More Human than Human

I watched Blade Runner during Winter Break and it was interesting to see how Ridley Scott, the director, apparently imagined in 1982 the future to be in 2019, with flying cars and replicants, who look like humans but are bioengineered creatures. The movie raises several questions that could be discussed in a Philosophy-blog, but there is one I found particularly interesting: What makes humans human? I am not going to attempt to answer this question, because I feel this is beyond me, since we have been trying to answer this question throughout our first year and as far as I am concerned we didn’t come to an absolute answer, but I would like to share what the movie has to say to this questions. The replicants look like adult humans and are not particularly attractive or so, but they all have superior strength, agility and variable intelligence depending on their model of engineering. But their life span is limited and pre-determined and they lack human emotions. The only way to detect them is to test their emotional responses and empathy by asking them questions. However, their lack of emotions is more and more questioned in the course of the story. The escaped replicants start making their own experiences and added to the memory they got implanted by their creators they develop their own memories and emotions towards them. In the final scene the blade runner, whose job it is to kill the replicants one after the other, fights against one of them and is clearly inferior. The replicant, however, is about to die soon, since his life span is coming to an end and he knows that. Surprisingly, the replicant saves his enemy’s life as he faces his own death. This action seems not to be human, but more human than human. In the end the replicant, the non-human, is the better human being than the “real human”. This interpretation makes it even harder to answer the above stated question. I can only recommend to watch this movie!

(Written: 10th Jan 2010)