Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by edta on August 02, 2003 at 14:14:17

Cleaning my HD and found this interesting bit about Philip K. Dick and his take on androids and humanity. Sorry I don't have the attribution. I'd appreciate it if someone knows where it's from.

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'In "The Android and the Human," Dick's speech about androids, robots, and simulacra (words he uses interchangeably for "artificial constructs masquerading as humans"), he describes these "fierce cold things" not as machines, but as "sly and cruel entities that smile as they reach out to shake handsŠ but their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave." Androids are not, he argues, different in their essence from humans-just in their behavior. For Dick, whose Exegesis notes that, thanks to the experience of 2-3-74, he'd finally started living the satori he experienced as a child torturing a beetle, the answer to the question "What is Human?" is: kindness, empathy. That's why it doesn't matter, to Dick, that those mechanical systems in his stories and novels that display kindness-like the automated taxicab that counsels the protagonist of The Game-Players of Titan not to leave his wife-are programmed to act human; if they act human, they are human. The converse is also true: A sly and cruel human being without empathy, without caritas, who "stands detached, a spectator," is-Dick insists-no kind of a human at all.

"The greatest change growing across our world these days is probably the momentum of the living toward reification," Dick writes a couple of years later, in "Man, Android, and Machine." How does this happen? In his earlier speech, Dick makes a Heideggerian argument that humans can actually be transformed into machines, by being "pounded down, manipulated, made into a means [rather than an end] without one's knowledge or consent." The "androidization" of humans, he warns, "has become a science of government and suchlike agencies now [using, he specifically mentions, "pacification drugs" like anti-depressants and tranquilizers, which transform a person who feels "wild grief, anger, fear, and all intense feelings" into someone who is "stable, predictable, not a menace to others"]Š until a time will perhaps come when a writer, for example, will not stop writing because someone unplugged his electric typewriter but because someone unplugged him."

All of which helps explain the strange pseudo-religion called "Mercerism," in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?-in which grasping the handles of an electronic "empathy box" allows one to "encompass every other living thing." One of Dick's best books (despite the fact that it almost never appears on any lists of his "classic" novels), Electric Sheep is not, as in the film version, primarily an adventure story, nor is it primarily a dystopian view of future urban life, nor even a metaphor for man's ambivalent relationship with technology. What the book is about is the human quality of empathy. The androids have no emotions-the only way that Deckard, the android hunter, can tell them apart from humans is by giving them "empathy tests"-and they're out to prove that "Mercerism is a swindleŠ The whole experience of empathy is a swindle." Deckard's real task (which Harrison Ford couldn't have pulled off even if it had been in the script) is to prove them wrong.

Dick's certainty that empathy and kindness can triumph over even the most insidious entertainment-enforced normality is also the theme of Flow My Tears, which explores the "subtle, intricate relationships which exist between the sexes"-in this case, between General Felix Buckman and his bisexual leather-queen twin-sister/wife-and which ends with Buckman crying over her death, and being embraced by a total stranger. In a 1970 letter to a friend about Flow My Tears, Dick writes, "In answer to the question, 'what is real?' the answer is: this kind of overpowering love." For Dick, in a world where we're all becoming androidized, acts of unselfish kindness are the only remaining proof of one's humanity.'