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ACF#18: Blade Runner
This week, the podcast is about Blade Runner. Pete Spiliakos has a few things to say you may not have heard before, starting with slavery in the New World. The old question debated by Bartolomeo de Las Casas in the case of the Indians comes up, in this instance, about the replicants: Do they have souls? I bring up the question of what scientific power does to our world in making it wholly artificial — the heavens are replicated on earth in this story, and it takes some guessing about whether humanity can survive the transformation.
We also talk about the noir detective genre; the use of sentimentality toward pets to prove humanity; the mortality that constitutes us as we are; and how much of our being we are having replicated when we throw off they yoke of work.
I didn’t know about the unicorn being added, and in fact I can barely remember the original ending. I bought the director’s cut thinking it was the usual 27 seconds of never before seen footage deal, and not a reworking of the story.
A lot of great insights — as usual. Thanks TT and Peter.
I’m torn now between going with my son-in-law today or watching the original first. We had already planned to go today. How important is the tie in to the earlier movie which I haven’t seen in decades?
Not at all important. Go! It’s better to see the original afterward, actually!
& send my regards to the s-in-l!
[BTW, very minor point: evidently there is a noise filter being used in the process somewhere and when your voices stop between sentences or paragraphs (a timing issue only) the signal drops to the floor (completely turns off) and there is an unpleasant disconnect in my ears. The filter needs to pass the room “color” (from all rooms being recorded) and only be used for controlling the other sources of noise. I don’t think compressors have this fault — I believe it only happens with noise filters but I’m an amateur and don’t know exactly what it is that’s happening and so I want to pass this request on to your sound guys for better listen-ability.]
Thanks — I hate to miss it on the big screen so I don’t want to delay any more.
Will do.
Evening Titus and Pete,
On the question of who is human, can one be an adult human without having been a child? In the world where evolution exists, no. But what if we could make adults, what would be the result, one, for example, language would change and become more simple, and less cluttered with irregularities. But this really does not address the function of childhood. Childhood is not just to fill our minds with memories, it is the platform from which we become adults. We can no more become adults without childhood than we can talk and hear normally if we get a cochlear implant as an adult. To imagine the nature of a human as a constructed organic print-out, and to imagine that this print-out human would be just like us but without childhood memories and on the other hand stronger, is a jumbled SciFi fantasy, and not thought provoking. There is a confusion of problems, if we can make these machine humans with built in socialization software, we could program in any aspect. We could program them to see their lives as just a vapor and that their short service was noble in an of itself. This unaddressed confusion also means that the insight into the nature of man and his history of slavery or genocide is thin. How is it that we can create reasons for killing those humans that we have put in certain categories is not insightfully examined. We do not have to go back into the history of slavery (today’s most satisfying Western guilt) for this question to be pointed, how about last week so to speak, in Rwanda, Yugoslavia, North Korea, Syria, we see we are comfortable with the deaths of these innocents. We have placed them into categories where their deaths are accepted.
I liked the movie even though (here it comes Titus) there was no singing an dancing, the philosophical questions are too ragged for my taste.
You could see it as a technology where the state of the art is still in progress. The idea of giving them memories at all was spoken of in a way that suggested it was an innovation, not part of the original program. What you’re suggesting could very well be a solution to the problems they were having with the replicants. They just haven’t gotten there yet.
Or maybe it was just badly written.
Evening Judge Mental,
Imagine that the replicants were programed to serve with no trace of rebellion and happily walk off this replicant coil at the end of their time. Also imagine the the humans began to ask themselves if they were loosing their own souls by having made such servants. Wouldn’t that place our own morality under the microscope more clearly. To me the question what is a human confounds the question of what is moral, leaving both questions the worse for their blending. I do think it is a brilliant movie, creating a world which one does not write off as just SciFi.
Two thoughts: first, given that replicants are meat, genetically engineered human, any talk of programming is going to fuzzier than what you could do with an actual robot. And also, I think making them organic human was central to the story. If you can’t tell the difference, are they ‘human’? If they are ‘human’, can you enslave them?
So the movie seems to be saying, however powerful the technology, it will run into the irreducible character of experience. You then can no longer control a being.
The movie also seems to be saying, the Tyrell motto, more human than human, is an inexpungible human longing–but being human is the best there is for us, even if people themselves stop believing it.
I think the questions of morality & humanity are tied up because of the temptation to hate ourselves. The Cute-animals internet & the singularity internet show what the many & the few experience as temptations to escape humanity.
What if the replicants were governed by Asimov’s three laws of robotics?
