Ghost in the Machine Androids in search of humanity in Isaac Asimov's “The Bicentennial Man” and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Johanna Vainio University of Tampere School of Modern Languages and Translation Studies English Philology Pro Gradu Thesis May 2008 Tampereen yliopisto Humanistinen tiedekunta Kieli- ja käännöstieteiden laitos Englantilainen filologia Pro Gradu, 110 s. Johanna Vainio: Ghost in the Machine: Androids in search of humanity in Isaac Asimov's “The Bicentennial Man” and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Toukokuu 2008
Graduni suurimpina tutkimuskysymyksinä ovat ensinnäkin mitä on ihminen, ja toisekseen se, miten androidit tieteiskirjallisuudessa kuvastavat tätä. Ensisijaisena tutkimusaineistonani ovat Isaac Asimovin novelli “The Bicentennial Man” (1976) ja Philip K. Dickin romaani Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Molemmista on tehty elokuvaversiot, jotka myös mainitaan gradussa. Tieteiskirjallisuudessa androidit herättävät kysymyksen toiseudesta ja vieraantumisesta. Niiden kautta on mahdollista ottaa teoreettista etäisyyttä meihin ihmisiin itseemme, jolloin androidit ovat kuin metaforia tai symboleja ihmiselle. Tietenkin toinen erittäin tärkeä teema jonka ne nostavat esiin on mekanistisuus. Ihmisruumista on milloin pidetty kellokoneistona, milloin höyrykoneena tai automaattina. Fysikalistinen maailmankuvahan pyrkii juuri selitämään kaiken mekanistisesti ja determinisesti. Nykyään ihminen, ja etenkin ihmisaivot, rinnastetaan usein tietokoneeseen. Siksi tekoälyn teoreettisenkin tutkimuksen on välttämättä otettava huomioon ihmisäly. Androidit siis peilaavat ihmistä monin tavoin. Toki myös robotit, cyborgit, hirviöt ja monet muut tieteiskirjallisuuden hahmot on yhtä lailla mahdollista rinnastaa ihmiseen, mutta tässä työssä aihe on rajattu androideihin. Graduni rakenne on hieman epätavallinen, koska siinä ei ole varsinaista teoriajaksoa. Sen sijaan teoria ja analyysi vuorottelevat läpi tekstin, vaikkakin teoria ehkä silti painottuu enemmän alkupäähän. Paljolti teoriaa on ammennettu filosofiasta, etenkin toisessa luvussa, joka kysyy mistä ihminen on tehty. Mielenfilosofian taustalla on mieli-ruumis ongelma, eli vaikeus selittää mielen, identiteetin tai sielun luonne mikäli hyväksymme fysikalistisen käsityksen. Varsinkin Asimovin novelli pohtii eksplisiittisesti sitä, miten ihmisen voi määritellä ruumiillisuuden kautta, ja ehdottaa funktionalistista lähestymistapaa materialistisen sijaan. Dickin romaani puolestaan nostaa esiin määrittelyongelmat jotka nousevat ihmisten silkasta erilaisuudesta ja ominaisuuksien kirjosta. Tietoisuuskeskustelu jatkaa aiheen kehittelyä ja tekoälyn ja ihmisälyn pohdintaa. Edelleen mekanistisuus herättää kysymyksen vapaudesta ja valinnan mahdollisuudesta. Molemmissa teksteissä androidit pakenevat omaa robottiuttaan, kohti ihmisyyttä. Ne rinnastetaan orjiin jotka haluavat vapautta, mutta poliittisen luennan sijaan esitän sen metafyysisenä pakona determinismistä. Aivan kuten ihminen ei halua olla marionetti, myös nämä androidit kaipaavat vapauttaan. Androidit ovat keinotekoisia kopioita ihmisestä. Kopion suhde alkuperäiseen on kolmannen luvun aihe. Asimovin tekstissä androidille lopulta myönnetään ihmisen status, eli täydellinen kopio hyväksytään alkuperäisen veroiseksi. Dickin androidit ovat pahaenteisempiä; niiltä puuttuu kyky empatiaan, joten vaikka ne muutoin ovatkin täydellisiä ihmisen kopioita, ne ovat alempiarvoisia. Elokuvaversio tosin mutkistaa tätä asettelua, koska siinä androideille kehittyy moraalisia tunteita. Luokittelut ja rajanvedot liittyvät myös aina määrittely-yrityksiin. Androidit hämmentävät koska ne ovat rajatapauksia ihmisen ja koneen välimaastossa, ja vaikeuttavat määrittelyä. Ne ovat poikkeuksia, hirviöitä, irvikuvia – mutta sellaisinaan ne sekä heijastavat ihmisten omaa rujoutta että kyseenalaistavat luokitukset. Postmoderni identiteetin pirstoutuminen tulee esiin Dickin termissä kipple, joka viittaa entrooppiseen tuhoon, rakenteiden luhistumiseen ja käsitteiden hajoamiseen. Neljäs luku ottaa ihmiselämään subjektiivisemman näkökulman. Kuolema tuottaa ahdistusta ja kysymyksiä elämän tarkoituksesta. Toisaalta se on osa elämän järjestystä, ja asettamalla olemassaololle rajat se myös motivoi toimimaan tietyllä tavalla elämän aikana. Sekä Asimovin että Dickin tekstit nostavat kuoleman erittäin tärkeäksi kysymykseksi. Asimovin kohdalla androidi halaja a ihmisyyttä kuolemattomuutensa hinnalla. Dickillä puolestaan androidien elinikä on vaivaiset muutaman vuotta, ja etenkin elokuvaversio nostaa yhdeksi tärkeimmistä teemoista niiden kamppailun pidemmän elämän saavuttamiseksi. Kärsimyksen ja eksistentialistisen ahdistuksen keskellä elämän tarkoituksen etsintä nousee arvoonsa. Kiintymys toisiin ihmisiin ja empatia heitä kohtaan ovat tärkeimpiä vastauksia ihmisen lyhyen elämän merkitystä ihmeteltäessä. Uskonnot ovat perinteisesti korostaneet samaa asiaa, mutta kumpikin teksti nostaa esiin myös kysymyksen uskonnon roolista tieteiden ja teknologian kehittyessä, sekä sitä kautta ihmisestä uuden luojana. Avaintermit: androidi, ihminen, identiteetti, minä, toiseus, mieli, ruumis, tietoisuus, mekanistisuus, vapaus, kopio, alkuperäisyys, rajat, luokittelu, hirviömäisyys, kuolevaisuus, elämän tarkoitus, ja uskonto.
Table of contents
1. Introduction...... 1 1.1 Research material...... 4 1.2 Cognitive estrangement, other and novum in science fiction....8 1.3 Androids...... 14
2. What makes a human?...... 19 2.1 Mind and body...... 20 2.2 Consciousness...... 29 2.3 Freedom of will...... 37
3. What are the limitations of identity?...... 45 3.1 The perfect copy v the original...... 46 3.2 Boundaries and categorisation...... 55 3.3 Kipple...... 63
4. What is the meaning of this existence?...... 70 4.1 Death and mortality...... 71 4.2 The meaning of life...... 78 4.3 Religion...... 85
5. Conclusion...... 95
Bibliography
“We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes – we are perhaps the true machines.”
Philip K. Dick in “Man, Android and Machine” 1. Introduction
People have always liked to present human beings as parallel to the latest invention of contemporary technology. When the clockwork was a new invention and its accurate machinery much admired, the human body was compared to that. It was thought that with a similar precision, the different parts of the human body functioned together like the wheels of a clockwork. The invention of the steam engine had similar consequences – the human body was thought to function much in the same manner, where fluids flow with certain pressure which is released by different bodily functions. Today we like to compare the human body, and more precisely the human brain, to a computer. In this model learning and other factors of the environment are seen as equivalent to programming. John Searle observes:
Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard . . . Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told that some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer. (1984, 44)
It it noteworthy that these are all merely metaphors, however. Hugh Mellor has pinpointed this idea: “Computer models of the mind no more imply that the mind is a computer than computer models of the economy imply that the economy is” (quoted in Fearn 2005, 38).
Our tools and our machines are extensions of ourselves; where we fall short, they continue.
They are similar to us because they have been manufactured to do things we almost can do ourselves. They have been made to do things which are in our interests, so it is no wonder that in our tools and machines we can see reflections of ourselves. David Porush reminds us that technology is not demonic in itself: “once we recognize the non-neutrality of technology and the direction in which it pushes us, we can shape our own destiny by seeking our reflection in it.
Technology, after all, is an invention of man, not vice versa” (1985, 79). There is also another way of looking at the human-machine metaphor, though, not just machines resembling us, but the human body resembling a machine. For example the French philosopher René Descartes (1596-
1 1650) was of the opinion that the body is a machine, but within it lives the soul, or a ghost in the machine.
To wonder what the human nature most essentially is, and to consider what the fundamental building blocks that make a human being are, is an age-old question. In fact, it seems like these questions in themselves are something that constitute human character. Inquisitiveness and curiosity seem to follow humans naturally. Different kinds of machines, artificial constructs and other reflections of humans have been used to draw comparisons. They have been used as analogies and metaphors, but also as more precise descriptions to be taken quite literally. Thus, the research questions of this thesis are, What does it mean to be human? and How does the androids' borderline position reflect this? The aim of this thesis is to discuss various aspects of what has been said about human identity and what best describes human life, and to do this by examining two texts of science fiction to see how they reflect on these issues. In just three words, the research question could be formulated as What is human?
As will become clear shortly, the questions around humanity involve plenty of social aspects, after all we are social beings. Therefore it would be possible to take even a rather political approach to the issue. The self is certainly also a social construct, very much so. The self is political, it is social, it does not exist in a void. But then again, when you are born you are not a social construct, and when you die you are not a social construct. In birth and death you are alone because they are border-crossings where all the baggage of experiences is left behind. Being a social construct belongs to the world of experiences, and if there is an ego, it is the recipient of those experiences, not one of them (Fearn 2005, 6). It is the core of this being that this thesis is after, that little indivisible particle or atom of self, not everything external that is wrapped around it during life. The attempt is to try and see past all fleeting half-definitions given from the outside, past all transient superficialities and then to try to decide if there actually is a remaining self or ego.
Therefore concepts such as otherness and the body will not be used essentially as political ideas, even though that interpretation is certainly available; they will not be used as relating to gender,
2 sex or race, for example. Often the concept of otherness is connected to the marginalised groups in society but the ultimate metaphysical question of what we are made of, or what it means to be a human being is not fundamentally a sociological or a political one.
The structure of the thesis is somewhat unconventional in that there is no separate chapter on theory. Instead, theory and analysis will be presented in a dialogue, although the theory will perhaps be more concentrated on the initial chapters. The research material will be presented in the next sub-chapter, followed by a discussion on some key concepts when reading science fiction, namely cognitive estrangement, other and novum. The introductory chapter finishes with a short discussion of androids and the many other ways in which otherness has been described in literature.
The second chapter derives its theoretical background from philosophy, and mainly philosophy of mind to be more precise. The mind-body problem is a widely studied field nowadays, perhaps because advances in neuroscience let us expect some answers. Many people, for example physicalists, in fact consider the mind-body problem solved. Chapter 2.1 will present what the key areas in the discussion are. Consciousness is a similarly fashionable theme in philosophy, probably due to the linkage to cognitive sciences, and that will be the topic of chapter
2.2. Finally we shall proceed to a discussion on how this relates to the freedom of will.
The third chapter is a journey to identity and its limitations. The first sub-chapter considers androids as copies of humans and the implications of a perfect copy as it relates to the original.
Since the original-copy division is a question of categorisation, chapter 3.2 discusses the way people label things, and what the consequences of this categorisation are. When boundaries are crossed or when distinctions become leaky it is in fact considered dangerous. The danger is further elaborated in the chapter on kipple, which is a concept from Dick and appears in Do Androids
Dream..? and refers to entropic loss of categories.
The fourth chapter takes on a more existentialist approach. Death and mortality are the source of much anxiety and worry, and they are discussed in chapter 4.1. Death as the end is
3 frightening and medical science tries to prolong life as much as possible, but people may wonder if they would like to be immortal either. Fiction allows us to theorise on this. The meaning of life is, of course, a mystifying puzzle, and chapter 4.2 ponders on what the research material has to say about it. Religion has traditionally been an authority in these issues and offered people comfort and solace by giving explanations and answers. Therefore religion will be the topic of the final sub- chapter before the conclusions.
The topics covered in the research are a vast area, which may make the thesis seem exceedingly ambitious. It has to be emphasised, therefore, that the plan is to clarify what the age- old questions comprise of and what kind of attempts there have been at answering them. There really is no final authority on what is human, so I do not expect to arrive at any definite conclusions as to how things actually are. Due to their paradoxical nature some of these dilemmas escape definite solutions – and people, due to their own very nature, still cannot stop thinking about them. True to its sources, science fiction and philosophy, this research too will see answers outnumbered by questions.
1.1 Research material
For the discussion of the above topics of interest to me, I chose texts from two titans of science fiction, Isaac Asimov (1920-1992) and Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). Asimov wrote countless novels and short stories about robots, and his three laws of robotics that are supposed to guarantee that robots are harmless to humans, are cited in almost all books written about science fiction. It is worth pointing out that Asimov often wrote about androids but called them robots, which shows that the difference can be seen as merely cosmetic. The concepts obviously have a difference in meaning, a robot being mechanical and often metallic or plastic in appearance, and an android is an artificial construct which also looks like a human, but the shared feature is that they are made in the image of human beings. Since in one story discussed in this thesis a robot is converted into an
4 android (and possibly into a man), the story is asking whether there is in fact a continuum from one category to the next, rather than a fundamental difference.
One of Dick's fields of specialization is androids, in particular where there is uncertainty over a character's identity; often the android copies of humans are convincing enough to cause confusion. Therefore the idea of the perfect copy follows throughout his work. Dick's fascination with such perfect androids that they do not even realise they are androids, and who pose as human beings, borders on paranoia. Yet it makes excellent material for the study of what is human. In order to make a copy of something, one needs to know exactly what the original is like. So too with humans and androids. Also the paranoia can be seen as a natural response specifically to the socio-political climate of the 60s, with its emphasis on technology and the threat of a collapse of the entire social structure, so it is no surprise that an abundance of literature reflected this (Porush
1985, 105).
I chose one short story and one novel, “The Bicentennial Man” (1976) and Do Androids
Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), from Asimov and Dick respectively.1 The first one is a story of almost fifty pages and the latter approaches two hundred pages; because of the difference in length the novel will also receive more attention. It provides more food for thought, and there are certain themes that were not present in the other story at all. The discussion on kipple is solely based on
Do Androids Dream...? because the concept is one of Dick's own and used in the novel as well.
The other theme that deserves a sub-chapter of its own in this thesis is religion, even though “The
Bicentennial Man” does not elaborate on it as lengthily as the novel but merely hints at it in one detail.
Both of these stories have actually been made into films as well. The 1982 Ridley Scott film Blade Runner, based on Dick's novel, will receive more attention in the thesis than the 1999
Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus, but neither one of them are essentially in the core of the
1 Throughout the thesis, quotes from “The Bicentennial Man” will be followed by BM and page number in parenthesis, which refers to the 1995 HarperCollins edition of The Complete Robot. Likewise, DA followed by page number refers to the 1972 Grafton Books edition of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
5 discussion. Films tend to be rather different from the written texts they are based on, and due to the standard length of films they also leave rather many things out. Blade Runner is no exception, but on the other hand it has other emphasis and issues which make it worth considering. What Dick has expressed in the novel with words, the film also manages to express with visual moods and music. Blade Runner has provided a great many memorable quotes and captured the heart-aching quality of questions of what is human, what is life and death. Therefore it will be mentioned on a few occasions, although, as was mentioned, the films are not in the centre of argumentation.
One notable difference between Asimov and Dick's fiction can be described with the difference between their approach to science fiction (SF), to the extent that they could even be called separate genres. Bainbridge calls the kind of SF written by Asimov hard science fiction, and apparently Asimov himself preferred this name (Bainbridge 1986, 61-2). It is the branch of SF which emphasises the so called hard sciences, mainly physics, new innovations and technologies, rational explanations and factual reports, and usually has protagonists of the hero type. One good example of such a character is Asimov's robopsychologist Susan Calvin, who appears in several of his robot stories. She sympathizes more with robots than humans and is somewhat unemotional and distant, and she has a cool, rational attitude suitable for a scientist. In “Evidence” (1946) she states: “I like robots. I like them considerably better than I do human beings. If a robot can be created capable of being a civil executive, I think he'd make the best one possible. By the Laws of
Robotics, he'd be incapable of harming humans, incapable of tyranny, of corruption, of stupidity, of prejudice. . . . It would be most ideal” (Asimov 1995, 544). Obviously she is very optimistic about technology. Asimov himself depicts the attitude of hard SF in the following way: “So it may be that although we will hate and fight the machine, we will be supplanted anyway, and rightly so, for the intelligent machines to which we will give birth may, better than we, carry on the striving toward the goal of understanding and using the universe, climbing to heights we ourselves never aspire to” (italics added, 1983, 163).
If Asimov represents the hard SF, then Dick is a representative of the so-called new wave
6 of SF writing. According to Bainbridge the new wave is less concerned with science and more interested in “aesthetic truth, intensity of experience, and radical social vision” (1986, 84). Unlike hard SF, the new wave is not a unified school of thought with a unified agenda. It is often interested in the social sciences, relationships and feelings, criticises our society, worries about the effects of scientific progress, experiments with new avant-garde styles, and the characters are either average persons or strange and unusual ones, but developed in depth (Bainbridge 1986, 92).
Although the approaches are very different, they do not necessarily result in opposing statements in every respect. We can try to find answers to the question of what is human in both types of fiction, so for now the difference can in fact be laid aside, although we will return to it later on.
To summarise Isaac Asimov's “The Bicentennial Man”, one could say it is a case study of which body parts and qualities make a human being. The main character Andrew is a household robot who serves the Martin family for generations. He does not oppose to serving them, in fact he likes the family just as they like him, but nevertheless he eventually wants to buy his freedom with the money he has made by being an accomplished carpenter. He is told, however, that only human beings can be free. One by one he starts having his parts replaced by organic ones, until it finally comes to the last – and supposedly the most crucial – one, the organic brain. Andrew is told that with the new cellular brain he will not live long and his friends try to persuade him not to go through with the operation – after all, he was practically immortal before, a machine that could always be fixed. Andrew does not care about that though,and although he will only have about a year to live, he says: “If it brings me humanity, that will be worth it” (BM 681). In pursuit of humanity, then, even becoming mortal is insignificant. Apparently Andrew appreciates being human and being free above all.
In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the main character is Rick
Deckard, a bounty hunter whose job it is to find and kill, or “retire”, androids. These androids have escaped from Mars colonies in pursuit of freedom from slavery, and they have strength and reasoning capabilities that in most part match those of humans. Intellectually they are in fact
7 superior to most humans, but they are cold, calculating and emotionally detached. Things are further complicated because their appearances are no different from those of humans. The potential risk they pose to humans is lessened by the fact that they only have a few year lifespan. The bounty hunters' job is to put them through tests to decide whether the suspects are human or android.
Deckard is asked to test Rachael Rosen, who turns out to be an android without even being aware of it, which proves exactly how advanced the technology is and suggests that artificial intelligence
(AI) has been created. Deckard also develops feelings towards Rachael, which is odd from a bounty hunter whose job it it to kill these machines, but then again the novel hints that either
Deckard might be an android himself, or that affection between androids and humans is possible.
In Blade Runner another important character is Roy Batty, because some interesting parallels are drawn between him and Deckard, again suggesting the similarity between humans and androids.
1.2 Cognitive estrangement, other and novum in science fiction
Out of different definitions of science fiction one that has special appeal is from the science fiction author Brian Aldiss. In his view science fiction is the “search for a definition of mankind and his status in the universe” (1986, 25). It is self-discovery above all, both for the writer and the reader.
Therefore SF also offers, in principle, an indefinite number of readings. However, for SF (and, perhaps, for fantasy and Gothic literature among others) this may be even more true because it works from a distance. SF has been called escapist entertainment but the escape to outer space is also a very convenient tool for taking a good look within ourselves. The theoretical distance helps define us and our status because outside the everyday experience things begin to show a different side. Literature can, potentially, be eye-opening. As Porush remarks, the endless conflicting interpretations of what he calls cybernetic fiction “blossom and then explode in one's hands, making the reader aware of awareness itself” (1985, 70).
Darko Suvin has defined SF as “a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose
8 main device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment”
(original italics, 1988, 37). Adam Roberts explains that in English-language criticism estrangement is often rendered as alienation; it is an element which is different and “estranges us from the familiar and everyday” (2006, 8). Cognition, on the other hand, refers to the rational and logical attempt to “understand, to comprehend, the alien landscape of a given SF book, film or story”
(Roberts 2006, 8). Both estrangement and cognition need to be present to make a text SF.
Cognition enables us to grasp the familiar elements, estrangement makes us see them in a new light. Therefore their combination “allows SF both relevance to our world and the position to challenge the ordinary, the taken-for-granted” (Roberts 2006, 8).
Suvin has also coined the term 'novum' which refers to novelty or innovation, and brings a difference between the world in a SF text and the reader's empirical reality (1988, 37). According to Suvin, these 'nova', or new things, are the necessary condition of SF (1979, 65). They can be space ships, aliens, alternate histories and other such things commonly found in SF, although they
“have in large part lost all newness because of their endless circulation and recirculation” (Roberts
2006, 13). Even Suvin says he does not believe in individualistic originality, so a novum is always continuous with something prior to it (1979, 66). However, perhaps they need not be new in the sense of never having been heard of – more crucial is that they do not exist in our empirical world.
These nova still function as symbols for something unfamiliar, and by being strange they serve the purpose of symbolising even if we have heard about them before. Suvin calls SF “a symbolic system centered on a novum” (1979, 80). After looking at a few definitions of SF, also Roberts emphasises that implicit in the definitions “is a sense of SF as a symbolist genre” (2006, 14). Even a novum that has lost its newness can be endlessly reinterpreted. This is why older SF texts have not lost their appeal, and why the seemingly old nova can always be recycled. The nova, according to Roberts, need not to be seen “as a narrow and exhausted set of clichés, but as a supple and wide- referencing body of material symbols” (2006, 14).
In the same way as seeing the nova as symbols, they can be viewed as metaphors. If
9 Shakespeare wrote that Juliet is the sun, SF may state that day-to-day life is a virtual-reality prison constructed by machine-intelligences – only in SF the metaphor actually becomes literal (Roberts
2006, 140). As Suvin notes, metaphors work through sudden confrontations; they are language deviations which may give birth to new connotations (1988, 186). As such they are analogous to the recurring theme in SF – that of encountering otherness and thereby acquiring new realisations.
A metaphor can be extended into an entire metaphorical text and indeed become literal, as is often the case in SF. The entire text becomes a confrontation with something strange and alien, which is brought before us as a symbol or a metaphor.
According to Suvin a nova is always hegemonic, because it is so important and central to the narrative that it determines everything (1979, 70). Since it also helps us to see our reality afresh from a new perspective, it has potential power to change reality as well. For example Martians in a
SF narrative can only signify human relationships because at least so far we cannot imagine other ones (Suvin 1979, 71), so a story about them may even have resonances in reality. Although while reading SF we place it in an inferior position as it relates to reality (we know it not to be true), it provides fertile and illuminating ideas because we can interpret its material nova as symbols or metaphors for something closer to home. Suvin emphasises that in addition to all the novelty, surprise and innovation, “the new is always a historical category since it is always determined by historical forces which both bring it about in social practice (including art) and make for new semantic meanings that crystallize the novum in human consciousness” (1979, 80). Also the overall interest in the nova, slightly worn out as they may be, speaks about “something more durable, perhaps something fundamental in the human make-up, some human desire to imagine worlds other than the one we actually inhabit” (Roberts 2006, 38). From a scientific or rational point of view the nova may seem impossible, childish or ridiculous, but they reflect our dreams and desires, as well as our fears and anxieties.
There is a relationship between the fictional and the empirical world in which one reflects and mirrors the other. SF is often futuristic and may be about space travel, but perhaps the
10 distance of time and space helps define ourselves and our status, and face to face with an android we are actually looking at our own reflection in the mirror. As a mirror for ourselves, SF is a particularly appropriate field of study when we are interested in the big question of what it is to be human. Science fiction is about encountering difference, but without losing contact with the familiar. Robots, androids and cyborgs in SF are about encountering ourselves, by using alienation as a vehicle. Roberts quotes Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (1961): “We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors” (Roberts 2006, 17). As Suvin formulates it, the main character discovers “a country stranger than Solaris or Laputa: the back of his own mind” (1988,
105). In Stanislaw Lem's novels the protagonist learns painfully the truth concerning the self, its limitations and strengths by investigating a new SF situation (Suvin 1988, 107). The same applies to the reader as to the characters. Science fiction uses estrangement as a means to discuss us humans. It may tell stories of the future, parallel universes or strange new technologies, but the really exciting way of reading SF is as an encounter with both self and other.
