SOURCE: Gillis, Ryan. “Dick on the Human: From Wubs to Bounty Hunters to Bishops.” Extrapolation 39, no. 3 (fall 1998): 264-71.

Philip K. Dick viewed the act of questioning as a fundamental part of his role as a science fiction writer. The “science” aspect of science fiction, according to Dick, comes not from the integration of strict or hypothetical scientific principles into a body of writing, as it does in gadget SF, but rather from the intense scrutiny that the science fiction writer puts his subjects through and his ability to conjure plausible theories by speculating about an idea in the same fashion that a scientist theorizes about the past by carefully examining an artifact or the universe by collecting physical data. Theology, reality, and sanity are all targets of Dick's probing and often insightful fiction. As a philosopher, Dick did not limit himself to just one area of inquiry; he usually scrutinized several of these subjects simultaneously.

Another area of interest that seems to have manifested itself early in Dick's career and constantly reoccurs in his work, up to and including his final novel, is the question “What is Human?” In fact, much of the criticism on Dick's work, headed by scholars who knew the man, such as Patricia S. Warrick and Lawrence Sutin, focuses on the various ways he was able to manipulate his investigation of the human. This, like many of the other philosophical questions that Dick confronted, has been a common topic of debate for thinkers throughout history, but Dick never seemed to be quite satisfied with any of the answers that these countless others provided. Instead, he took it upon himself to rethink the question, often reforming it when some new idea on the subject presented itself for scrutiny, allowing him to stamp it with another dose of his characteristic blend of humor and paranoia. The impact these methods of questioning have had on science fiction can be seen over a decade and a half after his death, in the work of such SF writers as K. W. Jeter, another of Dick's friends and author of the recent Blade Runner sequels.

Confronting the question in his first published short story, “Beyond Lies the Wub,” Dick took up a position contrary to thousands of years of thinking that contends humans are differentiated from and made superior to all other living creatures, since only humans possess a “soul.” He achieved his argument easily by conceptualizing an alien creature with an aptitude for emotional interaction beyond that of the story's human characters, primarily Captain Franco. The leader of a trading expedition to Mars, Franco is more concerned with an animal's monetary value than he is its physical beauty or environmental necessity. He stands before his ship as the live cargo is boarding and says, more to himself than anyone else, “We got a good bargain here” (27).

Franco's “good bargain,” however, turns out to be something of a raw deal when one of the crewmen follows the last of the alien animals up the gang plank, dragging an obese, fly infested alien atrocity behind him. Seeing nothing he can possibly gain from the four-hundred-pound, pig-like wub, the captain finally settles on the conclusion that “maybe it's good to eat” (28). But before anyone in the crew is given the opportunity to find out, the wub surprises them all by speaking to them in perfectly mannered English. Able to telepathically read their thoughts, the animal engages the crew in conversations about mythology and pleads for the captain to spare his life on the grounds that the wub are a peaceful race. “We live and let live,” the wub tells him, “That's how we've gotten along” (30). Unfortunately, the creature's reasoning falls on deaf ears with Franco, who sees “it” as his next meal.

The captain's will seems to be stronger than that of the slovenly wub, and looking the creature straight in the eyes as it has asked, he shoots it. Franco's inferiority is ultimately revealed, however, when it becomes apparent, while he dines on the wub's roasted carcass, that the creature's personality has taken over the captain's mind and that the personality of Captain Franco has died with the body of the wub. It is empathy, Dick argues, “the ability to put yourself in someone else's place,” that saves the wub from death (“Headnotes” 106). The creature displays not only empathy, compassion, and a sense of pleasure with human companionship, but also intellect and other characteristics that are perceived as aspects of the ideal human, while Franco shows no sign of these things. The wub possesses what Dick calls a “human” soul, while the authentic human, Captain Franco, “looks on other creatures in terms of sheer utility; they are objects to him, and he pays the ultimate price for his total failure of empathy” (106-7). These two are reversed. It would seem that, thanks to its “spiritual capacity,” the wub is possibly more human than its bipedal counterpart; herein rests the glimmer of hope, if any is to be found in the confusion of asking “What is Human?” The very quality that distinguishes the wub as human is, according to the writer, “its literal salvation” (106).

