![]() This is a disturbing idea, because it suggests that humans can only respond to Dick’s question, “What is human?”, with a vague and incomplete answer: “ Not an android.” It’s as if in the future-a world in which there’s scarcely any empathy left-humans have begun hunting and killing androids in a desperate attempt to remind themselves of their own humanity. Rather, the purpose of the box is to remind human beings that they have a common identity (even if this identity is an illusion) and that they are different from-and superior to-androids. ![]() As the android Irmgard Baty perceptively points out, the purpose of the empathy box isn’t to make human beings kinder or more sensitive-if it is, then the empathy box has clearly failed. One of Dick’s most provocative points about empathy and human nature is that empathy isn’t an emotional reaction at all-rather, it’s a way of uniting humans together against some kind of “other.” In Dick’s vision of the future, millions of people subscribe to a mysterious religion called Mercerism, which requires its members to grip an “ empathy box” that enables them to experience the sensations and feelings of their fellow human beings. After Pris learns that one of her friends has been “retired”-i.e., murdered by Rick Deckard-she’s devastated. On the flip side, the androids in the novel, such as Pris Stratton, show occasional signs of an emotional connection to other androids. Then there are other characters, such as Philip Resch, who are technically human, but are also cruel and totally lacking in empathy. Rick Deckard, the novel’s protagonist, is distant with his wife, Iran, and on the one occasion that he shows romantic interest in another woman, Rachel Rosen, his interest is quickly replaced by disgust. ![]() The human characters in the novel are cold and short with one another, even when they’re friends or spouses. The disturbing “joke” of Do Androids Dream is that, for all the talk about the importance of empathy, there doesn’t seem to be very much of it going around. ![]() Humans are supposed to respond by displaying empathy-i.e., they’re supposed to feel a sense of connection to the people or animals in the hypothetical situations-while androids are supposed to respond with a sense of coldness that borders on psychopathy. (The word “empathy” appears nearly 100 times in the book.) In the future, police officers distinguish between humans and androids by administering the Voigt-Kampff test, which is designed to measure one’s empathetic reaction to a series of emotional situations. Dick in which he proposed that all of Dick’s novels are structured around the same question: “What is human?” Sure enough, this question hangs over every chapter of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In a way, the other four themes of the novel represent four different ways of answering this question (for example, humans are human because they’re capable of making memories because they alter their environments because they can buy and sell things, etc.).Įven though there are many ways to answer the question, “What makes us human?”, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is most interested in one potential answer-humans are human because they’re capable of feeling empathy. In 2007, the journalist Adam Gopnik wrote a long essay on Philip K.
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