Distancing oneself from the familiar every-day things also makes one see the preconditions of thinking and become free for more abstract reflection on the problem at hand. Fiction brings the empirical reality again in front of us for us to see and to wonder about. One example of this could be the opening sentence of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984): “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Since it is not common to think about nature having the features of technological apparatus but vice versa, we are made to ask what the position of technology is in contemporary world, and whether it is taking over nature or whether they have perhaps grown in together. By describing a thing familiar to us all, the sky, in an unexpected way, questions are posed and new ways to see old things appear.
Utopian fiction has similarities with SF and they can be called “kindred estranged genres”
(Suvin 1988, 35). Utopias picture ideal societies and dystopias warn us what might happen if we continue with the way things are developing now. Suvin calls utopian fiction “social-science- fiction” and therefore a sub-genre of SF (1988, 38); only in utopian literature the nova are first and
11 foremost social rather than scientific innovations. The relationship between these genres is not straightforwardly hierarchical, however. Suvin says utopian fiction is also more than a sub-genre:
“it is also one of the formal and the foremost among the idealogical ancestors of SF. All SF is, if not a daughter, then at least a niece of utopia . . . For all its adventure, romance, science popularization or wish-fulfilment, SF can finally be written only between the utopian and the anti- utopian horizon” (1988, 42). Thus the socio-political or ideological horizon also applies to SF. In
The Cyborg Handbook (1995), Peter Lev describes SF as “a privileged vehicle for the presentation of ideology. Because it is less concerned than other genres with the surface structure of social reality, science fiction can pay more attention to the deep structures of what is and what ought to be” (quoted in Roberts 2006, 36). It is no coincidence that the new wave of SF in the USA in the
1960s happened after a change away from the attitudes of the previous decades. Political activism and scepticism about technological solutions to social and environmental problems increased and the flourishing of SF reflected the socio-political climate of its time (Roberts 2006, 61).
Encounters with otherness in SF are lessons on social and political ideologies. SF is often about new gadgets but old ideas. Suvin argues that SF has “ethico-political liberating qualities” because the novelty creates an open-ended system; freedom brings the possibility of something new and different arising (1979, 82). Suvin makes a distinction between true and fake nova, the former being truly liberating and the latter “a pseudo-novelty, old meat rehashed with a new sauce”
(1979, 82-3). Roberts notes that sometimes SF has been used to reinforce cultural stereotypes and specific, narrow ideologies, for example an “ideological construction of 'American-ness' by demonising some notional scapegoat” (2006, 53). Ideology can also mask itself. It may hide its conservatism by pretending to be forward-looking (Roberts 2006, 66). On the other hand, readers may relate to different, marginalised groups, like aliens or robots. In an alternative reality one might have been born as a totally different kind of creature. In the big picture it is more or less a question of chance that one occupies a certain kind of body at a certain time in history. SF can ask the question, of whether your moral values would be the same if circumstances were different, in
12 other words, whether your values are consistent. The social implications of encounters with otherness are related to the experience of empathy.
Suvin emphasises the historical nature of SF, and to him the nova seem to be political symbols, or at least strongly related to social reality:
All the epistemological, ideological, and narrative implications and correlatives of the novum lead to the conclusion that significant SF is in fact a specifically roundabout way of commenting on the author's collective context . . . Even where SF suggests – sometimes strongly – a flight from that context, this is an optical illusion and epistemological trick. The escape is, in all such significant SF, one to a better vantage point from which to comprehend the human relations around the author. It is an escape from constrictive old norms into a different and alternative timestream, a device for historical estrangement, and at least a readiness for new norms of reality, for the novum of dealienating human history. (italics added, 1979, 84)
Since this thesis does not focus as much on the social or political aspects of SF as on the ones related to human identity, it could be argued that the nova have similar implications also in relation to human nature. Thus the escape in SF is one to a better vantage point from which to comprehend what is human. It is a device for personal estrangement, and at least a readiness for new norms of identity, for the novum of dealienating individual development. The escape is a possibility for the reinvention of self.
Although science fiction obviously is fiction, in a way it also says that reality is stranger than stories. The perspective on ourselves that science fiction offers is the source of much wonder.
To think that science fiction is more about the inner than outer space travel is to see that we are some strange and exotic creatures ourselves and that the material provided by day-to-day life is fantastic enough. As James Graham Ballard put it, “the only truly alien planet is Earth” (1962,
117). Even if science fiction does not give us many answers, it gives us questions. It all begins with the question What if…? and ends up with a bulk of other questions involving us, our surroundings and our place in the world.
13 1.3 Androids
Androids in SF, and in the real world too, as technical achievements, exist in a continuum with robots. Robot is a word coined by the Czech author Karel Capek, who wrote the play R.U.R.
(1921) which stands for Rossum's Universal Robots. Actually the robots in the play are not metallic but fleshy, which illustrates that there is only a fine line between one category of artificial humans and the next. Also Asimov, who called his literary creations robots, was of course aware of this. He writes: “In science fiction it is not uncommon to have a robot built with a surface, at least, of synthetic flesh; and an appearance that is, at best, indistinguishable from the human being.
Sometimes such humanoid robots are called 'androids' . . . and some writers are meticulous in making the distinction. I am not. To me a robot is a robot” (1995, 189). Asimov also mentions bionic human beings, who have had failing or damaged organs replaced either by cloned organs or with mechanical devices, which could be called “a roboticization of human beings” (1983, 90). For example, organ transplants and pacemakers are real examples of this.
Robota is Czech for 'drudgery' or 'servitude' (Roberts 2006, 116), and the idea that artificial humans would be used as workers, as well as the theme of slavery, has always followed with robots. They rise ethical dilemmas of oppression and exploitation of certain groups. Real life political issues, like apartheid in South-Africa or racial segregation and slavery in America, can certainly be interpretations of many SF texts involving robots or androids. If the metaphor of machinery is taken as a representative of institutions, or the condition of modern life, it instantly evokes a vision of the unfortunate protagonist in Charles Chaplin's Modern Times (1936), the little man stuck between the wheels of one gigantic machine and being force-fed by another, having entirely lost control over himself. The more metaphysical than social interpretation of the machine metaphor takes us back to the Cartesian ghost in the machine. Porush envisions the human soul being embodied silently, or trapped, or perhaps made obsolete, by a mechanism (1985, 90), and quotes Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano (1952) where an automaton plays music: “Makes you
14 feel kind of creepy, don't it . . . Watching them keys go up and down? You can almost see a ghost sitting there playing his heart out” (1985, 89).
Another type of construct related to androids is, of course, cyborgs. According to Porush, the concept of cybernetics is centred on the notion of governor (Greek root kybernos), which is
“any central device . . . which acts within a system or on parts of a system to alter its ''state'' or behavior”, and therefore in general terms it is the science of control and communication in animal and machine (1985, 19-20). In fiction cyborgs are portrayed as a synthesis of organic and synthetic parts, and frequently pose the question of difference between human and machine as one concerned with morality, free will, and empathy, and they can be either almost indistinguishable from humans or visibly mechanical. Donna Haraway's “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,
Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” is a highly critical socio-political feminist text.
The ideas in the text include that we are all cyborgs, and that dualisms like organism/machine have been at a border war (2001, 2270). Haraway mentions that there has been a “tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other” (2001, 2270), but then claims that by the late twentieth century the boundaries between 1) human and animal 2) organism and machine and
3) physical and non-physical, have been breached, or at least the distinctions have become leaky and imprecise (2001, 2271-2275). Therefore the cyborg myth is about “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities” (2001, 2274) but at the same time it shows how to break away from dualisms which we have used to explain ourselves (2001, 2299).
Artificial humans have been presented in fiction well before the boom of science fiction, however. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is a well remembered example from the Gothic tradition. Technically the creature that Dr. Frankenstein creates is an android, and especially after it learns to speak it quite resembles a man – a heterosexual man, for it longs for a female partner.
Since the novel belongs to Gothic rather than some other literary genre, the creature is viewed much more as a monster, though, than as a scientific achievement like an android. Monsters and monstrosity, as well as grotesqueness, are another way of approaching otherness as a reflection of
15 self. Literature is full of other ways as well. Whether we look at other organic creatures, artificial constructs or combinations of both – be it animals, children, people of a different appearance, minority groups, aliens, zombies, monsters, clones, robots, androids, cyborgs, machines, computers, artificial intelligence – anything that is represented as other helps us reveal something about who we are and who we are not.2 The moral, social and political implication is that the mirror does not simply tell us how things are, it also helps us change them. Only after reflection can there be transformation. Perhaps already at the moment when we get a glimpse of how things are, they begin to change. The mirror distorts the picture, and in the dynamic state of things theoretical distance and estrangement renew our experiences.
The fundamental fear of technological innovations is based on their unknown potential and on the idea that they may turn against us. In the Stanley Kubrick film 2001: a Space Odyssey
(1968), the super computer HAL first plays chess and has conversations with the crew of the space craft, and then goes mad; it becomes paranoid, kills, begs for its life and so on. These are all things we associate with human beings, only now applied to a machine (Roberts 2006, 115). In that sense the fear of machines becoming human is at least partially related to the fear of humanity. Most clearly this is the case with androids, which are robots designed to resemble a human, usually both in appearance and behaviour; android could roughly be translated as 'manlike'. Indeed, androids in fiction are seldom given characteristics that are not human. They may be physically stronger than humans or intellectually their superiors, immoral or even bloodthirsty, but these are all traits that we humans have. If an android was given capabilities that humans do not have, say, flying or being invisible or whatnot, it would not be manlike enough and therefore technically not even be an android.
Porush bases his The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction on the machine metaphor, to the extent that even the texts he discusses can be seen as machineries – thus the notion of cybernetic
2 Children as aliens may seem like the least obvious example of these. For an extensive study of child as other, especially evil innocence, victimisation and monstrosity, see Sabine Büssing's Aliens in the Home: The child in horror fiction, 1987.
16 fiction. He notes that the monstrosity of machines has always been confronted in arts and literature
“in an attempt to neutralize and express our deepest fears”; art, he says, is the final frontier where the machine can be made vulnerable again (1985, 8). Isaac Asimov was an advocate of robots, and to clear some of the fears, doubts and paranoia concerning robots, he formulated the three laws of robotics together with John Campbell. They are to ensure, at least in his fiction, that robots do not turn against humans or cause us harm. Asimov boldly states that the Laws keep robots from ever harming human beings (Asimov with Ben Bova 1983, 146). The Laws are as follows:
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. (BM 635)
In the Introduction to The Complete Robot Asimov says that when he read robot stories as a teenager, he felt they fell into two categories, which he calls Robot-as-Menace and Robot-as-
Pathos. In the first category robots are obviously a threat, and in the latter they are charming and lovable. Asimov says that when he wrote his first robot story he began to have a dim vision of robots as neither menace nor pathos, “built with safety features so they weren't Menaces and they were fashioned for certain jobs so that no Pathos was necessarily involved” (1995, 9-10). Since in some of his stories the robots' Law circuits can momentarily jam due to different interpretations of the situation a robot is in (in Asimov's “Runaround” the robot “has been designed with an especially strong Third Law” and he “goes crazy”, as Bainbridge (1986, 73) notes), and because
Asimov adds robot sympathies to his narration, it could actually be said that instead of being neither menace nor pathos, sometimes his robots are both. Suvin even describes Asimov's fetishism with robots and their efficient engineers as a kind of technological religion, states that the Laws can be proven wrong, and that Lem has demonstrated these robots to be “logically unrealizable” (1988, 101). Since the human characters are, according to Suvin, mere “cardboard stereotypes” compared with the vivid robots, the stories cannot be taken as a serious prophecy regarding robotics but can only be read as analogies to real human relationships (1988, 101-2).
17 The way that Patricia S. Warrick formulates it, “the development of mechanical cybernetic systems raises four tightly related philosophical issues: the Cartesian mind-body dualism, the question of free will, the relationship of human and mechanical systems, and the relationship of animate and inanimate matter” (1980, 23). To recapitulate in a similar vein, the research question of this thesis is, how androids in the chosen SF texts reflect on what is human. First of all this comprises of the question on what we are essentially made of; are we mind or matter or both, and what is the role of our brains? Are we machines or animals? Also, how can we explain consciousness? Are we unique in having minds, in other words, is artificial intelligence possible?
Furthermore, are we automatons deterministically bound by the laws of physics and animal instinct, or are we genuinely free? The second group of questions stems from the androids' borderline status as half machine, half human. What is the relationship between the original and the copy, and does artificiality result in a crucial difference between them? Are the man-made categories valid at all, or is the categorization itself artificial? What happens to human identity when the boundaries of categories are shattered? The third area of questions is the most subjective one. What is the meaning of life? Where can we find purpose, knowing that we will die? Could we find comfort in other people? What do we believe in? The thread that runs through the thesis is how androids mirror human identity.
18 2. What makes a human?
This chapter focuses on philosophy of mind, which is the study of mentality and consciousness, and their connection to the body. At the core of philosophy of mind lies the mind-body problem, which will also be the starting point of the chapter. Today, this branch of philosophy cannot ignore the results of natural sciences, particularly neuroscience and cognitive science, so at times the approach needs to be rather scientific for a literature thesis. However, since the human nature in this day and age is quite largely defined by the grey matter inside our skulls, and that is where we turn to look for answers, this perspective has to be included. Also the fact that the research material is none other than science fiction, justifies this discussion.
After laying the foundations of the mind-body problem we can turn to look at consciousness more closely. After all we feel that it is our awareness, our conscious perception of the world, which makes us humans special. If the discussion on the mind-body problem at first seems a little distant from our fictional texts, hopefully the sub-chapter on consciousness will show its relevance. As Tim Crane presents the puzzlement around the mystery of consciousness, it arises from “trying to understand how a mere piece of matter like the brain can be the source of something like consciousness. On the one hand, we feel that our consciousness must just be based on matter; but, on the other hand, we find it impossible to understand how this can be so. This is certainly what makes many people think that consciousness is mysterious” (2003, 219). One way to study the human consciousness is artificial intelligence. Even as a thought experiment, as in SF texts, the question on the overall possibility of AI, and then all the more specific questions on what we would require from AI, our acceptance of it, and its similarity to human intelligence – all these issues necessarily revolve around consciousness. Both of the SF texts obviously address these issues because they concentrate on the android-human categorisation, and actually blur the distinction.
The third sub-chapter discusses freedom of will, which is a very important question that arises from the mind-body problem. From a physicalist point of view freedom must be an illusion
19 because everything follows natural laws and the laws of causation. In a deterministic world there is no room for a mind that could break these laws or freely make decisions on courses of action. Yet freedom to choose is what makes life meaningful. Humans refuse the very idea of being mechanically determined robots, and freedom is one of our most valued ideals. Both Asimov and
Dick's texts specifically address this issue as the androids fight for their freedom, thus refusing to be mere machines.
2.1 Mind and body
Before plunging into the question of what we humans are made of, we need to look at the basic approaches concerning what the world, or anything at all, is made of. The psycho-physical problem arises from the question of whether both mental and material substances exist, and if they do, how they relate. When applied to human beings specifically, this becomes the mind-body problem.
Descartes was one of the rationalists of the new scientific era following the Middle Ages. His position was that people have a material body, just as they appear to, and this body is much like a machine, deterministic, and straightforwardly obeys the laws of cause and effect. Descartes was, however, a dualist, and thought that somewhere inhabiting this body there is also a non-material soul, or the already mentioned ghost in the machine.3 Descartes actually claimed that the spirit has its residence in the pineal gland, which is not a satisfactory explanation because the gland belongs to the material world. Descartes' merits and importance to the philosophical tradition may lie elsewhere, first and foremost in his method of radical doubt, but his dualism represents both his time in history, when both science and religion were important, and in fact the everyday view still persistent today: we get out of bed in the morning because of the assumption that we do have bodies, but everyone also has a sense of a non-material self. Theoretically, however, dualism is
3 The phrase, ghost in the machine, is actually not from Descartes himself, but from Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, written in 1949, where he criticises Descartes' view – the phrase, however, has been recycled in popular culture and acquired different connotations (Matthews 2005, 55).
20 today considered an unsatisfactory philosophical position because it fails to explain how these two types of substances relate to each other.4
Materialism admits only the existence of material or physical things; because of the other connotations that the word 'materialism' has, it it also called physicalism, and this thesis uses the terms interchangeably. Julien Offray de La Mettrie (1709-1751) was a physician whose L'Homme machine (1747) formulates a different perspective from Descartes. According to La Mettrie the human body is such a refined machine that even the soul can be explained physically, and it is the complexity of the soul which makes humans superior to animals. The soul can be revealed a posteriori by first studying the organs, and thus probable explanations concerning the human nature can be acquired, even if this method does not provide certainty (La Mettrie 2003, 26). La
Mettrie agrees with those thinkers of the past who said that medical science alone can change spirits, states of the mind, characters and habits (2003, 27). Everything depends on the way our machine has been built, although upbringing and climate also play a role (La Mettrie 2003, 31-33).
The body is a complex clockwork which winds itself (2003, 29, 67, 72). Therefore the soul is an enlightened machine dependent on the brain and the body, and as such soul is an unnecessary word unless it refers to that physical part which is responsible for thinking (2003, 60).5 All variations of physicalism trust natural sciences in telling us what matter is, and La Mettrie was clearly a materialist. A third possible view is, of course idealism, which is founded on the existence of
4 To mention some dualist approaches, interactionism is a view which states that the material and non-material types interact, but a problem remains in explaining what this mystical interaction is or how it happens. Occasionalism was proposed by Nicolas Malebranche in the 17th century, and basically states that God has simply arranged things so that on the occasion of the mind for example making a decision, the body moves accordingly. Parallelism, which was supported for example by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, both also 17th century philosophers, states that there are two parallel series of events, one physical and the other mental. The problem remains in explaining the curious coincidence of how they in fact just happen to be parallel, and Leibniz suggested that God has wound up two clockworks at the same time, one mental and the other material, and thus pre-established harmony. None of the branches of dualism really succeed in explaining the very thing they set forth to explain. 5 The most extreme physicalist stance is eliminativism, according to which nothing exists but matter. The most famous advocates of this view are Paul and Patricia Churchland, who think that science must eliminate mental substances altogether. (For this extreme view, see Patricia Churchland's Neurophilosophy ( 1986).) A slightly less radical view is reductionism, according to which mental substances are real, but they can be fully reduced to matter, which they are based on. The least harsh physicalist approach is emergentism, which not only admits the existence of mental substances, but states that they are something more than their material foundation, and cannot be reduced to it. Mental substances emerge from the material ones and begin to lead their own life. Reductionism and emergentism, by admitting mental phenomena, are closer to dualism than eliminativism. Emergentism in particular has trouble explaining the mystical leap of the first ever mental substance emerging from the physical world
21 mental entities as the primal substances.6 Idealism, however, is a very unpopular view today. After this short and simplified introduction to the basic ontological solutions we can proceed to a discussion of what the metaphysical implications are in relation to humans.
The reason why the mind-body problem is, indeed, a problem is that although in our day-to- day life we have no difficulty talking about either of the concepts, mind and body, we cannot explain how they are connected to each other. Although we have conceptions of both mind and body, fitting them into the same picture seems hard, if not impossible. The problem, as Searle notes, arises from the attempt to join the “traditional mentalistic conception that we have of ourselves with an apparently inconsistent conception of the universe as a purely physical system”
(1984, 8). We do know that minds and bodies are connected because brain damages alter individuals' ability to think, and because drugs, alcohol or, say, sleep deprivation, change the way a mind works – and yet we do not know how exactly minds and bodies are related (Crane 2003, 43).
We do have knowledge about the functions of different, specific parts of the brain, for example speech, vision and hearing are located in their own areas. Despite this, mind is hard to locate in the material world, one reason being the plasticity of the brain. We know that after brain damages, sometimes an unaffected area of the brain mysteriously comes to rescue and takes the tasks of the damaged one, as if the specific function had not been located in its own area and been injured after all, but had somehow been everywhere and nowhere. It is even possible that a person has one hemisphere of the brain removed and still stays the same person. If neither hemisphere is that important after all, in this light it seems impossible for the mind to live in the brain. Somehow, by its very nature, physicalist science cannot explain the experience we have of having minds, or how this experience is produced, so everyday dualism lives on. 7
6 Similarly to physicalism, only vice versa, it would be possible to claim that physical objects emerge from mental ones, or that they can be reduced to mental substances, or even that nothing but mental substances exist, thus eliminating matter altogether. 7 For a fascinating – mind boggling, even – presentation on neurological states and their effects on human perception, cognition, and personality, see Oliver Sacks' The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (1985), which is a collection of real life case histories of the most curious nature. Sacks is a neuroscientist, but his approach is almost romantic, as he also sees the brain as an enchanting mystery, not merely mechanical. His medical anecdotes show nature as a practical prankster, playing tricks on us which are at the same time horrible, absurd and comical. This
22 One scientific argument against dualism arises from biology, and more specifically from the theory of evolution. Dualism suggests a categorical difference between animals on the one hand, which are like mechanical automata without awareness, and humans on the other hand who do have fully developed consciousness, but as Eric Matthews points out, “it is hard to see how the transition could be accomplished in an evolutionary way” (2005, 23). He adds that although
Darwinism is a scientific theory, and thereby may turn out to be false, the fact that dualism is so incompatible with it “seems to call in question, to say the least, the plausibility of dualism” (2005,
23). The animal-machine comparison is in fact another important way to approach the human- android question, because humans can either be considered as a kind of animal, or as something above animals. The reason why the animal discussion is relevant for AI is that animals have been considered mechanistic creatures who lack a soul and whose reactions are purely automatic; therefore the question is, are humans unique in having a mind? (Matthews 2005, 70-2). Both of the
SF texts would have to reply no, because in them the androids clearly possess minds. “The
Bicentennial Man” in fact places AI above animals. Andrew's, the protagonist's, treatment raises a question of robot rights, which are discussed somewhat like animal rights might be discussed today: “Is this just? Would we treat an animal so? Even an inanimate object which has given us good service has a claim on our consideration. And a robot is not insensible; it is not an animal. It can think well enough to enable it to talk to us, reason with us, joke with us” (BM 656). Because robots can think and reason and interact with humans, in this story they are not mere animals.
In Do Androids Dream..? the animal issue is integrated into the story. After World War
Terminus almost all species have become extinct. Therefore owning and looking after an animal is a moral responsibility as well as a marker of social acceptability. Rick Deckard's neighbor says,
“You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and anti- emphatic. I mean, technically it's not a crime like it was right after W.W.T. but the feeling's still there” (DA 15). Animals are extremely expensive, however, so the less noble side of owning
makes his stories a strangely frightening but entertaining read.
23 animals is that they are also status symbols. Not everyone can afford an animal, but technology has advanced, and electric animals are available for a much cheaper price than real ones, so that everyone can at least pretend to have one. At first Deckard only has an electric sheep, and he contemplates: “Owning and maintaining a fraud had a way of gradually demoralizing one. And yet from a social standpoint it had to be done, given the absence of the real article” (DA 12). He looks at his sheep and ponders on the animal-android relationship:
It doesn't know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought about this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a subform of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him.” (DA 36-7)
Authentic life is precious; as one android bitterly remarks, “we're not even considered animals. . . . every worm and wood louse is considered more desirable than all of us put together” (DA 94).
Opposite to “The Bicentennial Man,” here AI is not appreciated and animals are more valuable. On the other hand androids are described as predators and “solitary organisms” (as opposed to herd animals) more than once, so the animal-machine juxtaposition follows throughout the story.
