Everyday we all make choices and whether we know it those choices impact everybody around us; one of the most valuable lessons to learn in life is your actions have consequences. In Victor’s Anatomy students will be immersed in a VR game where they will have to make empathetic or nonempathetic choices. When the game begins Nurse Amber is finishing her shift at the labor and delivery unit of a hospital and packing her things to leave. Heading out to her car she is stopped by a man who beings to ask her questions of life and creation, suddenly everything goes black and Amber wakes in a laboratory with the man. He reveals to her that he is Dr. Frankenstein and he wishes to create new life. He tells her she must use her abilities as a nurse to help him or she will die. Then the game transfers to the students control where they must try to help create this monster but prevent it from turning evil like its creator.
I was inspired by both Greys Anatomy and Frankenstein in this concept for I want students to also get a better understanding of human anatomy while learning about empathy. These will both be measured by questions about empathy and anatomy before and after the game is played. To follow up questions after the game students will be asked to write a personal refection to observe how it possible affected them in their personal lives. If time permits, I would also like to do a follow up refection a month later to see if their views on life or empathy have changed. It can be used in classrooms for students ages 15-24.
This game is to be submitted to be part of Teaching Tolerance, an organization for teachers dedicated to teaching students about bullying, acceptance and tolerance. They allow teachers to build learning plans for teaching students about empathy and this game could act as an addition to that.
“In his undead shoes” will be a Virtual Reality cinematic experience that makes the viewer see the world as the creature from the novel “Frankenstein” and go through some key moments of his life.
I would want to use this app to engage people aren’t really into Frankenstein or weren’t really captured by Frankenstein upon the first read. I would like to capture that audience to get them to reevaluate the novel and reframe their view of the novel into the perspective of the creature. Since this will be told through a different medium than the novel, it will hopefully appeal to a different audience than the book while still getting some of the themes across.
This app will use a first person perspective and place the viewer in the shoes of the creature created by Frankenstein. It will include key moments like his birth and rejection from his creator, his learning and observation of society and his exile. We will frame and shoot this in a way where it’s not explicitly known that you are Frankenstein’s monster or that this is the Frankenstein story until the end. When you are exiled, you will find your creator again and he’ll mention that you are an undead abomination he created, wholey unnatural. Then the title will appear “In his undead shoes”.
The whole point of this is to show someone what happens when society rejects you for something you can’t control and how that lack of empathy can shape you. This relies on how Mary Shelley breaks down the fact that “sympathy” is deeply rooted in seeing and visual appeal, and that when a harsh “ugliness” is introduced, society will no longer sympathize (Sympathy, Seeing and Affective Labor, Kyung Sook). Once they experience all the things that the creature experienced, that should hopefully give the audience a more clear link to the creature. We can then open a discussion about the experience, ask how it left people feeling and then reflect on some of the actions of the creature. Open ended questions can be asked like “Why did the creature constantly ask Frankenstein for a wife” and “Why did the creature kill Elizabeth?”. After reflecting on these questions, we can open a discussion about how to prevent something like this or how things like this happen in reality on a smaller, more grounded scale.
What makes us human can be seen without argument on the surface. We are bi-pedal, omnivores with opposable thumbs and a tuft of hair at the top of our head and no tail on our bottoms. A key debate item on what makes us human is our ability to emphasize with others, human and animal alike. Empathy has been seen in other mammals outside of humans including dogs, elephants, and chimpanzees. Animals have the ability to demonstrate the aptitude to “feel into” others to understand how they are and do something to help out. If this is so widely seen in mammals then this is not a human trait. Examples of humans making the wrong choice is clearly illustrated in Philip K. Dicks novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Halfway through the novel the main protagonist Rick Deckard is assigned to kill an android that is a public star on Earth and performs opera. Deckard himself enjoys her singing and enjoys opera and is almost convinced she is human. This does not stop him from “retiring” her (Dick). Only at this scene do we begin to see Deckard start to show empathy towards androids. Explained by James Harris at Johns Hopkins University, empathy is “an evolutionary mechanism to maintain social cohesion… you’re more sensitive to the pain of other members in a group” (Viegas, 2014). Deckard is unable to emphasize with the androids for so long because he thinks of his job as a “Us versus Them” complex. The determining factors on what separates human beings from chimpanzee’s, dogs, and elephants is our ability to think of not only the future but alternative ones. From this we are able to make deliberate choices.
