Holy Quarrel by Philip K. Dick
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When Technology Tells Itself Stories

A somewhat opaque and confusing story. It compounds difficult issues of epistemology, how we know what we know, with issue of ontology and metaphysics, what there is to know about. At the centre of the story is a reference to St. Anselm’s 11th century proof of God, which is bizarrely interpreted. Nonetheless, Holy Quarrel has an intriguing theme which is more pressing today than when it was written.

An automated defense system called Genux-B has apparently gone amok and begun a nuclear preemptive strike. But no one knows for sure if it is accurately assessing the data it receives, which are too vast and complex to be comprehended by human beings. This is the epistemological part of the story, and a not uncommon theme in Dick’s work and other sci-fi.*

The Genux-B has also reached some other conclusions about the state of the world, however. It considers that there is a God, and that this God has directed Genux-B’s creation through human agents. It has additionally inferred that the threat detected through its data is not simply military, it is also moral since it originates in a force which is opposed to God, that is, the Devil.

Some tests on Genux-B carried out by engineers confirm that the system is able to distinguish true and false data by comparing new data to what it already ‘knows.’ Further tests show that it is also processing this data logically; specifically it is able to deduce the necessity of its own existence in order to receive any data at all. So the system is functioning on all cylinders, as it were.

Into this puzzle, Dick throws Anselm. Anselm’s proof of God is really a sort of definition. God, he claims, is that of which nothing greater can be thought. Seen one way, the definition is inductive and empirical (or at least experiential); seen another, it is entirely deductive and moral. As a definition, therefore, it can be either ‘true’ or it can be ‘meaningless’, but it can’t be ‘false’.

Effectively the programmer recruited to ‘fix’ Genux-B is simultaneously being asked a technical epistemological and a moral metaphysical question. In a sense he’s being thrown into the midst of Anselm’s definition. Quite understandably, he doesn’t know how to respond to a question roughly equivalent to ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’

But Dick’s interpretation of Anselm is strange. He has an FBI agent imagine, à la Anselm, just such a divine being of infinite capabilities. But at that point Dick inserts a startling twist: “Then, when you’ve imagined Him possessing all those ultimate qualities, you notice that He lacks one quality. A minor one—a quality which every germ and stone and piece of trash by the freeway possesses. Existence. So you say: If He has all those others, He must possess the attribute of being real.” Dick’s character is confounding existence and reality.

The problem is that in scholastic philosophy, existence is not a quality or a property of anything. That is, something may have the property ‘red’ but it can’t have the property ‘existence’. In formal terms: Existence is not a predicate, at least not for Anselm. In less technical terms, a fiction may be real in a number of ways, but none of its content may be in existence.

What Dick seems to have in mind is not Anselm’s proof but this inter-personal reality of fiction. Literature is evidence that people share stories. Many of these stories are about events and people which do not exist and have never existed. Yet these stories, like religious myths, establish a cultural context which shapes our behaviour. They are moral.

And the boundary between fictional and purportedly factual stories, like in science, is difficult if not impossible to determine with certainty. We exist within stories about non-existent things. Existence then is a context not a property.

In Dick’s story, Genux-B has sufficient technological sophistication to tell itself stories. But it apparently doesn’t have the capability to distinguish its stories from what exists. Like many human beings, religious and ideological fundamentalists among them, Genux-B has come to believe its own press. And since it has a story-telling ability superior to that of human beings, its stories cannot be gainsaid. They, like Anselm’s proof, can either be true or meaningless but they can’t be false.

The engineers conclude ‘no meaning’ because the nuclear attack has been cancelled. However, Dick, as the god-like author, tells us that the threat was/is genuine. When technology tells itself stories that it then takes as the way the world is, it will have met the standard of the Turing test. It will be indistinguishable from humanity. At that point we’re all in real trouble.

As for the multiplying gum balls: I don’t have the slightest idea what they mean. Perhaps Dick didn’t either except to indicate the reality of the threat.

*As an indication of Dick's genius, AI enthusiasts have only recently picked up on his insights, usually badly. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

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