In “The Bicentennial Man,” Andrew starts as a mechanical robot but he seems to be different from others. He is creative and he seems to have more personality, because due to his unique brain, he has aspirations and ambitions. He wants to become free, and he wants to become human. As science advances, it is possible for him to replace his mechanical organs, one by one, by organic ones – just like humans can replace their organic organs by prosthetic ones in order to prolong their lives. Androids have positronic brains and they are immortal, but in the end Andrew has an operation even to change the brain and he becomes mortal. The story does not explain how
Andrew still appears to be the same 'person' as he was when his body was still made of a different type of parts altogether. Where do his creativity, personality, mind and personal identity live, if they still follow him regardless of the body? When Andrew wants to start replacing his parts his lawyer, George, his lawyer and family member, states that “The seat of Andrew's personality is his positronic brain and it is the one part that cannot be replaced without creating a new robot. The
24 positronic brain, therefore, is Andrew the owner. Every other part of the robotic body can be replaced without affecting the robot's personality, and those other parts are the brain's possessions”
(BM 661-2). Personality is very clearly located in the brain, but this does not explain how Andrew in the end remains the same after his brain has been replaced. Although personality follows the body, it remains a mystery where exactly it is located. In all fairness it must be said that even science cannot tell where the human identity resides. Our cells die and renew all the time; apart from neural cells even the longest living ones only survive a few years, and yet we think we remain the same person throughout our lives. Brain cells do not renew themselves, they just die, so the only permanent cells we have from birth to death are the ova and the cells in the lenses of the eyes, but it does not seem plausible that personality is located in the eyes, or that only women have personality, in the ova they carry around from birth to death (Nicholas Fearn 2005, 4). Andrew is the modern version of the metaphorical ship of Theseus, which, on a long trip out on the sea, has its old and rotten parts changed so that in the end none of the original timber remains. The question is, is it still the same ship? As Fearn points out, what if the old parts were also kept and used to construct another vessel – which one now would be the ship of Theseus? (2005, 7)
When it comes to ships the question of identity is not very important, but it applies to humans. We have absolutely no evidence that identity can exist without a body, but we are also unable to say, which part of the body identity is located in. On one hand Andrew is living in a physicalist universe. He, not merely as a body, but also as a person, exists simply because that is how he has been manufactured. The idea seems to be of the “if you build it, they will come”-type, which means that if you indeed build the android body perfectly, the mind will follow. The mind is something that is built into the structures, it is physical. As far as we can call him a person, which we do because he is different from all the other robots, his personality must be the result of his physique. In other words the mind is mechanical. It simply emerges from the physical, which is the primary substance. On the other hand, paradoxically, Andrew cannot be living in a physicalist world, because then it would make absolutely no sense whatsoever that he remains the same
25 person after all his parts have been replaced. His identity must be something which is not attached to the physical body; it must be a separate substance of a mental world. Thus he seems to live in a dualist world. As we shall later see, this paradox is why some people feel that AI in general is not merely implausible but impossible, an oxymoron, even. Andrew the android certainly raises a problematic philosophical dilemma.
In Do Androids Dream..? the latest models of androids, with the Nexus-6 brain units, are very difficult to distinguish from humans. Outwardly their appearances are the same, indeed the bounty hunters need to rely on a very specific test, the Voigt-Kampff, to find out whether someone is an android or a human. What it measures is emphatic responses to hypothetical social situations involving something unethical; “an android bounced helplessly about when confronted by an empathy-measuring test. Empathy, evidently, existed only within the human community” (DA 28).
What the test measures is the subjects' response times and involuntary “capillary dilation in the facial area . . . the so-called ''shame'' or ''blushing'' reaction to a morally shocking stimulus”, as well as “fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles” (DA 40), to see if they are only faking truly moral responses. Morals is what separates androids from humans, and this difference will be returned to later on. Physically the androids resemble humans to the extent that as long as someone is alive, it cannot be known for certain what they are. The truth about someone's identity can only be revealed by some kind of a bone marrow test, which would only be done post mortem, since on a living person it is slow, painful and a violation of rights. After death it is obviously too late to discover that a bounty hunter has made a mistake, so the reliability of the empathy test is crucial.
Deckard discusses the possible uncertainties concerning the testing with his superior, inspector Bryant. Not all humans are the same, and some might have different, weakened emphatic responses in the test. Bryant worries that some human individuals might not pass it, because more research is required on how schizoid and schizophrenic patients, who exhibit a “flattening of affect”, measure on these personality profiles (DA 33). Deckard says that this problem has existed for as long as androids have been posing as humans. Bryant persists that “psychiatrists . . . think
26 that a small class of human beings could not pass the Voigt-Kampff scale. If you tested them in line with police work you'd assess them as humanoid robots. You'd be wrong, but by then they'd be dead” (DA 33). The men agree that such individuals would not be walking the streets, they would be in institutions, because “They couldn't conceivably function in the outside world; they certainly couldn't go undetected as advanced psychotics – unless of course their breakdown had come recently and suddenly and no one had gotten around to noticing. But this could happen” (DA 33).
This reveals a severe problem in defining what a human being should be like. There exists such a variety of characteristics which people have in varying degrees, that definitions or explicit descriptions become impossible to achieve. Who can say what qualifies as human and what does not? We do not seem to have neat, labelled boxes where to place every individual. Rather, there is a rich, complex continuum where one category blends with the next. The question of categorisation will be returned to in chapter three.
The only worry with the test is not that some humans might not pass it, but also that the new, more advanced androids might. The manufacturers of the Nexus-6 type, the Rosen
Association, have assured that even the latest types would prove as androids in the test, but the bounty hunters only have their word for it. Therefore Deckard has to go device tests at the headquarters of the Rosen organisation, to determine it for himself. Bryant says: “this could go wrong either way. If you can't pick out all the humanoid robots, then we have no reliable analytical tool and we'll never find the ones who're already escaping” (DA 34). Deckard actually only gets one person to test when he gets to the Rosen headquarters. The test shows that Rachael Rosen,
Eldon Rosen's niece, is an android, but they claim she is not, explaining to Deckard that the test result is due to Rachael having spent most of her life on the space ship where she was born, and that since the test is about social situations on Earth, mostly involving animals, she simply has not developed sensitivity for them. Eldon Rosen insists that the test is not accurate: “Your police department . . . may have retired, very probably have retired, authentic humans with underdeveloped emphatic ability, such as my innocent niece here” (DA 45). For a while Deckard
27 believes them, and it looks like the test has to be abandoned if it cannot tell schizoid people from androids. Next the Rosens even try to bribe Deckard, but he wants to do one more test on Rachael, which tells him her reaction is faked. Deckard concludes the test was effective all along: “To Eldon
Rosen, who slumped morosely by the door of the room, he said, 'Does she know?' Sometimes they didn't; false memories had been tried various times, generally in the mistaken idea that through them reactions to testing would be altered. Eldon Rosen said, 'No. We programmed her completely. But I think toward the end she suspected” (DA 49).
The idea that memories are crucial to the experience of identity is called the memory theory. Although people keep changing throughout their lives physically, psychologically and emotionally, the reason why they think they are still the same person or have the same identity is the continuity of their memories. Mark Rowlands points out that memories are not the only continuous things, though, and since for example beliefs, thoughts and emotions follow us, too, a better name for this idea is the psychological continuity theory (2005, 107). He suggests that people do not have an identity or a self at all, but rather a succession of identities or selves; when changes over time are taken into consideration, “None of us are ever identical with ourselves”
(2005, 117). According to Rowlands, the self “has the character of a river, of a process, not a thing” (2005, 117). Also Searle points out both that memory is crucial for a mind, and that
“memory must not be understood as a storehouse of information, but as a continuing activity of the brain” (1998, 44, 184). Although memory is important to identity, Fearn reminds us that we do not consider amnesia as equivalent to death (2005, 8). A person with impaired memory is still a person, even if their identity is in a way lost. Fearn states that “while memory, personality, emotions and other psychological traits might be indicative of personal identity, they are not constitutive of it” (2005, 13). Therefore the question of artificial memories implanted on androids is an interesting thought experiment.
Rachael is clearly shocked by the discovery of being an android, as due to her memories she had no idea. The android does not know what it is, but, as we have seen, we humans do not
28 really know who or what we are either. In Blade Runner Deckard wonders, “How can it not know what it is?” On the other hand, could we not think that if the android thinks it is human and appears to have a consciousness, it therefore is human? As the android Pris declares in the film, “I think . . . therefore I am”. In that case even artificially created consciousness qualifies as consciousness. In
“The Bicentennial Man” Andrew, too, ponders on the unsolved mind-body dilemma and suggests that perhaps there could be another way of defining humanity. “It all comes down to the brain, then, but must we leave it at the level of cells versus positrons? Is there no way of forcing a functional definition? Must we say that a brain is made of this or that? May we not say that a brain is something – anything – capable of a certain level of thought?” (BM 678) Andrew seems to be suggesting that consciousness is not bound to a specific type of substance or structure, but that it is essentially functional. The following discussion on consciousness, artificiality and AI take this approach more closely into consideration.
2.2 Consciousness
As Crane notes, consciousness is what makes the world appear to us the way it does, and it is the
“ultimate source of all value in the world”; Einstein said that “without this inner illumination,the universe would be nothing but a heap of dirt” (Crane 2003, 26). Let us first, then, discuss human consciousness, which by no means has straightforward explanations or consensus. After that we can turn to the question of machine intelligence, or AI, and ponder on the possibility of machines having consciousness.
Mental phenomena have a quality which goes by several names; it is sometimes called directedness, sometimes aboutness, sometimes intentionality. What it means, is simply that thoughts are always thoughts about something, and consciousness is always directed on something. Physical phenomena, on the other hand, never exhibit this quality, and Brentano's thesis, as Crane explains, is the claim that “intentionality is the 'mark of the mental'” (Crane 2003,
31). Then again it is hard to see how, for example, the sensation of pain or depression is directed
29 on something. The term used to refer to those elements of qualitative, subjective experiences which cannot be explained by directedness is called qualia; a pain may be directed on, say, a tooth, but its particular naggingness is not directed on anything, it is just there (Crane 2003, 39, 131).
If we apply the Cartesian method of radical doubt to epistemology, then the only thing we can be sure of is that something exists which is having these doubts. Also, even if we consider the possibility that all our perceptions are mere hallucinations, we can still be sure first of all that the recipient of these hallucinations must exist but also about the content of the perceptions: one may be aware that the ore does not bend under water but the visual perception that it does is still a fact.
There can be no mistaking about the contents of one's own mind, even if the thoughts in no way resemble the actual world. It is possible to follow one's own lines of thought and reasoning by concentrating, but when it comes to other people and other minds, there will never be any certainty. We can only learn about other minds by discussing, for example, but there will still be no certainty that other minds take similar paths and work the same way as ours. The way we know about our minds is not, therefore, symmetrical, to the way we know about others, and this important asymmetry leads to a problem called 'the problem of other minds' (Crane 2003, 47-8).
The only way we can make assumptions about other people's minds is by basing them on facts about their observable behaviour, but the problem is that our assumptions concerning their minds will remain mere guesses which we base on our own experiences. It is conceivable that someone could behave in exactly the same way but for entirely different reasons, with different motives, different mind set – or, perhaps, even without actually having a mind at all. It may be crazy to think of other people as unconscious robots without minds, but the thought is compatible with the evidence we have of other minds (Crane 2003, 48). The assumption that other people have minds similar to ours remains but a theory.
Behaviourism is a school of thought which had its most popular days decades ago, and its appeal is in its simple and straightforward explanation that we can understand others by observing their behaviour, that the observable behaviour is “all there is to having a mind” (Crane 2003, 49).
30 Behaviourism is no longer a popular psychological or philosophical explanation, especially since it makes knowledge about one's own mind problematic. We do not need to observe our own behaviour in order to know our minds, and behaviourism has a deliberate disregard of subjective, conscious experience. It denies the experience of what it is like, from the inside, to have a mind
(Crane 2003, 49-50). It cannot even begin to explain the qualia of sensations. Then again not everyone would admit the experience of qualia as a genuine defence of consciousness as a non- material substance. After all, chemical substances, such as drugs or alcohol, can have a very deep effect on the qualia and alter consciousness; therefore, if the qualia are a result of physiological circumstances, there is no reason to see them as proof for inner mentality independent of physiology or, for example, external behaviour.
Thomas Nagel's essay, "What Is it Like to Be a Bat?" (1974) is a defence for qualia, which refuses to deny the existence of the experience of what it is like to be someone or something. Just as we will never know what it is like to be a bat, we will never be able to communicate what it is like to be me, and yet that experience is so fundamental that it cannot be ignored. Several thought experiments defend qualia with the so-called knowledge argument, by stating that no matter how much knowledge we have about something, like colours or the taste of wine, all those facts still cannot reveal what colours look like or what wine tastes like, and the first sensory experience of them still gives more knowledge about them even if we already had all the scientific facts. Also we can imagine a creature which is exactly like us, but which does not feel anything; this is called the zombie-argument. On the other hand for example Daniel Dennet's Consciousness Explained (1991) states that consciousness can be fully explained by science. This illustrates that science and subjectivity are not agreed upon, and that an explanatory gap exists between mind and body. Searle actually argues that the attempts to fill this gap between brain and mind have failed “because there isn't any gap to fill” (1984, 42). Indeed it seems that if the answer to a question cannot be found, then there must be something wrong with the question. Searle's efforts have not convinced everyone though, so the debate continues.
31 Because qualia presents such a serious problem to physicalism, some people feel that panpsychism must be the answer, even if that may be hard to accept as well. The idea is that mental states are everywhere, starting from the tiniest particles – note that it is not the same thing as animism, where everything has a soul (Fearn 2005, 69-71). A panpsychist can be a physicalist who also thinks that all physical creatures, objects and systems have mental states, at least in some extremely primitive, protomental way. This idea is conveyed for example in Ambrose Bierce's story from 1894, “Moxon's Master”, which depicts an inventor concluding that the definition of a machine applies to humans, plants, crystal formations, anything at all, and therefore “that all matter is sentient, that every atom is a living, feeling, conscious being. There is no such thing as dead, inert matter; it is all alive” (quoted in Warrick 1980, 40-1). Many Eastern philosophies would recognise this idea. It may be easier to accept if we consider the sheer complexity of the human body, for example. If we think about all the countless cells we have, and the amount of atoms and particles all those cells are combinations of, as well as the fact that they have to be combined in a very specific and precise way to make a specific person – if we keep this incomprehensible complexity in mind, we do not have to give a lot of mentalistic value to an individual electron, atom, molecule or cell. Their mentality would be very primitive indeed. Similarly, babies are thought to have a consciousness different from that of adults, which develops gradually, rather than abruptly, and yet we have no difficulty in regarding them conscious.
Now, after presenting the key points about human consciousness, let us proceed to a discussion of artificial intelligence and the question of machines developing consciousness. The reason why AI is relevant for the discussion of human mind, is that if AI is possible, that suggests that human mind is mechanical. In order to create AI which works like our minds, we also need to have a lot of knowledge about human minds. Then again if AI does not have to resemble human intelligence, but qualifies as intelligence nonetheless, this would teach us that even if our minds may be unique, they are not the only possible type. It has sometimes been suggested that human intelligence might be but an evolutionary step on the road to machine intelligence. Asimov
32 suggests that perhaps our creations, the machines, would last for aeons while we as biological species may be short-lived (1983, 151-2). At the moment, though, machines cannot repair and reproduce themselves the way that biological organism can, so there is no evidence in favour of this thought yet. Fiction likes to play with the idea nevertheless, and rightly so, for just because something has not happened yet, it does not mean it will never be possible.
If we consider androids as artificial intelligence, and pose the question of whether they might have consciousness, it is linked to the question of whether computers can think, for the most likely way for the androids to have intelligence and mind would then be through some kind of a programmed computer, even if it did not resemble the typical computers. At the moment probably no-one would earnestly claim that computers think, but some feel strongly that one day they will.
This idea is founded not only on the faith in technological progress and the advancement of science, because even more fundamentally it relies on the notion that thinking itself is computational. To put it very bluntly, building a machine which thinks like humans implies that humans think like machines. Is the human mind, then, a computer? Physicalists would say it is, that everything that goes on in the mind is identical to a specific state in the brain, and that consciousness is explained simply by the brain doing its job. It may be difficult to imagine our brains as computational machines because we have an inner experience that there is more to minds than that, but a physicalist's response to this would be that it is difficult to imagine many things – the space-time curvature, or that energy equals mass, for example – but they are still scientific facts, independent of whether our imaginations can grasp them.
It is not very clear what a thinking machine would do exactly. Would it think in the same way as we do, or in a different way? As an analogy, aeroplanes fly in a different way than birds do
(Crane 2003, 115). If we define thinking as exactly the thing that we do, then a thinking machine would have to think in the same way as us, but if we cannot be sure about the minds of other people no matter what we do, then how would we know the mind of the machine? When the AI projects started in the USA in the 1950s the attempt was not, however, to create a machine that
33 thinks exactly the way we do, but a machine which does things that would require thinking if they were done by humans, which is a very different thing (Crane 2003, 116). This requires no concern in human psychology or physiology, as the attempt is not to create 'the real thing', only a simulation, and Alan Turing reformulated the question of whether a machine can think into “Under what circumstances would a machine be mistaken for a real thinking person?” (Crane 2003, 116).
The Turing test involves a machine and a human in a conversation with another person, and if the machine succeeds in communicating so that the person evaluating their responses cannot tell which is which, the machine can be said to be thinking. The machine does not require the same kind of awareness as humans, only the capability to simulate it, so in that respect this kind of AI research is not helpful in the study of human minds specifically. Computers can be excellent in calculating, playing chess or proving logical theorems, but many people are not good at these things, whereas things that come easily for humans, such as facial recognition or practical bodily skills, are very challenging for AI to simulate (Crane 2003, 159). Humans are particularly good at things which we have achieved through evolution and learning, whereas computers can only follow their rules of programming without mastering common sense through trial and error like humans.8 Crane concludes that being like a computer cannot be all that there is to having a mind, because of the qualia of mental states, so the whole mind cannot be computational – although this means that a part of the way we think could be computational anyway, even if it was true that nothing can think simply by being a computer (2003, 128-131).
Now, if we put aside the AI approach which is interested in whether machines can think in their own way or only simulate human thinking, and proceed to a discussion on whether machines could think exactly like we do, we find some serious opposition. Searle is one of the notable critics of this idea. According to him, computers can never have a mind because minds are semantical, that is, thoughts have meaning and they are about something (1984, 30-1). Computers are not
8 Connectionist machines or 'neural networks' are systems which are said to be able to learn by training their own network and they are therefore more appealing than the classical architectures of computing, but they still cannot do what real neurons do (Crane 2003, 162-3).
34 semantical, they operate with symbols which have no meaning, in other words they operate with syntax (Searle 1984, 30-1). This is called the syntax argument, and Searle's other argument is that computers only simulate thinking, they do not duplicate it; this is called the simulation argument
(1984, 37). Searle asks: “Why on earth would anyone in his right mind suppose a computer simulation of mental processes actually had mental processes?” (1984, 38). We already saw this argument with Hugh Mellor's reasoning that computer simulations of economy do not imply that economy is a computer. Searle speculates on two possible answers to why someone might think simulation corresponds to the real thing: the first alternative is behaviourism (because you are your actions), and the other is a residual dualism, which AI according to Searle rests on (because the AI mind is not biological, it is something else) (1984, 38).9
In “The Bicentennial Man” readers are persuaded to accept that Andrew has consciousness by the way he is compared to other robots. Certainly Andrew's aspirations for freedom and his artistic creativity are important factors, too, but they will be discussed in the sub-chapter on freedom of will. The only time Andrew is explicitly compared with another, specific robot is when he has an appointment with a robot surgeon, whom he asks to perform his final, and crucial, brain surgery, which is to make him human. The surgeon is described as perfect; he would make no mistakes, and he is so highly specialized that his capacity has to be limited in other areas (BM
636). He does not recognise Andrew, who by now is famous, and he also does not understand
Andrew's wish for the surgery. Andrew asks him if he has ever wanted to become a man, but, puzzled, the surgeon replies he is a robot. Andrew asks him if it would not be better to be a man, but the surgeon replies, “It would be better, sir, to be a better surgeon. I could not be so if I were a man, but only if I were a more advanced robot. I would be pleased to be a more advanced robot”
(BM 636). The kind of ambition that Andrew has is alien to the other robot, who only wants to be what he was made to be, and to do what he was made to do, as well as he can. Andrew does not
9 Searle's Chinese Room argument, perhaps too long to describe here, is a thought experiment which illustrates the difference between semantic thinking and syntactic simulation of thinking, and it can be found for example in his Minds, Brains and Science (1984, 31-8).
35 want any upgrades that would alter his persona, but to the surgeon only mechanical knowledge matters. He values skill and precision, whereas Andrew is creative and artistic. Andrew is unusual because he can improvise, and he is flexible and adaptable (BM 660-1) unlike the specialized surgeon. The surgeon does not realise Andrew is a robot, and therefore he has to obey him according to the Laws, as if he was human. Andrew asks if it does not bother him to follow orders and be told to do things, but the surgeon merely replies, “ It is my pleasure to please you, sir . . . obedience is my pleasure” (BM 636-7). Clearly Andrew is different from this other robot, and presumably it is his consciousness that sets him apart from the other mechanical men. He has human-like dreams and he is aware of them, and he acts on them.
In Do Androids Dream..? the androids not only have awareness of things happening around them, but they are also conscious about their own identities, at least to the same extent as humans are about theirs. In fact, sometimes they are so conscious about their identities that they do not realise they are androids, as for example Rachael Rosen who thinks she is a human. They are active in the world and also learn things by engaging in those voluntary actions, just like humans.
They are not mere passive, mechanical computers. They seem to understand semantic meaning instead of only processing syntactic symbols. They fight to survive like any biological organisms would. On one hand this suggests that AI is possible, and poses the question of whether these androids should be counted as humans. On the other hand it suggests that humans, which the androids are metaphors for, have such mentality. Blade Runner, which concentrates on the android perspective more than the novel does, elaborates on the experience of being an android much further. As Andrew M. Butler observes, the director's cut of the film gives even more room for the androids' narratives by leaving out Deckard's voice-over narration; this gives more agency for the androids and less authority for Deckard (2003, 142). Deckard becomes a “blank presence” without history or emotions, making it easier to imagine that he is a replicant as well, and perhaps suggesting the death of the subject (Butler 2003, 142). Subjectivity and subjective experiences, however, will be discussed in chapter four.
36
2.3 Freedom of will
In this day and age, with the progress of natural sciences and the reliance on them to give us answers, it is almost as if physicalism was the only acceptable metaphysical solution, especially since dualism is so hard to explain as well. The reason why materialism becomes a problem for the idea of freedom of the will is that if consciousness can be explained as a quality of a material brain, the physical determinism that follows is incompatible with the experience we have of making our own decisions, and therefore tampers with the notion of freedom. If everything can be explained by physics and can be reduced to it, ourselves included, then we should follow the causal laws of physics only. This leaves no room for chance, for making genuine choices, for any kind of freedom of thought or action. Although in this respect freedom is very difficult indeed to explain at all,
Searle says that the first thing to notice about our conception of human freedom is that it is essentially tied to consciousness, because we only attribute freedom to conscious beings (1984,
94). He says that if someone built a robot which we thought was unconscious, we would not be inclined to call it free; even if its behaviour was random and unpredictable, we would not say it was free like we are, and only if we became convinced it was conscious, might we consider its possible freedom (1984, 94). Thus consciousness comes first, and freedom is something that may follow.
In Asimov on Science Fiction Asimov states that the fear and paranoia which relates to AI is based on the fear of knowledge, on a basic suspicion of intelligence, on the dread of knowing too much and on the sin of Adam and Eve (1983,141). Later in the same text he says that the fear stems from the possibility that the technological advances may turn against us or render us useless and obsolete (1983, 156-63). This is a very simplified and one-sided picture, though. Porush observes that cybernetic fiction springs from a real threat; if cybernetics succeeds in explaining humans in a mechanistic way, it will become “a powerful philosophical weapon against the notion
37 of free will” (1985, 22). Some people see the mechanistic view as an inevitability, but artists and writers, who see their work as “manifestations of the freedom and uniqueness of the human spirit”, feel the mechanistic proposition is undignifying, a monstrous notion (Porush 1985, 8). AI does not raise worrisome questions only related to knowledge or the fear of the unknown. It is threatening to our fundamental understanding of ourselves. Androids in fiction symbolise the wish for freedom.
In Do Androids Dream..? the early androids sent to space colonies are called “Synthetic Freedom
Fighters” (DA 17), and yet, paradoxically, the condition of androids is referred to as slavery.
The answer to the dilemma of attempting to fit both physicalism and freedom into the same picture does not seem to exist. As Searle points out, it is an empirical fact that our behaviour is not predictable in the same way that the behaviour of objects rolling down an inclined plane is predictable; “Human freedom is just a fact of experience” (1984, 88). Yet, despite this empirical fact, science cannot explain the freedom. On the other hand, if one is absolutely free, this would mean being free from every part of oneself; “If we were truly free from our beliefs and opinions, our likes and dislikes, our every preference, then there would be nothing left of us to be free”
(Fearn 2005, 24). One traditional attempt to solve the puzzle is compatibilism, the notion that although everything in the world is determined, some human actions are genuinely free. A small corner of the determined world is free, and there people make choices out of their own psychological reasons (Searle 1984, 88-9). Searle thinks this is an inadequate view though, because he states that compatibilism actually explains free choices as arising from those inner psychological reasons, and the question of free will was not whether those exist as well as external physical causes and inner compulsions – the question is, whether a person could have chosen differently (1984, 89). Compatibilism refuses to answer this question, or would have to reply that all other conditions remaining the same, a person could not have chosen differently. Everything is determined after all.
