"Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel — best known to the wider world through the movie it became, Blade Runner — is a strange, jagged, philosophically restless book. The question the book asks, and the way it forces you to feel that question, is among the most important things 20th-century science fiction has done: what actually makes us human?

This is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. Aristotle's answer was "rational animal." The Christian tradition's answer is "made in the image of God." Modern materialism's answer is, more or less, "a particular arrangement of atoms." Dick proposes a different answer, and the whole book is built around it.

The Book in Thirty Seconds

Earth is decaying after a nuclear war. Most of the animals are dead. Owning a live animal is the ultimate status symbol; people who can't afford the real thing buy electric replicas and try to keep up appearances. Most healthy humans have emigrated to off-world colonies. The androids who serve as labor on those colonies sometimes escape and come back to Earth, where they pose as humans. They look exactly like us. They act exactly like us. Some of them don't even know they are not us.

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter whose job is to find these escaped androids and "retire" them. His distinguishing tool is the Voight-Kampff test: a battery of questions designed to provoke an involuntary empathic response. Real humans respond instinctively to descriptions of animal suffering. Androids — no matter how sophisticated — do not.

The book is the story of one day in which Deckard hunts six escaped Nexus-6 androids, falls in love with one of them, and slowly loses his ability to tell the difference between killing a machine and killing a person.

Empathy as the Mark of the Human

Dick's claim is bold. What makes us human is not our intelligence (the androids match it), our memories (some androids have implanted memories they sincerely believe), our appearance (indistinguishable), or our self-understanding (some androids believe they are human). It is our capacity for empathy — the involuntary inner response to another creature's suffering or joy.

There is something to this. Empathy is morally significant. The whole Christian moral tradition takes it seriously. Christ's compassion in the Gospels, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the call in Romans to weep with those who weep — empathy is woven into the fabric of how we are supposed to love our neighbor. Adam Smith built his moral philosophy on it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). David Hume thought sympathy was the basic moral fact. Dick is reaching for something real.

The book also has a brilliant literary instinct here. Empathy is exactly the thing that cannot be faked from the outside. You can train almost any other human behavior. You can simulate intelligence, mimic emotion, perform compassion. But the involuntary microexpression when someone describes a calf being killed — that, Dick is betting, is something the machines cannot produce. The Voight-Kampff test is moral philosophy made literal.

Where the Answer Goes Wrong

I actually really love this book, but I have to disagree.

First, some humans in the novel fail the Voight-Kampff test in their actual behavior. They are cruel to animals. They are cruel to each other. They cooperate with the regime that produces the androids and hunts them down. Are they less human than the androids? Dick lets the question hang, and he is clearly nervous about the answer.

Also, some androids in the novel display something that looks an awful lot like love. Rachael Rosen seems to feel something for Deckard. Roy and Irmgard Baty seem to love each other. The book never resolves whether this is real emotion or sophisticated simulation, and Deckard cannot tell the difference. By the end, he is not sure his own emotions are real either.

The deeper problem is philosophical. Empathy is a symptom, not a foundation. If you want to say empathy is what makes us human, you have to answer the question: why is that morally significant? Why does the capacity for involuntary suffering at another's suffering matter, when other involuntary biological responses do not?

The Christian tradition has an answer. Empathy matters because every human being bears the image of God, every human being possesses intrinsic dignity, and empathy is the appropriate response to a fact that is true whether we feel it or not. The empathy itself is not the source of human worth. It is the right way to react to human worth that already exists.

Drop the metaphysical foundation and empathy alone cannot do the work. A well-trained sociopath could pass the Voight-Kampff test by learning the right responses. A traumatized survivor could fail it by being numb. Empathy is a feeling, and feelings can be cultivated or destroyed. They cannot ground morality on their own.

Dick may have sensed this, which is part of why the book turns toward religion in its strangest and most interesting passages.

Mercerism

Most readers of Do Androids Dream underrate the religious material. The novel contains an invented religion called Mercerism, centered on a Christ-like figure named Wilbur Mercer. Believers connect through "empathy boxes" that allow them to share, collectively and bodily, in Mercer's suffering as he climbs a hill under a hail of stones. Mercerism is empathy elevated to a sacrament.

Late in the book, Mercer turns out to be a fake — a washed-up actor whose hill-climbing was filmed in a studio. But here is the strangest move in the novel: this revelation does not destroy Mercerism for Deckard. He continues to feel Mercer's presence after the unmasking. He keeps experiencing the shared suffering. The book leaves open the possibility that a fictional Christ figure may have become, through human belief and shared suffering, a real spiritual presence. Dick is reaching for the metaphysical foundation his empathy answer needs, but I must say this is an entirely implausible grasp at straws. Reality doesn’t conform to our emotions.

A Note for Anyone Who Read My Nagel Post

Thomas Nagel asked in 1974: what is it like to be a bat? His point was that there is something it is like to be a particular conscious creature, and that this irreducibly subjective what-it-is-likeness cannot be captured by any third-person description.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep asks the same question about a different creature. What is it like to be an android? Is there anything it is like? Or is the inside of an android dark — sophisticated information processing with no one home? The book never gives you the answer, because it cannot. From the outside, you cannot tell. From the inside, even the androids might be confused.

Dick and Nagel are working the same problem from opposite ends. Nagel is the analytic philosopher proving the limits of third-person knowledge. Dick is the novelist dramatizing what those limits feel like when you have to act inside them with a gun in your hand.