What Makes Us Human
I've been thinking about Bladerunner (aka Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick) lately. In Bladerunner , there are androids ("replicants") which look fully human. There's one way to really tell if someone is human or android, and that's to subject them to a specific test. The test measures emotional responses to questions about animals--eating animals, wearing animals, animals in pain. Here's a link to a scene showing it from the movie with Harrison Ford (embedding disabled). Why have I been thinking about this scene so much? Seeing the images of the animals in the Gulf Oil Spill (like these from the Boston Globe ): It seems to me that our response to this situation is a test of whether we're human or not.