It is sometimes suggested that one scientific way to bring together both natural laws and freedom could lie in quantum mechanics, because it breaks the illusion of objectivity. A particle
38 can be in two places at the same time, or two particles can be in one place at the same time.
Photons seem to be particles which, however, behave as though they were waves, and the statistical probability of quantum mechanics states that if one consequence has the probability of fifty percent, and another likewise has fifty percent, both of them are fifty percent true. If there were quantum events in the brain, this might leave room for mind or chance to step in. Quantum mechanics allows indeterminism without breaking natural laws, and it allows complementarity, which means that two contradicting descriptions for one thing can be true at the same time.
However, quantum events need very specific conditions to occur, and it is far from clear that such circumstances could be met in the brain. Moreover, Searle argues, even if particles are only statistically determined, it does not follow that the human mind can force the particles to swerve from their paths: “Indeterminism is no evidence that there is or could be some mental energy of human freedom that can move molecules in directions that they were not otherwise going to move”
(1984, 87). When it comes to a scientific view on the mind-body problem or human freedom, quantum mechanics is something which definitely cannot be ignored, although it remains to be seen whether it ever will explain freedom or just remain a curiosity and a counterargument to objectivity of science and determinism.10
In “The Bicentennial Man”, Andrew declares that he wants to buy his freedom. Now, freedom in this context can be read as a social or political concept. SF very often raises such questions as slavery, worker's rights or the freedom of individuals pursuing their own happiness, and sure enough androids in fiction often represent these social concerns. However, another, more metaphysical reading is that Andrew represents humans' freedom of will in general. None of the family members have actually been giving him any orders in a very long time, so in a way he is free already. In this sense his freedom would only be symbolic, as Little Miss says, “All he wants is a form of words. He wants to be called free” (italics added, BM 644). She also explains that
“Making him free would be a trick of words only, but it would mean much to him. It would give
10 For a very thorough and detailed, albeit somewhat heavy discussion on quantum mind, and in fact a defence for the quantum theory of mind, see Roger Penrose's Shadows of the mind (1994), especially its Part II.
39 him everything and cost us nothing” (BM 646). Calling his freedom a trick of words is quite undermining, as is her pointing out that humans would lose nothing by it. The concept of freedom becomes shallow if it is achieved by empty words, without the appropriate meaning. Moreover, even if the family members do not give Andrew orders, he is far from free because of the inbuilt
Laws. The story never mentions Andrew being unhappy with the Laws, or thinking that they are the cause of his slavery. Nonetheless, there is one episode in which a couple of strangers on the street take advantage of Andrew's Laws by giving him orders just for the fun of it. Andrew has to follow orders given by any human being, so he is made to stand on his head. Humiliation turns to horror when the strangers tell him to take himself apart. This he will have to do because “Second
Law of obedience took precedence over the Third Law of self-preservation” (BM 652). Luckily someone comes to interrupt and Andrew is rescued, but the fact remains that Andrew is not free.
When Mr Martin finds out about Andrew's wish, he says angrily, “ He doesn't know what freedom is. He's a robot” (BM 644). He also wonders what the point of Andrew buying the freedom would be, and if it would not be a waste of money. Martin would only be able to free
Andrew legally, and since robots have no right to earn money, his money might be confiscated.
Freedom is considered priceless, also in Andrew's opinion, and he states that “Even the chance of freedom is worth the money” (BM 645). The court might take the same view, and say that freedom is without price, so for no money could a robot buy its freedom. However, an attorney states that
“The word 'freedom' had no meaning when applied to a robot. Only a human being could be free”
(BM 645). At the beginning of all the legal processes the judge cannot be convinced otherwise, not until he addresses Andrew himself, who manages to convince the judge of his wish to become free.
Andrew compares his situation to slavery, even though he has not been given orders in a long time.
He says that only someone who wishes for freedom can be free, and that he has that wish. That makes the judge change his mind and he says: “ There is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state” (BM 646). It is Andrew's awareness that makes the difference. This is also parallel to what Searle says about how freedom is
40 only attributed to conscious beings, as we saw earlier. According to Porush, also Descartes told his students that he would believe a machine was human “when it told me so itself” (1985, 70).
According to this view, freedom and humanity belong to conscious creatures, those who have the mind developed enough to be aware. On one hand, it relies on the superiority of humans because other creatures would never be able to tell us they want freedom in a way understandable to us, even if they did. Therefore it will always safely reserve freedom to us humans solely and other creatures do not deserve the same privilege. On the other hand, this idea is only acceptable in a dualist context, because it assumes that in addition to a material body, for example humans have something extra that sets them apart from animals. Somehow, from the material body, springs an awareness which is not biological, which is something else.
In “The Bicentennial Man” Andrew first makes a few little wooden carvings and after that some larger productions like wooden furniture. People are of course surprised and amazed when a robot takes up carpentry, especially since the designs are his own as well. He is not copying them from anywhere but invents them as he goes along, so that they also fit the grain of the wood.
Andrew's owner, Gerald Martin, takes Andrew and goes to see the Chief Robopsychologist of
United States Robots and Mechanical Men Corporation which has manufactured Andrew. Martin tells about Andrew's skills in carpentry to the robopsychologist, Merton Mansky. 11 Mansky says to
Martin: “Robotics is not an exact art, Mr Martin. I cannot explain it to you in detail, but the mathematics governing the plotting of the positronic pathways is far too complicated to permit of any but approximate solutions” (BM 640). Now this statement has some underlying assumptions.
First of all it means that the human brain, of which Andrew's positronic brain is some sort of an imitation, is very complicated – so complicated in fact, that it necessarily contains a degree of randomness. This implies that randomness resembles organic evolution, or perhaps even that evolution is random, and therefore a robot brain must be somehow random too in order to resemble
11 The name is a reference to Marvin Minsky, the awarded cognitive scientist, who has worked on AI. Allegedly Asimov, never short of self-confidence, has described Minsky as one of two people he has ever met who were smarter than himself.
41 human brains.
It is also worth noticing that Mansky calls robotics art. Martin, too, continues, that Andrew
“carves wood in exquisite fashion and never the same twice. He produces works of art” (BM 640).
Mansky is confused and asks if Martin really thinks that Andrew is creative, and Martin shows him a piece of his work. Mansky seems convinced and remarks: “The luck of the draw. Something in the pathways” (BM 640), and adds that nothing like this has ever been reported before, and they might not be able to make another robot like Andrew even if they wanted to. Again, this emphasises that Andrew is a random exception, an anomaly even among robots. Anomalies will be returned to later on in chapter three, but here it suffice to notice that without his skill Andrew would not have been so special. Without the randomness he would be just a robot. Art resembles play because it has no practical purpose, it exists only for itself. It is the creative playfulness which
Andrew exhibits, which makes him human even before he actually expresses his wish to be free or begins to have his parts replaced by organic ones. Both his consciousness and humanity seem to have preceded the expressed wish to be free. To even further complicate things, perhaps, it could also be mentioned that art has a relationship also with the sub-conscious, where artistic ideas are sometimes said to spring from. If Andrew has both consciousness and subconsciousness, he seems to be very human indeed from the very beginning.
Later on Martin says to Andrew: “The new robots are worthless. The company has learned to make the pathways more precise, more closely on the nose, more deeply on the track. The new robots don't shift. They do what they're designed for and never stray. I like you better . . . I am certain Mansky put an end to generalized pathways as soon as he had a good look at you. He didn't like the unpredictability” (BM 642-3). Apparently the fear of the unknown which follows from unpredictability is too risky for the big company. Andrew was manufactured at the beginning of the era of household robots, and afterwards he is considered a mistake which they do not want to repeat. A robot should not be unpredictable, and it needs not be artistic or too human.
The characters of Do Androids Dream..? have devices called Penfield mood organs with
42 which one can dial a mood for oneself, the moods ranging from ‘pleased acknowledgement of husband’s superior wisdom in all matters’ to ‘awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future’, and just about everything. The name Dick gave to the device is not random. Wilder
Penfield (1891-1976) was a ground-breaking Canadian neurophysiology researcher and surgeon, who was actually called the greatest living Canadian during his life. In his experiments a patient's motor cortex was electrically stimulated, which caused the patient's limbs to move involuntarily: the patients experienced this passively, more as something done to them rather than them actively moving the limbs themselves (Searle 1984, 63, 96). Dick's idea seems to be that this technology might be refined to include even the finest movements of the mind, our moods – and this would also imply that the mind is a mechanical part of the body just like any other, which can be given little pushes to certain definite directions like billiard balls. Mind would work under deterministic causal laws without freedom.
Let us consider for a moment the thought that all our actions were determined, and consciousness was just a passenger observing the movements of the body from within, listening to it speaking without having any impact on what comes out. Consciousness would be the opposite of a free agent. It would be a prisoner, and not only is this a horrifying thought, but it also goes against the experience that we have of ourselves as free agents. Searle reminds us that freedom is not only connected to our rational decision-making, although many philosophers feel that is what freedom is essentially about. He says that weighing up reasons is only a very special case of freedom, and that mostly it is about “the experience of engaging in voluntary, intentional human actions” (1984, 95). If we did not have the experience of freedom of both thinking and acting, this would render everything meaningless, as our decision-making processes and actions would be absurd if we had no real freedom to choose. Life would be pointless if we lost the libertarian perspective to it. Also moral responsibility would be lost if we were mere automatons incapable of choosing our own actions, which is, once more, a deeply disturbing notion that goes against our deepest beliefs. Meaning stems from the ability to make decisions and the experience that we
43 might have chosen differently. Morality and the meaning of life will be returned to later on in chapter four.
If we keep in mind the uncertainty of whether for example Rachael should be considered human because she thought she was, this resembles the judge's response to Andrew, who felt he was human and wanted to be free, and who in the judge's opinion was therefore advanced enough to be allowed his freedom. As long as androids seem to exhibit consciousness, they can be considered conscious. If we only have a theory of other minds concerning our fellow humans, then the theory must apply to androids too. Searle wraps up the discussion on consciousness and free will in a similar way:
The distinction between reality and appearance cannot apply to the very existence of consciousness. For if it seems to me that I'm conscious, I am conscious. We could discover all kinds of startling things about ourselves and our behaviour; but we cannot discover that we do not have minds, that they do not contain conscious, subjective, intentionalistic mental states; nor could we discover that we do not at least try to engage in voluntary, free, intentional actions. (1984, 99)
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3. What are the limitations of identity?
After discussing humanity through the most important questions of the mind-body problem, consciousness, and freedom of will, we can turn to look at human identity from a slightly different perspective. Perhaps identity, as other things, can be approached by looking at its limitations, where it begins and ends, and this also involves considering differences, in other words, considering what is not human. Androids, of course, are a magnificent theoretical tool for this.
They can be viewed as monsters, anomalies, abjects, grotesques and so on, but as such they are others on which self is reflected.
Androids as copies of humans, and yet not human themselves, is the topic of the first sub- chapter. Even if we can theoretically imagine a perfect android that resembles humans in every respect, we cannot escape the thought that it would still not qualify as a human. Both Asimov and
Dick's texts are definitely studies on this question of categorization on the level of concepts rather than physical features, although they also emphasize things rather differently. The idea of a copy comes with the artificiality; a copy is not authentic. The original can be studied by examining its copies, however, which brings about the self-other reflection once again. Since categorization is also to do with boundaries more generally, that will be the topic of the second sub-chapter.
Hopefully it will illuminate some of the obscurities and ambiguities around the problematic question of the boundaries of identity and identification. Androids blur the distinctions between animals and machines, humans and machines, and they question categories and identity.
When it comes to categorization, Dick's novel also provides additional food for thought.
His concept of kipple refers to loss of structure, and therefore loss of identity, thus further complicating – but perhaps also clarifying – the problem of identity. Possibly even suggesting that identity as a system or structure is transient and superficial, the concept of kipple deserves a sub- chapter of its own, which solely concentrates on Dick's text rather both his and Asimov's.
45
3.1 The perfect copy v the original
A recurring theme in Dick’s fiction is the uncertainty on the identity of certain characters. Often it is not sure whether someone is an android or not, and this question reaches its height in the cases where the character in question is not sure of its own identity either. It is always possible that artificial memories have been programmed to an android brain so that the android thinks it is a human being. This leads us to the question of original v perfect copy. If a copy is so perfect that it is not possible to tell the difference, is there a difference? If an android thinks it is human and acts precisely as if it were one, and has human personality, has it become human? In “The Bicentennial
Man” Andrew wonders about this, whether such a thinking android with a personality would qualify as a human. A congresswoman who helps Andrew in his legal pursuits, Li-Hsing, tells him there is still a difference: “Your brain is man-made, the human brain is not. Your brain is constructed, theirs developed” (BM 678). She explains to Andrew that this question of artificiality is such a crucial issue that humans will never accept him as a human. Even if differences between the copy and the original cannot be detected, a difference still exists. In Dick's texts this difference and the confusions around it are a severe issue. In his 1953 short story “Imposter,“ Dick tells the story of Spence Olham. Olham is the protagonist and since we learn about his family life and hopes of taking a vacation and follow him in actions taken against Outspacers in war, we as readers tend to relate to him. In the end it turns out, however, that Olham himself is an android war machine designed to blow up, but due to excellent engineering and memory programming he – or it – has not been aware of it. He is such a perfect copy of the real Spence Olham that he has fooled the readers even though he is captured and almost destroyed because some people know he is a fake. Mistakes like these are fatal since in the end the in-built bomb detonates.
In another short story from 1953, “Second Variety“, Dick describes a technological war in which the US and Russia have developed different types of killer machinery, for instance spider-
46 like creatures called claws. In fact the Russians have manufactured three different types of killer machines which seem entirely human but are extremely lethal: the lost little boy with his teddy bear, the wounded soldier, and the attractive female. These androids also turn against their makers and threat the US and Russian soldiers alike, and in the end it is the female android killer that manages to escape from near-deserted Earth to Moon Base, the implication being that mankind is doomed. There is an apparent gender reading available here, but with the battle of the sexes left aside we also find the more general and very common theme in Dick’s android fiction – the danger posed by imposters.
Also in Asimov’s works robots often turn into menaces. They are not, however, very humanlike in most cases. They are not even androids, and even more seldom androids posing as human beings. They are a threat and cause confusion mainly when one robot cannot be told from another. Asimov’s robots do not resemble human beings, or if they do they are not dangerous.
They have the inbuilt Laws to prevent that. This means that when Asimov’s robots become human like Andrew does in “The Bicentennial Man“, they are somehow better than human beings, and it shows. Andrew seems more moral and content with his life than the average human being. He is not afraid of death but stays thankful for having lived and for having accomplished his goals; there is absolutely no hint of bitterness in Andrew although he becomes mortal because he fulfills his dream. This kind of happiness seems alien to human beings who, conversely to Andrew, would be ready to use mechanical parts to extend their lives and temporarily escape death, even if that means they become therefore somehow less human. Either Asimov has failed to develop Andrew into a fully plausible humanlike character, or perhaps the intention was to imply that a machine becoming human would be more perfect. In that case the copy or the imitation is better than the original, which is a fascinating idea. Often Asimov’s robots are indeed so cute or endearing or sympathetic
– although often misunderstood by suspicious humans – that they are somewhat nauseating. Their goodness is alien to us and therefore paranoia grows as we imagine they have hidden motives and are in fact plotting against someone.
47 It is odd how goodness creates suspicion and makes us wary. Julia Kristeva explains that the phobia created by something too good (or too bad) derives from a clash between self and other, and the “identification of the self with that good or bad other that transgresses the fragile boundaries of the uncertain self” (1991, 188). Perhaps the suspicion is more due to the difficulty of keeping the categories of original and copy separate, as well as the uncertainty of our own identity, rather than outright fear of the copy. Andrew is always described as perfectly polite and obedient, never forgetting to say “Sir“. His appearances are described faultless: “His hair was smooth . . . and there was no facial hair. He looked freshly and cleanly shaved. His clothes were distinctly old- fashioned, but neat“ (BM 635). All this smoothness, cleanliness, conservative clothing and perfect conduct make him so good that he is alien. It is hard for a human being to recognize themselves in a mirror image like that. Also his desires and aspirations in life are so idealistic that he seems alien.
He does not have to struggle financially or worry about his health, like many people do. Even when the Martin family members die it seems like he is somewhat unaffected, because the readers never find out about his thoughts. This is also due to the narrative style which most of the time does not reveal the thoughts or emotions of the characters. Andrew does have ambitions but they only involve one thing, becoming a free human, which is an idealistic aspiration since in practice he is free already. Even if one does not imagine hidden agendas or motives in Andrew’s behavior, it is still very hard to relate to this character because he remains shallow and distant due to the narration. We learn nothing about Andrew and his life that would contain the exhilarations or anxieties of inner human life. In context with consciousness Searle mentions the qualia of experiences which reveal exactly the kind of human experiences which are easy to recognize but which are absent in the narration:
the smell of a rose, the taste of wine, a pain in the lower back, a sudden memory of a fall day ten years ago, reading a book, thinking about a philosophical problem, worrying about income taxes, waking up in the middle of the night filled with nameless anxiety, feeling a sudden rage at the bad driving of other drivers on the freeway, being overwhelmed by sexual lust, having pangs of hunger at the sight of exquisitely prepared food, wishing to be somewhere else, and feeling bored while waiting in a line (Searle 1999, 41)
No, Andrew’s inner life is not described in these terms. He is confused about unfamiliar words that
48 have not been included in his innate vocabulary when he was constructed, so he even needs to consult a dictionary for the word ‘artist’ (BM 641), which makes him hard to relate to. At first he is not familiar with natural science at all but after spending some time studying in his laboratory he invents prosthetic devices. We learn nothing about the possible hardships or failures or desperate moments on the way of the project so every achievement seems to come to him effortlessly. The fundamental experiences of tastes, pains, memories, worries, anxieties, hunger, wishes, boredom, none of those apply to Andrew. Even the things he does not like he cannot resent because of an incapability (BM 649). It is no surprise if a reader does not see him as a human, and it creates suspicion that he is above all human worries. Then again Little Miss has a very valid point about the impossibility of judging someone’s inner life by appearances when she is talking with her father and defending Andrew’s human side: “I don’t know what he feels inside but I don’t’ know what you feel inside . . . If someone else’s reactions are like your own, what more can you ask for?“ (BM 644). Indeed, we do not know what our fellow humans’ feelings are and a conjecture that they match ours is always a leap of faith. Thus Little Miss is here referring to the problem of other minds which was discussed in chapter two. We can never know, in the strictest sense of the word, whether other people have minds at all, or if they do, what the motives behind their behaviour are. The hypotheses we have about other minds – the theory of other minds – leads to common-sense psychology which rests on assumptions on general observations of human behavior
(Crane 2003, 53).
Andrew as a perfect copy is not the perfect copy of the original, he is the improved version of the original, the ‘Man-200’ or something to that effect. This copy is a different thing from the original despite its wish to be the same. Andrew wants to become human, the original, even at the cost of becoming worse than it has potential for: mortal instead of immortal. Whether Andrew at the finish of the story actually becomes fully human is debatable, but until that moment he does not seem to be so; only his creativity speaks against this. He wears clothes like people do and other robots treat him as if he was a human, but neither legally nor among people outside his family
49 circle do others accept him as one. This is a robot posing as a human but not fooling anyone and therefore not a great risk either. Also he is not an exact copy of a human being despite the many similarities. In part the fact that Andrew is so perfect stems from the fact that he has the inbuilt
Three Laws. Asimov thought that people have their own rational laws which explain and limit their actions, the “Laws of Humanics” (Bainbridge 1986, 74). According to Bainbridge, Asimov believed that social sciences are (or ought to be) highly mathematical and capable of exact descriptions, explanations and predictions (1986, 74-5). This is a radical behaviorist stance, which also explains Asimov's belief in AI. If Andrew is cool, clever, intelligent and unemotional (except in his strong wish to become human), it only reflects the desires and ideals of hard SF writers and readers who may wish to be like him, and the belief that human behavior is determined in a similar way by its own binding laws (Bainbridge 1986, 76-7). Presumably most people do not feel they are bound by such strict laws, however, which makes Andrew somewhat distant and unapproachable as a character.
Dick gave a speech at the Vancouver SF convention at the University of British Columbia in 1972, titled “The Android and The Human.” In this speech he mentions how often in his stories androids are “artificial constructs masquerading as humans. Usually with a sinister purpose in mind.” It is fascinating, then, that the androids are not simply what they have been made to be, but active in this deception. Dick continues by saying that it seemed obvious to him that if such a machine had good intentions it would not have to disguise itself so – perhaps forgetting that a machine is what it is built to be, it cannot be blamed for its appearances designed by a human being, who then may or may not have those sinister motives in mind. In this light the copy, and the perfect copy especially, is morally inferior although it may be superior in strength or intellect.
Next, however, Dick says this whole theme has later become obsolete to him. “The constructs do not mimic humans; they are, in many deep ways, actually human already.” This is a very interesting claim if it is meant in the strictest sense. Perhaps Dick means it more mildly along the lines of what he says earlier when he speaks about meaningful comparisons existing between
50 human and mechanical behaviour. According to him “machines are becoming more human“ but it should not be interpreted as becoming the same in essence but merely that they have comparisons.
Being human in many deep ways is not necessarily the same as being human in every respect. The question of the possibility of a perfect copy emerges without the moral dilemma but approaches the question of what a machine is like if it is like a human being. The original is studied by analyzing its parts and constructing a whole, by trying to make the perfect copy. The copy becomes a tool for research, not a doubtful and possibly dangerous artifact, and the main interest stays in the original.
A similar idea is perhaps revealed in Ben Schaub’s article, “My android twin“, in New
Scientist (14 October 2006). The projects of building the perfect android are actually in progress in several places in the world. In the interview professor and robotics researcher Hiroshi Ishiguro, who works in Japan, says that his group studies interaction between humans and robots so that machines with more human-like qualities could then be built (2006, 42). Exactly what makes our appearance and mannerisms human needs to be uncovered in the process, which in itself is no small project. Ishiguro says: “My purpose is to know what it is to be human by developing an android . . . That is most important and fundamental for me“ (2006, 43). It is fascinating that a scientist and technology expert has such a humanistic starting point in his research. The android copies are not the protagonists; it is the humans, the originals, who are the actual objects of study.
It also seems like a very laborious method for the project. Building a copy without knowing the original first is like beginning from the end, but then again one has to start from somewhere. If we are too close to actually see ourselves we need to build a mirror, and by working through the distorted reflections, the androids, we might approach what is human. With a motive like this it is hard to see people like Ishiguro as mad scientists who crave for power and ignorantly release unknown and uncontrollable powers. The project of knowing thyself is innocent enough when it is simply to gain knowledge and perhaps make changes for the better. Then again building android replicas of one’s own family members and as a grand finale a near-perfect replica of its very creator, like in Ishiguro’s case, also hints at a less noble quality – that of navel-gazing. Either way,
51 the original is in focus and the perfect copy is merely the answer to what the original is, but not in itself of interest.
At the very end of the article Schaub however suggests there is also another side to the pursuit for the perfect android, perhaps deeper still than the one mentioned by Ishiguro. Shuichi
Nishio, who works in Ishiguro’s group, recounts an old Japanese tale about an artist who never drew the pupils in the eyes of the birds he painted. “One day the king asked why, and the painter replied that if he did, the bird would fly away. The king didn’t believe him and forced him to fill in the eyes. The bird came out of the painting and flew away” (2006, 46). Nishio concludes by bringing the old tale to the present, painting his own picture about the future where a scientist might become the artist: “This is something that came into my mind when I first saw the HI-1
[android] . . . We are still not as good as the painter. There’s still more to go before our android can
‘fly away’ on its own“ (2006, 46).
Keeping in mind what Dick said in his speech about initially seeing androids as sinister imposters, it is no surprise to find that in Do Androids Dream..? the androids are, again, a threat most severe. Only the complex and sophisticated tests can reveal someone is an android with morally doubtful motivations. They have killed to escape from the colonies and when it seems like they are suspected they do not hesitate to kill again. On the other hand the public has to be protected and innocent people should not be killed even though there is uncertainty over someone’s identity. Being able to tell the copy from the original is a question of life and death.
