A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man. - Philip K Dick "Man, Android and Machine"
PKD is contrasting man, android and machine and asking what the difference is and where the lines become blurred. It's part of an overarching series of thoughts that PKD had about the nature of reality, expressed in this essay:
Man, Android and Machine
We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes -- we are perhaps the true machines. - PKD
In the essay, PKD means that in the sense that we are vehicles for God - "We are suits of clothing which He creates, puts on and uses and finally discards..." and by extension that everything - the systems, structures and machines we create are also alive by dint of being expressions of "the energy fields" of our minds.
PKD was pretty far out, maaan.
DADOES originates in the idea of an android as something "cold" and "fierce":
a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory -- that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.
These creatures are among us, although morphologically they do not differ from us; we must not posit a difference of essence, but a difference of behavior. In my science fiction I write about about them constantly. Sometimes they themselves do not know they are androids. Like Rachel Rosen, they can be pretty but somehow lack something; or, like Pris in WE CAN BUILD YOU, they can be absolutely born of a human womb and even desing androids -- the Abraham Lincoln one in that book -- and themselves be without warmth; they then fall within the clinical entity "schizoid," which means lacking proper feeling. I am sure we mean the same thing here, with the emphasis on the word "thing." (PKD)
At first glance this seems to contradict the usual Bladerunner interpretation of the blurred lines between man and machine, however this becomes less clear when we talk about Deckard - a man who kills replicants for a living. His empathy has its limits.
A human being without the proper empathy or feeling is the same as an android built so as to lack it, either by design or mistake. We mean, basically, someone who does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator, acting out by his indifference John Donne's theorem that "No man is an island," but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and a moral island is not a man.(PKD)
In some sense, Scott nails it when he says Deckard is a replicant - just one born from a human's womb and not a lab.
So DADOES sets out the ambiguities of man and machine. Replicants like Rachel that say they love you and appear to mean it, yet can murder an animal. Even those actions are ambiguous - why does Rachel kill the goat - for revenge for her replicant colleagues or for rejecting her? Dick doesn't give us the answer. It's the idea that a replicant can be a facsimile of a human with all the surface attributes but none of the interior - but
how do we know when the behaviours are the same?
In DADOES, he sets up parallels between humans and replicants. Humans administer empathy tests to distinguish humans from replicants but are blind to their suffering and will kill them without any sense of guilt, in the same way Batty is blind to the spider's suffering. Deckard cheats on his wife with Rachel and then behaves indifferently to her.
PKD may have used the pet spider as a symbol of something many people would consider absurd for anyone to be upset over in the way that Isidore is. It's not uncommon for children to torture or kill spiders without a second thought. Empathy is selective, but lack of empathy is inhuman, even when it's done by humans. He tests our empathy and asks us if
we are truly human?