A study done in 2010 at University of Michigan tested college age students’ ability to emphasize with each other. Through the use of a survey that asked questions like “I don’t feel sorry for other people when they are having problems” or “when I see someone being taken advantage of, I feel kind of protective towards them” to then gauge their reaction. Reactions were based on a sliding scale if the question described the student well or not at all. After completing this survey Michigan State found that college students are forty percent less empathetic then those who graduated two to three decades ago (Grasgreen, 2010). If as a generation we are becoming less empathetic and finding empathy as a less desirable trait, then we cannot claim that empathy is what makes us human. This is seen again in the novel, where the more empathetic character is John Isadore, who is claimed to be a chickenhead and special. Isadore is a chiceknhead because of his inability to pass an IQ test, and special from the radioactive dust that has made him unable to reproduce. If he is seen in the caste system as an untouchable, then his ability to feel empathy and emphasize easily is also undesirable. Isadore’s own boss mocks him when he mistakes an organic cat with an electrical one and becomes disheartened by its death.
Another prime example of empathy not belonging only to humans is in the overall themes seen in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. While this book was published in the late sixties and highlighted issues seen during the cold war like sexism and the civil rights movement it also still holds truth to the present. The unsympathetic treatment of women and people of color in the sixties can be seen today through the #MeToo movement and the Black Lives Matter protests. In this novel, the major ideal and factor that helps to tell humans and androids apart is the ability to display empathy. There is a literal religion in the book based on empathy called Mercerism (read as Marxism) that revolves around the idea of an “Empathy Box”. The box takes the human characters to a scenario that is best described as multiplayer virtual reality and allows them to think and feel in a sort of hive mind state (Dick).
Yet, one of the main characters of the book Rick Deckard is very unremorseful until the middle-ending chapters of the book. Rick’s job is a bounty hunter, who gets paid to kill androids that were slaves on mars and escaped to earth. He holds no remorse for killing the almost seamlessly human like androids and has a main goal of gaining enough money to buy a real animal (Dick). The androids in this book show much more empathy then Deckard is able to. One android, named Pris Stratton, is visibly upset and distraught after learning that her friends that are androids have been killed, (by Rick) and that the killer is after her next. Her empathy shown towards the remaining two androids is that of someone who is scared of her friends dying. They are all in a similar boat and does not want harm to befall her friends (Dick). Empathy cannot be considered a human trait when we are so hesitant to display acts of empathy, but robots are easily able to feel for others with no hesitation.
Empathetic Rats Spring each other from Jail 2011, Ed Young
Major contributions to taking apart the idea that empathy makes us human is that other animals show empathy. Asian elephants for example are able to tell when someone in their group is stressed and will use their trunk to caress the upset elephant. This can be akin to a person consoling a baby that is crying by caressing them (Suddendorf, 2013). This is also seen in mice. Mice will only console family friends when they are in pain but will not reach out to other mice. This can be seen in humans, because we are more likely to help people that are similar to us than people who do not look like us. This was also true for the androids from the novel. An entire group of escaped androids had built their own police station as a way to protect each other and seem inconspicuous to the human population around them. When found out by Deckard, they ushered him into a room alone and tried to find an easy way to kill him without attracting too much attention to their makeshift safehouse (Dick). An assistant professor at Oregon Health & Science University who studied mice said that based off this finding “We believe there’s a genetic contribution to the ability for empathy” (Viegas, 2014).
A reason we may be less empathetic is from desensitization from twenty-four-hour news outlets, social media, and exposure to intense violence daily. A constant stream of violence and graphic images from the internet and the television can sometimes make it harder to emphasize with others. This is seen in Tim Recuber’s article “What Becomes of Empathy?” when he discusses the empathy gap. Seeing tragedies happen over seas in very different and distant places like Afghanistan and Iraq, it can be hard to feel anything but helpless. The empathy gap describes the feeling of maybe wanting to sympathize with the attacks in Iraq but not doing anything about it or to help. But when the Paris attacks and bombings happen, there is more of an outcry because that is a little less distant and different. Humans in general have a hard time feeling empathy for others especially when it crosses racial boundaries (Recuber, 2016).
