By focusing on the purpose and the significance that the electronic devices have for Dick’s protagonists, the paper proposes to show that “mood organs” and “empathy boxes” represent not only an extension of the protagonists’ human bodies and minds, but also the very proof that they are human.

In this, we are moving toward a society that is both “posthuman” in its attempt to move beyond the traditional concept of “human nature” towards one that can more readily adapt to the contemporary technological and scientific knowledge, and “transhuman” in its attempt to use the available technologies in order to enhance human physical, intellectual and psychological abilities. Dick’s novel is therefore less concerned with what is real and more with what is fake more precisely, it explores whether it matters being able to distinguish between what is real (human) and what is not. Baudrillard suggests that the real is no longer possible what exists is the hyperreal, that is enhanced models of a real without origin or reality epitomized in the form of either the enhanced human or the “fake” one: the cyborg or the android. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? human contact is necessarily mediated or facilitated by machines.

The concept of human identity is increasingly being influenced by the inevitable interaction and connection with modern technologies, rather than direct human contact.

Androids dream of electric sheep pdf