a concept.
L3
- ontological shifts
- labor. androids as donkey-engines
- entropy and the Tomb World.
- cybernetics, entropy and information. Technology is always breaking down. Language as a technical problem and PKD very sensitive to it.
- "entropy is a huge problem" well not really? Would be interesting to see a history of it
- Ask Claude
- Here's a history of entropy — and why it's actually a much richer concept than "entropy = bad disorder":
A History of Entropy
1. The Practical Origin: Steam Engines (Early 1800s)
- Entropy didn't start as philosophy — it started as an engineering problem.
- The Industrial Revolution and development of steam engines was a period of reflection on the physical properties of matter, energy, heat, work, and temperature.
- Early engines were famously terrible:
- early heat-powered engines like Thomas Savery's (1698), the Newcomen engine (1712), and Cugnot's steam tricycle (1769) converted only about 0.5% of input energy into useful work output. Over the next two centuries, physicists investigated this puzzle of lost energy — the result was the concept of entropy.
- The first conceptual seed came from Lazare Carnot (1803), who argued that in any machine, accelerations and shocks of moving parts represent losses of useful work — and that perpetual motion was therefore impossible. This was the first rudimentary statement of what would become the Second Law.
2. Clausius Names It (1865)
- In 1865, Rudolf Clausius gave irreversible heat loss a name: Entropy. He was building on the work of Carnot, who laid the foundations of thermodynamics while looking to improve the performance of steam engines.
- Clausius introduced the concept of entropy in 1865, coining the word from the Greek *τροπή (tropē)*, meaning transformation, turning, change.
- He deliberately chose the word to mirror "energy" — in his words: "I have deliberately chosen the word entropy to be as similar as possible to the word energy: the two quantities are so closely related in physical significance that a certain similarity in their names appears to be appropriate."
- His key formulation: the entropy of an isolated system never decreases, and in any real (irreversible) process, it strictly increases.
- Clausius's 1865 paper ends with: "The energy of the universe is constant. The entropy of the universe tends to a maximum."
3. Boltzmann's Statistical Revolution (1877)
- Clausius's entropy was macroscopic and abstract. Ludwig Boltzmann gave it a microscopic, probabilistic meaning.
- Boltzmann developed the statistical explanation of the second law of thermodynamics. In 1877 he provided the Boltzmann definition of entropy: S = k·ln(Ω), where Ω is the number of microstates consistent with a given macrostate.
- Boltzmann saw entropy as a measure of statistical "mixed-up-ness." This was a profound reframing: entropy isn't some mysterious dissipating substance — it's just a count of how many ways a system can be arranged. High entropy = many possible arrangements. Low entropy = few. Systems evolve toward high entropy simply because there are vastly more high-entropy states. No mysterious force required.
- The dynamical approach of Boltzmann, together with the elegant theory of statistical ensembles at equilibrium proposed by Josiah Willard Gibbs, led to the Boltzmann–Gibbs theory of statistical mechanics, one of the most successful theoretical frameworks in physics.
4. Von Neumann Extends to Quantum (Late 1920s)
- In the late 1920s, John von Neumann wanted to quantify the entropy of a quantum system in a mixed state and introduced his own definition. The von Neumann entropy is related to the number of states of a quantum system.
- This generalized Boltzmann's classical framework into quantum mechanics.
5. Shannon's Information Entropy (1948) — and a Famous Naming Story
- In 1948, Claude Shannon set out to mathematically quantify the statistical nature of "lost information" in phone-line signals. To do this, Shannon developed the very general concept of information entropy, published in his A Mathematical Theory of Communication.
- Shannon reportedly wasn't initially aware of the deep connection to thermodynamics. When he visited John von Neumann and asked what to call his measure of uncertainty, von Neumann famously replied (as Shannon later recounted):
"You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage."
- Shannon entropy (H = −Σ p·log p) turns out to be mathematically identical in form to Boltzmann–Gibbs entropy — differing only in the presence of the Boltzmann constant k. This was not a coincidence.
6. Connecting Information and Physics: Maxwell's Demon & Landauer (1929–1982)
- The conceptual bridge was cemented by the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment and Landauer's Principle.
- Maxwell imagined a demon sorting fast and slow molecules, seemingly decreasing entropy without doing work — violating the Second Law. The resolution: **Szilard (1929) showed that the act of measuring the molecules' states involves acquiring information, which is physical. Landauer (1961)* then proved that erasing* one bit of information necessarily dissipates at least kT·ln2 of heat — tying information directly to thermodynamic cost.