Another reason it can be hard to emphasize with others is because of how divided we have become. In Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” this is illustrated perfectly in a section named Fractured Identities. The paper talks consistently about feminism but can be applied to broader groups as well. In this article, Haraway explains how even in groups of marginalized individuals who should be able to “speak the same language” and relate to one another, that this is still not possible. While Feminism is predominantly made up of women, all of those women have a different experience with feminism (Haraway 295-300). A white woman upset at how her looks are ridiculed in her workplace is not able to relate to a black woman who is unable to get past the interview stage because she doesn’t fit into European beauty standards. There is no one person who is just a feminist, because they fit into other categories and go by other labels as well. With different labels, different backgrounds and different experiences, it can become almost impossible to unionize with others.
Works Cited
Buonarroti, Michelangelo. The Creation of Adam. C. 1510, Sistine Chapel Ceiling.
Dick, Philip K. Blade Runner: (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). Ballantine Books, 2007.
Within the past few months, plastic straw bans have become all the rage. Last July, Seattle lead the initiative becoming the first major U.S. city to ban plastic straws. Corporations like Starbucks are starting to follow suit as well. This seems to show a growing movement towards helping the environment. After all, plastic waste is one of the biggest threats to our environment right now. Research has predicted that there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish (Sutter). Banning single use plastic straws seems like a logical step towards helping our earth, but it appears that might not be the case. This is just one of many small scale environmental “fixes” that is encouraged among society that actually doesn’t do enough to help. Not only that, but these short sighted solutions actually do a lot of damage to the disabled community as a whole.. Short-sighted, small scale environmental “fixes” that are placed on the consumer like straw bans are similar to the emphasis on empathy, especially empathy to animals, shown in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, emphasizing a sort of empathy that hurts society more than it actually helps.
Courtesy of P.J.L Laurens and Wikimedia Commons
There have been claims that Americans use 500 million straws per day, which seems to lead to a catastrophic amount of waste, but studies suggest that straws make a much smaller dent on our ecological footprint in the ocean than we think. Straws account for less than one percent of all the plastic waste in the ocean. When exaggerated numbers like this are presented, people result to quick, short sighted solutions and then don’t think about the consequences. Most people don’t realize that straws exist to help the disabled drink beverages, and having them available at all restaurants helps make their lives a lot easier and restaurants more accessible.
Small, simple solutions like ditching plastic straws have become extremely popular, not because they’re extremely impactful, but because of how easy they are to incorporate into everyday life and it becomes something to flaunt that shows how much someone cares about the environment. There are countless examples of this environmentalism-lite, between taking shorter showers, turning off lights and recycling. Though these all help, they aren’t impacting the environment as much as people think. What it’s mostly doing is making people feel good for helping out and then ignoring how it affects the disabled community.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a similar phenomenon of small scale empathy expectations is also placed onto society. All of the humans in this society follow a religion called “Mercerism” which follows the plight of Wilbur Mercer, a human that was persecuted while climbing a mountain. This religion was spread to help unite humanity, or what was left of humanity on Earth after World War Terminus. The main tenant of Mercerism is empathy. Humans are taught to be empathetic towards each other and the only separation between humans and the undesirable androids is a presence of empathy.
The odd thing about Mercerism is that the people of this book don’t seem to exhibit that much empathy. There is a huge focus on it, people constantly remind each other to be empathetic. None of the “regular” humans act empathetically out of their own free will, they only act empathetically to show off to their neighbors and look good to them. Rick Deckhart finds out that his neighbors horse is pregnant and says to him “for you to have two horses and me none, that violates the whole basic theological and moral structure of Mercerism” (Dick, 10). Deckhart is only playing this empathy card to try to get his neighbors horse. He’s extremely jealous of his neighbor, for he has no real animals to tend after. Deckhart has an electric sheep he looks after, but he despises it, constantly talking about how embarrassed he is of the sheep and how much shame it brings him. Yet he can’t get rid of the sheep because he knows “how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and anti-empathic.” (Dick, 13). The only reason he tends after an animal is to show his neighbors how empathetic he is. His only sign of empathy is a shame, a show, which is similar to how some people see straw bans and other environmental “fixes”.
