dropzone:
Um, it was a movie. Or a novella. Or a novelization. Or another movie, depending. Not intended to be taken seriously. Or it was, Dick being a bit nuts. I didn’t intend it seriously, except as a lead into my belief that this discussion is, at best, silly because a reliable test is impossible.
Yeah, I know. I was using it the same way.
Miller:
The test isn’t designed to elicit specific emotional responses, it’s desgned to provoke an emotional response which it can then gauge for being genuine or manufactured. The idea isn’t, “If this question makes them angry, they’re a replicant,” it’s, “Replicants won’t have genuine emotional responses to this question.” And, of course, there’s reasons why a human might fake an emotional response to a question like that, which is why there’s a lot of questions. A “real” person is going to have genuine emotional responses to most of them. A replicant, in theory, wouldn’t have a genuine emotional response to any of them.
That said, in my headcanon for the movie, the Voight-Kampala test is actually bullshit pseudoscience, like a lie detector.
Yes, they were testing whether the apparent response would match the responses their sensors recorded (esp pupil movement). But the mother question was the second question, so not much of a basis for comparison.