Facebook is Worse than an Android Invasion

A little backstory first...

In Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, android technology has become so powerful and advanced that it threatens human society's very definition of what it means to be human.  After the nuclear apocalyptic events of "World War Terminus", Earth is reduced to shambles and left deserted by mostly everyone.  Androids have been manufactured as expendable workers with the purpose of colonizing the harsh conditions of new planets for the survivors of mankind.  As it advances, the android technology becomes increasingly self-aware.  This leads to periodic escape attempts by small groups of androids as they use deadly force in efforts to escape their labor camps and flee to Earth.  The humans on Earth eventually catch on to the androids attempts to hide within the remains of human society as humans.  They assign bounty hunters to track down, "retire" (kill), and purge these artificial machines from the human collective.

This is the general premise of Philip K. Dick's book.  But what I didn't add in that short synopsis is that it is hinted throughout the book that androids were not only designed in order to do the dirty, dangerous work on planets like Mars, but that they were also designed as a cure for the existential loneliness that the survivors of World War Terminus felt since so many people had perished.  

And the electric animals are an even more obvious example of humanity desperately attempting to fill in that void of loneliness with something that is not real.  Let me explain.  Animals were wiped out even worse than the humans after the war.  And in the post-apocalyptic society that emerged out of the ash and nuclear fallout came a renewed sense of value for living organisms.  Thereafter it became not only altruistic to take care of a living animal, such as a cat or goat in one's home, but it also became a status symbol.  Living animals were rare, and as they were valued so highly, (ironically) they became very expensive commercial commodities.  And like all successful commercial commodities, ersatz "fake" electric animals also became popular.  They were much cheaper than the real animals and for all intents and purposes were identical to living animals (much like the androids and humans).  

The main character in Androids, Rick Deckard, is a bounty hunter whose goal in life is to own a living animal.  We begin the book introduced to his unhappy, depressive wife and dying malfunctioning electric goat.  Clearly Deckard is disheartened by the situation, but he's determined to make enough money to win his goat.  Right from the start we can tell that the electric animal isn't fulfilling his desires as a real animal theoretically would. 

Why? Well I suppose you could say that it's unnatural, but many things are "unnatural" and even if they aren't made in nature, they are still a part of the natural world.  

Instead I would argue that Deckard isn't satisfied with the electric goat because it exists solely for the purpose of serving the demands of society which has unnaturally imbued it with immense, but entirely artificial, value.  Something is of value to us because it inherently creates its own meaning simply because it exists in its existence and nothing more. The act of inflating something with value not only contradicts the very definition of value, but it also has the opposite, degrading effect. 

And this is where Facebook comes in......so tune in next week!

Does it really...?

THE VOIGHT KAMPFF CAPTCHA TEST

Have you ever entered in a CAPTCHA, believing that it was right, only to find that it was actually wrong and in turn question whether you yourself are, in fact, really a robot?

     Okay.

   I'm going to say.... probably not.  However, we've all experienced the nuisance of having to interpret the blurry and scribbled hieroglyphics of a CAPTCHA program at some point in our internet lives.  In the more difficult CAPTCHAs, just entering the correct text can be considered a veritable feat.  But by entering the correct CAPTCHA phase you have successfully proved...to a computer... that you're a human... and not a computer.

          Cool.
               Moving along.

                                          ......Click.  Scroll.  Click-click. Click......


Wait! Before you enjoy your post-CAPTCHA webpage come back here for a sec.

Let's look at this scenario again.  What exactly is going on here?  Why are we doing this test in the first place?  Doesn't this seem a little odd to you?

Well in order to fully understand CAPTCHA it's important that you understand what the acronym stands for, which is:



  BETCHA didn't know that, huh?  Well honestly neither did I, until recently. It sounds so absurd that I still can't read it without thinking that its some kind of joke.  But the Turing Test, created by the brilliant British computer scientist and mathematician Alan Turing, really does exist.  Turing created the test in order to study artificial intelligence.  A computer, Turing believed, might not be able to "think" like a human (yet), but it could certainly imitate a human very well.  There are a number of variations of the Turing test, but the simplest involve a "judge", a human, and a computer.  In the CAPTCHA version of the Turing test, you are the human, the malicious spam bot is the computer, and the judge is actually the CAPTCHA computer program.  Since the spam bot is unable to replicate the CAPTCHA words, and hopefully you are able to, CAPTCHA realizes that you are in fact a human, and allows you special access to the website you're visiting.

      Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart.


 So this isn't truly that odd. This is a simple test after all, or at least it seems to be on the surface, and spam bots can't be all that intelligent.  But think of who is given the responsibility of deciding whether someone is  human? Yeah that's right. A computer. Of course, it's still a computer program created by humans, but what would this test be like in the future once technology has approached human intelligence?


  The answer is... who knows!?