- Thermodynamic entropy relates to the ignorance of microscopic details in macroscopic observations, while information entropy captures epistemic uncertainty, but they converge in scenarios like Maxwell's demon, where acquiring information about a system can seemingly decrease entropy, only to be offset by the thermodynamic cost of information erasure.
7. The "Disorder" Misconception
- One thing worth addressing directly:
- entropy is most commonly defined as "disorder," although it is not a good analogy since "order" is a subjective human concept, and "disorder" cannot always be obtained from entropy.
- The disorder framing is a pedagogical shortcut that has caused enormous confusion. Entropy is better understood as the number of microstates compatible with a macrostate (Boltzmann) or uncertainty in a probability distribution (Shannon) — both precise and measurable.
The Takeaway
- The history of entropy is really a history of the same mathematical structure being discovered independently in heat engines, statistical mechanics, quantum mechanics, and communications — each time revealing that it was measuring something deep about uncertainty and information. Far from being a "huge problem," entropy is arguably the most unifying concept across physics, information theory, biology, and computation. The "problem" framing usually comes from the colloquial disorder metaphor — which was never quite right to begin with.
- Maxwell's demon – Pynchon connection. Cybernetics, a potted history.
- Binswanger – existential psychoanalysis – Ellen West – origin of Tomb World. Body as a trap.
- Ask Claude
- Here is a structured synthesis of Binswanger's existential psychoanalysis, the case of Ellen West, the origin of the "Tomb World," and the body-as-trap theme:
Binswanger & Existential Psychoanalysis: Ellen West and the Tomb World
1. Ludwig Binswanger: Background & Method
- Binswanger is considered the first physician to combine psychotherapy with existential and phenomenological ideas.
- He was influenced by existential philosophy — particularly after World War I — through the works of Martin Heidegger, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Buber, eventually evolving his own distinctive brand of existential-phenomenological psychology.
- His method, Daseinsanalyse, departed sharply from Freud.
- Binswanger critiqued traditional psychoanalysis for its reductionist view of the psyche as isolated from the broader ontological structures of being, arguing instead for an understanding of mental illness as a fundamental disorder of the patient's "world-design" (Weltentwurf).
- Binswanger saw Husserl's concept of the lifeworld as a key to understanding the subjective experiences of his patients, considering that "in the mental diseases we face modifications of the fundamental structure and of the structural links of being-in-the-world."
2. The Case of Ellen West: Overview
- In 1944–45, Ludwig Binswanger published The Case of Ellen West, the founding case of existential analysis and one of the most famous cases in modern psychiatry.
- Ellen West (1897–1921) was the pseudonym of a patient of the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. Having been in treatment for a severe eating disorder with depressions since 1910, she was admitted to Binswanger's sanatorium in Kreuzlingen in 1921.
- She underwent two periods of psychoanalysis, was treated as an inpatient in a psychiatric hospital by Binswanger, and was consulted upon by Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler.
- Multiple psychiatric diagnoses emerged, including hysteria, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia.
- To construct his analysis, Binswanger consulted the patient's clinical notes as well as her private journal, poems and letters to grasp the "totality of her existence."
- This made the case unusual:
- the reason this sad story is one of the more famous case-studies is not so much the problem — anorexia is not too uncommon — but the ability that Ellen West had to express her perspective on her own problem, and the fact that her psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger, chose to truly listen to her.
3. The Three Worlds (Umwelt / Mitwelt / Eigenwelt)
- Binswanger began a discussion of her Eigenwelt — the "own world" of her subjective, purely personal experience — compared with her Mitwelt — the "with world" of interpersonal relationships — and her Umwelt — the "surrounding world" of natural objects, including our bodies, existing independently of us.
- He held that Ellen West's mode of existence was marked by a withdrawal during childhood into her Eigenwelt from her Umwelt and her Mitwelt.
- In clinical terms:
- in Ellen West's case, Binswanger described an excessive immersion in the Eigenwelt — obsessed with bodily thinness and past regrets — coupled with withdrawal from the Umwelt and Mitwelt.
4. The Origin of the Tomb World
- At the heart of Binswanger's analysis is a fundamental split in Ellen West's existential structure between two opposing experiential "worlds":
- Ellen, somewhere in her childhood, split her life into two opposing camps. On the one hand there is the "tomb world," which includes her physical and social existence. Her body, with its low needs, distracts her from her purposes. It gets older every day. Her society is bourgeois and corrupt. The people around her seem oblivious to all the evil and all the suffering. In the tomb world, everything is degenerate and degenerating, everything is being pulled down, into the grave, into a hole.