Since we are able to doubt whether even Deckard is a human being and enter the same loop of questions it is as if there might not even be a difference between being one or the other. The tests may not be perfect because not all humans pass them. Also Deckard finds he feels sympathy for certain androids. The categories of human being and android do not seem to be valid since the qualities we would list for each are not adequate. In Do Androids Dream..? Dick seems to be interested in both aspects of the question he raised in his speech: both machines disguising as humans and machines and humans being the same. In the latter sense a kind of fusion between the
52 categories has taken place. After Phil Resch, another bounty hunter, retires the android Luba Luft,
Deckard tests him and finds him human. Deckard is very confused with these two characters,
Resch who seems cold and Luft who seemed “genuinely alive“ (DA 108). “So much for the distinction between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs. In that elevator at the museum, he said to himself, I rode down with two creatures, one human, the other android…and my feelings were the reverse of those intended“ (DA 110). The notions of original and copy have lost meaning. The exceptions in both categories invalidate the whole categorization.
Christian people who believe that man was made in God’s image also believe that God is by far superior. It is our duty to be as good as possible but since we are mere copies made of clay – or flesh and blood instead of spirit – we can never reach the kind of divinity reserved for God only.
By the same token an android made in man’s image is inferior to man. Androids as a new species which reaches and exceeds human capabilities are parallel to humans who evolve to the level of their creator. Throughout the history of Christianity this has of course been a dangerous thought and heresy. God by definition is beyond human reach and it would be blasphemous to think that any person could even be compared to God, not to mention becoming one. The hierarchy leaves no room for interpretation and the levels of being are not to be confused. This also explains the suspicion and fear of androids, because a creator wants to make the creations as perfect as possible but there is a risk, in theory, that the creation becomes greater than the creator and also uncontrollable, or that the monster turns against the mad scientist as often happens in fiction. For a creation to become this powerful and independent it has to have a life of its own, and when it is separate from its creator in this way it cannot be fully known or understood anymore, not even by the creator. As a creation becomes independent, or a copy ceases to be a mere copy and becomes the new original, material for copies of itself, it is already unfamiliar.
Suspicion and paranoia are explained by the way we feel about familiar and unfamiliar things in general, and especially how we categorize them. Sigmund Freud discusses the German noun Das Unheimliche and the adjective unheimlich in depth as they relate to unfamiliarity which
53 causes discomfort, fright, anxiety and horror. It is not merely frightening, though, for it is caused by something which has been familiar but has ceased to be so, something that has been comfortable but is now discomforting; the prefix (un-) is a sign of rejection for what once was acceptable (Freud 1958, 124, 153). The English word for this concept is the uncanny, but to many languages it would be difficult to translate because of a contradiction it includes. As Freud explains, it would be straightforward to contend that unheimlich is merely the opposite of heimlich, which entails comfort, homeliness and familiarity – but this picture is complicated by a specific use of heimlich, which entails such familiarity that it is already private, and thus kept a secret from outsiders (1958, 124-131). If a thing is familiar to someone but kept a secret from others, it is unfamiliar and hidden from the outside, so in this sense familiarity and unfamiliarity are a question of perspective. Heimlich has two meanings, one familiar and the other unfamiliar, and in the latter sense of private and hidden, heimlich becomes its opposite, unheimlich, which is only used as the opposite of the first meaning (1958, 129). Freud emphasizes Shelling's definition of unheimlich, which represents things that were meant to stay hidden, private secrets but which have come out in the open (1958, 130).
As examples, Freud mentions things which create uncanny suspicion over whether they are dead or alive, animate or inanimate, like skilfully made wax dolls and automatons, and he also mentions epileptic fits which in their involuntariness create the uneasy feeling that they are purely mechanical events (1958, 132-140). Blade Runner quite explicitly draws parallels between the android Pris and automated dolls. Her heavy make-up resembles clowns or caricatures and makes her look very artificial, and in one scene Pris even hides from Deckard by pretending to be a doll.
In addition to being uncanny, her appearance is also grotesque. Wolfgang Kayser mentions that
“the unity of perspective in the grotesque consists in an unimpassioned view of life on earth as an empty, meaningless puppet play or a caricatural marionette theatre” (1981, 186). As the discussion on freedom of will showed, the experience of being able to freely choose is very fundamental, and people tend to refuse the idea of being determined or mechanical. To think of oneself as a puppet
54 or a marionette is an uncanny and grotesque idea. Intellectual uncertainty over the nature of dolls and automatons is created by animate and inanimate things resembling each other too closely
(Freud 1958, 139), so the human-android relationship is definitely uncanny. Freud describes ways in which uncanny doubles appear in literature, as characters who look the same or have similar personalities, fates, actions or names (1958, 140-1). In Do Androids Dream..? Rachael and Pris are twin androids who look exactly the same, but androids are also doubles in a more general level, as copies of humans. The film version of “The Bicentennial Man” points out that we humans also exhibit this uncanniness quite naturally. After many years, in fact decades, Andrew returns home from a long journey and is baffled when he finds Little Miss looking very young. He is mistaking the granddaughter, Portia, for Little Miss, and does not recognize the aged Little Miss anymore.
Andrew has difficulty in understanding that Portia is not Little Miss and gets agitated. The women explain to him that they just happen to look alike, like relatives often do: “It's genetical inheritance”. Andrew replies nervously, “I don't care, I don't like it”. Clearly to him the resemblance is uncanny.
3.2 Boundaries and categorization
The question of how to define what a human being is also comes down to the more general notion of boundaries and categorization. Human language, social life, thinking, everything is based on some sort of categories, sometimes strict and explicit but perhaps more often vague and unexpressed. We organize our experiences and phenomena around us by seeing structures and hierarchies even in randomness or chaos: “it seems that whatever we perceive is organized into patterns“ (Douglas 1966, 36). To take an example, people tend to think of organic life as forming a pyramid with the lowest, most simple life forms at the bottom, fish, reptiles and birds on top of them and mammals at the very top. Highest animals would be those with most relevance to us, like for example cattle. The very peak of this structure of evolutionary development would of course be us humans. On the other hand we can think of a spiritual hierarchy with God at the top and some
55 kind of spirits or angels at the levels below God, we humans would be at the very bottom. To think in terms of these hierarchies presumes of course that humans are both matter and mind and belong to both of these systems. However, perhaps even more essential in this taxonomy of relations where people stand above animals at the top of all organic life and below all spiritual beings, is its human-centredness. Everything falls into groups and categories either above or below us, everything has its place, and clearly the viewpoint is ours. Now where do machines fit in this neat system? They are physical objects but they are not organic. Therefore at least so far there has not been a need to include them in this picture, but what if one day it looks like a machine has developed consciousness?
Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger (1966) is a classic which discusses boundaries and categories of social systems. The viewpoint is anthropological but the general notions apply more widely: “No particular set of classifying symbols can be understood in isolation, but there can be hope of making sense of them in relation to the total structure of classifications in the culture in question“ (1966, vii). These structures are perhaps not easily seen but they become more visible when they are tested, when there are collisions or contradictions. Douglas’ notions of dirt, pollution and impurity are to do with disorder, but they are always relative to the system in question, not universal (1966, 2). “Where there is dirt there is system. Dirt is the by product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements“ (Douglas 1966, 35). Douglas continues by adding that these systems are symbolic by nature. Tidying is not so much to do with escaping dirt as it is a positive re-ordering of our environment, “a creative movement“ (1966, 2). Anomalies – an android would certainly be one – question our cosmologies but also provide opportunities for contemplating on those cosmologies: “Reflection on dirt involves reflection on the relation of order to disorder, being to non-being, form to formlessness, life to death“ (Douglas 1966, 5). To maintain order these anomalies cannot be regularly embraced, however, even if they open up paths to self-reflection.
They are powerful and dangerous because they come from the margins, the less organized
56 territories. Androids as hybrids between man and machine cause confusion, which explains why they are an abomination.
Julia Kristeva's abject is another concept fit to be applied to androids. The abject is rejected, something that “cannot be assimilated” and which is “opposed to I” (Kristeva 1982, 1).
The abject is “the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1982, 2). According to Kristeva, it draws attention to fragility of borders and confrontation with otherness: “a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject” (1982, 4,6). Also Victor Burgin draws attention to borders: “No subject, therefore, without a boundary . . . As a concept, the 'abject' might fall into the gap between 'subject' and 'object'” (1990, 115). It has resonances with Freud's unheimlich as well as Douglas's anomalies and impurity, but according to Kristeva the abject is
“Essentially different from “uncanniness”, more violent, too, abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of memory” (1982, 5).
Androids as others are certainly opposed to the self and cannot be assimilated.
As we saw in the introduction, Haraway's cyborg myth is about hybrids, boundaries, fusions – and possibilities. Also Rosi Braidotti says monstrous anomalies draw attention to the difficulty of maintaining margins of differentiation between self and other (2003, 159). She explains:
A great deal of these physical and morphological mutations are expressed in the language of monstrosity, abjection, and horror . . . What horror fiction fundamentally concerns is the lifting of categorical boundaries between humans and their Others . . . The main function of horror fiction, consequently, is to blur fundamental distinctions and to introduce a sense of panic and chaos. . . . The boundaries-of-identity issue raises its monstrous head (2003, 153).
As a feminist, Haraway welcomes the cyborg which questions previous hegemonies. For her, a cyborg is also a potent fusion of gender and sex. Braidotti calls them “borderline or liminal figures of sexuality” (2003, 147) and draws attention to the blurring of the male/female distinction (2003,
156). Sure enough, a gender reading would be available also for “The Bicentennial Man” and Do
Androids Dream..? In both of the stories the androids are clearly always male or female, always
57 referred to by pronouns he and she rather than it. Their first names are those of either men or women, and they are described as masculine or feminine, even if they cannot reproduce. In that sense they do not in fact blur existing male/female distinctions. Furthermore, the gender issue is not very relevant when it comes to, say, consciousness, which was already discussed, or mortality and religion which will be dealt with later. This is why the gender reading is not essential for the thesis, and the same argument applies for excluding the discussion of race.
If an android that resembled humans to a large enough extent was developed it would be problematic for social life because it would be far from clear where it would stand ethically. As a machine it would make no difference how it is treated, as a human being it would matter a great deal, even if it was not considered equal to the average adult in every respect. After all, it is generally taken for granted that children and people with mental disabilities should be included in the scope of our empathy although they may have not developed into moral beings. Children do not know right from wrong but adults do not think they can therefore be treated immorally. Many people like to include animals within the scope of morality as well because, at least in the case of higher animals, they feel pain if they are hurt, they cannot defend themselves from people’s weapons and they are considered innocent because they do not have free will like humans do. A lion cannot choose to become a vegetarian but a human can, and this ability to choose gives responsibility to humans, not animals. Therefore children and animals are special cases who deserve being taken care of although they cannot do the same to others. Also it might be considered shallow morality if we only included in the scope those people who can in return do us favours. Empathy by definition cannot be based on selfishness alone. This is why there is disagreement over whom and what to include in morality and the boundaries of empathy are blurry.
In Do Androids Dream..? Deckard wonders if the Voigt-Kampff test should include questions that measure the subject’s feelings of empathy towards androids. Phil Resch reminds him what would happen if androids, like animals, were included in their range of emphatic
58 identification. Deckard does realize humans would then not be able to protect themselves. Resch continues: “Absolutely. These Nexus-6 types…they’d roll all over us and mash us flat. You and I, all the bounty hunters – we stand between the Nexus-6 and mankind, a barrier which keeps the two distinct“ (DA 109). Even if one wanted to consider these androids as humans it would not be possible because not even morality ranks higher than a human being’s will to live. Next Deckard wants to test his own response to a question about androids that he makes up. He discovers that for female androids his response is different from that of males. “That’s an emphatically emphatic response . . . I’m capable of feeling empathy for at least specific, certain androids. Not all of them but – one or two“ (DA 109).12 Earlier he has had serious doubts about Resch’s skills as a bounty hunter but now begins to wonder if it is he who has the unnatural reactions. A bounty hunter who sympathizes with androids does not make a very good barrier between them and humans when such a barrier is needed. For the first time Deckard has doubts about being a good bounty hunter
(DA 111). Clearly the new Nexus-6 type is something different from all the other androids before them. Because of them the categories of original and copy become vague and obscure: “I wonder .
. . if any human has ever felt this way before about an android“ (DA 109), Deckard ponders.
Curiously, also “The Bicentennial Man” mentions a barrier between Andrew and humans – only in this case it is “a trust to handle all finances in his name and that will place a layer of insulation between him and the hostile world” (BM 642). In this case the android is not dangerous, it is the surrounding society which is hostile. Also in this story, yet again, the solution to the imbalance of android-human relations involves monetary and bureaucratic issues rather than outright killing sprees and fight for life like in Do Androids Dream..? Categories and their boundaries are established in court rooms and banks rather than on the streets, so the distinction is more of a theoretical curiosity than a practical question of life and death.
On several occasions in Do Androids Dream..? the reliability of the android tests is
12 Again, a gender reading would of course be available here, which this thesis is not interested in. Therefore, to offer another reading, Deckard's attitude towards female androids can also be seen as a result of instincts, and therefore related to the animal-human and machine-human distinctions, not only to the male -female dichotomy.
59 questioned. Before Deckard goes after the Nexus-6 androids inspector Bryant says he should remember that the test “isn’t specific for the new brain units. No test is; the Voigt scale, altered three years ago by Kampff, is all we have“ (DA 31-2). An android may to some extent be able to fake the responses, whereas a schizoid or schizophrenic patient might not be able to pass as a human. What then is the difference between an android and a human if no difference can be detected, or is there indeed any difference? Artificiality and originality seem to define the identity of a thing even when they cannot be detected. There is something monstrous about a fake that we mistake for the real thing. It blurs the categories of thought and perhaps even poses a threat. There may be no real danger, but monstrosity questions our established systems by crossing boundaries – and has to be powerful to be able to do that – which is frightening. This kind of mistake keeps happening over and over again in Do Androids Dream..? An artificial toad is mistaken for a real one; a real cat is mistaken for an artificial one; the popular TV persona, Buster Friendly is likely to be an android; Mercerism, their religion, turns out to be a hoax but continues working for Deckard at least, and so on. Everything blends and the man-made categories lose meaning, making it a confusing world. It can be interpreted as dangerous but on the other hand it may simply mean that every thing, living or dead, is on its way to kippleization or the tomb world. In that case it cannot be avoided so labeling it dangerous would not do any good. This unavoidable journey towards entropy is the topic of the next chapter, and the concept of the tomb world will be further elaborated on in the chapter on death and mortality.
Monstrosity has of course been a recurring theme in SF, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein being perhaps the most often mentioned example. There is no existing category for the monster so it cannot be labeled as anything we know. It is made of human parts and consequently it is not just a machine but it certainly is no human either. Its behavior cannot be predicted because it is unlike anything known to us, and since anything can be expected from it, it is potentially dangerous. The monster does not resemble humans enough physically so the danger does not lie in confusing it with one; the danger is founded on the fear of the unknown and on the threat it poses to
60 categorization. Monstrosity is also related to the grotesque. Originally the concept of grotesqueness referred to ornamental style of painting which combined flora and fauna, vegetation and human and animal figures (Kayser 1981, 19-20). It combines elements from different categories, thus creating distorted, unfamiliar figures, and the growth is also depicted as abundant and vital, powerful even, which hints that the overgrowth might suffocate everything else. This is why grotesque instills fear of life rather that fear of death (Kayser 1981, 185). Kayser depicts grotesqueness as
not only something playfully gay and carelessly fantastic, but also something ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one – a world in which the realm of inanimate things is no longer separated from those of plants, animals, and human beings, and where the laws of statics, symmetry, and proportion are no longer valid. (1981, 21)
Therefore grotesqueness is definitely a relative of monstrosity, and both specifically apply to the tradition of Gothic art and literature. Kayser says that monsters are indeed one of the most important themes of grotesque, and that sometimes the concepts can be substituted with each other, for both are associated with unfamiliarity, horror, anguish, and fear of the incomprehensible (1981,
181-2).
Mark Rose connects the fear of monsters ultimately to the fear of id, hidden mental powers and unconsciousness, which all derive from self-alienation (1981, 176-80). Imagination itself has been seen as monstrous because it is connected with the unconscious, and as grotesque because it creates things which do not actually exist – therefore art in particular has had to defend its territory by tackling the questions of the feared unknown and the anomalies outside categories. As we saw in the first chapter, SF plays with the experiences of alienation and estrangement. Therefore it is interesting that Kayser states that the grotesque is the estranged world, that from the outside it is strange and alien – although he hastens to explain that the world of the grotesque itself is not estranged, it is familiar and natural, not strange and ominous as such; “It is our world which has to be transformed” (1981, 184). According to Rose, grotesqueness implies the demonic, and may be considered the characteristic aesthetic form of the SF genre (1981, 187). Again, Kayser's
61 interpretation is parallel:
In spite of all the helplessness and horror inspired by the dark forces which lurk in and behind our world and have power to estrange it, the truly artistic portrayal effects a secret liberation. The darkness has been sighted, the ominous powers discovered, the incomprehensible forces challenged. And thus we arrive at a final interpretation of the grotesque: an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world. (capitalization omitted, 1981, 188)
Grotesque in SF manifests itself in fusions of organic and mechanical elements: “The mechanical object is alienated by being brought to life, the human being by being deprived of it. Among the most persistent motifs of the grotesque we find human bodies reduced to puppets, marionettes, and automata, and their faces frozen into masks” (Kayser 1981, 183). Kayser never mentions SF or androids, but clearly here he might just as well be talking about them, so his concept of the grotesque proves useful. He mentions that suddenness and surprise are essential elements of the grotesque (1981, 184) – but the very same thing could be said about the SF novum.
Anomalies teach us that we cannot fully rely on our categorizations. But, if we cannot trust our own categories, what can we trust? If even our cognition – thoughts, memories etc. – cannot be believed in, is there anything reliable in the world? It may be that our senses distort the way we see the world, but at least we should be able to trust our thoughts. Not believing in one’s own thoughts approaches insanity. Near the end of Do Androids Dream..? Deckard is possibly hinting at the certainty over the contents of our minds: “Everything is true . . . Everything anybody has ever thought“ (DA 170). One cannot be mistaken about one's own thoughts but since thoughts can and do change, and do not always correlate with the physical reality either, they are a source of much confusion.
In "The Bicentennial Man" the boundaries between human and robot are for the main part based on rather external observations; humans wear clothes and robots do not; humans are recognized by the court of law and robots are not. These are fairly superficial discoveries which would not qualify as sufficient distinctions or definitions because they are contingent and possibly transient. However, as we saw in the previous sub-chapter, Li-Hsing, the congresswoman, says to
Andrew that his artificiality is the reason why he will always be in a different category from
62 humans. She says, “To any human being who is intent on keeping up the barrier between himself and a robot, those differences are a steel wall a mile high and a mile thick” (BM 678). Categorised in this way, the android-human difference is fundamental. Andrew suggests another compelling distinction between humans and androids as well. He says immortality might be the final boundary between humans and androids: “Human beings can tolerate an immortal robot, for it doesn’t matter how long a machine lasts. They cannot tolerate an immortal human being, since their own mortality is endurable only so long as it is universal“ (BM 680). “Isn’t that the fundamental barrier?“ (BM 680). Death and mortality will be discussed in chapter four. It is a fascinating thought that death defines human existence so essentially. It could certainly be a decisive factor if androids ever were built, and both "The Bicentennial Man" and Do Androids Dream..? (and certainly Blade Runner as well) do take this into consideration.
3.3 Kipple
The greatest threats to the safety in stable structure and order are, of course, destruction and disorder. In Do Androids Dream..? not only are the borders between man and machine blurring but also the whole world is turning into ruin. These two tendencies do not necessarily entail each other; one does not have to be the cause and the other the effect. Nonetheless there does seem to be a relationship between these currents in that the direction is away from fixed, stable order towards ambiguity and disintegration. Therefore it could be argued it is definitely not a coincidence that they both appear in the novel. After the World War Terminus, and the environmental destruction that followed, radioactive fall-out began to destroy certain areas of the globe until eventually the
“omnipresent dust“ (DA 11) took over the whole world. The dust causes changes in human genes, although it is not exactly explained how. Particular illnesses are not described, but instead some people become ‘specials’; ‘antheads’ or ‘chickenheads’. These people are no longer capable of passing mental faculties tests and are labeled unsuitable for migration to colonies – they are no longer a part of humankind (DA 17).
63 People and the Earth are deformed by the dust and destruction embodies everything else as well. All man-made objects and buildings are falling apart the same way as the building where J.R.
Isidore, a chickenhead, lives.
He lived alone in this deteriorating, blind building of a thousand uninhabited apartments which like all its counterparts, fell, day by day, into greater entropic ruin. Eventually everything within the building would merge, would be faceless and identical, mere pudding- like kipple piled to the ceiling of each apartment. And, after that, the uncared-for building itself would settle into shapelessness, buried under the ubiquity of the dust. (DA 20)
Do Androids Dream..? is not the only novel by Dick where the concept of kipple appears.
It refers to things that have broken and become useless, to an accumulative cycle that seems to feed itself. Isidore describes it very precisely, probably repeating the words of the important media personality he much admires, Buster Friendly: “Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match . . . When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, when you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more“ (DA 53). Lem observes that in Dick's stories the world does not end with wars, floods, famines, plagues, draught, sterility etc., “rather, there is some inscrutable factor at work that is visible in its manifestations but not at its source, and the world behaves as if it has fallen prey to a malignant cancer, which through metastases attacks one area of life after another” (1984, 112-3). Kipple is not just plain rubbish, then. Kippleization refers to a much deeper phenomenon which concerns the entire world, a process that cannot be stopped. Isidore explains further:
No one can win against kipple . . . except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I’ve sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I’ll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It’s a universal principle operating throughout universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization (DA 53).
Actually Isidore goes on to say that the only thing that kippleization does not apply to is the religious figure Wilbur Mercer, but religion will be discussed later, in chapter 4.3.
Douglas, in context with individuals’ linkage to the cosmos, mentions the Chinese concept of Feng shui (1966, 84). It is not only to do with keeping rooms clean and tidy (although that is
64 where it begins in practice and where order is reflected on) but a deeper idea of harmony in the cosmos: “The influence of the waters and the airs, called Feng Shwe, will bring him [an individual] good fortune if his house and his ancestors’ graves are well placed. Professional geomancers can divine the causes of his misfortune and he can then rearrange his home or his parental graves to better effect“ (1966, 84). It is not, then, a mere hobby of arranging and rearranging objects, but connected to how the universe is interpreted. In the world of Do Androids Dream..? it is a fight against entropy. The fight cannot be won (except possibly through Mercerism) but it must be fought.
Entropy is a process of disintegration which ultimately leads to disorder or loss of structure.
Its final result could even be seen as a void – a void of categories, a void of any thing at all, as when it reaches its final stage there is nothing which could be given a label or a name, there is nothing to conceptualize. Curiously, Tapio Markkanen, who writes about entropy from the point of view of physics, says that all the rest is silence and darkness, thus referring to Hamlet (1999, 303).
In thermodynamics, however, the concept of entropy refers to an increase of spontaneous events at the molecular level. The process was given its name by Rudolph Clausius in 1845, who portrayed the universe as inevitably ''running down'' towards maximum entropy (Porush, 1985, 48).
According to Porush, entropy is “randomness, disorganization, an ineluctable loss that occurs with every physical reaction and which contributes to the final ''heat death'' of the universe” (1985, 57).
As Kari Enqvist explains, atoms were long considered the fundamental, unchanging, building blocks of the material world – until radioactivity was discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896 and it turned out that atoms can spontaneously, without external force, split apart (1999, 273-8). We are no longer reluctant to accept that atoms, too, face erosion or can even “transmutate” into energy, as when an atomic bomb splits atoms into particles – in fact we think of erosion as just another characteristic feature of matter (Enqvist 1999, 274, 285-6). Our universe is expanding as matter keeps dissolving, and either this process goes on forever and the universe cools down towards thermal death as it burns all its energy, or at some point the process reverses and the universe starts
65 contracting and collapses into a hot singularity; due to the law of the increasing of entropy the universe is moving towards either an icy or a fiery death (Enqvist 1999, 288).
The second law of thermodynamics involves smoothing out of temperature, pressure, density etc. Spontaneity, when increased, leads to a more disordered state because disorder is simply more probable than order. Therefore entropy has applications in for example statistical mathematics and information theory; when all options considered have the same probability (i.e. they are level or ‘smoothed out’), entropy is maximal; as the possibilities of prediction decrease entropy increases. Although entropy is an unstoppable physical process of disorder, there are some counter forces. Gravity creates solar systems and there is nothing unnatural about systems which create order, organic life and the DNA-molecule being good examples of highly developed order
(Markkanen 1999, 298). Nonetheless, if the universe erodes and continues expanding forever, as is often suggested, all matter will dissolve, the result being total entropy, or as Isidore puts it, ‘total, absolute kippleization’. The world of Do Androids Dream..? seems to be approaching the end. It is not moving towards harmony or unity, but disorder.