They wouldn’t be human, they would be slaves, and they story wouldn’t be as interesting. Asimov’s robot stories almost always involve the three laws going haywire in some way.
It’s been a long time since I read We can Build You. The replicants are human?
Yeah, like all the animals are; genetically engineered, artificially grown.
Pretty much. The laws would apply to themselves, too. There are replicants in the movie who don’t know they’re replicants. They at least think they’re human. They seem very human…
Evening Titus and Judge Mental,
I take your points about these organic creatures, and I agree that morality, agency are woven into being a human, my argument is that the structure of our puzzle is muddy. How did these organic print outs become so socialized that they are indistinguishable from humans, how were they given vocabulary, logic, thoughts, affect? However these characteristics were created, other characteristics could have been created and there is no inherent human aspect which is imbedded with a print out human which we have any reason to believe is by necessity unchangeable, and if it is so what is it, how did it get there, and why can’t it be altered. An Azimovian puzzle would have worked more convincingly, where does the replicant/human interface break down, where does the programming fall short, eye contact, sarcasm, jokes, aesthetic taste. The movie is assuming all of this is fine, we can’t really tell which is which, if that is the case then the problems are all arbitrary inventions and as such are not part of a logic that exposes the question of what is a human, and how should humans think about their living creations.
Evening Titus,
More important than my nit-picking is that it is a great pleasure to hear you and your friends talk about anything. Thanks for all of the thoughtful commentary from “Lives of Others” to “Blade Runner” and on and on. The commentary is always thought provoking even if there is no singing and dancing.
I prefer this view. Asimov was not a good thinker about human things. This movie shows a good mind because it starts from where you & I start: How things look to us, what we can experience of them. In Asimov books, things go bad because of a smarmy, arrogant attitude, only to be replaced by another smarmy, arrogant attitude, once the pat answer comes. Here, you have you ask yourself as you do: How did we end up with this?
Well, the story is really & truly right that we want our computers to imitate or replicate us. We want them to do know us better than we know ourselves–from recommendations on Amazon to life satisfaction from an Apple gadget.
So all these questions emerge: How much do they replicate?
& how well do we know ourselves?
The movie is also true to our social situation–Apple did not predict that the iPhone would have the effect on America it has; nor did Amazon predict it would end up as it has. Corporations do not know how they affect our society in advance; nor are they truly in control of their products.
So the story as a mystery replicates our problem with technology: We want change, but we’re scared of what it might change…
Very interesting discussion. I can’t say as I have much to add, for the movie never really grabbed me, but I do appreciate the additional perspective.
Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes. So goes the body. But the soul occupies the body for a time, and the soul is not made, it was created, and exists beyond the death of the body. Why shouldn’t the soul be able to occupy a suitable body, even if not made naturally? The body needs to be sufficiently complex to be a suitable abode for a soul to experience life in the physical world. That sufficiency doesn’t exist in the real world today, but it might, someday. It only exists in science fiction today.
Watching the 4k blueray edition of Ghost in the Shell (which feels a lot like an updated version of Blade Runner) yesterday, I thought of the irony devoted in so much sci-fi of synthesizing a living body artificially. So much energy devoted just to recreating the miracle that nature manages everyday. What would be the purpose of repeating what nature already does?
Another academic with whom I’ve corresponded about this movie is Mr. Andrew Norris, who has a fine essay on the movie & an even better lecture (fewer discussions of modern philosophers…)I’ll give you his remarks on the Blake quote from the movie:
If you happen to like more abstract philosophizing, here’s the lecture:
To note: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danidiplacido/2017/08/09/harrison-ford-and-ridley-scott-are-still-arguing-about-blade-runner/#3516b6805f95
Evening Titus,
I can’t find a better response to the problems I see in the movie than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJaH54BKO2Y, I also think that the “Hoosier Hot Shots” recorded a better version of this song.
In the 1982 theatrical release Deckard makes a passing reference to his ex-wife…that she called him ‘Sushi’ – dead fish. Not likely that he’d be a replicant and permitted to marry a human.
Have been watching the 1982 version this morning…in two years the world is supposed to have flying cars, replicants and off-world colonies since it takes place two years from now. Of course, in Kubrick and Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey we should have had a massive commercial space station and colonies on the Moon. Sixteen years hence and still nada. Maybe if Newt had been elected president. :-)
OH – be still my heart!
It occurs to me that the most virulent detractors of the Donald were also anti-Newtrons.
Betcha they wish they could get a do-over on that one.
Yes, my suspicion of the people on our side who worked to get Hillary elected started in the late 1990s and was “woke” during the 2012 campaign. Now Trump has flushed them all out of the brush and into the open.