Philosophy and The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy

Transcription

1 Philosophy and The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy

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3 Philosophy and The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy Edited by Nicholas Joll University of Hertfordshire, UK

4 Selection and editorial matter Nicholas Joll 2012 Chapters their individual authors 2012 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2012 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Philosophy and The hitchhiker s guide to the galaxy / edited by Nicholas Joll. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Adams, Douglas, Hitchhiker s guide to the galaxy. 2. Philosophy in literature. I. Joll, Nicholas. PR6051.D3352Z '.914 dc Transferred to Digital Printing in 2014

5 I dedicate this book to my mother, who loved Hitchhiker s. This book is also for my father. Through it, he might get a better sense of what my mother and I were always banging on about.

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7 And it occurs to me that running a program like this is bound to create an enormous amount of popular publicity for the whole area of philosophy in general. (Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy)

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9 Contents Preface Acknowledgements ( Thanks for All the Fish ) Notes on the Contributors xi xii xiv Introduction 1 Nicholas Joll Part I Ethics 1 Eat Me : Vegetarianism and Consenting Animals 27 Ben Saunders and Eloïse Harding 2 Mostly Harmless? Hitchhiker s and the Ethics of Entertainment 50 Nicholas Joll Part II The Meaning of Life 3 Life, the Universe, and Absurdity 75 Amy Kind 4 The Wowbagger Case: Immortality and What Makes Life Meaningful 101 Timothy Chappell Part III Metaphysics and Artificial Intelligence 5 I Think You Ought to Know I m Feeling Very Depressed : Marvin and Artificial Intelligence 129 Jerry Goodenough 6 From Deep Thought to Digital Metaphysics 153 Barry Dainton ix

10 x Contents Part IV Logic, Method and Satire 7 God... Promptly Vanishes in a Puff of Logic 185 Michèle Friend 8 The Judo Principle, Philosophical Method and the Logic of Jokes 213 Andrew Aberdein 9 The Funniest of All Improbable Worlds Hitchhiker s as Philosophical Satire 236 Alexander Pawlak and Nicholas Joll Glossary 269 Bibliography of Adams, Philosophy and Everything 285 Indexes 298

11 Preface This book philosophises via the wonderful Hitchhiker books by Douglas Adams. But it does not mean to presuppose any knowledge of philosophy. So: Don t Panic! However, an interest in philosophical matters is required. Still, and as this book will show, Hitchhiker s is not above a little philosophy in the same way that the sea is not above the sky. Consequently, anyone who loves Hitchhiker s is liable to have some interest in philosophy. For a fuller introduction to the book, please see the Introduction that follows. Now, since there is that Introduction, you might wonder why this preface exists. Well, I wanted to start with a short and friendly bit of text. For philosophy can be forbidding, even when, as in this book, pains are taken to make it accessible and intriguing. There s an additional reason for this preface, though. It s this. Traditionally one ends a preface with one s initials and location and there was a location that I just had to get in. N. J. A café in Rickmansworth xi

12 Acknowledgements ( Thanks for All the Fish ) I have received a lot of fish from many quarters, as it were. For encouragement and general support, I thank: my father Barrie; Liz Strang; my sisters Felicity and Louise; Nick Hale and family (Nick had the café idea for the preface!); Charmaine Coyle and James Rodwell; Sarah Clark, Paula Grogan, Beck Pitt, Anne Raustøl, Jonathan Stibbs and Susi Taylor, and Brendan Larvor. Quite a few people provided helpful comments on drafts of those parts of the book that I wrote (as against the parts I merely edited). Those good people are: Andrew Aberdein; Chris Belshaw, together with other participants of the 2011 Open University conference Thinking in the Open, at which I delivered an early version of chapter 2; Sarah Clark; Charmaine Coyle; Fabian Freyenhagen; Jerry Goodenough; James Rodwell; Ben Saunders; Ken Westphal; and Colin Westripp. (Acknowledgements for chapter 9, which I co-wrote with Alexander Pawlak, are to be found in that chapter.) For information about things Hitchhikery and about Douglas Adams, my thanks to the following: Richard Beadle, Matthias Dörrzapf and George Watson (all of St John s College, Cambridge); Daniel Dennett; and various members of ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha, the official Hitchhiker s fan club, and especially therein David Haddock, Carrie Share and Enjoy Mowatt, and my contributor and co-writer Alexander Pawlak. xii

13 Acknowledgements ( Thanks for All the Fish ) xiii Thanks also to my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Priyanka Gibbons and a big hand, of course, to all of my contributors, all of whom put a lot of effort into their respective chapters. Despite all this help, any mistakes in my contributions to this volume any signs that I do not really know where my philosophical or Hitchhikery towel is are my responsibility alone.