  But this raises my next point. In this futuristic scenario, how would we determine who is human and who is inhuman?  Well this requires us to examine the next logical question which is what does it mean to be human? This is something that Philip K. Dick attempted to answer in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.  In this science fiction novel androids are as intelligent, if not even more intelligent than humans in the the newest Nexus 9 model androids.  So if intelligence can be used to separate humans from androids, what can?

 Instead there is the hypothetical Voight Kampff empathy test.  Even Alan Turing realized how difficult it would be to define what it is to "think", especially in the case of a machine.  Philip K. Dick believed that empathy, rather than intelligence, would give artificial intelligence away. The Voight Kampff test times the dilation of the subject's pupils and blush reflex in response to questions (or statements as the one in the box above) that are intended to produce an emotional bias.

 Well this is the method that Rick Deckard employs in order to hunt down and identify escaped androids in Dick's novel.  But if this emotional test works better than an intelligence or imitation test, then what is empathy? Are machines incapable of empathy due to the fact that they are not human?  What is it about humans that makes humans special in this way?

  These are some of the more nuanced, underlying questions in Philip K. Dick's novel and I'm not sure that he answers any of them at all.  Personally, I don't think that there really is anything special about humans.  (but I don't mean it like that!) It's all about time and evolution.  I am almost certain that machines/androids/you-name-it will be indistinguishable in the future, in all aspects, to humans.  Our current artificial intelligence, *cough* Siri *cough* will be as analogous to the true artificial intelligence of the future as the first single celled organisms on Earth after the primordial soup are to human beings!  

 Seriously.  Though there is quite a gap it is very possible that with more advanced technology, human emotion, even human "irrationality" will be programmable.  Hell, can you imagine purchasing a computer and selecting which random personality you want your computer to have along with however much RAM and etc. you want?  

 This unleashes a slew of other ridiculous seeming ideas that may definitely become a reality in the future!  

 Needless to say that's a lot to worry about, in addition to being excited about.

 Anyway, if this really concerns you, next time you stumble upon a CAPTCHA on a website, I suggest that you kick that spam bots ass, flip the bird to SkyNet (aka Google/Apple/Microsoft), and enter the correct phrase like a real human!

        ........................................ that is, of course, while you get the chance.

The Man, The Legend, The Rebooter

  In this post I want to take a step back from the goals of this blog and simply direct your attention toward Philip K. Dick for a second.  I just read this fascinating article that David Duffy wrote about him in 2007.  I encourage you to read it, but be warned! The font is white on a blue background and it is very difficult to read!... But anyway, regardless of the aesthetic problem, it was a tremendously insightful read.

  I can't say that I know much about Philip K. Dick.  I mean, I've read about him on the aforementioned blog and his Wikipedia page and perhaps a few other sites.  However, there is always a recurring feeling that I get when I read about his bio on any site.  It seems that Dick wrote science fiction in an attempt to understand the questions he held regarding the nature of the universe and life.  To me, his works of writing are more than just novels.  They are incredibly vicarious experiences.  You get unadulterated, complete VIP access to all of Philip's thoughts and fears he garners.

Honestly this intimate level of entanglement with Dick's mind is disturbing and frightening at times.  I'm confident that this unease is what is preventing me from picking up and reading VALIS or The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick.  But at the same time, this uncomfortable feeling can be considered something special.  I don't know many other writers, aside from maybe Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut, that can effectively ransack my mind and leave with me a mixed feeling of confusion and self-doubt.

You might be thinking if those are the symptoms, why the hell would you ever want to read one of his books?

 Well, I think it's necessary to have a "reboot"every once in a while.  It's too easy to accept reality for granted.  Of course if we didn't we would all be insane, but dipping our feet with Philip into the absurd and bizarre worlds that he takes us allows us to ask ourselves the same questions that Dick presumably asked himself as he wrote literature in search of the answers.

I might finish one of Dick's novels with fewer answers and more questions than I had originally started with.  But somehow I find that that's actually the beauty of his work, and I like to think that maybe he felt the same way.  After all, it's not so much the answers that I find but the questions that I raise, as I read something like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, that excites me.

 In questioning my own thoughts and principles, I am left a little distraught after I have put the book down.  However, this experience allows me to create new perspectives that I would never have created without this force.  Admittedly, it is challenging.  But it is both very rewarding and refreshing in its own way.

It is a philosophical reboot.

Thank you P.K.D.

After researching some articles about Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I feel that I’m more confused about my topic than before. It might have been that the article I read by Jill Galvan wasn’t actually as related to my topic as I thought. I mean certainly it was interesting, but it pointed out many ideas that I hadn’t noticed while I was reading, ie how the government uses technology to enslave the people, and I don’t believe that was P.K.D.’s intention while writing the book.
I did some very factual, scholarly research of P.K.D. …. on wikipedia…. in regards to his bio and it sounds like he was a great science fiction writer who turned into a nutball. Most of his books deal with reality and how it turns out our perception of reality is our reality. But even if P.K.D. did turn out to be a nutcase who wrote a 9,000 page pseudo-autobiographical religious experience after hallucinating on pain killers (post an impacted wisdom teeth surgery…it’s actually a crazy story), I don’t think that he was a paranoid anti-government hippie at the time he wrote Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which I feel is what Jill Galvan might have thought he was, albeit to a certain degree, because she focused on this issue in much depth in her work. Anyway..)

