Blade Runner & Being Human
[Written by Joe for an undergraduate movie review. We've also recorded a two-part podcast on Blade Runner]
What makes you human? This is one of many questions that form the basis of the philosophical dimensions of the 1982 film Blade Runner. A science-fiction neo-noir set against the dystopian Los Angeles of 2019, and based on the 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, the film depicts a future in which artificial humans who are almost indistinguishable from ‘real’ humans are engineered to work in off-world colonies. When a group of these robots, known as replicants and led by Roy Batty, illegally escape back to Earth on a mission to extend their pre-determined expiry date, ‘Blade Runner’ Deckard is charged with hunting or ‘retiring’ them. The film explores themes that raise deep existential questions about the human experience in conjunction with technological advancements. Most importantly Blade Runner is, as Stephen Mullhall puts it, ‘explicitly concerned with what it is to be a human being’.[1] Post-release, Blade Runner has undergone many revisions, I shall focus on the 2007 ‘Final Cut’ of the film, seeing this as the definitive version. I will concentrate on Roy Batty’s death monologue, examining the themes of memory, cognition and what it means to die, but I will also draw from other scenes to inform my exploration of the concepts held in the film. I contend that the replicants in the film show what it means to be human, and are in fact more human than human.
Firstly, by examining the characteristics of the replicants, we can through comparison differentiate human and non-human. It is shown that the replicants have distinct personalities, they have a will of their own, and are fundamentally mortal. They share with humanity the same emotions; fear, joy, rage, love, they dream and have memories. Yet they are seen by society as machines; even the term ‘retiring’ is used in order to avoid the implication that they can die, as to die you must first live. Death in the film is ubiquitous; the driving force of the plot is the mortality of the replicants. So, given that these traits are to be found in humanity, what exactly is it that makes them any different from us? The film itself establishes the difference between human and replicant as the ability to empathise. In determining who is ‘real’ Deckard employs the Voight-Kampff test. The device measures involuntary iris dilation, fluctuation of the pupil, and capillary dilation in response to a series of questions designed to evoke emotional and specifically empathetic reactions.[2]
Roy Batty’s death at the end of the film exemplifies the replicant’s awareness of itself, as well as throwing doubt onto the idea that what makes us distinctly human is our ability to empathise. After saving Deckard from certain death (itself a clear indication of the empathy that he holds) Batty states; ‘I've seen things you people wouldn't believe’. By taking note of the linguistics used in this soliloquy, the use of personal pronouns specifies that the replicants are conscious beings that are aware that they think and aware of what they experience. This idea is furthered by a previous self-identification made by Batty: We’re no computers Sebastian, we’re physical’. This evidently shows the self-awareness held by the replicants, as they distinguish themselves from inanimate computers. If we take Locke’s suggestion of what makes a person; ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self’[3], then it is clear that these replicants qualify for personhood. Peter Singer’s distinctions of personhood go beyond experience, weakening the importance of emotions in making you a person; ‘There are many beings who are sentient and capable of experiencing pleasure and pain, but are not rational and self-conscious and so not persons’.[4] These arguments detail how through self-identification and self-consciousness Roy has personhood, despite him not being biologically identical with humanity. I however think that experience should be examined in relation artificial sentience. We have established that Roy and the other replicants in the film are aware of themselves and what they have done, can they feel?
Roy continues: ‘I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate’. Expressing that he has experienced these events leads me to question to what extent he can experience such things, as Roy’s brain is a construction of his programming. In discussing Qualia (the subjective component of sense perceptions) Dennet provides an analogy of a wine-taster, contending that if an intelligent system was devised that, upon input, could accurately describe a wine, then ‘it seems that it would never have, and enjoy, what we do when we taste a wine’.[5] He furthers this by saying that the conscious mind is not just the place where witnessed colours and smells are, but it is where the appreciating happens. Dennet suggests that not only must you be a thinking thing, as humans go above that, stating that appreciation ‘is the ultimate arbiter of why anything matters’. Appreciation here for humans is the difference between the series of causal chains that a computer would use to elicit a response. Ethically therefore, responsibility of the replicants is non-existent, as in a sense they are not performing actions, the ‘ones and zeros’ are. Nevertheless, even human consciousnesses can be reduced to physical events in the brain; where a mental event like pain or a taste sensation mirrors a physical event in the central nervous system.[6] So to this extent our brains function in the same way.
He concludes: ‘All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die’. The very fact that Roy considers his death and accepts it is the defining factor when in determining whether or not he can be considered human, closing the gap between machine and man. No other being that we consider to be alive is aware of the concept of death, or knows that it is going to die. Heidegger states ‘The mortals are the human beings. They are called mortals because they can die. To die means to be capable of death as death.’[7], it is replicants too whose lives are lived as ‘being towards death’, in that lies Roy’s humanity.[8] Blade Runner obviously helps us understand the topic of philosophy in that it presents and demonstrates concepts of what it means to live, and necessarily die. The replicants are extreme cases of humanity; from their super-intelligence, and super-agility, to their exacerbated mortality. By highlighting Roy’s perception of himself we can not only examine his relation to life, but necessarily examine what it means to be a human.
[1] Amy Coplan and David Davies (ed.), Blade Runner (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2015) p1
[2] Berys Gaut, ‘Elegy In LA: Blade Runner, Empathy and Death, in Blade Runner, ed. by Amy Coplan, and David Davies pp31-46
[3] Jeff Speaks, ‘Locke’s psychological theory of personal identity’, in <www3.nd.edu> [accessed 24th November 2017]
[4] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics, (Cambridge University Press, 1993) p101 <https://books.google.co.uk> [accessed 20th November 2017]
[5] Daniel C. Dennet, Consciousness Explained, (Boston: Allen Lane, 1993) pp21-42
[6] Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is almost certainly False, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) p39
[7] Martin Heidegger ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. Hofstadter (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1971) p4 < http://www.arch.mcgill.ca> [accessed 30th November 2017]
[8] Peter Atterton ‘’More Human Than Human’ Blade Runner and Being-Toward-Death’, in Blade Runner, ed. by Amy Coplan, and David Davies pp46-68