The humanity shown by the physically animalistic wub and the total lack of humanity displayed by the emotionally animalistic human represent one of the primary dangers that Dick saw in trying to distinguish the human from the nonhuman. Like most SF writers of his Cold War generation, he also linked this confusion to the expanding role of technology as a shaping force within human society; however, unlike the way that others perceived this topic, he did not view technology as an inherently evil menace. For Dick, the threat comes, instead, when technology obtains the ability to disguise itself as human, and our ability as observers to differentiate one from the other is lost.

In his 1972 essay “The Android and the Human,” Dick envisions the day when an android walks out of the factory and is shot by a human waiting outside. The human, Dick says, will be shocked to see the wounded android bleed, and reacting in self-defense, the android will shoot back, only to find mechanics where the man's heart should be. “It would be rather a great moment of truth for both of them,” the writer states (187). This may be true; however, the chaos that arises out of “Beyond Lies the Wub” is now magnified, due to the fact that both the actual human and the synthetic humanoid physically resemble human beings. Once again, a being's display of (or failure to display) empathy is crucial to distinguishing the living being from the automaton.

This concept plays itself out most fully in Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Set in a post-nuclear holocaust future where robot engineering can manufacture an artificial android brain nearly indistinguishable from that of a “real” human brain, the novel deals with human empathy and the overlapping characteristics of man and machine. As a result of the radioactive devastation following “World War Terminus,” the animal populations of Earth have been almost entirely destroyed. Earth's remaining human population, following the teachings of an archetypal religious figure, Wilber Mercer, has taken to caring for living animals in an effort to show that they possess the capacity for empathy and that the human cruelty that led to WWT no longer exists.

“The concept of empathy,” Patricia S. Warrick has written about Electric Sheep, “becomes for Dick the Critical characteristic that identifies a human” (131). Unfortunately for the inhabitants of the dust covered world, there are more people wanting to fulfill their “moral” obligations to Mercerism than there are animals to receive this ideological empathy. As a result, not only are animals bought and sold at tremendous prices in a “used car” type of environment, but those devotees to Mercer not able to afford the high cost of morality must often resort to owning an artificial, battery-powered electric animal.

Such is the case with the story's protagonist, Rick Deckard, who only earns a small salary at his job as a bounty hunter for the San Francisco Police Department. Deckard is only able to afford upkeep on an electric sheep, but he dreams of the day when he will earn enough bounty money from hunting androids, on earth illegally, to be able to buy a real flesh-and-blood ewe, like the one he owned years before. The character gets his opportunity when the department's senior bounty hunter, Dave Holden, is put into the hospital by an android fitted with the new “Nexus-6” brain unit.

The Nexus-6 creates a problem for Deckard, because it enables androids to simulate human beings in intellect and reason as well as in physical appearance, creating the possibility that the bounty hunter might mistake an actual human for an android and accidentally “retire” that person in the confusion. As in the case of “Beyond Lies the Wub,” empathy is used to separate the artificial humans from the authentic ones. This tedious task is performed with the help of the Voight-Kampff empathy test, which consists of a series of questions, asked to elicit an emotional response. Reaction to the emotionally provoking questions is automatic in an organic human's physiology, but an android, on the other hand, is a technological construct and, therefore, not naturally designed to react emotionally. Androids are unempathic, and the difference between the time it takes them to register a question in order to duplicate a false emotional response and actual human response time is what reveals an android as an imposter.

It is this unempathic trait that also makes the synthetic humanoids such a threat to the Mercer-loving populace of Earth. As impassive as this opinion might seem on the part of the humans, there is precedent set within the context of the story to defend the Mercerists' position. Not only is it stated at several points throughout the text that androids refuse to act empathically even on behalf of androids, but near the end of the novel androids are shown acting against life, out of pure malice. In one example, while her stupid, yet kindly, human benefactor watches in disgust, the android Pris Stratton tortures a living spider by cutting its legs off one at a time before chasing it with a match to see if it is still able to run, and in another, the android Rachael, acting on behalf of an android manufacturer, the Rosen corporation, throws Deckard's newly purchased black Nubian goat off a building roof to its death.

