Name: Richard Alexis Cano Gómez

Document: 1017214805

Course: Philosophy and literature in English

On animal and android cognition in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

All throughout the history of philosophy there has been a large discussion about the nature

of animal minds. This discussion had, since the ancient times, a repercussion in the way the

human being has treated animals (and other humans too) and how these ideas entitle the

reasoning species (or even race) to take advantage of the more “animal-like” ones. For

example, some of the religious and philosophical ideas that sustained that the colored

people is inferior pointed to their “servile nature”, since most of the African tribes weren’t

prepared for war1 (i.e they were a peaceful people) when the white man came. Moreover,

some of the ideas behind the concept of the “soul” or “mind” were adjusted to fit the

interests of the white man over the rest of the world, leading to assumptions like the black

people or the Native Americans had no soul, no minds, so they were no better than objects

or animals. Nevertheless, there were some philosophers (mostly since the modernity) that

tried to claim a human status to every exploited man or woman of a different type of skin,

but there were less philosophers that advanced on the nature of non-human animals. In this

essay I will try to concentrate on the ideas of David Hume about animal cognition and I

1
Taking into account that war had a very important place in western medieval history due to the alleged
need for man to be strong enough to protect his faith and conquer through it.
will put up some of them against Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick,

specially to the ones dedicated to empathy towards animals and androids.

The argument of analogy

Behavior has been the primary criteria to ascribe mental states to everyone that isn’t me.

Ever since the self became a relevant philosophical idea, thanks to Descartes’s cogito ergo

sum, there has been doubt about the mind of every other human being besides me. In

Descartes’s own words: “I have no proof that the people I see walking through the street are

not automatons built to deceive me”. Descartes raised the unstoppable doubt that lead to

solipsism and never gave a reasonable response to this very idea. What we are obliged to

say is that “if it behaves like me, then it must be like me”, since we have no other way of

making sure of the foreign mental states than the external projection of the same mental

states, i.e: behavior. But besides how scary this idea looks, nobody has really that kind of

doubt when it comes to relate to each other, since when I engage with others, I don’t doubt

at any moment that the people talking and interacting with me are any different than me.

So, in the pragmatic side of things, Cartesian doubt is not a very big problem. However,

until this very day there is still doubt about the nature of the non-human animals and their

status as sentient beings2.

2
In a recent article, there was exposed that some government party in the UK voted to decide whether
animals feel pain. The result is that they don’t: http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/brexit-government-
vote-animal-sentience-cant-feel-pain-eu-withdrawal-bill-anti-science-tory-mps-a8065161.html
To realize how animal minds have been better understood in the modern times, we need

only to see what David Hume argues against Descartes. This latter philosopher understood

animals as mere machines with no spirit. They act based on instinct, they don’t engage in

the activity corresponding to reason, they just sleep, eat, and act in immediate terms,

without any interior process going on. Hume, on the other hand, thought that even though

we don’t have any information of their inner states, we can make an inference based on

behavior, since they seem to respond to several impulses just the way we do. For example,

when a dog is harmed in one if its legs, he cries, or tries to defend itself from the attacker.

The way most animals behave reflect naturally in the way we act, therefore we can ascribe

mental states based on the ones we have when encountered with the same input. This is

what Hume calls the Analogy argument, since humans can make analogies to give animals

a determined mental state rather than none. The interesting thing about this is that even

today we are not really far into understanding animal cognition, so Hume’s argument is still

at the center of the discussion when cognitive scientists try to understand animal minds. All

in all, what is at the core of this problem is the mind/body problem, ¿are we just a mind and

a body to carry it? ¿Can they be separated? ¿Can there be only bodies with no soul, or souls

without a body? These are the kind of questions that Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Rise and we can try to discuss while reading the novel.

Empathy at a certain degree

In the novel we find a lot of places where empathy is in the foreground. The first and most

mentioned throughout the book is Mercerism, a fictional religion that involves connecting
oneself to a machine that can create some kind of collective gnosis composed of millions of

individuals feeling each other’s emotions. This is a particular experience that can only be

achieved by human beings regardless of their social class, gender, nationality, capacities

and so forth. However, androids cannot access to this experience, so “apparently” are

deprived of a mayor empathic experience. Due to this fact, some of the androids reject

Mercerism and decide to undermine the basis or that religion. On the other hand, it is

believed that no android can experience the very feeling of true empathy, since they don’t

really care for others and worry only for themselves. In fact, in the basis of this assumption,

the Earth police built a test designed to find the empathic response on the subject and

determine if she is an android, who are illegal on earth. The main character, Rick Deckard,

for example, draws our attention to what he calls de coldness of the androids while

interviewing a suspect: “Her tone held cold reserve — and that other cold, which he had

encountered in so many androids”. However, the coldness is not only for the androids,

since there are electric animals which are used as a replace for pets, since “real” animals are

expensive. This is a constant in the novel, since the other character we follow named John

Isidore works for a company dedicated to the maintenance of electric animals. Actually,

there’s a genuine struggle for Isidore, since in his work he encounters a sick cat, which he

thinks is artificial but turns out to be real, since the electric animals show symptoms of

being sick when the circuits are damaged. At a simple glance, no one can tell if an animal is

real or not, it requires a close examination to discover the true nature of them to determine

surely their components. This is a mayor theme in the novel: deception, since everyone is

susceptible of being deceived by the appearances. The androids behave like human beings;

the electric animals behave like common non-human animals. It is a difficulty for Deckard,

since his job depends on his capacity to tell between one and another. However, in the
middle of the novel Rick Deckard questions the necessity to retire “androids” and begins to

feel real empathy for them, or better said, for one of them, a female android singer named

Luba Luft. The appearance of this character is of a beautiful and talented woman who sings

at the Opera House and tries to live her life as if she were what she appears to be. Luba Luft

is not a threat to any human being, for she wants to be like one, but ends up killed by a

bounty hunter named Phil Resch who feels no empathy for androids, referring to them as

mere objects. However, Rick Deckard finds himself in a dire situation when he begins to

worry about the androids he is mean to kill, to the point he has sexual relations with a

female android. On the other hand, John Isidore engages in a relationship with three

androids and realizes he feels as if they were real sentient and conscious beings, and even

falls in love with one of them. But after all, the novel doesn’t want to state that androids

have or not a real conscious experience, since it plays with the role of the appearances.

Nonetheless, we can argue that the volition and epistemic stances of every android in de

book appear as real as it can get, and that’s what Rick Deckard finds out about his job: He

has never killed a human being, instead he has killed dozens, so his guilt becomes so much

of a burden to the extent of causing him a religious experience. Deckard realizes he is doing

wrong, he is killing innocents that are capable of dreaming just like him, of projecting

themselves into the future, that feel solitude when alone, and despair when in danger.

Isidore and Deckard end up as lovers of the synthetic, since they both realize that behavior

is sometimes enough to determine the mental state of the others, so they apply the analogy

argument when experiencing empathy for androids and animals alike. Each one of them

realizes that after all, real feelings like empathy could not exist to other human beings, like

Phil, who feels no remorse when killing androids that look like defenseless women.
Deckard and Isidore find, each one on his own way, that behavior is after all, the only thing

they have to ascribe mental states, not only for androids, but for human beings also.