I liked his novel because it dealt with a more interesting question than whether or not technology has invaded our lives, I think everyone would agree that it has, but I really enjoyed the existential plight of the main character Deckard as he struggles to understand his self, his purpose in the world, and ultimately what it means to be human. The fact that the book is set in a sci-fi backdrop with androids makes this philosophical playground even more accessible to toying with and teasing our idea of what it means to be human and to be alive.

If you haven’t read this book before and I asked you what the primary difference between a human and an animal is you would have no problem answering the question. The answer is our brains. Animals don’t function on the same cognitive level as humans. But what if an organism were synthetically manufactured, ex-vivo, by humans with essentially the same cognitive prowess as human beings? Yeah changes up things a bit now doesn’t it?

Well these products are know as “Andies”, short for Androids in P.K.D.’s imagination, and while they aren’t human… they are human. You could say that the only difference might be their purpose in “life” compared to a real human being? The Andies were created by humans as an expendable workforce that would be responsible for the hazardous mining and development of Mars and colonies on other planets. You see the Earth was destroyed in a final World War Terminus and is left virtually unviable, save for a few areas where the survivors wear lead codpieces to ensure that they are genetically secure.

Either way the lives of these real people are miserable and some Andies have become smart enough to escape the colony planets, through any means necessary including murder, and come to Earth. Rick Decard is a police agent whose job is to “retire” (kill) Andies as essentially a glorified, uniform bounty hunter. The obstacles he faces as he tracks down the smartest group of Andies out on the market yet utterly destroy the foundations of his being. At one point in the novel he sleeps with an Andy woman and even begins to wonder if he himself is an android…

I don’t want to spoil the ending in case you read, but it’s a fascinating journey. If you’ve watched Blade Runner with Harrison Ford then you probably know that Ridley Scott, the director, recently included a deleted scene where it was implied that Ford was a replicant (the movie’s version of an android).


I guess we’ll never know the truth in either case. Ultimately I suppose it depends on your perception of reality. And well, that’s completely up to your interpretation. So go check out the movie or the book! They’re pretty different since the movie was only an adaptation of the book. The book is incredible, slightly wonky and the movie is just badass, but the ideas in the movie aren’t as rich as they are in the novel.

Intro Post

Names? SciFilosophy, Novel Philosophies, The Philosophy of Science Fiction

Hi everyone who’s reading this. My name is Mike, I’m a senior majoring in biology here at SC. I’ve never written blogs or followed someone’s blog posts before, but I’m interested to try it out and see what it’s like. So… let’s begin!

   At the first day of class I really didn’t have a coherent idea for my possible blog topic, but since then the ideas I’ve jotted down have all sort of merged together in what I think is an interesting way. But I did know that I wanted to either write about science fiction novels or certain aspects of philosophy since I’ve always been interested in both subjects. I used to be an avid reader of Costco and Border’s bestseller novels all throughout elementary and high school, but at some point before college I stopped reading books for fun. Which I feel is kind of unfortunate because I really enjoyed reading all different kinds of books, not just science fiction but thrillers and adventure stories. Even if Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt series where formulaic and predictable they were a heck of a lot of fun back then and it was easy to get lost in the adventure with Dirk as he escaped the bad guys in his vintage hot rod cars. Another great author I used to read, who wrote a good deal about the ethics of cutting edge science and technology, was Michael Chricton. Most people know him as the guy who created Jurrasic Park (…which I’ve never read surprisingly!), but I knew him as the author of Andromeda Strain, Terminal Man, Congo, NEXT, Sphere, Timeline, State of Fear, Prey… the list just goes on and on.

   The other possible topic I wanted to pursue for this blog was philosophy, but this just by itself seemed like a very daunting task to write about each week. So I figured why not combine my two ideas and write a blog about the philosophy of science fiction novels. And as corny as they are, SciFilosophy and Novel Philosophies were two possible blog titles that sprung into my mind. (I guess a third would be just a boring one, ie; The Philosophy of Science Fiction)

   Anyway… in regards to which novels I would write about, I had just re-read Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which inspired the making of the movie Bladerunner) before summer ended and it was a fantastic book. P.K.D. brings up ideas such as what it means to be human, the meaning of existence, and morality in a very fresh and unique perspective which completely captivated my interest as I read his book. I definitely want to discuss the ideas from this novel in my next blog post. In addition to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I think I’d like to look at Slaughterhouse 5, Cat’s Cradle, Ender’s Game, A Scanner Darkly, State of Fear, and Cell. I’m trying to come up with more, but if you can recommend another SciFi novel that I can add to this list please let me know! I’ve read all of these except for A Scanner Darkly so new books would be more than welcome. It’d be awesome to check out something new.