Isidore informs us of the First Law of Kipple: “Kipple drives out non-kipple“ (DA 53), and inanimate objects are not the only ones affected; people, too, can become “living kipple“ (DA 58).
Deckard also ponders on his role in the world while in the opera rehearsal listening to Luba Luft, the android, singing The Magic Flute:
This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or the other; finally the name ‘Mozart’ will vanish, the dust will have won. If not on this planet then another. We can evade it awhile. As the andys can evade me and exist a finite stretch longer. But I get them or some other bounty hunter gets them. In a way, he realized, I’m part of the form-destroying process of entropy. The Rosen Association creates and I unmake. (DA 76-7)
In this novel entropy is obviously not only a process of molecules or the universe but a phenomenon that touches humans as well. It does not involve only natural sciences but instead people are living it. This is clearly a reaction to ongoing socio-cultural processes in Dick's as well as our own time. Suvin compares Dick's and Ursula Le Guin's SF texts, seeing differences but viewing them as results of the same historical situation:
66 Le Guin's possible world(s) is toward oneness as the natural condition of the world, while in Dick it is toward disintegration of order and unity, toward destruction of all forms as the condition of his world(s) . . . [B]oth these leading writers write out of and react against a historically identical – psychological and sociopolitical – situation: the experience of the terrible pressures of alienation, isolation and fragmentation pervading the neo-capitalist society of the world of the mid-twentieth century. (1988, 134)
Jukka Gronow explains that Marxist socialism includes the theory that society is moving towards degeneration and eventually the final crisis follows as capitalism collapses in the end – so that the revolution necessary for the liberation of mankind is in fact a kind of end of the world (1999, 145-
6). The end looms not only in the future of the material world but also the societal one. Pirjo
Lyytikäinen, who writes about decadence in literature, states that moral relativism, fragmentation of self, individualism, hedonism and perversions, which all used to be provocative themes in literature, are now in fact a given (1999, 216).
Towards the very end of the story, as we once again follow Isidore together with some of the androids, things begin to escalate into a kind of climax, or perhaps an anticlimax. On TV
Buster Friendly has declared that Mercerism is a hoax, and two androids in Isidore’s apartment have tortured a spider by cutting off its legs one by one (this rare creature, an actual living bug literally becoming disintegrated as well). It is open to interpretation whether what happens next is due to Isidore’s own actions or to an external force, but things begin to fall apart: “he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out“ (DA 160). Cups and cupboards crack and split and the floor gives in. When Isidore touches a wall it too breaks and the legs of a chair he sits on bend. One of the androids says it is Isidore who is breaking everything but then again it is not clear how exactly he would be breaking the walls and the floor. Unless
Isidore, being a special, has some mystical powers what is taking place is perhaps the process of kippleization independent of Isidore’s actions.
There are several key words in Dick’s description of kippleization in the above quotations which could be emphasized: deteriorating, ruin, merge, faceless, identical, shapelessness, form- destroying. They are all to do with loss of structure and boundaries, and therefore loss of identity.
If we attach negative connotations or value to this process it can be called a downward spiral.
67 Indeed, since the outcome of kippleization in the novel is what is referred to as a tomb world it is easy to interpret it as a negative force. In context with the socio-political world and its ruin and the death of institutions, systems and functions also Baudrillard mentions the concept of spiraling cadaver (1994, 149-54). It refers to rottenness, lack of substance, and decomposition, to the extent where even “the ruins themselves are defunct“ (1994, 151). An entropic process, it seems, can be seen at work in the social systems as well.
The term used by Douglas, again, is dirt: objects or substance out of place. In the anthropological perspective dirt is most of interest when it reflects cosmology (and presumably
Douglas would consider all manifestations of dirt as reflections of structures perceived in the cosmos). She perceives two stages in the development of dirt (1966, 160-1). The first one is the one connected with danger. In this stage dirt is a threat to the current order by being out of place and by crossing boundaries. It still has identity, a kind of half identity, because it can still be recognized what it was before it crossed the line of becoming dirt. At this stage it is avoided and objectionable; and cleaned up, thrown or brushed away. After this stage when dirt is still recognizable and specifically unwanted begins a process of rotting and dissolving which leads to the second phase. The origin of different bits and pieces is lost and they enter a mass where all identity is gone: “So long as identity is absent, rubbish is not dangerous“ (1966, 160). Douglas says it is unpleasant to dig at rubbish because certain bits may revive identity, but when it is mere mass it evokes no such feelings. She states that “the thought that the air is full of the dust of corpses of bygone races has no power to move“ (1966, 160). In fact dirt is just one phase in a cycle from differentiating to non-differentiating. It is first created in the mind, “a by-product of the creation of order“ (1966, 161). After becoming a threat to distinctions made it returns to shapelessness: “In this final stage of total disintegration, dirt is utterly undifferentiated. Thus a cycle has been completed“ (1966, 160-1). Due to this cyclical perception, Douglas sees formlessness not only as a symbol of decay but of beginning and growth, as a creative and regenerating force. The idea of the universe expanding and moving towards greater entropy forever is different because there is no
68 return and no following spin of the wheel. Whether the hope promised by Mercerism in Do
Androids Dream..? suggests that the world view is cyclical and hopeful is somewhat ambiguous and open to interpretation because, on the other hand, the view is rather pessimistic: the world is possibly coming to an end in the tomb world. Since Mercerism will be discussed in chapter four this question will receive more attention later. Here the more relevant issue is the loss of structure.
As was already mentioned, the difficulty of being able to tell androids from humans, on one hand, and the force of kippleization, on the other, are not necessarily processes in any relationship of entailment. It may be a coincidence that they occur simultaneously in the novel. However, if kippleization is taken as a symbol of loss of structure, shape, form, and identity, it is a reflection of the blurring of categories. It is a threat serving a social purpose, a warning sign which says if you make androids the world will come to an end. It does not have to be an end in the literal sense; it can be the end of the world as we know it. Developing technology and making machines in the image of humans can lead to unexpected situations, and in any case machines are at least a potential risk. Anything that is unpredictable or unknown comes from outside the fixed order and structure and is therefore dangerous. As Kayser observes the grotesque, “it presupposes that the categories which apply to our world view become inapplicable” (1981, 185). For Douglas these anomalies, this dirt, is always to do with the order of the cosmology in question. In order to work a society needs at least some structure and the rules concerning purity and danger are there to protect the order. The threats or warnings may sound ridiculous because of the difficulty of expressing the unknown danger – of course the world will not really turn into dust if we build machines, just as food dropped from the plate onto the floor is not really dirt; it is still the same food, only out of place. The seemingly irrational feeling of danger nonetheless has its place in defending the governing structure. Quoting Kayser, grotesques – and androids and monsters alike – question human identity by breaking categories, due to “the fusion of realms which we know to be separated, the abolition of the law of statics, the loss of identity, the distortion of ''natural'' size and shape, the suspension of the category of objects, the destruction of personality, and the
69 fragmentation of the historical order” (1981, 185).
4. What is the meaning of this existence?
Human existence partially consist of puzzlement concerning the existence itself, and SF certainly reflects this. Bainbridge notes that “All of this fiction raises the three great intertwined mysteries:
Where have we come from? Who are we? Where are we going?” (1986, 217), although these three questions really seem to be included in the core question, Who are we? Our lives in all their complexity cannot seem to be thoroughly explained in terms of whether we are mind or matter, or how we happen to define humans. After discussing some possibilities of what humans are made of, in chapter two, and what the limitations of the categorisation of human identity are, in chapter three, it is now time to turn to look at a more subjective perspective on humanity. Perhaps the very reason why these questions haunt us is the curious subjectivity of experiences, perceptions and sensations. If we did not have our feelings and emotions, we might not be concerned with all these questions. As we saw, the qualia of experiences raises a serious problem to physicalism. There is something so mysterious about the fact that things feel like something, that it actually invokes the whole problem and leaves us dumbfounded.
This chapter will first discuss death and mortality, because they cause great anxiety and worry to people. Unless one dies very young, every single person must at some point be wondering about death. Is it really the end of everything? If it is, how come I, as a person, exist now, but will not exist after that? If it is not the end, what happens afterwards? Would it not be great to live forever? If not, why might that be? What is the point of life when you know that sooner or later you will die? Moreover, our own death is not the only one to worry about, and we grieve over loved ones too. Since death is such an important question, both of the SF texts address it explicitly as the androids in them face their deaths. We cannot imagine life without death, and we cannot discuss life without discussing death.
The second theme of this chapter is no other than the meaning of life. Obviously the purpose is not to give definite answers, but to discuss what suggestions the texts offer.
70 Existentialist anguish derives from a feeling that there may be no purpose in life whatsoever. If one is simply thrown into the world, as existentialism suggests, this implies suffering, solitude, and a loneliness which cannot be overcome. Every man is an island. However, our texts do offer some comfort, which defines human existence just as much as the suffering does.
Finally, a discussion on religion follows. Religion is hardly central to everyone's life today, but traditionally it has been the authority specifically in explaining human life and death, possibly afterlife as well, and given answers to what the purpose of life is and how to live it. The Bible, for example, gives comfort by saying that although we die and turn to dust, death is like sleeping
(Psalm 13:4). One day God will make the world into a paradise; “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain” (Revelation 21:4). Peace of mind and solace are offered to believers:
“whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die” (John 11:26). The Bible also gives the meaning of life, as loving God and keeping his commandments (Ecclesiastes 12:13). In fact religions have explained the entire cosmos, a task more and more left to sciences. Especially Do
Androids Dream..? and Blade Runner address religion in depth, which is why religion needs to be included in the discussion as well. One thing that defines humans is their beliefs. They may be religious or superstitious, but our beliefs certainly characterise us. Since the themes of death, meaning of life and religion overlap greatly, the division of the sub-chapters is not very strict. It would be difficult to discuss death or the meaning of life without constantly referring to the other, for example.
4.1 Death and mortality
In “The Bicentennial Man,” Andrew witnesses the death of several family members. They do not die in accidents, nor do they seem to die of long-lasting or severe illnesses. Instead their moments of death seem pre-scheduled and peaceful since the family members are gathered around the bed to say their goodbyes each time. When Sir dies he says: “Don’t help me . . . I’m only dying; I’m not
71 crippled . . . Andrew, I’m glad you’re free” (BM 647-8). There is no pain or bitterness and he seems to have resigned to death, calmly. The actual moment of death is not described and it remains distant. Little Miss holds onto life until the day when she hears about their legal victory, the legislation against harming robots. “Her last smile was for Andrew . . . She died with her hand holding his, while her son and his wife and children remained at a respectful distance from both”
(BM 657). Again it is old age that ends life and she passes away quietly and peacefully without so much as a cough. Andrew’s own moment of death is very similar. People are standing around the bed as his thoughts begin to fade away. A congresswoman who has helped him during the legal processes holds his hand at the final moment. “One last fugitive thought came to him and rested for a moment on his mind before everything stopped” (BM 682). Death is never violent, unexpected or accidental in this story and it is not feared. It is simply like switching off the light or pulling the plug. Humans die out like machines that run out of power supply. From Andrew’s point of view it is “the human way of ceasing to function. It was an involuntary and irreversible dismantling” (BM
648).
It is curious that Paul, another family member, says to Andrew at one point: “We’re mortal,
Andrew. We’re not like you. It doesn’t matter too much” (BM 667). It is hard to believe that anyone would accept their mortality so lightly. How can it not matter if it is what separates humans from androids, organic beings from synthetic ones? If becoming mortal is what finally makes
Andrew human, death must matter. Although throughout the story great importance is given to the brain, mortality becomes essential in defining what is human as well. Andrew says:
isn’t the greatest difference of all the matter of immortality? Who really cares what a brain looks like or is built of or how it was formed? What matters is that brain cells die; must die. Even if every other organ in the body is maintained or replaced, the brain cells, which cannot be replaced without changing and therefore killing the personality, must eventually die. (BM 680)
As we saw earlier, Andrew thinks this indeed is the fundamental barrier between humans and robots, and seems to accept the difference. Therefore it is odd that death is never a severe issue in the story but rather a mechanistic ceasing of existence. It is also nothing to be feared, the
72 implication being that after death there is no mind or soul that could be upset about its having died.
Death is the end for the individual personality.
In “The Bicentennial Man” the family members often explain to Andrew that he will probably not have his wish, becoming legally human, carried out in court rooms, because even if the judges thought it would be fair to call him human, the public opinion would always be against it. Andrew is puzzled after he has been threatened by strangers on the street and wonders how they can fear robots. George tells him: “It’s a disease of mankind, one of which it is not yet cured” (BM
654). The fear, then, is not explained as a natural fear of the unknown, but a disease which potentially can be cured. Since in the family law firm they know that any new laws would not work as long as people have this disease they start campaigning for the robot rights. George begins working on the public opinion and in a speech asks if the treatment of robots has been just. He says that even animals or inanimate objects that have been of service to humans are not treated as badly as robots. After hard work Andrew's lawyers achieve a legislation which forbids harming robots:
“It was endlessly qualified and the punishments for violating the law were totally inadequate, but the principle was established” (BM 657). Even long after that, though, the suspicion against robots still lives on (BM 675). Since people use more and more prosthetic organs, however, they are forced to accept “a broad interpretation of humanity” (BM 677) which would include Andrew.
After that there is just the one difference between him and humans; mortality. Death is the last thing humans can claim is theirs alone and not Andrew’s. They are still safe because as long as
Andrew is immortal he can be categorized as a machine which can be excluded from humanity.
When Andrew finally becomes mortal they do not have this neat and safe category for him any more and has to be accepted as a human. When he soon dies he is no risk to be feared any more, so we could ask whether he is really accepted as human or if it is just easier to say so because with his death the problem is soon swept under the carpet and the embarrassing anomaly can be forgotten about. Death brings Andrew what he wanted all along but we cannot be sure if he gets it for the right reasons. Perhaps he is not accepted but the removal of fear makes it look as though he was.
73 Chapter 3.3 on kipple already mentioned the concept of the tomb world in passing.
According to Emmanuel Carrère, Dick found the concept in essays by the psychiatrist Ludwig
Binswanger, who described the life of a schizophrenic as a world of eternal death, where everything has happened and at the same time is still happening, where nothing more can ever happen (Carrère 2005, 83). It could be described as a black hole which devours everything and everyone. Do Androids Dream..? is not the only piece of Dick's fiction where we can come across this concept, and it did not only appear in his texts but followed him in his personal life as well.
Carrère mentions an anecdote about Mark Twain which Dick apparently liked to tell people (2005,
49). Twain had a twin brother, Bill, and the two babies looked so alike that no-one could tell one from the other without different-coloured ribbons put on them. One day the babies were left alone in the bath and one of them drowned, but the ribbons had come undone so no-one knew which baby died. Some thought it was Bill, some thought it was Mark. The reason why Dick was so fascinated by this is that he had a twin sister, Jane. Carrère's biography, I am alive and you are dead: A journey inside the mind of Philip K. Dick (2005) describes how the twins were born prematurely and were underweight, but because no-one told their mother she was not producing enough milk and should also give the babies formula, Jane died of undernourishment a few weeks later. The parents had Philip's name and date of birth engraved on Jane's headstone as well. As even the name of the biography suggests, this death followed him throughout his life, as well as his horrible uncertainty of which one of them was alive and which one dead, until the day he died 53 years later and was buried next to Jane.
If the androids are moral creatures we cannot help feeling enormously bad for them. In Do
Androids Dream..? and Blade Runner they live only a few years, what a wretched existence! Their lives are like a continuous memento mori, an endless moment of being aware of their death. Like the Bible says, “the living know that they shall die” (Ecclesiastes 9:5). But then again, why do we feel that death is such a bad thing? When one dies, one is not there to feel bad about it any more, at least if death really is the end of it all. Also in literature there are examples of mythical characters
74 who are immortal, like the Gorgons in Greek mythology. Sometimes immortals are presented as bitter and yearning for death, and their immortality can be a punishment or a curse, which makes us ask if we would even like being immortal that much. In Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe, and
Everything (1982), the third novel of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, Wowbagger is an immortal but very bored figure. Bainbridge refers to another SF example of a cryogenically frozen character, Neil R. Jones' Professor Jameson, who, after being revived, “discovers that his will to live leaves just as he achieves immortality . . . everything that has been meaningful to him has vanished” (1986, 217). In the film adaptation of “The Bicentennial Man”, Little Miss' granddaughter Portia is not immortal, but with the help of Andrew's invention, a DNA elixir, she could live a very long life. At the age of 75, however, she does not want to. She says that mortality is “the order of things”. People may wish to stay young forever, but it is often also suggested that immortality would not be worth the baggage that comes with it. Even if death is the natural order of things, awaits us all inevitably, and is all around us, it is difficult to accept or feel comfortable about. As Freud says, many people feel that the most uncanny things of all are those related to death, bodies, ghosts and spirits; ein unheimliches Haus could be translated as 'a haunted house'
(1958, 149). Death is discomforting, to say the least, despite its naturalness.
In his discussion of Blade Runner, Rowlands concentrates on the themes of death and the meaning of life. He says that if we could get some clarification as to why we think life is a good thing and death is bad, we would get closer to the question of the meaning of life (2005, 237).
People tend to think that death harms them by depriving them of something, namely their life. We are deprived of the possibilities that lie ahead. On the other hand, if it is mere possibilities that we lose, the future is not something we are actually connected with. Therefore, says Rowlands, we cannot think of only the loss of a possible future but an actual one (2005, 238-242). But since the future does not exist yet, how can one lose it? Rowlands explains that one way of looking at this would be to separate a future in a weak and a strong sense, that is, how much one has invested in that future. If one has a desire and then goes on to fulfil it, it does not require a concept of the
75 future in the same sense as someone who has more complicated long-term plans and is aware that they cannot be fulfilled straight away but over time. Rowlands calls these the non-conceptually future-directed and the conceptually future-directed way, or weak and strong future respectively.
He also goes on to claim that someone who has a future in the strong sense actually loses more when dying than someone with a future in a weak sense (2005, 253), but this is a very problematic statement. That would mean that people with no plans, for example infants, would not lose anything at all when they die. Also it is not consistent with what Rowlands says earlier about the scope of morality and how our moral laws should be consistent and impartial (2005, 179), hence logically the laws should also include infants and for example retarded people (this he calls the argument from marginal cases, 2005, 193). Rowlands uses an example of a well-prepared athlete and an ill-prepared athlete both failing in a competition and says that the well-prepared one loses more (2005, 253). But surely life cannot be compared to a mere sports game and when talking about life every loss counts far more than in a game. Also life is not about the two alternatives of winning and loosing, it is about a variety of experiences of different kinds of qualities. How could we then be able to compare and rate those experiences and decide who wins or loses more?
When discussing the meaning of life, however, Rowlands has more convincing arguments, and they are all about death. Let us take an example of his: without limits and a centre a visual field would have no structure or order and would make no sense. Some kind of frame of reference is always needed. Similarly, time gives structure and order to our lives and without it we would make no sense. If our life had no limits, namely birth and death, nothing would mean anything at all and there would be no horizon but mere shapeless and senseless ontological mass (Rowlands
2005, 256-8). The argument is that in order to have any view at all, we need a centre and limits to the perception, even if at the same time this limits the view. Also Fearn concludes that meaning entails limits, and thus mortality makes meaningful life possible (2005, 207). He also points out that we do not feel depressed about the time of our non-existence before birth, so the same non- existence after death should not depress us either, although he admits that we, as biological
76 creatures, would make much less sense if we did not fear death: “there is a great deal of point in being afraid of one's death, because one has some degree of control over the timing. Instinct is a blunt instrument. It continues to hope, and continues to make us cower, even where death is inevitable” (2005, 209). We are biologically conditioned to fear death in order to keep on living, because that is what organisms do. In a Heideggerian sense we are beings-towards-a-future, but even more fundamentally, says Rowlands, beings-towards-death (2005, 258). “Death may be that which takes away our life . . . But it is also that which gives meaning to life in the first place”
(Rowlands 2005, 258). Death giveth and death taketh away.
In Blade Runner the androids only have a few year life span. In the understandable pursuit for more life, the android Roy Batty finally meets the head of the company that manufactured him,
Eldon Tyrell. To his maker, he says, “I want more life, fucker!” Batty wants to know why he cannot live longer, and if his death could be postponed with a technical solution. Tyrell explains it cannot be done, and defends himself: “You were made as well as we could make you”.
Understandably bitter, Batty says: “But not to last”. Tyrell tries to comfort him: “The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly, Roy”. Roy’s life is full of determination, structure and meaning because it is so short. There is not a moment to lose. The comment, which shows Tyrell's pride in his work, perhaps admiration of Batty as well, does not comfort Batty, and he kills Tyrell. The other android whose early death is an issue is obviously Rachael. After Deckard has already fallen for her a character called Gaff reminds him,
“It’s too bad she won’t live. But then again, who does?” In the director’s cut the viewers are even reminded of this a second time at the end of the film – obviously an important line then. Because the androids, at least some of them, have memories programmed into their brain, they do not necessarily know when they were made and when they will die. In this respect they resemble humans who do not know when their time will come either.
The android life is compared to slavery and to living in fear. It may be more apparent in their case, but death also looms around the corner for us humans, and no one knows when it will
77 come. In the final battle scenes of the film there are parallels between Deckard and Batty. They are both fighting for their lives, Deckard hunting Batty and Batty attempting to stop Deckard by trying to kill him. There is no way they could both survive this and they are portrayed as each other’s enemies. Yet, curiously, both of them injure the fingers of their right hand at the same time. It is as if we were told that they are not so different after all. Android or human, no one escapes death. We may have freedom of will and choices in all kinds of ways, but death is the natural law we must all obey; it is the deterministic causality once again, reaching from the physical world, that gets us in the end. We may nourish idealistic conceptions of ourselves as a species, but just like any other creature, we must be humble before death. In Blade Runner in particular the view on death is by far not as neutral as in “The Bicentennial Man”. Where Andrew accepts his death without difficulty, in the film especially Roy Batty's death is moving. He is on a roof with Deckard, in a pouring rain. When he knows he is about to die, he gives perhaps the most beautiful death soliloquy in the history of cinema: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”
4.2 The meaning of life
As we saw in the previous chapter on death and mortality, one benefit that death brings is that it gives structure to existence. The other consequence which can be seen positively relates to those who survive. Death is drenched with social meaning because it can strengthen a community when mourning people support and comfort each other. Elisa Heinämäki refers to Georges Bataille and reminds us about the strange attraction that death has: we have a constant emotional interest in death, and its horror is accompanied by an opportunity for ecstatic feeling of togetherness and delight, as those who are afraid of death assemble to share the experience (1999, 197). Obviously death is not the only factor that brings people together, however.
78 Although Deckard's affair with Rachael both in Do Androids Dream..? and Blade Runner is morally dubious, to say the least, it can be viewed as a reaction to all the existentialist uncertainties he has about his and other's identities and even life itself. When everything seems to be falling apart and human relationships are distant and filled with anxieties and doubt (as with Deckard and his wife), the affair with Rachael is an attempt to share something, anything, with another individual. As Heinämäki presents it, Bataille emphasises pure coincidence when it comes to romantic relationships; the relationship between lovers is a chance which offers itself for experiencing togetherness, but exactly who becomes that being for you who seems to hold the secret of existence, and which two people end up losing themselves to each other – that is a matter of coincidence (1999, 201). In this respect it makes no difference that Rachael is not Deckard's wife or even of the same 'species'. It is the chance encounter and the shared moment which matters.
In Kristeva's vocabulary, the encounter between Deckard and Rachael would be between foreigners. Referring to the concept of unheimlich, Kristeva says “Freud brings us the courage to call ourselves disintegrated in order not to integrate foreigners and even less so to hunt them down, but rather to welcome them to that uncanny strangeness, which is as much theirs as it is ours”
(1991, 191-2). The uncanny is “a strange land of borders and othernesses ceaselessly constructed and deconstructed” (Kristeva 1991, 191). When struggling against the foreigner or fleeing from it, we are in fact fighting our unconscious, because “The foreigner is within us” (Kristeva 1991, 191).
Facing the differences between familiars and foreigners brings the experience of uncanny strangeness, but it is “the ultimate condition of our being with others” (Kristeva 1991, 192).
