Memory
Memory, and its reliability, is a major issue in many of Dick's stories. As well as being a major feature of Blade Runner it also plays a crucial role in both Paycheck and Total Recall. We all know that we can forget things that have happened to us, and there is reason to believe that we can 'remember' things that never happened to us at all, either via hypnosis, or simply by being mistaken. In many of his stories takes this further by describing a future where memories can be surgically implanted or removed.
In Blade Runner the issue is raised when Deckard first encounters Rachael, a replicant who fully believes that she is a human. The Tyrell/Rosen corporation has even given her implanted memories and photos of her past. After a tearful Rachael produces a photo of herself and her mother, Deckard looks at his own photos on his piano, and then at the photos which used to belong to Leon, another replicant. The question we find ourselves asking is how does Deckard know that his own past is real? He has photos, and memories, but so does Rachael, and she is a replicant.
In the novel the question is visited again by Dick via the character of Phil Resch, another bounty hunter who, with Deckard's help, discovers that he has been working for an orgianisation full of replicants, and is forced to confront the possilbility that he is a replicant himself. Even though he has memories of his life, that include taking and passing an empathy test.
Dick's position is clear: memory proves nothing. The characters of Rachael and Phil Resch essentially serve as thought experiments to back up a strong position of memory skepticism. No matter what Deckard might remember, he cannot possibly know whether he is human or whether he was built in a lab two weeks ago.
What's different about humans, and why does it make us better than replicants?
In the film we have the empathy test, to distinguish between humans and replicants, and in the novel there is an even stronger emphasis on empathy. The vast majority of humans have an “empathy box”, which allows them to connect emotionally with other humans who are using it at the same time. This serves as a metaphor for the major difference between a human and a replicant. Humans have the empathy box, they can empathise with each other, they are sensitive to each others feelings. Replicant cannot use the empathy box, they lack the crucial element that would allow them to connect emotionally with humans and with each other.
This distinction between humans and replicants underpins a major moral issue. At the beginning of the novel, as Deckard is about to set of for the Rosen corporation to test the Nexus-6 androids, we learn that there are certain schizophrenic humans who have a similar empathic deficiency to the replicants, and might fail the empathy test which is used to detect them. The implications being that a bounty hunter using the empathy test that Deckard uses could mistakenly believe that a schizoid human was in fact a replicant posing as a human, and would attempt to retire that human.
The question that Dick is asking us here is: why does a replicant whose only difference from a human, besides age and the nature of its construction, is an lack of empathic ability which is also found is a small minority of mental patients not have the same right to life that those patients have. The assumption of many of the characters in the novel is that to kill an empathically deficient human would be an outrage, but to retire a replicant would be perfectly acceptable.
In the novel Deckard begins to question this assumption as he starts to develop feelings toward some of the replicants, Rachael in particular. In the film this is even more apparent. It appears at the beginning of the film that Deckard has quit his job because he was not comfortable with his role as a hired killer, only to be coerced into resuming this role by his former boss. Deckard clearly feels some sense of remorse after 'retiring' Zhora, and he harbours Rachael in his apartment even after he is ordered to kill her.
The film takes this issue a little further than Dick does in the novel, where replicants are permanently lacking in empathy. The replicants we see in Blade Runner are capable of developing their own emotional responses, which is why the Tyrell corporation has built in a four-year lifespan as a failsafe. The implication is if they lived any longer they would become indistinguishable from humans. Roy Batty goes through a visible transformation over the course of the film. At one point he murders his creators in anger at their giving him so little time to live, but by the end of the film he has changed drastically. As his death approaches he saves Deckard's life having been initially fighting him to the death, and we are left with the impression that Batty is perhaps the most human out of all the characters in the film, despite the fact that he is a replicant. The same message comes out of Deckard's relationship with Rachael. In the film they fall in love and live happily ever after, and Deckard's partner spares her life, presumably on the basis that she is as human as he or any other is, and has just as much right to live.
The issue of whether the replicants empathic deficiency in the novel make killing them acceptable is closely related to a popular argument in favour of vegetarianism. Many meat eaters attempt to justify their behaviour by saying that the animals they eat lack either the intelligence, or the potential to build relationships that humans have. The response being that there are mentally ill and brain-damaged humans who also lack these qualities, so to say it is acceptable to eat animals on that basis is to say that it is acceptable to eat mentally ill people. But few meat eaters would agree with such a position.
The big question that Dick is asking us is: what is it about humans that gives us more right to moral treatment than ay other animal, or android for that matter?
The mood organ
Perhaps of Dick's most fascinating creations. In the novel Deckard and his wife Iran have purchased a Penfield Mood Organ; a device which allows them to control their moods by dialing different settings. The settings range from the useful – Deckard at one point dials a setting that gives him “a creative and fresh attitude toward his job” - to the bizarre - “My schedule for today lists a six-hour self-accusatory depression” - to the obviously satirical:
“Dial 888,” Rick said as the set warmed. “The desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it.”
Iran decision to programme a six-hour self-accusatory depression is very illuminating. The reason that she chooses to do is because at one point she experiences guilt at feeling the happiness which she has programmed herself to have. She feels happy but in her mind she knows there is plenty to worry about, their apartment block is half empty, most animals are becoming extinct and most humans have left the planet for the off-world colonies. She feels discomfort because she is feeling happy even though the world is in a very sorry state. This split-feeling that Iran experiences seems to point toward a kind of mind/body dualism. She says: “although I heard the emptiness interlectually, I didn't feel it”.
Another issue is raised when Iran continues:
"I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting – do you see? I guess you don't. But that used to be considered a sign of mental illness; they called it 'absence of appropriate affect.'"
By using the mood organ, Deckard and his wife's emotions are just as programmed and unreal as the replicants are. This makes it even harder to justify Deckard's killing of the replicants.
The use of the concept of the mood organ can also be read as a criticism of the use of anti-depressants or more generally of solving our problems by pretending they don't exist. Perhaps, Dick suggests, we should feel depressed if we have reason to be. If we force ourselves to accept situations that are unnacceptable, we may end up standing by while our world is destroyed as it has been in the future that Dick shows us in his novel.
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