This isn’t the only example of lost empathy in the world of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. When the Earth was destroyed by World War Terminus, most humans left the earth because of radioactive dust that was left over from the war that had debilitating effects on humans. If someone was exposed to too much fog, they would become physically disabled, in that they couldn’t reproduce, or mentally disabled, becoming a “chickenhead”. The novel follows one of these “chickenheads”, John Isidore, and he is shown to be the most compassionate and empathetic character we see. He is empathetic towards animals, humans and androids alike, showing true, genuine empathy for all of them. Yet these “chickenheads” aren’t allowed to immigrate off of the destroyed Earth to the new colonies on Mars because of their afflictions from the dust.
In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Dick is trying to say that empathy has lost its meaning, it is no longer a genuine emotion and become something done for show, often leading to short-sighted reactions that end up harming a portion of the population. It has become something to flaunt to you neighbor, remind them how much more empathetic than you are than them. In the novel Mercerism rose as a product to of World War terminus, and in real life environmentalism rose as a product of climate change. Both of these have good intentions, but end up short sighted and damaging. People become empathetic for show and don’t truly consider who they’re affecting. This point is more relevant now than even before. A University of Michigan study has show that current college students are 40 percent less empathetic than those who went to school twenty to thirty years ago (Grasgreen).
Humans are only doing these small fixes like straw bans and recycling because it helps them feel like they’re making a difference. It makes them look good. They’re not truly helping the environment and addressing the root of the issue. They’re content in doing tiny fixes for two reasons; the problem is extremely large and society doesn’t expect them to solve this issue. People choose to ignore the true stakes of the issue, just going for the most superficial part of it, making them seem more contentious, but not too much so that they would become overzealous. In modern society, empathy has become a balancing act, dancing between caring enough to make others admire you, but not too much as to make others uncomfortable. People never stop to think that these “solutions” hurt the disabled around them.
Similarly, the humans in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep look after an animal because society wants them to, but no one really acknowledges why they should look after animals. Animals initially became so coveted because most became extinct or endangered from the global war. The humans are the reason most animals are extinct and now that the war is over, they have to look after animals, but they just do it now to look empathetic to each other. They don’t do it to help recover the animal populations that were destroyed by war. Not only that, but restricting some of the population to Earth to create a “better” colony on Mars might seem good, so they can pass on “desirable” traits, but these limitations just hurt people who are already at a disadvantage. That’s extremely similar to a lot of these environmental quick fixes people do. We never think of why we recycle besides of the fact that it “saves the planet”. Most people don’t stop and think that we need to save the planet because of damages tracing back from before the industrial revolution, and they don’t stop to think that something drastic needs to be done to counteract the dire circumstances.
Part of the reason this is such a huge problem is because empathy can only be stretched so far. Empathy is a nice problem, but when it’s just for show, that’s a huge issue. Even if it isn’t just for show, empathy still isn’t extremely effective on its own. It’s suggested that empathy is only the first step in helping others, and it can be damaging if empathy is on its own. Empathy can be used as a step to make a desire to help others, but it can also create apathy or disgust when someone or something is too foreign (Recuber). It’s easiest to empathize with what we are similar to, but it’s extremely hard to try to empathize with an animal that’s so different from us, or from something so much bigger that it becomes abstract. That’s exactly what happens in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep with the animals, especially the electric ones, and what happens in reality with humans trying to empathize with the health of our environment. This is what leads to caring about things for show.
People need to realize why we do things to help the environment and care more, instead of just caring for show and doing the small things that make us look good. Just like caring for an animal because society makes you, instead of caring for an animal because most animals are almost extinct. Society gets caught up in fixing some small symptoms of a bigger issue. It’s all about “reducing straw waste” instead of “reducing all waste” or “saving the manatees” instead of “stopping global warming”.