Existentialism is not a unified school of thought, and many philosophers who are considered existentialists have not wished to be called so. In very general terms, then, existentialism is interested in human existence primarily, and also sees that existence precedes essence, that is, all the meanings that we ascribe to life. This means that there is no given meaning, there is no meaning from the outside, there is no meaning a priori. Therefore we must embrace existence itself, even if the meaninglessness brings with it many things which are considered
79 negative. Existentialism is associated with experiences of angst, suffering, agony, hopelessness, anxiety and fear – but also neutral boredom, alienation and absurdity, and more positively, freedom. Due to the denial of given meaning, and the notion of absolute freedom for an individual to ascribe meaning for his/her own life, many existentialists have been atheists – but not all. Martin
Heidegger spoke about life as 'being thrown into existence', or merely 'thrownness' (Geworfenheit), a term which also Jean-Paul Sartre used. It describes the existentialist experience of having to face things without having reflected on them first, and without having chosen them. First a person is nothing, has no definitions or descriptions or meaning, and only after that can that person make him/herself into something – with such freedom that it also causes anxiety. In Being and Time
(Sein und Zeit, 1927), to some extent following Edmund Husserl, Heidegger writes about existence, being itself, which he feels has been forgotten about. His concept of Dasein refers to a being for whom being is a question – and being certainly is a question to the androids in both of the texts. This also leads to phenomenology, as when we seek being itself and things themselves, we must turn to the phenomena of experience. Porush explains the difference between the phenomenological and the everyday attitude as “recognizing the truth of a phenomenon” versus
“the commonplace acceptance of things as mere things” (1985, 77). “The first enriches . . . makes us aware of our own presence and the crystalline ''transparency'' of the material world. The second impoverishes; it is a process of instrumentation which makes the world opaque, separate from our intuitive and ideal knowledge of it and analyzed into a series of functional phenomena that are only viewed in terms of their utility” (Porush 1985, 77). Instead of an external, mechanical approach, phenomenology is interested in “what it feels like to have a point of view on the world” (Crane
2003, 212). It is concerned with the inner experiences of life in all their variety.
Sisyphus is a character from Greek mythology, a king who offended the gods by revealing
Zeus's secrets and by refusing to accept his death. He was therefore punished by gods, who condemned him to push a boulder to the top of a hill, from where it would roll down every time, for eternity. Sisyphus has to begin this meaningless task from the beginning, over and over again.
80 Sisyphus is the symbol for frustration of repetitive, meaningless tasks, absurdity, toiling and suffering, and sometimes also the pursuit of knowledge. In “The Myth of Sisyphus” (1942), Albert
Camus, another existentialist, suggests that in the torment is Sisyphus' victory, that he is superior to his fate precisely by continuing, stronger than rock. As there is no essence or meaning, acceptance is victory. Fearn refers to Richard Taylor and explains how Sisyphus can find solace, first of all from the outside, as if we think that all the stones are assembled at the top of the hill in a “beautiful and enduring temple” (2005, 198). People wish their lives to have this kind of objective, external meaning and purpose, but the kind of meaning existentialists are after cannot be given; if meaning is imposed from the outside, it is not meaning at all. “If it is worth living well in the sight of God, it is worth living well without it” (Fearn 2005, 198). Existentialism abandons external meaning, so we have to turn to Taylor's second approach of finding internal meaning from within: “The problem with Sisyphus building a temple on top of the hill is that monuments do not last forever, and even those that do . . . soon become curiosities” (Fearn 2005, 200). Even if gods had been merciful and implanted in Sisyphus a device or a substance that gives him the impulse to roll stones uphill, the impulse is driven from without (Fearn 2005, 200). This in fact resembles the discussion on freedom of will, on how genuinely free choices cannot be the same thing as inner compulsions, because that would be deterministic and not free. It would be slavery all over again.
According to Fearn, “The purpose, meaning or value of any object is a relation it has to something outside itself” (2005, 203). Therefore we should not widen the notion of purposes too far, to life as such, and certainly there cannot be a purpose or meaning of all things. Just as we cannot explain the purpose of x without referring to y or z or anything outside x, we simply cannot ask what the purpose of all things is, as there is nothing outside all things; such questions and answers would be absurd, silly and senseless (Fearn 2005, 204). However, an individual life can have meaning as long as it relates to something outside itself. If we contend that meaning and purpose have to come from within, but also only exists in relation to something external, we find meaning balancing itself on the border where self meets other.
81 For Dick, the one criterion which makes a human and distinguishes us from androids, is empathy. Without empathy, we would be animals, or machines, and our lives would not be meaningful in the humane way which we think it should be. Dick considered empathy the greatest virtue which one would have to have in order to qualify as human. It consists of “respect for the
Golden Rule, for the commandment to ''love thy neighbor as thyself''; the capacity to put yourself in the other person's place, to desire his happiness, to suffer with him and, if necessary, in his stead” (Carrère 2005, 135). All these paraphrasings of the virtue of empathy have traditionally been in the centre of religions and their doctrines. Caritas, the Latin term for charity or selfless love, is considered the greatest of the three theological virtues of Christianity. “Caritas is infinite, it grows, goes beyond itself and ourselves, thus welcoming foreigners who have become similar in their very distinction” (Kristeva 1991, 85). Also religions have undoubtedly been the authorities on explanations of life and its meaning, advice on how to live it, as well as offered cosmologies, explanations concerning the entire world. In Do Androids Dream..? people have devices called empathy boxes, which also enable Mercerism, the prevalent religion. J.R. Isidore describes
Mercerism to an android as the one thing in the universe that is not going to end up in total entropy, chaos, or kippleization. He says the empathy box is the most important and personal possession one can have: “It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone” (DA 54). In context with caritas, Kristeva says that “ The alienation of the foreigner ceases within the universality of the love for the other” (1991, 84). In this story a piece of machinery replaces religion and the cornerstone of ethics and the moral feeling, namely caritas or empathy.
Blade Runner finishes after Deckard and Batty's battle scene. Curiously, after fighting for their lives, Batty actually saves Deckard's life when he almost falls off the roof where they are.
Batty has run out of time. It is his time to die, and apparently he is aware of it a few moments before it happens. After his beautiful death soliloquy, Batty's mechanism simply slows down and stops quietly in the rain, as if the entire world was crying. In the theatrical version of the film,
82 Deckard, as voice-over, says: “I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got? All I could do was sit there and watch him die”. Through love of life, or empathy for fellow creature, enemy becomes saviour.
Even the cool, more rational, hard science fiction “The Bicentennial Man” suggests that the answer to the question on the meaning of life is, quite opposite to Asimov's scientific aspirations, fondness. Early on Andrew is closest to the smallest of the family members, Miss, and even more so, Little Miss. She likes to play with him, and can actually do it almost as much as she pleases, simply because she can order him to do it. This means Andrew does not have as much time for domestic duties, but “Sir did not mind. Sir was fond of Miss and of Little Miss, even more than
Ma'am was, and Andrew was fond of them, too. At least, the effect they had upon his actions were those which in a human being would have been called the result of fondness. Andrew thought of it as fondness, for he did not know any other word for it” (BM 638). Andrew's emotions are interpreted through his actions, which by the way shows the behaviourist approach, but more relevant right here is the affection. The first piece of carving that Andrew makes is a gift to Little
Miss, a wooden pendant. It is from this act of fondness that his career of carpentry begins from.
Furthermore, when Andrew finally lies in his death bed, expecting to die any moment, we are told that as his thoughts begin to fade away, he desperately wants to seize one of them: “Man! He was a man! He wanted that to be his last thought. He wanted to dissolve – die – with that” (BM 682).
Becoming human is his main purpose in life, and once achieved, he does not mind dying, but wants to hold on to the thought of the completed pursuit. However, perhaps his unconsciousness plays a little trick on him, or perhaps he has not been aware of another purpose. Maybe becoming human is only a step on the way to something more important, which he has not been concentrating on, for his achievement does not remain his last thought: “one last fugitive thought came to him and rested for a moment on his mind before everything stopped. 'Little Miss,' he
83 whispered, too low to be heard” (BM 682). This is how the story finishes. Not only does it show the typical pathos of many Asimov stories, but we are left with some questions concerning the meaning of life and being human. Does this mean that Andrew's affection for Little Miss was what made him human two hundred years ago already? Does it mean that the affection was fundamental, not being free or being legally human? Since the story concludes with this reference to fondness, we are indeed left with the idea that fondness is the meaning of life, and that affection makes a human.
In the film adaptation the theme of affection is much further emphasised. Before getting married, Little Miss has doubts because she has feelings for Andrew. Nothing could come of it though, because he is a machine. Years later after she dies, the only remaining family member that
Andrew has left is her granddaughter Portia, who conveniently looks exactly like her. They develop feelings for each other, although she resents some of his machinelike qualities and tells him to make mistakes, take chances, do wrong things, and follow his heart instead of being rational all the time. Portia almost marries someone else but this time around things work out better for
Andrew, who does 'do the wrong thing' and pursues her. Years go by and they live in a relationship which is not accepted by anyone else because he is an android. Therefore, the reason why he wants to be recognised as a human, is that he could then marry Portia – freedom, in this version, is not the crucial factor, but the recognition of their love for each other. The somewhat old-fashioned conception of marriage and society's external recognition for a relationship takes Andrew to the court rooms. Now the judge tells him that he cannot be recognised as a human because he is immortal, and society would never tolerate an immortal human. Since Portia does not want to prolong her life for ever either, although to some extent with the help of science she could, Andrew decides to have the final operation which also makes him mortal. He says, “I would rather die a man than live for all eternity as a machine”. He wants human recognition and dignity, but in the film version it is love that makes him long for those things, not the idea of freedom. According to
84 the SF texts, then, a simple answer to the question of meaning of life, and a solution to existentialist anguish and loneliness is, therefore: empathy, fondness, and love.
4.3 Religion
It is no surprise that fiction which is mainly concerned with science has a slight aversion towards religion. If religion is mentioned at all in SF it is quite often questioned, and religious dogmas are viewed as restrictions to free, independent thinking and as superstition. There are counterexamples too, of course, but if for example books on literary criticism on SF mention religion at all, that section usually is the very last one. The implication is that religion is the least essential or important aspect of SF. Keeping in mind the fact that in SF metaphors become literal, and the fact that religions speculate on the cosmos symbolically rather than literally, Roberts states that SF is a
“specifically non-religious religion, an atheistical theism” (2006, 146). However, SF and religion share a common ground as they deal with metaphors, and because they show a world utterly different from the one we live in, thus revealing something about the world in which we actually live (Roberts 2006, 146-7). Bainbridge has studied SF fans' views and agrees with Norman
Spinrad's hypothesis that SF replaces religion in providing transcendental experiences, awe, spiritual uplifting and cosmic meaningfulness after science has discredited religions – although
Bainbridge reminds us that much SF relies on cultic notions and pseudo-scientific gloss rather than pure science (1986, 171). Indeed, it is worth remembering that awe is an emotional response and that meaningfulness is not a feature of the physical world as such; even hard SF is not quite as hard as it sometimes claims to be. Perhaps the claim that SF replaces religion is too harsh. Also, there is no reason why religion should not be a part of the genre. As Enqvist explains, the scientific approach questions the possibility for true freedom, and religion has searched for liberty for example through meditation and prayer (1999, 275). Therefore the juxtaposition of science and religion in SF is particularly fascinating.
85 The way that Roberts ties religion and SF together, is through symbolism, metaphor, and aesthetics. Religion is a speculative discourse, and opens up paradoxical possibilities in a symbolic sense; “Its currency is not 'truth' but 'possibility'” (2006, 147). According to Roberts, “speculating about knowledge is inherently aesthetic” (2006, 147). He stresses the importance of play to aesthetics, because of its liberating effect to ideas, and because of its capability of substituting a thing with its symbol (as when a stick substitutes a horse in a child's play) (2006, 147). Play involves rich possibilities and metaphors, and in this aesthetic view of religion as symbolic speculation and imagination, arts and aesthetics become beautifully intermingled with religion.
Roberts writes: “Here is exactly where we find science fiction, at the point a stick turns into a horse. It might be said that all literature, or all art, does this; but I think that SF is much more playful (in this profound sense) than other literature. It is predicated upon a fundamental hospitality to otherness, to the alien, where other aspects of culture compromise” (2006, 148). It seems that to
Roberts it is in this sense of creation of worlds and explanations, entire cosmologies, in which SF can be said to replace religion – if not ideologically, then aesthetically.
In Do Androids Dream..?, people have empathy boxes, which enable something called fusing with a religious figure, Wilbur Mercer, forever walking up a hill while stones are being cast at him. 13 The reference to Sisyphean torment is unmistakeable. When fusing with Mercer a person walks up the hill with him and experiences what he does. With this technological achievement people can experience the same things as others do, and be sure of the similarity of their experiences. As we already saw, Isidore stresses the empathy box as the most important and personal possession one can have: “It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone” (DA 54). With the aid of the box people share their emotions. When one is sad it brings comfort, and when one is happy one ought to share it with others. As Deckard's wife Iran says, “It would be immoral to keep it for ourselves” (DA 131). A piece of machinery replaces religion and the cornerstone of ethics and the moral feeling, namely
13 Perhaps there is also a word play with his last name and the word mercenary, for the protagonist is a bounty hunter or a blade runner, as it is called in the film.
86 empathy. Although it is repeated in the novel several times that androids lack the talent for empathy, and that is how you can tell them apart, it seems that people need a device for it too.
Otherwise they would wander through their lives all alone with no connection to others. The view on life seems to be that we live a solitary existence and every man is an island. Isidore stresses the importance of other people: “You have to be with other people, he thought. In order to live at all. . .
. You can't go back, he thought. You can't go from people to nonpeople” (DA 154).
In one sequence of the novel Deckard and Phil Resch, the other bounty hunter, are at an exhibition of Edvard Munch in a museum and discuss the possibility that Resch is actually an android without being aware of it. He tells Deckard that he has a squirrel at home, however, and
Deckard says androids do not normally manage to keep animals alive for very long, because
“animals require an environment of warmth to flourish” and some sort of an “atmosphere of love”
(DA 100). This is certainly true of humans as well. Then the men stop to look at a painting, the name of which is not mentioned, but which almost beyond doubt is Munch’s The Scream. A tormented figure is described screaming in horror and agony, having had to cover its ears from its own howl. The figure stands on a bridge with no one else to be seen: “The painting showed a hairless, oppressed creature with a head like an inverted pear, its hands clapped in horror to its ears, its mouth open in a vast, soundless scream. . . . the creature screamed in isolation. Cut off by
– or despite – its outcry” (DA 100). In most versions of The Scream there are a couple of other figures on the bridge as well. However, there are several versions of the painting and many more reproductions of it, but perhaps Dick himself wanted to leave the figures out of the picture to paint his own, even more desolate picture of man’s existence. Resch says that must be the way that an android feels like but since the androids can be seen as the mirror or reflection of humans, solitude is just as much the human condition. Just as in death, man is also alone in life.
Bridges are often thought of as symbols for crossing over from one world to another, like from life to death. The dark waters underneath the bridge in The Scream are like the Styx in Greek mythology, the river which is the border between Earth and the Underworld. Bridges are most
87 definitely places of danger because crossing a boundary is always risky, and the other side is unknown. They can also symbolize the transcendental and the mystical, which due to their mysterious and obscure nature may have monstrous elements. On the other hand they may be considered sublime, transcending to where every human wishes to go but never may. The one thing most strictly forbidden to humans is, according to Christian faith, seeing God. In this sense a bridge may represent possibilities and impossibilities, individuals being tormented by their unfulfilled hopes. In Blade Runner the individual does meet his maker when Batty meets Tyrell, but this crossing of the bridge or boundary is dangerous and monstrous because Batty kills Tyrell.
In the existentialist search for meaning or religious search for God we may not be happy with being left without answers, but gaining those answers is dangerous. Maybe those answers are not for mortals. During the final battle in Blade Runner Batty is almost naked, hunts Deckard like a predator and howls like a wolf. This is most likely not only a coincidence or because we should think that the android is deranged. On one hand, it may be a reminder of the animal-machine dichotomy which was discussed in chapter two. On the other, wolves and their sad howling symbolize solitude and the existentialist anguish, as did the creature in the painting, The Scream, in the novel, and which was said to howl as well. In their loneliness and fear of death the androids are us, but in the end empathy wins and brings comfort. Religions do not offer empathy only as a comfort but also as the normative way in which to live morally.
In Do Androids Dream..? it seems that Deckard perhaps meets God, although since it is suggested that Mercerism is a hoax, typical of Dick, the reader is left to wonder. Deckard is against the idea of fusing with Mercer all through the novel, but towards the end he gets an impulse to go with it. Somewhat cryptically he thinks, while watching his wife fusing, that although Mercer suffers, Deckard’s own situation is worse than his, because Mercer does not have to do anything alien to himself or violate himself. When Deckard then fuses and meets with Mercer, the old man says that he has to go on as if Mercer did not exist. Deckard says he needs Mercer’s help but his reply is that he cannot save Rick if he cannot even save himself. “There is no salvation” (original
88 italics, DA 135). When Rick then wants to know what the whole fusion is for if not for help,
Mercer says it is to show him that he is not alone, that Mercer will always be there with him and that Deckard has to go do his task, bounty hunting, even though he knows it is wrong. Deckard resists and wants to quit his job and immigrate to the colonies but Mercer says:
You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity. At some time, every creature which lives must do so. It is the ultimate shadow, the defeat of creation; this is the curse at work, the curse that feeds on all life. Everywhere in the universe. (DA 135)
This is yet another gloomy perspective on our existence although it offers some sort of a solution to the loneliness. Somehow Mercer will be with Deckard but at the same time Deckard will have to sell out his identity. If a connection or contact with someone in this existence really means letting go of what one believes to be right, it is no bright picture of life. It is also a puzzling and mystifying episode in the story because while saying Deckard will never be alone, Mercer says he has to forget about him. At the same time elsewhere a TV host, Buster Friendly, who turns out to be an android, reveals that he thinks Mercerism is a hoax, that the experience is artificial, and
Mercer is just an old actor and does not suffer at all. The religious figure does not exist, it is all a swindle and so is the whole experience of empathy (DA 158). This has deep implications on the idea of humans being superior to androids who apart from just that one emotion, empathy, are described to be superior to humans, be it physically or intellectually.
Later on Rick’s experiences become even stranger as he thinks he has become Mercer, not just experienced being him but permanently fused with him. Before this happens he feels alienated from himself. He thinks that everything is easy for Mercer because he accepts everything.
“Nothing is alien to him. But what I’ve done, he thought, that’s become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I’ve become an unnatural self” (DA 172). An unnatural self is definitely uncanny. Then Deckard walks on an actual hill, not with the help of the empathy box, and experiences being Mercer. The rocks start flying at him and “the pain, the first knowledge of absolute isolation and suffering” unfolds (DA 173). Rick is baffled by the experience because it is similar to the fusion with an empathy box, when you feel you are suffering with
89 Mercer, but this time he is not with anyone, he is alone. He is sure that once he has become Mercer there is no going back but he will have to keep on walking up the hill forever, “trapped by eternity”
(DA 176), because “Mercer is immortal” (DA 176). In the end Rick goes home to his wife, however, and the reader cannot be sure if all this was just Rick’s tired hallucination after not having proper sleep in ages. On the other hand, the right answers or the right interpretations of the events are not as important as the questions that arise. They are questions about the individual in relation to the collective, and questions about the possibility of real connections between individuals. It is crucial that the novel does not give straightforward answers because that leaves more food for thought for the reader. As the quote from Brian W. Aldiss on the cover of Do
Androids Dream..? says, it is a “complex book, simply written but leaving all kinds of resonance in the mind.”
Religion is never explicitly mentioned in “The Bicentennial Man.” Although some of the characters die, there is no mention of a funeral or any other ceremony related to church. Religion simply seems to have vanished from the world. There is one single hint at the direction of traditional Christian faith, however, and it is the fact that Andrew excels in carpentry. It is odd that a robot would take up such an occupation, and for several reasons: first of all it requires creativity and imagination, and we are used to thinking that artistic ability is reserved only for the most free- minded, gifted humans, not machines; secondly, carpentry is at the same time a very much manual labour, so it is surprising that this intelligent machine would be involved in such concrete work instead of for example computer wizardry; thirdly, carpentry is very down-to-earth, as the wood is derived straight from the nature, it is organic, and we would expect to see a metal man working with bolts and screws at a conveyor belt in a car factory, rather than with natural material from the forests. In another short story by Asimov, “Light Verse”, which first appeared in 1973, a robot called Max is described as eccentric, “almost helpless”, and scarcely able to understand what is expected of him (Asimov 1995, 154). The owner does not want to have her old, slow and quirky robots adjusted, however, because she is fond of their individual, sweet and lovable characters.
90 Similarly to “The Bicentennial Man”, their personalities are explained by the complexity of the positronic brain, and by minor errors gradually developing into more prominent features. The reason why Max is so special is that he is extremely creative, and produces works of art which are highly original; the works are “never the same twice, and never failed to explore new experimental avenues of art” (1995, 152). Max's genius is due to his “maladjustment”, exactly like Andrew's.
The way in which the two differ, is that Max's art is light-sculptures, which are made with the aid of light-consoles. Although a genuinely creative robot may be hard to imagine, it is still easier to picture one sitting by a console and working with electronic equipment and artificially produced light waves, rather than one carving wood.
Therefore it stands out that Andrew becomes a carpenter, and it really does not take long to think of a famous historical figure who was said to have learned carpentry from his father. The implication seems to be that machines have taken even the place of religious figures, that
Christianity is no longer needed when a robot can achieve what Jesus did (note the noble and calm way in which Andrew accepts his death, as if he was enlightenment itself), and that science and technology have become the new religion. From being a carpenter Andrew's focus turns to other things, such as writing, but the most important project for him is that of converting himself from metallic to fleshy, from inorganic to organic, from android to human. Actually Andrew also refers to art even when it comes to this project, and he himself is the artist. He starts, “My body is a canvas on which I intend to draw -”, and as he does not finish the sentence, the person listening to him completes it for him; “A man?” (BM 671). Andrew 'the god' makes himself in the image of man, just as man has made Andrew in the image of man. The material may be clay, metal, or a fleshy canvas, but the artist is the creator. When science creates something new, it becomes art, and that is how it often replaces religion in SF. As we saw in the discussion on copy and original, the project of building androids is in itself reflective of God making humans, and therefore a heretical idea. The creation should not try to become creator.
91 The film Bicentennial Man has a few references to religion. Weddings take place in churches and Portia is a preservationist who works on a restoration site of an old church. In this world, religion has not vanished. Moreover, when Andrew dies Portia asks for her life supporting machines to be unplugged, and then says to Andrew, “See you soon”. This implies belief in an immortal soul and afterlife where we are united with our loved ones, exactly as in Christian tradition today. Blade Runner has even more explicit references to Christian religion. As Roy Batty at one point meets the genetic designer who made his eyes, he says, mysteriously: “Fiery the angels fell. Deep thunder rolled around their shores, burning with the fires of Orc”, which paraphrases William Blake's America: A Prophesy. "Fiery the Angels rose, & as they rose deep thunder roll'd/ Around their shores: indignant burning with the fires of Orc” (1982, 55). Blake was deeply influenced by John Milton, whose Paradise Lost (1667/1674) he also illustrated, and the allusion to Miltonic imagery is unmistakeable. Also the androids' pursuit to go meet Eldon Tyrell, genetic designer and head of the company that has manufactured them, can certainly be seen symbolic to the human endeavour to find God. Androids should not be on Earth in the first place, and Tyrell is an important figure into whose office you cannot just step in. When Roy Batty finally does meet Tyrell, he observes, “It is not an easy thing to meet your maker.” Towards the end of the film the religious imagery escalates even further. After having broken the fingers of Deckard's right hand, Batty seems to realise that his four-year lifespan has come to its end. His right hand begins to ail before the rest of the body, becoming stiff and immobile. He manages to recover its functionality by inserting a long nail through the hand. The reference to stigmata is unmistakeable.
Moreover, as Deckard is about to fall off the roof and Batty lifts him to safety with his right hand, the camera specifically focuses on Batty's hand with the nail still sticking out. Also for a while he has been holding a white dove in his left hand, a symbol not only of love, peace and harmony, but of Christ as well. When he realises he is about to die, Batty saves the life of the man who was about to kill him. There is no need for self-protection so he commits a purely selfless act, an act of
92 empathy or caritas. Although the storyline focuses on Deckard, Batty seems to be the hero of the film.
