Do Androids Dream of Electric Religion?

Our discussion in class about the differences between "natural," "organic," "wilderness", and the struggle in finding a definition to something so widely used but little understood reminded me of a similar conversation I had earlier in the week about humanity, religion and video games.

Phillip K. Dick wrote his book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? around the question of what makes a human a human? He explores this idea in a variety of ways, but one side story to the main plot is a focus on a religion called "Mercerism," which is a virtual religion people "tune into" with a visor and gloves to participate in the story of Mercer. The story, as I remember it, goes along the lines of Mercer forever walking up a hill being tortured by other humans and the terrain, which the people tuning in can physically feel. People want to feel this pain, and in a sense, are connected and experience communion with one another through this virtual reality and shared strife.

With the other person, I brought up the idea that perhaps religion today could be explored through video games in this way, and then the talk turned to artificial intelligence. The other person was staunch in the fact that a man-made object could never be a human, and I, remembering one of the main takeaways of the plot of Androids being that we, as humans, imbue the meaning of "life" onto things, thought the other. I asked him, in a much less polished fashion of course, this question:

Imagine someone has been with you your entire life. He is your closest friend, and you have seen him laugh, cry, think logically and illogically, love, have beliefs, doubt, struggle, and display every other manner of human emotion. When you become an adult, you are told by your family that this person is an android, a robot who has been programmed to do the things he has done and to look as human as possible. At what point does this friend cease to be human?

His response was that a robot/android could never chemically reproduce the brain operations of life, and can only do a series of if/then statements that would never be subtle enough to replicate human thought. It was an interesting conversation, but I thought that some other questions had to be answered first, namely:

1) What defines a human, and what defines an android? 

2) Is it the new awareness of the friend the actual point where the switch from human to android takes place? 

3) Can computer programming have the same effect on both the thing performing it and to an observer watching this programming taking place as the human brain does for both? 

4) Is the difference between a human and an android actually meaningful? 

5) If the difference is meaningful, then is the assumption of humanity enough to make something human? 

6) Is a human’s relationship to something artificial significant enough to transform it into something human? (Good old Phillip K. Dick here)

7) Can a human cease to be human in the first place?

8) For the android and the human, is there any “ceasing” of humanity that can even be done?

I don't know the answers, and I expect that if they were fully explored, it would take pages and pages to do so fully. I just thought it was interesting that our discussion about definitions, humanity, naturalness and the like fit so perfectly into a question that I find fascinating and interesting. 

I have weird conversations, looking back on it....