Personal opinion about Deckard’s book
The book ends when Deckard after withdrawing the 6 androids, fed up, flies towards a completely uninhabited area and finds a real toad that humanity believed an extinct species. He returns home and shows it to his wife who, taking the toad in his hands, discovers that he is electric. Deckard is finally going to rest after a small dialogue where, for the first time, he accepts that there is life in electrical things: “[…] The Electric Things have their lives, Too. Paltry as thhos lives are ".
Before starting this analysis it would be good to define the two concepts that, from my point of view, are the most important throughout history to explain and blur the line between human being and not be:
Empathy: according to the SAR is "the feeling of identifying with someone and sharing their feelings".
Consciousness: again, according to the SAR is defined as: "immediate or spontaneous knowledge that the subject has of himself". This definition is very ambiguous. What does it mean to have knowledge of yourself? What defines the "I" that we create ourselves? To explain that, Douglas R. Hofstadter wrote the book: "I am a strange loop" in which he deepens deeply and detailed about the phenomenon we call consciousness and that will be vital in this analysis. Hofstadter proposes that our consciousness is a phenomenon that can be explained as follows: our perception of the world through the senses and its representation in our brain is comparable to that of a digital camera connected to a television showing what records in real time. This perception of the world can be seen in all life forms: insects that react to changes in the temperature of the environment and move;the birds that "feel" the air currents and change their movements to take advantage of them;A robot inside a car that, identifying obstacles around it, is driving itself through a road and finally the human beings that, following this analogy, we can take that “digital camera” that is our perception and point it totelevision".What happens then according to Hofstadter? I recommend reading the book if you find this topic interesting since he enters many details that enrich his analogy. Within our brain we have symbols that represent everything we see: the image and word "tree" for example. But when we perceive ourselves we create a "loop", a loop that, within our brain, makes us create a new symbol: "I".
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Hofstadter enters an incredible analysis of: our consciousness as the true identity of our soul (defending that there is no immaterial soul), whether or not there are different soul sizes (whether our consciousness is our soul, is the human soul biggerthan that of a mosquito?), And why is it that human beings have a larger consciousness (or soul). This is where we begin to connect with some dice themes:
Some philosophers contemplate our inner light, our "me", our humanity, our soul, as if they emanate from the nature of the substrate itself, that is, the organic chemistry of carbon. […] Why would carbon chemistry have some exceptional magical property that would lack those of all other substances?And what is that property?How does it make us conscious beings? […] Why do our carbon -based relatives, but belonging to other species, are not as conscious as us?[…] ” – Douglas R. Hofstadter
We begin to enter an interesting discussion of which I am completely in favor of: if our consciousness were our soul (because there is no mystical property that is) other conscious beings could be considered almados? This issue is also incredible in "Ghost in the Shell" by Mamoru Oshii where history makes us question: What would happen if our consciousness moved to a completely robotic body? Would this make us less human? Would our possession of a human soul take us out?
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Androids, in the book, lack empathy, betray each other to save themselves, some are very easily resigned to death when they know that it is inevitable and almost at the end of the book, some Nexus-6 torture a spider (maybethe only spider living in the world) without any remorse, cutting 4 legs. But are not these qualities that could also occur in any human being, given certain circumstances circumstances?
For Hofstadter, a consciousness is equally regardless of how it has emerged and this would make our analysis of artificial intelligence change as well as also change in the book: it has a consciousness therefore has a soul;There are different levels of consciousness so there are different levels of souls.
The "I" (yours, mine, anyone’s) is a tremendously effective illusion and with an incredible survival capacity. Our "yos" are self-food illusions that constitute an inevitable byproduct of the strange loops, which, in turn, are an inevitable byproduct of those brains possessing symbols that guide their respective bodies through the dangerous scenario of life. (P. 350)
Our being, our "I" is higher thanks to the fact that humans have the ability to nest symbols within our brain in our brain apparently infinite and arbitrary ("son" is a symbol that nests the "father" symbols,"Mother", "Birth", etc.) So our existence focuses on our thinking and this in turn, as Hofstadter describes it is simply: "A dance of symbols".
So for Philip K. Dick, what could existence mean? Because you give us question again and again: what makes us human (even if androids could be considered human too)? And at this point I think Philip K. Dick maybe he gave us an answer: we have dreams, we yearn for, we want, we want to connect ourselves. All this could be explained with Mercerismo, that doctrine in which humans connect in a collective experience. As I mentioned before, humans who connect through a empathy box can live the same experience together again and again: Wilbur Mercer (all the connected "live" from their perspective) scale a mountain again and again. This immediately reminded me of "The myth of Sisyphus" by Albert Camus and, although it has not been intentional, I think here a proposal to our humanity: the world and existence are absurd. According to Camus, we can relate our existence to that of Sisiphus who, having made the gods angry, is condemned to push a huge uphill upstairs in a mountain only so that it falls again and having to start over from below for the entireeternity, without the possibility of change. I don’t know if Philip K. Dick wanted to do this analogy but it seems to me that it blocks very well with how the book ends.
In his essay, Camus proposes that our condition is that of Sisyphus, our conscience of the world and its chaotic future is one of the reasons why it is absurd. It then proposes a new existence: that of the absurd man: he who waits for the end but despises it (p. 338), the one who has a science without illusions unlike the "men of the eternal". For him or her, religion is to jump, avoid the problem of the absurd denying an unrecognizable part of the world: since I cannot understand my existence, I leave it in the hands of something that I know I will never understand. So, according to Camus, what do we do here if everything is absurd?:
Now, if the absurd annihilates all my possibilities of eternal freedom, it returns and exalts me, on the contrary, my freedom of action.
The absurd man thus interviewed a burning and frozen universe, transparent and limited in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which there are only sinking and nothingness. Then you can decide to accept life in such an universe and take out its forces, its denial to wait and the stubborn testimony of a life without comfort. […] If I convince me that this life has no other face than that of the absurd, if I feel that all its balance is due to the perpetual opposition between my conscious rebellion and the darkness in which I struggles, if I admit that my freedom does not havesense but in relation to its limited destiny, so I must say that what counts is not to live as well as possible, but to live as much as possible.
Then, being aware of us, of science that composes us and gives us life, being aware that, as Philip K arises. Dick, we could create artificial life and not less alive, without shelter of a religion or a God, what we have left is what we ourselves propose as principles and goals to which our time consecrates. And if a consciousness feels and thinks in the same way, is it less human? My answer would be: no.
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