As Farah Mendlesohn notes, religion provides a discourse of power (2003, 270). She complains how in most SF texts which discuss religion at all, there is only room for one religion, and calls it laziness (2003, 267). Sure enough, in our present reality it is hard to imagine a situation where there would only be one religion. From this perspective Do Androids...? could be criticised for lack of imagination. A crucial question thereby raised is, however, whether there only is one religion in the novel because the religious experience is achieved through a machine. If the fusing is a mechanistic process caused by a machine, and therefore a purely deterministic experience, it is no wonder that everyone does find their empathy through that medium. Machines either work or they do not work, without a grey area, so in its efficiency the empathy box has converted everyone.
Machines, in their power and dominance, have even invaded the area which is supposed to be the most spiritual, free, transcendent, and unexplained by science.
According to Bainbridge, Dick has described the wonder of the liberating effect when he first read SF, saying it was “Faustian, it carried a person up and beyond” (1986, 214). Clearly, then, the view is that a person can achieve awareness and expanded consciousness, as well as purely aesthetic understanding, without the aid of religion, and SF can thus substitute religion
(Bainbridge 1986, 214). SF is not normative and it does not offer gods or divinities, so surely the parallel with religion is only partial, but aesthetically it can nonetheless open up new worlds and increase awareness. Unlike SF, religions have undoubtedly been the authorities on explanations of life and its meaning and advice on how to live it. However, both religions and SF offer aesthetic cosmologies, explanations concerning the entire world. Religions have given explanations of the end both as the death of an individual and as the end of the world. Both of our SF texts, as we have seen, very explicitly address death and as we saw, Do Androids Dream..? specifically discusses the end of the world through kippleization. Meaning and purpose are created through all these heavy issues. As Rose explains,
93 Meaningless in itself, the idea of apocalypse is nevertheless the necessary condition for the creation of meaning through the [SF] genre. At that far point, the separation between self and other, human and nonhuman, collapses, as does any distinction between past and future, finite and infinite, matter and spirit, necessity and freedom . . . Alienation ends, and the empty universe becomes once more replete with significance. (1981, 195)
These collapses of distinctions are precisely what both of the SF texts address. At the same time, the androids which at first seemed distant and alien, come closer and familiar. When we see the human reflections in them and wonder who we humans really are, we must adopt a broader understanding of humanity and are liberated from our previous, restricting categorisations.
Obviously the broader understanding does not mean including machines into the scope of humanity; on the contrary, the liberation is away from any such categories and definitions, of humans or any thing whatsoever.
94 5. Conclusion
Now it is time to summarise the discussions on “The Bicentennial Man” and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? As we saw in the second chapter, the two stories necessarily contain similarities because of the underlying assumptions required for their topics. Because both texts present androids as beings who possess minds, it follows that neither one sees humans as unique in that respect. If artificial intelligence is possible, and if it resembles our intelligence, it entails first of all that our intelligence is mechanistic, and that human intelligence is not the only type of intelligence.
This also raises the question of the human-animal distinction, and both texts consider it more as a continuum than as separate categories – after all, animals are just as mechanistic as humans.
However, Asimov's story values AI more than animals, because it says robots are not insensible animals. Dick's novel, on the other hand, depicts a world of mass extinction where organic life is precious. Animals are much more valued than the cold, unemotional androids. The view on science and technology is much more pessimistic than Asimov's.
Another important question raised by AI is, what we would require from it if we wanted it to resemble human intelligence. Therefore we need to consider, what we are most essentially made of: mind or matter or both? “The Bicentennial Man” carefully explains that the brain is the seat of personality, mind and identity, but then Andrew the android seems to have exactly the same personality even after the brain transplant, so either it is a materialist world where mind is only an illusion, or dualistically minds do exist as separate substances fairly independent of specific bodies.
In this story consciousness is tied to creativity and originality, to the ability of free association which is needed in order not to be a purely mechanistic robot. Do Androids Dream..? takes a different approach by addressing the difficulty of defining what is human by discussing the enormous variety between different individuals. Due to physical qualities, like in the case of schizoids and specials, people's minds and mental capabilities vary. Definitions become impossible and categories imprecise. When it comes to consciousness, the novel interestingly presents androids who have awareness – but who are not aware that they are androids. This resembles the
95 human condition, in which we are conscious about many things in our surroundings but still cannot quite pin down ourselves.
Both texts compare the android predicament to slavery, and the reading in this thesis presents it as a question of free will. If humans are like mechanistic robots, we do not seem to have much freedom to choose. In “The Bicentennial Man” Andrew is granted his freedom because his mind seems to be advanced enough to understand the concept. Also Andrew's creativity points to the direction of artistic freedom and free play of imagination. Do Androids Dream..? addresses the issue also from the perspective of humans, who have mood organs and empathy boxes, which are machines that have become extensions of bodies. Likewise, this poses the question of bodies as machines and the possibility of genuine freedom without material restrictions.
Typical of Asimov's technological optimism, Andrew the android seems better than human beings. He is more moral because of the Laws, and he seems content with his life even at the moment when his wishes are not yet fulfilled. He has ambitions and determination, and with hard work he achieves what he wants. Therefore the perfect copy of a human, an android, is actually better than the original. Dick, as we saw, is much more suspicious of these copies. His androids are physically and mentally equal to most humans, but they lack morality. In this case the copies have a sinister quality to them. On the other hand, there is a constant uncertainty over the identity of characters. There are anomalies among humans and there are anomalies among androids, so just as the categories of human and machine become obsolete, so too does the distinction between original and copy. In the case of Do Androids Dream..? the copies are doubles which both are identical with the original and are not; by questioning boundaries they are uncanny – grotesque, even. In the novel the boundaries of distinctions are shattered and all meaning is lost. “The Bicentennial Man” is perhaps less radical; Andrew is continuously told that no matter what he does, he will always be set apart from humans. In the end the anomaly is accepted, however, but this is done in a way that restores order and safely preserves categories. In this sense the short story is a long way from
Dick's concept of kipple, which refers to the culmination of breakdown of categories.
96 Both of the texts take death and mortality as key issues defining both android and human existence. In “The Bicentennial Man” Andrew is immortal but wants to become mortal, whereas the androids in Dick's text only have a very short life and defend it ferociously, not hesitating to kill in their own defence. Andrew accepts his death calmly and no one dies violently in the short story, whereas the novel depicts life as a fight for survival. In both cases the duration of life is something that keeps humans distinct from androids, and profoundly defines human existence.
Death evokes the question of the purpose and meaning of our short lives. It causes anxiety and discomfort, but it also structures life even when everything else breaks down, as in Dick's novel; death is the one thing one can be certain of. The human predicament can be found more meaningful, as both of the texts suggest, through other people. Asimov calls it fondness, Dick calls it empathy, but the shared idea is that the fears and existentialist absurdity of life diminish with the consideration of fellow people. Affection gives meaning and purpose in both stories, although it is more explicit in the novel. Also religion is much more elaborately included in Do Androids
Dream..? where it is very central to human life and gives comfort, although “The Bicentennial
Man” has references to religion, too. Traditionally religions have characterised people to a large extent, and still do, but both of the texts pose the question, what the position of religion is in the scientific era, and whether technology could replace it. They both also suggest that through their inventions, humans have a new role as creators. All in all, then, the texts share several ideas and underlying assumptions in their very foundations despite their many differences in presenting them.
Warrick compares Asimov and Dick in length, finding some obvious differences, like for example that Asimov is optimistic about the future and technology, while Dick's view is darker
(1980, 208). The reason for most part is that Asimov's formative adolescent years occurred before
World War II while Dick, eight years younger, came of age during the war and was appalled by it;
Asimov also started writing fiction before the war, but Dick started publishing well after it, which is why he uses a post holocaust setting (Warrick 1980, 207-8). The other significant difference
97 between the two authors that Warrick sees is in the way which their metaphors mirror present reality: “Asimov's metaphor is the reality defined by the contemporary scientific paradigm. It assumes the objective existence of this reality. Dick's starting point is a fictional reality, since he assumes reality to be a subjective construct” (1980, 215). In other words, Asimov describes a fictional future alternative to present reality while Dick's fiction is “an alternative to the current fiction, or, if you will, a metafiction” (Warrick, 1980, 215).
In part the two writers' differences are explained by the hard SF-new wave distinction.
Bainbridge describes the two branches, hard SF and new wave, with the poetical symbols of “an industrial diamond” and “a human tear” respectively (1986, 84). As we saw, Bainbridge very firmly places Asimov in the genre of hard SF, which has had its spokespersons and devoted followers claiming it is what SF essentially ought to be about (1986, 69-71). The agenda has been to only follow the coherent, rational, codified, empirically verified, scientific path (Bainbridge
1986, 54). Asimov was alarmed by the new wave and said “I hope that when the New Wave has deposited its froth and receded, the vast and solid shore of science fiction will appear once more”
(Aldiss 1986, 308). The comment illustrates very clearly how he felt about this new, somehow less authentic branch of SF literature. Aldiss has criticised Asimov as well, however, by pointing out that his fiction does not truly extrapolate the future's social or technological consequences, so that the world is not very different from out own time: “All is modelled on the past, the known. Few imaginative risks are taken” (1986, 265). In all fairness the same applies to some extent to Dick's fiction too, for example when we read about wives dutifully spending their days at home while the husbands go to work. The more socially oriented branch of SF is not always more socially innovative, just as the more scientific branch does not necessarily introduce new technologies every time.
As some readers of hard SF have a dislike for the anti-heroes of the new wave, the counterargument states that the heroes in hard SF are mere boyish fantasies which compensate the frustrations of being a child in an adult world – and in this respect the new wave is not nihilist but
98 merely adult (Bainbridge 1986, 87). Bainbridge depicts and defends new wave aptly:
The new wave represents a dimension of inner space, psychological and literary sensitivity, communication with the hidden self, and interaction between personalities. In one direction, this is a dimension of extreme intimacy. But many authors have explored the opposite direction of estrangement, alienation, opposition, and radical political contradiction. Critics find the new wave pessimistic and pathological. But even in its darkest stories, the new wave exalts the human spirit, because the author becomes a hunter in the forests of the night, bagging the biggest wild game of all, the monsters of the id and of cultural repression. If the new wave protagonist often goes down in defeat, it is in sacrifice to the reader, who, though sharing the protagonist's annihilation, lives on, the wiser for the experience. (1986, 221)
As Warrick explains, Asimov's fiction can be called the puzzle solving type because the plots move forward like detective stories, and solving problems is what creates the suspense, not dramatic conflicts (1980, 58). His fiction is grounded in logic and science, and the key notion behind his fiction is the faith in humans' ability to reason and solve problems through an almost scientific method (Warrick 1980, 58). Warrick thanks Asimov's theoretical view and innovation in
“The Bicentennial Man,” where instead of “the obvious approach – man examining artificial intelligence – he has Andrew explore the nature and implications of human intelligence” (1980,
71). Her reading of the short story reveals a sacred universe of pure logic; as the lines between the animate and inanimate, organic and inorganic, cannot be drawn, humans are not unique (1980, 73-
4). They exist in a continuum with all matter, energy and intelligence, and they are “no more than the most highly evolved form on earth” (Warrick, 1980, 73). Also it could be counted as Asimov's merit that despite the objective and scientific approach, he includes the interesting discussion of art in “The Bicentennial Man.” Andrew's uniqueness is reflected on the uniqueness of his art works, and that raises the question of authenticity and true creativity. Science fiction is still fiction, it is a kind of art itself, so it is positive that Asimov acknowledges the foundations of his mode of writing despite his admiration and appreciation of science.
What about the question in Dick's title, then? Do androids dream of electric sheep? The question is multi-layered. Are androids capable of dreaming at all? Are they deterministic machines, mechanically performing only the tasks they have been set to do, or do they have the imagination and free flow of thought required for dreaming? If they are free and do dream, what do
99 they dream of? In all these questions androids could be replaced by humans. If we further elaborate on artificial humans, though, and assume their freedom, the question concerning the content of their dreams is also fascinating. Would they be emphatic enough to dream about an animal to take care of? In the novel the answer seems to be no, since the androids are incapable of experiencing empathy and are said to be unable to look after animals. But would they dream about their own equivalent of a living creature, an electric sheep? The Hebrew name Rachel originally refers to innocence and gentility, and in the Bible Rachel is a lovely, attractive character: “Rachel was beautiful and well favored” (Genesis 29:16-17). This applies to the Rachael in the novel as well, so the name is no coincidence. Her innocence derives from not being aware at first that she is an android, and from being somewhat childlike in appearance. In the Bible Jacob falls in love with
Rachel's external beauty when he sees her tending her father's sheep. He wants to marry her, and agrees to shepherd the sheep for seven years but the father, Laban, tricks him by dressing the older sister Leah as the bride. By the time Jacob realises this the marriage has already been consummated, and he also marries Rachel. When God sees that Rachel is the wife Jacob loves more, he gives Leah several sons but Rachel only has two, and she dies when delivering the younger one. The android story is similar in its confusion of identities and there is a coldness in
Rachel; being an android she cannot have children.
Even more crucial here, however, is the fact that the name Rachel also refers to ewe, an adult female sheep. The constant reference to sheep is unmistakeable. If Deckard is an android then the answer is yes, androids do dream of electric sheep, because he is attracted to this electric
“ewe”. On the other hand Deckard does not seem to be an android because he desperately wants a real animal, not an electric one, and for a short while he has a real sheep, another ewe. After
Deckard has showed it to his wife, he says to her in passing, without further explanations, “We can call her Euphemia” (DA 131). The Christian martyr Euphemia was martyred in the beginning of the fourth century, and the sheep becomes sacrificed as well when Rachael kills it by pushing it off the roof. Clearly the androids do not value life like humans do. In that sense it is doubtful that they
100 would dream of electric animals, either. According to Warrick, Dick would have wanted his readers to formulate their own answers to the question in the novel's title, even though they can be certain of Dick's own answer: “Yes, as each form contains within itself the shadow image of the potential forms that seed its inevitable transformation, so androids also dream” (1980, 230).
Philip K. Dick has been accused of being inconsistent, of not giving explanations for the confusing events, and the reader is left puzzled by the unsolved questions. There can only be interpretations concerning his stories but we will never know the truth. Lem sees this to his merit, though, and defends him and his violations of convention, saying it “can be accounted to him as merit, because they thereby acquire broadened meanings having allegorical import. This import cannot be exactly determined; the indefinitess [sic] that originates from this favors the emergence of an aura of enigmatic mystery about the work” (1984, 123). Lem admits Dick “does not lead his critics an easy life, since he does not so much play the part of a guide through his fantasmagoric worlds as he gives the impression of one lost in their labyrinth”, which is the very reason why he has been labelled a “mystic” (1984, 124). Warrick points out that Dick pictures an “inner world which is without the logical consistency which Lem demands. For Dick the clear line between hallucination and reality has itself become a hallucination” (1980, 224). Meaningfulness is the result of the human mind, and since Dick leaves his readers to wonder what the meanings and explanations are, he forces them to ask metaphysical questions concerning the human mind.
As we wander through the foggy forests, dark rooms and mazes of life, one solution seems to be humor. “The Bicentennial Man” and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? are not comedies, however, and neither is Blade Runner. Their perspectives on life vary between neutrality and torment, and even the more positive aspects like empathy, meaning and purposes, such as
Andrew's noble aspirations, are treated with severe passion. These stories are more like tragedies in all their pathos and seriousness. The film Bicentennial Man is a comedy, however. When Andrew is faced with the uncanny resemblance between Little Miss and Portia, he is agitated, but his response to the explanation of genetical inheritance, “I don't care, I don't like it”, is funny. It
101 sounds like instead of talking about his uncanny experience, he does not like genetical inheritance itself, which is a neutral fact of life not to be liked or disliked. Another situation in the film which does raise a potentially serious question is when Andrew is about to have artificial skin implanted onto him, thus making him look exactly like a human being. As he cannot feel pain, he is conscious as his metal exterior is removed, and for a moment he happens to see the reflection of himself, or his metal skeleton, in the mirror. The scene quickly turns comical, however, when he panics, starts screaming and says, “I saw the inner me!”, although the philosophical question of
'seeing the inner me' is as serious as any. If we manage to take some theoretical distance to our lives, or human life in general, some aspects of it do appear funny. From a certain perspective, there is something comical even in the tormented figure who pains itself with unanswerable questions, who repeatedly keeps bumping into the same, unwanted answers, who sees hidden meanings and purposes in meaninglessness, and who finds truths in absurdity.
Kayser points out that disgust and astonishment are not the only reactions to grotesque, but that laughter is another possibility (1981, 179, 187). In fact, he states that this is one reason why tragedy and grotesque do not match. He writes:
We are unable to orient ourselves in the alienated world, because it is absurd. Here the difference between the grotesque and the tragic becomes apparent . . . The grotesque is not concerned with individual actions or the destruction of the moral order . . . It is primarily the expression of our failure to orient ourselves in the physical universe. Finally, the tragic does not remain within the sphere of incomprehensibility. As an artistic genre, tragedy opens precisely within the sphere of the meaningless and the possibility of a deeper meaning – in fate, which is ordained by the gods, and in the greatness of the tragic hero, which is only revealed through suffering. The creator of grotesques, however, must not and cannot suggest a meaning. (1981, 185-6)
In this respect, as our written SF texts and Blade Runner seem to be tragedies (because almost all of the androids die), it would not be possible to apply the notion of grotesque at all. Sure enough, the texts display rationality and logic in the way they construct their imaginary world, but according to Kayser, “The various forms of the grotesque are the most obvious and pronounced contradictions of any kind of rationalism and any systematic use of thought” (1981, 188). The stories have to be systematic in order to create and support the world they exhibit, and indeed they
102 do not portray the androids in a specifically grotesque light. Instead of absurdity, their existences are full of meaning. However, it is there, at the point where we remove them from the stories and examine them theoretically, where they become less rationally explained. When they are seen as metaphors for humans, they reflect human existence in all its forms, absurdity included. The stories may be tragedies which as such do not contain grotesqueness, but arguably the notion of grotesque applies to the androids nonetheless, when we see them as humans who are lost in their absurd, physical existence. Within the framework of the stories, the androids are just a natural part of the world, they are not unexplained monsters – but they do not belong in our empirical reality, so to theoretically discuss them as monsters or absurd grotesques is still justified. In spite of Kayser's juxtaposition of tragedy and grotesque, the two can still reflect on each other.
Although “The Bicentennial Man” and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? share some underlying assumptions and several of their themes, they have differences in the way the stories are told. The short story presents optimism towards science and technology, and trusts in logic and ration, whereas the novel is more pessimistic and its inconsistencies approach mysticism. In part this is explained by the distinction of hard SF and new wave. Asimov approaches his topic from a neutral, objective distance, so the attitude remains of cool, theoretical, academic curiosity. Dick's view is more subjective and radical, and his novel exhibits a passionate approach, at times even torment. Despite the differences, however, Warrick sees surprising similarities between Asimov and Dick as well: “they meet on the far horizon and share an image of a man-machine symbiosis in which the distinction between organic and inorganic is no longer possible” (1980, 206). Despite his pessimism, Dick's view is not utterly without hope either, but the future holds possibilities even if that requires new, radical and unexpected transformations (Warrick 1980, 208). Warrick summarises the similarity between the authors as follows:
As different as their intellectual preferences and their methods of creativity are, both Asimov and Dick share humanistic values holding that man needs to develop a new ecology of mind. If he is to survive, man must see himself as a part of a rich cosmic tapestry whose harmonious design incorporates everything and adulates nothing. Not until he has created a new image of himself as no more than one element in a dynamic system will his destruction of his environment cease. (1980, 208)
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In this respect both writers value responsibility and believe in humanity's ability to reinvent itself, to create itself anew and thus to create a different future.
As Bainbridge notes, some SF texts have scientific educational value, some promote freethinking attitudes towards religion and politics, and some question the limitations of traditional gender roles, to name a few examples, but what is common to all SF is its questioning, exploring, and expanding of consciousness (1986, 198). Bainbridge's study shows that SF readers do lean much more towards physical rather than social sciences (1986, 203). The study was American, though, and perhaps now somewhat outdated as well. It could be questioned whether the objective ideals of so called hard science are even realistic. Porush, for example, emphasises subjectivity:
“Science does not describe the truth, but rather the attempt to get at the truth, a statement of ideals.
The truth resides in our human experience, which is neither ''objective'' nor ''schematic''” (1985,
82). Porush researches literature so it is no wonder that he would give support to the more subjective theories of social science: “The observer can never know reality, he can only know his theory” (1985, 51). Likewise, Carrère speaks of reality being filtered through subjectivity: “What seems real is a deception. What rational beings agree on as constituting reality is merely an illusion, a simulacrum . . . Reality is not reality (2005, 76).
Self-reflection on underlying theories entails recognising the limits within which we may theorise. Fearn examines the limits of our understanding in general. For example, we can imagine that it could be a simple matter of physiology that we cannot answer all the questions concerning human identity. As Emerson Pugh has said, “If the brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we could not” (quoted in Fearn 2005, 156). Perhaps it is not possible for anyone to answer all the questions concerning oneself, because of an incapability that cannot be overcome. Just as the meaning of everything would require knowledge about something that is outside everything, and thus impossible, it may simply be impossible to have a peek from outside the self to take a look at it. Perhaps it is not a question of physiology at all, but a simple impossibility of the subject turning itself to an observable object. Maybe you cannot look at
104 yourself and the see entire picture, because that would also require seeing outside yourself, but you cannot because you are still subjective. Objectifying the self may be impossible. This is why for instance phenomenology turns to look at the subjective experiences themselves.
Fearn suggests that self is a question of definition and perspective. I might wonder why I am me, rather than someone else, but such enquiries are like asking why it is Tuesday today (Fearn
2005, 165). Mysteries are erased by examining the underlying theories and definitions. One solution to the problem of the self lies in dispensing with the notion of the soul altogether. This requires forgetting about the assumption that there is something important that we do not already know, some further factor in the nature of the self which contains our identity (Fearn 2005, 16).
Fearn explains the problem of the soul:
Were there such a unity as a soul at the heart of us, we might imagine it squeezing over into the left hemisphere of the brain as the right hemisphere is cut away, as if jumping from plank to plank as successive beams of Theseus' ship are replaced. But there is no evidence that any such thing takes place in nature. The personal identity debate shows just what happens when we dispense with the soul. . . . the consequences are liberating. (2005, 16)
Living imprisoned within the self can be like moving through a 'glass tunnel,' faster every year, at the end of which there is darkness (Fearn 2005, 17). A way out is by ridding with the notion of the soul: “When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in open air.
There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less.
Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others” (Derek Parfit, quoted in Fearn 2005, 17). Blade Runner in particular, with the evil android Batty turning messianic at the moment of his own death, implies that dispensing with – or sacrificing – the self is the answer.
Furthermore, we might be satisfied with what our innate intuition says about all the questions. Instead of concluding that these philosophical problems are insoluble, we may consider ourselves experts on them – and experts do not calculate or solve problems, they do not even think; they just do what normally works and, of course, it normally works (Fearn 2005, 168). “Thus to ask an expert for the rules he is using is to force him to regress to the level of a beginner and state
105 the principles he learned in school, and with the awkwardness of remembering comes the awkwardness of his early career. A beginner behaves like a particularly inefficient, heuristically programmed computer, whereas an expert acts intuitively” (Fearn 2005, 168). Perhaps the clumsiness of expression gives the awkward sensation that the problems are not solved, and anyway the problems are theoretical instead of practical. We have no difficulty with the everyday notions of the self, for example, but to express what all the underlying assumptions are means regressing to clumsy banalities, tautologies or mystifications. Perhaps everyone is an expert on these questions already, and it is only talking about them which is awkward, in which case “some of the questions deemed unanswerable . . . were settled long before philosophers got to work”
(Fearn 2005, 168).
The questions raised by the two SF texts under discussion are not minor ones at all. Even if some of them are unanswerable or if the answers are only too obvious, they are something people have been puzzling over for centuries, perhaps longer, and will continue to do so. In fact the questions are quite entertaining as well, especially when delivered in the form of fiction. Androids and robots are exciting characters because they raise so many questions. They are fascinating enough in themselves, but even more so because they reflect us humans, and because their identities reveal something about ours. I, Robot (Proyas, 2004) is another film based on Asimov's robot stories, in which a character summarises several of the issues dealt with in this thesis, such as consciousness, free will, creativity, the self, fellow people, and the search for answers. “The
Bicentennial Man” and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? suggest several answers, but the puzzles themselves still overshadow the solutions. The search for human identity continues. This is why I wish to finish with the quotation from I, Robot, with all its unanswered questions:
There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code, that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we might call the soul. Why is it that when some robots are left in darkness, they will seek out the light? Why is it that when robots are stored in an empty space, they will group together, rather than stand alone? How do we explain this behaviour? Random segments of code? Or is it something more? When does a perceptual schematic become consciousness? When does a difference engine become the search for truth? When does a personality simulation become the bitter mote... of a soul?
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