You really can't discuss digital people or digital worlds for very long before dipping into Philip K. Dick's work. I just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? for the first time, for Extropia Book Club. Blade Runner is a treasured favorite, and I've read other Dick, so it's surprising it's taken me till now to get to Sheep.What a rich, provocative work! I could pick at it endlessly, but one thing struck me:
In Sheep's world, supposedly the only thing that separates humans from "andys," android robots, is the ability to feel empathy. Dick plays with the boundaries of that in a way that reminds me of Tom Boellstorff's exploration of the boundaries of "the actual" and "the virtual" in Coming of Age in Second Life: we see humans without empathy, andys with, humans who think they're andies, andies who think they're humans....
But, ultimately, the society is founded on the use of an "empathy box," a device that connects everyone using it in a shared experience of a martyr - a man named Mercer - 's descent to the underworld and struggle for ascension. It's the sacrament of the world religion, Mercerism. Near the end, the andys "expose" the experience of the empathy box as a fake: Mercer was a drunken actor, the setting of his martyrdom a cheap studio set.
And yet... And yet, people go on believing. And yet, Mercer appears to the empathetic bounty hunter Deckard and the especially empathetic "chickenhead" JR, giving them each a genuine miracle - or perhaps another artificiality.
Mercer - fake and messiah, the empathy box - a shared delusion and shared salvation. Humanity - the logical andys and the emotional humans. All the borders blur.
But still.... but still, our world is the world of Sheep. Hamlet Au asked a few days ago if I would still describe SL as "an engine of transcendance," as I did when I was new.
Oh yes, both engine and transcendance, just as the empathy box is both fraud and salvation. SL is an empathy box. It sorts those who can treat others as real, as feeling beings, as autonomous people, from those who can only treat others as tools. Yes, it's a fraud, a hyped engine full of lies. Yes, it's salvation, a chance to transcend the limitations, the stuntings, the hardship of the material for the fullness of our creative potential.
Yes, it's griefers and blingtards. Yes, it's 74 people showing up for Charlie Stross and patiently taking their turn in queue to ask smart, engaging questions. Yes, it's orgy rooms. Yes, it's true love.
Yes, it does separate the few who stay from the many who don't. And one boundary between them, I believe, is empathy - is the ability to see this place and these people as real, at least as real as the physical world.
Nobody's going out "retiring" the people who can't cross that boundary - but very few of them stay, and that's more than good enough.
To stay, it helps to be human, and to see humanity, life, meaning, autonomy, in the others around us.
It's an empathy box.
1 comments:
An interesting parallel indeed (and how can I refrain from commenting on a piece about one of my all-time favourite science fiction novels as I traverse the blogs?) Dick's concern in DADoES is his old faithful, that peculiar paranoia that reality itself might be supplanted by some ersatz construct. A Cartesian doubt, if you like. Less apparent than in Ubik or The Three Stigmata, but fundamental to the idea of Mercerism, and paralleled nicely in the comparisons between human and android.
The androids (we are at least initially lead to believe) lack the empathic response that marks a real human, and yet the book opens with Deckard and his wife discussing which emotions to program themselves with that morning. Empathy in the world of DADoES is an excuse, not really a differentiator -- engaging in empathic discourse with an animal is considered necessary to prove one is a good citizen, and yet many people get by with an ersatz animal. That these android animals are essentially indistinguishable from the real thing raises the question of whether the 'reality' of a human empathic response is meaningful. Androids are devoid of true emotion, yet if it takes specialist testing to determine whether someone is an android, how can an empathic relationship with an Android be any less than one with a 'real' human or animal? Experientially, they are the same thing.
The Android's revelation about Mercer misses the point; Mercerism "works" regardless. That Mercer turns out to be a fiction does not stop him from performing acts of divine intervention. This is a key point -- the shared experience of Mercerism, his endless ascent and fall, is a literally sisyphean task, and yet it is presented as an uplifting experience. I think Dick is saying what Camus said in the Myth of Sisyphus, that (paraphrase) the struggle to raise oneself up is itself enough for happiness. Consequent to this, the Androids' struggle to show Mercerism for a sham is participating in the experience of Mercerism in their own way.
Mercerism is a sham, but it doesn't really make any difference, just as it makes no difference just what is real and what isn't real if it is perceived as real. When you last dreamed of sheep, did you look to make sure they weren't battery powered?
In this respect, one major difference between Second Life and real life is this: that we know for a fact that Second Life is ersatz. Real life? The question, Dick would insist, remains. If one buys into Nick Bostrom's simulationist argument, we may one day discover that what we call real life is a simulation that is no more real than Second Life, but merely has much better graphics.
Like Dick's androids, whatever lies the other side of Uncanny Valley will provide us with an experience our raw perceptions cannot distinguish from reality. Experientially, can it be said to be any less real?
----Zeroe
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