These actions compare in no way to the emotions displayed by the story's human characters such as Deckard, who administers the Voight-Kampff test to himself after retiring a female andy. The bounty hunter asks only one question: “I'm going down by elevator with an android I've captured. And suddenly someone kills it without warning” (124). When this question fails to obtain an emotional response (which is natural, considering that androids are not thought to be living entities, and therefore do not require empathy), the bounty hunter asks a follow-up, “A female android,” and when the V-K meter registers a significant response, Deckard learns that he is becoming at least somewhat emotionally attached to those animatronic creatures that he must destroy in order to earn enough money to support himself and buy his live sheep (124).

However, the problem of telling humans and androids apart is once again complicated by authentic humans who either do not possess the ability or refuse to act empathically. “A human being without proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake,” Dick reminds his readers. “We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate that his fellow living creatures fall victim to” (“Man” 211). Dick first became aware of these humans impersonating androids while researching his 1962 Hugo Award-winning novel, The Man in the High Castle, a story set in an alternate America divided by the Japanese and the Nazis following an Axis victory in World War II.

After reading through countless stories of concentration camp horrors recollected in Gestapo documents, the writer concluded that such atrocities could only be committed at the hands of a “defective” mind-set. This method of thinking, he reasoned, was not the result of any one person's individual beliefs or actions, but rather a pattern reflecting the group ideology of an entire community of such thinkers. “I realized that, with the Nazis, what we were essentially dealing with was a defective group mind,” Dick told interviewer Paul M. Sammon, “a mind so emotionally defective that the word ‘human’ could not be applied to them” (Sammon 16). The artificially constructed android became a metaphor for these “inhuman” beings, unwilling to defy ideological programming, and Dick, realizing that this “androidization” was not exclusive to the German military machine, included it in Electric Sheep as a reminder to the reader that the human can still imitate the machine, even in a society founded on empathy.

Throughout the novel, this idea is most apparent in the society's attitudes toward its “moral obligation” of empathy for animals. Despite the fact that this practice evolved from a religious ritual designed to ensure peace and the survival of life, animal trading has moved into the realm of big business. Animals are known more for their book value in the Sidney's Animal & Fowl Catalogue than for species' traits or physical characteristics. If characteristics are important, it is often because those particular characteristics alter the value of that particular animal. In an opening scene reminiscent of Captain Franco surveying his cargo, Deckard's neighbor Bill Barbour lectures the bounty hunter on the value of his own Percheron mare due to the limited number of quality Percheron horses “in stock.” Electric animals, such as Deckard's sheep, are frowned upon by this society, despite the fact that they are designed to require just as much empathy from their handlers as an authentic animal. This is because the religious value of animal-keeping has evolved into a symbol of status, where wealthy corporations such as the Rosens are given advanced copies of the “Sydney's” guide before its monthly release to the general public, and people follow, like blind automatons, the “defective group mind.”

Logically then, in a social structure such as this, the human can be recognized by his non-animatronic behavior; in other words, acting against being reduced to an instrument of ideology. Examples of this human defining behavior are also present in Electric Sheep. Although it can be argued that Deckard's continued android hunting, even after learning of his empathy for the machines, is serving the social ideology by following through with his orders, a stronger argument can be presented by observing the fact that Deckard does follow through with his orders, eliminating all of the remaining androids, but continually questioning his actions while carrying them out. Deckard is also acting against the greater ideological structure of prescribed empathy by following through with his assignment against the humanoids, despite his feelings for them. Deckard is not acting without empathy; the V-K test proves that the feelings are there. Instead, he is acting on his own free will, undaunted by the antisocial implications of his actions.

This contempt for social ideological imposition presents itself at the end of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep as well, providing a source of hope as those aspects of the human character try to set themselves apart from the defective android group mind. At the end of the story, distraught over his conflicting emotions, Deckard travels into the desert, and while there, discovers a toad. Excited by the prospect of finding an animal not only listed as extinct in his latest copy of “Sidney's” but also “the critter most precious to Wilber Mercer,” Deckard races home to his wife Iran, who, stimulated by the thought of the world's emptiness, is in the midst of a severe emotional depression (209). However, upon examining the animal, Iran discovers a control panel in the amphibian's stomach, proving that it is, unfortunately, only electric. While her husband abandons the find dejectedly, Iran resolves to care for the ersatz animal, ordering it an aquarium and artificial flies for food. The toad provides Iran with a reason to endure. Now that she once again has an object for her empathy, which is different from the socially prescribed empathy—she wants to care for the toad despite society's dissapproval of electric animals—Iran also has hope once again.