- On the other hand there is the "ethereal world," the world of the soul, pure and clean, a world where what needs to be done is done, where acts are effortless because unencumbered by the weight of matter. In the ethereal world, we can be free and fly.
- Binswanger's analysis emphasizes existential critiques of traditional psychiatric approaches, examining the conflict between the "tomb-world" and "ethereal world" as central to Ellen's identity struggles.
- In the 1940s, Binswanger described many idiosyncratic "worlds" of his patients, such as Ellen West. The "swamp world," the "tomb world," and the "aetherial world" seem to have been good phenomenological
- descriptions of her actual experience.
5. The Body as Trap
- This is the philosophical core of the case. Ellen West's relationship to her own body was not merely symptomatic — it was ontological:
- She experienced her physical form as a grotesque prison confining her ethereal aspirations. West expressed a visceral horror of corporeality, viewing her body as fleshy, burdensome, and emblematic of decay, while yearning for transcendence into a pure, weightless existence akin to an angel's flight.
- In her late twenties, West's body image distortions and dietary obsessions had escalated into a rigid framework of existential rebellion, where food refusal symbolized resistance to the "tomb world" of material existence and a desperate bid to halt time's inexorable march toward dullness and ugliness.
- Ellen West tried to ignore the "tomb world." She wanted to fly above the material and the mundane into the ethereal, into the good and the right and the pure. And, in one small domain, she came close to succeeding: she managed to reduce her body to a skeleton.
- Binswanger's phenomenological reading frames this as a structural problem of being, not just a psychiatric symptom:
- Binswanger's phenomenological approach emphasizes the relationship between the body and existential identity, rejecting Cartesian dualism. Binswanger is especially critical of the Cartesian mind/body separation, arguing that science must not view "the organism only as a natural object" but must keep in mind that the concept of organism results from a reductive abstraction.
6. Authenticity, Suicide, and the Final Escape
- Binswanger believed that Ellen alternated between inhabiting the above-ground (a fantasy realm) and the below-ground (a death realm), and therefore, she was living inauthentically.
- Ultimately, she showed her one moment of authentic existence when, paradoxically, she ended her physical existence. For when she died of her own volition, she broke the circle of existence that imprisoned her for the first (and last) time.
- Writing more than 20 years after her death, Binswanger assures us no
- Dick and depression. Moods make the world. Esthetic of depression – Deckert's wife.
- WWII changed ecerything. Cybernetics as about control. DIck as playing games with the dual senses of entropy . He gestures towards hope and escaping the pull of entropy
- whirlpools, boundaries, homeostasis (autopoeisis, but neither PKD/ED doesn't use the term)
- what is good about entropy? It reveals the truth (in disease/malfunction)
- regression, degenerating, dust
- Buster Friendly & the super-posters of the internet – and how it depresses us.
- £
- Exekiel dry bones vision
Q&A 1
- Baret Baumgart (writer, CA weirdo)
- Descartes animals mere machines
- be brief Ask Claude
- Descartes held that non-human animals are automata whose behaviour can be explained by bodily mechanism rather than by reason or an immaterial soul.
- This formed part of his wider mind-body dualism, in which humans alone possess minds capable of thought and language.
- Key claims of the doctrine:
- Animals are machines/automata; they do not think, have no language, no self-consciousness, no consciousness, and are totally without feeling.
- Only humans possess immortal, immaterial souls. Animals were explained entirely in terms of bodily structure and the movement of animal spirits.
- Dualism thus became coupled with animal automatism — the position that non-human animals are akin to mechanistic devices like clocks.
- Nuance:
- No one disputes that Descartes held animals to be machines/automata that do not think, but some commentators argue he was not necessarily committed to the view that animals are totally without feeling.
- Ethical fallout:
- The "beast-machine" theory has been opposed since its formation and has been entirely disproven by science, yet the idea that non-human animals are outside the sphere of moral consideration remains entrenched.
The book
- Penfield mood engine, ha. Clearly satirical
- The animal stuff – just hits different since we are now cat parents
We produced what the colonists waanted,” Eldon Rosen said. “We followed the time-honored principle underlying every commercial venture. If our firm hadn’t made these progressively more human types, other firms in the field would have.
A mammoth corporation like this—it embodies too much experience. It possesses in fact a sort of group mind. And Eldon and Rachael Rosen consisted as spokesmen for that corporate entity. His mistake, evidently, had been in viewing them as individuals. It was a mistake he would not make again.
- kipple ≡ entropy more or less,