The rules of Pullman’s Dæmons

Ben Dalton — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 00:18:53 +0000

A recent post from Ben Fry describing On the Marionette Theatre by Heinrich von Kleist reminded me to return to the ideas of dæmons as created by the author Philip Pullman. In the acknowledgements of the His Dark Materials trilogy, Pullman cites On the Marionette Theatre as a particular influence for some of the themes in his books. In a 2007 interview, Pullman concludes a description of Kleist’s short story about the human struggle between grace and self-consciousness by saying:

I can’t tell you what an impression that essay made on me, and how profound and important I think it is.

What interests me in this essay however, and in the Pullman books that followed it, are the themes of puppetry and personal companions. Pullman’s creation of soul-like dæmons – physical manifestations of some aspects of human nature in the form of personal animal companions – establish an interesting set of rules for experiments in personal robotics. Pullman describes daemons as “one being in two bodies”. Applying this to robotics-for-everday-life we move towards a zuhanden teleoperation interface that begins to form an extension of self. The users expression of emotion through a limited system is then much like the puppeteer at the beginning of Klesit’s story.

The rules for personal robots built to work like Pullman’s dæmons would be:

animal form
almost always the opposite sex to their owner
touching somebody else’s dæmon is an act of intimacy
a dæmon may have a shifting form or a fixed one depending on how fixed a person’s personality is
human and dæmon must stay within a short distance of each other (with the exception of witches)
dæmons tend to talk mostly to their owner

A fun set of restrictions to work with I think.

!ii » personal robotics

The rules of Pullman’s Dæmons