I’ve just finished reading Ishiguro’s 2021 novel, Klara and the Sun, and I was scripting a video review, but I wanted to focus on one aspect in particular.
Spoilers Ahead
A word of housekeeping before the total spoilers. Klara is an Artificial Friend, an AF: an android companion sold to keep lonely children company in a near future. She is paired with Josie, whom she takes to be about fourteen and a half, and whom we meet as a frail, sickly girl. Klara hasn’t only been purchased to keep Josie company. She’s been bought to become Josie, should Josie die – the fate that has already taken Josie’s older sister, Sal. Her companion is a contingency plan.
That is the premise. The question it leaves on the floor, and one I want to pick up, is the old one about human exceptionalism – about the special essence that supposedly makes someone that someone and not another. Call it the self, identity, if you are so inclined, the soul. The novel effectively stages the disagreement through three people. Josie’s mother has bought the replacement but doesn’t quite believe in it; she wants the insurance without believing the policy will actually pay out. Josie’s father is simply against the whole technology. And Capaldi, who builds these things, is a true believer: there is nothing inside a person that can’t be learned, copied, and continued.
I should say straight away that I think Capaldi is right, and that the novel, against its own staging, agrees with him, which is precisely the sort of move Ishiguro likes to make, handing the correct view to the character you are primed to distrust.
I should also say, by way of disclosure rather than advertisement, that I don’t believe in individuals and selves to begin with – not as anything sturdier than heuristics, useful fictions we keep on the books for administrative convenience. I argued this at length in The Architecture of Encounter, and I mention it only so you can see the slope I am standing on before I start rolling things down it.
Here’s the deal: If there were some inner essence – the thing Capaldi denies and the father fears losing – then the right question would be whether Klara has it, or could acquire it, or is forever shut out from it. But Ishiguro wants us to suppose the subject to be Josie, and I don’t think the essence is inside Josie at all – or any inside of any purported subject. It’s rendered onto her, in the encounter, by the people who stand in relation to her: the mother, the father, the boy Rick. The thing we call a soul is not an item to be carried. It is a pattern that a relationship sustains.
Now, the moment one says something like this, a particular kind of reader sits up and reaches for the word ‘projection’, and assumes I’ve just dissolved the whole business into wishful thinking – that the self is made up, sprayed onto a person the way we render face onto wall sockets and taps. But this isn’t the claim at all, and the difference is the point.
Consider the Big Dipper. Seven stars, and a ladle. Of course, there is no ladle. There is nothing up there with a handle and a bowl; there is no celestial object that is the Dipper, over and above the stars, arranging them. Pareidolia. An eliminativist will tell you that the Dipper isn’t real – there are only stars, and the ladle is a story. But that’s wrong too. One can’t draw the Dipper round any seven stars you fancy. Those stars, from here, subtend that figure, and no amount of preferring a prettier arrangement will reshape them. The asterism is constrained. It’s not a substance, but neither is it a whim. As patterns go, it’s real, found not invented, that we have given a name – and the instant the name exists, grammar quietly offers you ‘the Dipper’ as a thing that has its stars, a single object that owns its own parts.
Consider the self as the Dipper. It’s convergence-stabilised: everyone standing where we stand picks out the same figure, against any private preference for a tidier one, because something in the arrangement answers back. It’s heuristic in exactly the way an asterism is – not a natural kind, but functional just the same.
But the Dipper is perspectival, right? Those stars are scattered across wild distances and epochs; the figure is an accident of where we happen to stand, and from anywhere else in the galaxy there is no Dipper at all. Doesn’t that make the self merely a point of view – the mother’s vantage, the father’s – and so, after all, mind-dependent, in the eye, exactly the idealism I claimed to be refusing? This view from nowhere?
No, and the reason is the most useful thing I know about objectivity. The Dipper is vantage-relative and completely objective. Given the position, the figure isn’t optional. Anyone aligned similarly on Earth sees those seven in that shape; it is not your private projection, it’s invariantly the case from a specifiable standpoint. Observer-relative is not the same as observer’s-whim – that elision is the whole confusion, and dismantling it is most of the work. The persona is objective in just this positional sense. It is rendered through a relational standpoint, not free-floating and not internal, and from that standpoint it isn’t up for grabs. The mother can’t render Josie as whomever she likes. The field constrains the figure. The persona lives where the Dipper lives: not in the stars, not in the eye, but in the constrained encounter between a standpoint and a field that will not deform to flatter it.
Which finally brings me out of the sky and into the kitchen with Klara and the mum.
Picture the mother, in an ordinary morning, in interaction. Not a forensic scientist with a mass spectrometer, but rather a woman making breakfast and watching her daughter come down the stairs. At this level what is present is not a hidden essence she is somehow detecting through the surface. It’s what the relationship calls upon and whether it is met. There’s no electron microscope at the breakfast table, no soul-meter – just a standpoint, a field, and a figure rendered between them. So suppose a clean case: that Capaldi swaps the replica of Josie overnight, and the mother wakes to it – a sliver of a time-slice. In that instant, she’s encountered Josie. In this moment, there is not difference – to her.
Of course, there’s always a material difference – hence my disclaimer frame. The replica differs from Josie in numberless ways, every molecule and every scar’s exact histology, just as this star differs from that one. But almost none of those differences are ones the relationship being tracked. Crucially, there is no privileged material difference, no single molecular fact that is Josie, such that to lose it would be to lose her. The Dipper has no one star that is the Dipper. The person has no one fact that is the self for a sharper instrument to weigh out and vindicate.
This is why I speak in the language of individuals and selves at all, given that I don’t believe in them. I speak diachronically because that is the appropriate level of the heuristic – the same level at which I can happily discuss the Big Dipper without committing myself to a ladle. It’s the promoted reification that I decline.
And here is why it agrees with Capaldi. The father is wrong that something uncopiable would be lost; Capaldi is right that nothing internal is reserved. But the sentimentalists are not simply deluded, either, and Ishiguro is too good to leave them so. Something is irreplaceable. It is only that it was never inside Josie. Klara’s own closing realisation – and it is the quiet devastation the whole book is built toward – is that the special thing she had been straining to learn and reproduce was not in Josie at all. It lived in the mother, the father, Rick: in the particular web of renderings thrown onto that one stream and no other. The irreplaceable thing is real, and it is relational, and it is precisely what a perfect copy inherits rather than lacks – because the copy walks into the same web, and the web, not the interior, was the essence all along.
This content was produced by Bry Willis, a philosopher with a focus on language. He shares content here on Substack as well as on his Philosophics Blog. Bry uses various LLMs in his production workflow at all stages, from ideation to production, as well as for the production of ancillary content – audio and video summaries, images, PDFs, and possibly other media.
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many years ago, distrustful of what has now become the LLM instantiation I science fictioned an idea of a analog engine that inter-laced with our neurology, not to replace or augment, but to provide a pathway to another substrate: a ship of perseus with real upgrades not just replacements. A psychopomp not a soul-eater. (And not digital as we know it), heuristics (after Douglas R, Hofstadter) do not impress me as ghosts, even for selves that do not exist. Given the copy has even less soul I still think that neural lacing idea provides a better analogy (pun intended) than heuristic mapping (the map is not the territory. Even if our flesh is given into predicative generations and generative hallucinations (AKA expectations & routines).
It is not even that there is an elusive something to be capture that mapping cannot do, merely that even is we are a map ourselves (of the world, of ourselves) this non-existence is still happening to some one instance, and that materiality is what matters, and calling that a soul or spirit is one of our most misguided hallucinations
my criticism is one of commodification rather than the aggregate though