Voigt-Kampff Test

The Voigt-Kampff empathy test operates through a device that measures capillary dilation, blush response, and iris fluctuation when subjects are exposed to scenarios designed to provoke empathic response: a child's hand caught in a door, a wasp crawling on someone's arm, a description of a calfskin wallet. The test was Dick's deliberate counter-proposal to the Turing test, which focused on conversational performance. Where Turing asked whether a machine could convincingly perform humanness through language, Dick asked whether a being possessed the involuntary physiological signatures of genuine emotional response. The test assumes that empathy is not a behavior that can be learned or simulated but a state — the condition of having one's internal reality altered by apprehension of another being's experience. The body betrays this alteration before the conscious mind can intervene, producing measurable changes that performance alone cannot replicate.