14 Notes on the Contributors But who the devil are you? [...] We [..] are Philosophers. (Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 25) Andrew Aberdein is Associate Professor of Logic and Humanities at Florida Institute of Technology. Much of his research is concerned with the interplay of formal and informal accounts of human reason. He read the first Hitchhiker book as a ten-year-old schoolboy and has been a fan ever since. It was Hitchhiker s that first kindled his interest in philosophy, an interest that he has been delighted to be able to make his career not least since he is so unsuited for employment in the customary alternatives: hospital porter, barn builder, chicken-shed cleaner, bodyguard, radio producer, or script editor of Doctor Who. Timothy Chappell is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Ethics Centre at the Open University; he is also a Visiting Research Fellow at the Department of Moral Philosophy in the University of St Andrews. He grew up reading The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy, and nearly always knows where his towel is. Barry Dainton is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Liverpool. His research is focused mainly on consciousness, time and space, and the nature of the self. He often blames the primitive condition of his financial planning for the future on a curious but unshakeable suspicion that the Earth will shortly be demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. xiv

15 Notes on the Contributors xv Michèle Friend, a Hitchhiker fan from an early age, has since grown up to become a philosopher of logic and mathematics. She teaches lots of formal logic, and presents it as the ultimate form of escape from the brutish and nasty lives most humans are forced to lead. Jerry Goodenough is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia and an Associate Lecturer of the Open University. His research interests include thought experiments, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of or via film. He has been a keen science fiction fan since someone gave him a copy of Wells s The War of the Worlds when he was nine, and can still remember listening to the very first broadcasts of The Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy on his car radio on the way home from work all those years ago. Eloïse Harding is Ben Saunders s better half and the animalrightsy part of the equation. She has been grappling with the question of animals who want to be eaten for a while now. Her academic interests focus on political ideology, horizontal politics and protest. She blogs at increasingveganicity. blogspot.com. And she likes ducks. Nicholas Joll hails from near Rickmansworth and has taught philosophy at several universities, including the Open University and the University of Hertfordshire. He has various philosophical interests and, indeed, an interest in the nature of philosophy itself. He was as keen to produce this book as Ford is to go to parties. Amy Kind teaches philosophy at Claremont McKenna College in the United States where, as she has found on more than one occasion, an infinite improbability drive would come in enormously handy. Although her inner science fiction geek only revealed itself relatively recently, she has since written articles appearing in Battlestar

16 xvi Notes on the Contributors Galactica and Philosophy and Star Trek and Philosophy. She is currently making plans to have attended the time travellers convention that was held at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2005 and if the verb tenses of that sentence seem awkward, Amy refers you to Douglas Adams s remarks on the grammatical difficulties related to time travel. Alexander Pawlak studied physics and philosophy in his quaint home town of Marburg in Germany. After gaining his degree in 1998 he began a career in science journalism and in 2002 he became editor of the membership journal of the German Physical Society. He has been a fan of Hitchhiker s since the 29th of April 1984, the day the first episode of the TV series was broadcast on German television, and in March 2000 he interviewed Douglas Adams for the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. In 2010 he published his book Die Wissenschaft bei Douglas Adams ( The Science of Douglas Adams ). He is not married and lives in Heidelberg. He is not a professional philosopher, either. Hence at several points in the writing of his contribution to this volume he found his head filled with a thousand wary philosophers shouting at him. Ben Saunders is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling. His academic interests focus mainly on democracy, which has been likened to two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for lunch (not a procedure he recommends!), but he has also written pieces for Soccer and Philosophy and Philip K. Dick and Philosophy. He always takes a towel with him when travelling.