Even as the Nazi social order illustrates the very real danger of the android mentality imposing itself onto our non-science fiction world, forcing the question “What is Human?” at a day to day level, Philip K. Dick's final novel The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, serves as a reminder that even in the “real” world, the human is differentiated from the android by his “soul.” Not only is that soul expressed in the human's willingness to defy programming, but, as in the case of the wub, it also serves as that human's hope of salvation.

Modeled closely after the life of Dick's friend Bishop James Pike, who died in the desert while studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, the novel tells the story of Bishop Timothy Archer's search for theological truth and hope in an afterlife. After uncovering clues in ancient texts that many of the fundamental teachings of Christianity may come from a source much older than Christ, Archer resigns his position as Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of California and travels to the desert of the Middle East to find the truth. The revelation that Christianity may be an elaborate fraud shakes Archer's faith, and he does not believe that he can continue to administer to the spiritual needs of his congregation when he, himself, does not hold that same deep-seated spirituality.

Archer's resignation shows his empathy for his congregation, putting their spiritual and emotional needs over his practical need for a steady income, but even more so, the resignation shows Archer's willingness to break with traditional conventions and social standing in order to serve the needs of his own soul. Archer is known world round as an intellectually gifted theologian and scholar. He was active in the civil rights movement of the 60s, marching “with Dr. King at Selma,” the story's narrator—Archer's daughter-in-law, Angel—keeps reminding the reader, and he beat the rap, so to speak, at more than one heresy trial (116). Yet the bishop relinquishes his entire career in order to fulfill his need for answers. Speaking of people like Bishop Archer (and Pike) in “The Android and the Human,” Dick states: “Their energy doesn't come from a pacemaker; it comes from a stubborn, almost absurdly perverse refusal to be ‘shucked’; that is, to be taken in by slogans, the ideology—in fact, by any and all ideology itself, of whatever sort—that would reduce them to instruments of abstract causes, however ‘good’” (189).

Archer's death, however noble it may have been, has had a severe impact on the only two people left alive to have felt it, Angel and the son of his mistress, a schizophrenic named Bill. Both of them deeply lament Archer in his absence, and yet, having been touched by something of the bishop's empathy, both keep the hope of his spirit alive in her and his own way. Bill maintains, through the revelation of intricately detailed information, that the spirit of the dead Archer has fused with his own, and both souls live together in one body. But however convincing Bill's tale of transmigration might be, it is still only the tale of a mentally ill individual, and, therefore, told under the shadow of doubt. Angel, however, while not claiming that Timothy Archer's soul resides within her, displays many of the characteristics commonly associated with the late bishop's spirituality. For example, Angel commits to caring for Bill, now that everyone who could have possibly looked after him is gone. This act of empathy could be said to show the human aspects of Angel's personality that she now exhibits in the defiance of the ideology's views of schizophrenia, thanks to the intervention of Timothy Archer's humanity.

From wubs, to bounty hunters, to Episcopal bishops, Philip K. Dick's determination to get to the heart of what is “human” about humanity spanned an entire range of characters, as well as the entire length of his thirty-year career. Forcing the question “What is Human?” out of the realms of archaic philosophy and science fiction, Dick concluded that it is not a simple one to answer and that the android is not simply a science fiction prop. The android lives among us; it is us, as long as we continue to separate ourselves from that part of our character that is human. The human separates himself from the android by his empathy—to use Dick's word—his soul, and that empathy, human hope of salvation, is expressed in human willingness to defy the programming that would reduce him to an ideological automation.

Works Cited

Dick, Philip K. “The Android and the Human.” In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. 183-209.

———. “Beyond Lies the Wub.” The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick. vol. 1. New York: Citadel Twilight, 1990. 27-33.

———. Blade Runner (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.) 1968. New York: Ballantine, 1989.

———. “Headnotes for ‘Beyond Lies the Wub.’” In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. 106-7.

———. “Man, Android, and Machine.” In The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. 211-31.

———. The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Vintage, 1995.

———. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Jeter, K. W. Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human. New York: Bantam, 1995.

Sammon, Paul M. Future Noir, The Making of Blade Runner. New York: HarperPrism, 1996.

Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony, 1989.

Warrick, Patricia S. Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987.