Courtesy of USPS and Wikimedia Commons
When empathy becomes expected of us, that’s when we need to question why we’re expected to feel empathetic. If society is forced to feel empathetic towards something, it’s important to question why we’re empathetic towards that thing. Why do the humans need to care for the animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? They need to care because almost all animals have gone extinct through a world war. Caring is enforced in order to try to save the wildlife of Earth, and to try to help the human race maintain its humanity. In modern society, people are told to recycle and reject single use plastics because of a huge plastic waste issue on Earth that is endangering the health of the world.
This compassion is forced on the common people and that’s the real problem. It’s not their fault the animals are almost extinct. It’s not the fault of the consumer there is so much plastic waste. The plastic waste is forced on them with excessive packaging, a readiness of single use plastics and a bombardment of other ridiculous plastics that no one is asking for. In both of these instances, people are forced to act a certain way to fix certain problems and then are shamed if they don’t, yet these problems are not created by them. The ones that created the problem remain unaffected, still perpetuating the problem and not feeling bad at all. Making people empathize with small things helps blind them to the larger systemic issues. All the empathy is forced onto regular people by a larger force. It’s hard to focus on the big picture when you’re looking at a small detail.
Having expectations to care for something can be helpful, but the purpose might become lost, or the empathy may become too distilled. When someone is too focused on a small issue, they react quickly, and these reactions end up hurting others. It’s hard for people to focus on empathizing with the disabled when society has forgotten about them, actively silencing this community, and then leads attention towards another object to empathize with. Once the purpose is lost, too distilled, or even causing collateral damage, then the empathy becomes basically useless. At that point, why even bother.
In chapter nine, Deckhart attempts to apprehend Luba Luft for the first time but she calls the “police” on him and he is brought into a police station that doesn’t know he exists. It is revealed that this station is fully populated by androids and is fairly self-sustaining. They have their own bounty hunters that hunt androids with their own test of distinguishing androids. Phil Resch is one of the ones living there, and he’s very quick to throw Garland under the bus as an android. He’s extremely eager to kill androids, but is shocked once he finds out he is an android. Resch believes “that the best place for an android would be with a big police organization such as W.P.O.” (Dick, 109). Resch has a point, because he is fairly good at taking out other androids.
If there is an entirely self-sustained police force that has their own test to determine androids, how would they rival the force Deckhart is in? Is it possible that Deckhart and his force is full of androids that would fail the “reflex-arc response” that is used at Mission Street Hall of Justice? Could Deckhart be like Resch? How effectively can one truly measure humanity if differing tests exist like this?
There was an interesting scene in chapter 5 that could discredit the Voigt-Kampff test. The Voigt-Kamff test was administered by police to detect whether someone was a human or an android by providing a series of situations or images to stimulate an empathetic response. Rick Deckard administered the Voigt-Kampff test to Rachael Rosen who was specifically selected by Eldon Rosen to be tested. The test had concluded that she lacked the necessary empathy that all humans should have. Rachael said, “You would have retired me” (Dick 52). Eldon explained to Rick that Rachael had grown up away from Earth aboard Salander 3 and did not have the same exposure to empathy that someone on Earth may have had. Eldon set this up to prove that not every human passes the Voigt-Kamff test. Though Eldon does later admits that Rachael is really an android.
Is it ethical to continue using Voigt-Kamff test? What are some potential benefits and/or consequences of using the Voigt-Kamff test?
A machine of sorts, called the black empathy box, immerses its users in a new setting where they are all physically and mentally unified into one being, “You felt it, too, he thought. Yes, the voices answered.” (Dick 22-23). Through a “special”, named Isidore, we experience this. Of course Isidore also experiences everyone, just as everyone experiences Isidore. “He experienced them, the others” (Dick 22). In this new place Isidore, now living through a mythical man named Wilbur Mercer, must climb a seemingly endless hill. However, that impossible task alone, is not enough. There are also antagonists wishing to make his infinite journey that much worse. They pelt him with rocks, and one connects with his arm. This pain is felt by all connected to the black empathy box, and not only is it felt there, but it is there waiting for them when they return to the real world.
My question is, could something like this black empathy box teach empathy? If so, is it ethical? In the pursuit of empathy, is it morally okay to put everyone through pain?
