Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner is widely regarded as a "masterpiece of modern cinema" and is regularly ranked as one of the great films of all time. Set in a dystopian future where the line between human beings and ‘replicants’ is blurred, the film raises a host of philosophical questions about what it is to be human, the possibility of moral agency and freedom in ‘created’ life forms, and the capacity of cinema to make a genuine contribution to our (...) engagement with these kinds of questions. This volume of specially commissioned chapters systematically explores and addresses these issues from a philosophical point of view. Beginning with a helpful introduction, the seven chapters examine the following questions: How is the theme of death explored in Blade Runner and with what implications for our understanding of the human condition? What can we learn about the relationship between emotion and reason from the depiction of the ‘replicants’ in Blade Runner? How are memory, empathy, and moral agency related in Blade Runner? How does the style and ‘mood’ of Blade Runner bear upon its thematic and philosophical significance? Is Blade Runner a meditation on the nature of film itself? Including a brief biography of the director and a detailed list of references to other writings on the film, Blade Runner is essential reading for students – indeed anyone - interested in philosophy and film studies. Contributors: Colin Allen, Peter Atterton, Amy Coplan, David Davies, Berys Gaut, Stephen Mulhall, C. D. C. Reeve. (shrink)

Who but a nostalgic reactionary would take an interest today in the version of Blade Runner that was originally released in 1982? With its anchoring voice-over and ‘happy ending,’ the film appeared to retreat from posthumanist subjectivity into a humanist shelter, where the lines between human and inhuman are firm and clear.In the wake of Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992) and Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), the ‘impostor’ that has been on the (...) loose since 1982 appears to have little hope of survival. The ‘real thing’ is apparently here, unafraid to depict authentic posthumanist subjectivity.To approach the earlier version of the film in this manner is to ignore the flickering of subjectivity running through the text. This essay offers, therefore, a reading of the 1982 version that draws out how, regardless of its yearning for humanism, the film baffles the anthropocentric understanding of subjectivity. I am not seeking to rescue Blade Runner in the name of nostalgia, and my point is not that the version released in 1982 is actually the ‘authentic’ text. My argument, rather, is that Blade Runner frustrates all attempts to limit its depiction of subjectivity to the space of humanism. (shrink)

Widely acclaimed upon its release as a future classic, Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is visually stunning, philosophically profound, and a provocative extension of the story in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner. Containing specially commissioned chapters by a roster of international contributors, this fascinating collection explores philosophical questions that abound in Blade Runner 2049, including: -/- What distinguishes the authentically "human" person? How might natality condition one’s experience of being-in-the-world? How might shared memories feature in (...) the constitution of personal identities? What happens when created beings transcend the limits intended in their design? What (if anything) is it like to be a hologram? Can artificial beings participate in genuinely romantic relationships? How might developing artificial economics impact our behaviour as prosumers? What are the implications of techno-human enhancement in an era of surveillance capitalism? -/- Including a foreword by Denis Villeneuve, Blade Runner 2049: A Philosophical Exploration is essential reading for anyone interested in philosophy, film studies, philosophy of mind, psychology, gender studies, and conceptual issues in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. (shrink)

Thanks to its brilliant melding of film noir, science fiction, and cyberpunk motifs, not to mention its stirring music and unprecedented visual density, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982/2007) has become an influential cultural icon. What really sets the film apart from most movies, however, are the ways in which it encourages philosophical questions. Virtually all commentators agree that “What does it mean to be human?” – understood as asking something like “What characterizes the real (or authentic) human being?” (...) – is the central philosophical question the film raises. Attempting to answer that question can be a fertile approach to the film, with moral implications for how to think about the qualifications for inclusion in the human community. That is not, however, the only way to appreciate the philosophical significance of Blade Runner. The film also encourages viewers to ponder the question, “What fundamental experiences constitute the uniquely human mode of self-consciousness?” Showing how the latter question leads to a richer appreciation of Blade Runner as philosophy is the aim of this chapter. (shrink)

What is the “miracle” that protein farmer Sapper Morton mentions when he says to K: “You never saw a miracle”? It is the transformation of inorganic life into organic life. Rachael, who was a replicant in the old Blade Runner (though falsely believing she is human) gave birth to twins. Tyrell had “perfected procreation,” in the words of Niander Wallace, but his knowledge has been lost. The theme of 2049 revolves around the scientific and philosophical question whether machines (...) can become organic. Is a human only an accumulation of parts or cells, or does the quality of being human denote more than the sum of its parts? Is a bioengineered human a real human or simply a sophisticated machine? Furthermore, the film associates the organic with the real. Real humans as well as real memories are linked to a larger whole. The article reflects these constellations against various philosophical stances. (shrink)

Despite its oft-noted ambiguities, critical reception of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner ; Director's Cut ; Final Cut ) has tended to converge upon seeing it as a futuristic sci-fi film noir whose central concern is what it means to be human, a question that is fraught given the increasingly human-like replicants designed and manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation for human use on off-world colonies. Within the terms of this way of seeing things a great deal of discussion has (...) been devoted to putative criteria of being human and the question whether the once-retired blade runner, Rick Deckard, is or is not a replicant. I aim to explore a radically different course of interpretation, which sees the film in fundamentally moral and religious terms. Put in the starkest light, the film is not about what makes us human but whether we can be saved from ourselves, from our terrifying inhumanity, our moral blindness. (shrink)

This article examines K's messianic becoming in Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), tracing his transformation from a replicant officer to a man with his name. While current scholarship has primarily focused on K's development of human traits beyond implanted memories, I demonstrate that K's transformation unfolds through three epiphanic events. These events, paralleling three differencing repetitions of the name Joe, culminate in an uncanny caesura that fundamentally disrupts K's problematic epistemic relations to the world, his hologram partner (...) Joi and himself. Building on Gilles Deleuze's cinema aesthetics, this article delineates how the film's symmetrical yet dis-symmetrical structure of chiasm and audiovisual counterpoints reinforce these repeated yet differentiated narrative ruptures. This filmic strategy creates a complex temporal framework that invites the viewer to participate in K's movement from programmed existence to deterritorialized becoming. The analysis further engages with Jacques Derrida's concept of messianicity without messianism to explore how this aesthetic experience, enriched by the film's biblical allusions and unique musical motifs, suggests a post-digital rethinking of what re-appropriates the human as human. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to argue that Blade Runner: The Final Cut (Ridley Scott, 2007) has cognitive value which is inseparable from its value as a work of cinema. I introduce the cinematic philosophy debate in §1. §2 sets out my position: that the Final Cut affirms the proposition there is no necessary relation between humanity and human beings. I outline the combination of cinematic depiction with distinctive features of the narrative’s peripeteia in §3. In §4, (...) I explain the cognitive value of the peripeteia. (shrink)

The 1982 film, Blade Runner, presents many questions conceming the position and relevance of the human being in the postmodern epoch. The audience is confronted with androids, called replicants, incredibly handsome "beings" whose language rises at times to poetic beauty, while the humans in the film are embarrassing physical and moral examples of the species. With whom will the audience identify or sympathize, the human or the simulacrum? The film further complicates this issue by incorporating traditional Christian symbols (...) and language in relation to the replicants. The film seems to suggest that consciousness is the defining characteristic of humanness, whether one speaks of an organic human being or a replicant. Current debate between scientists, philosophers, and theologians centers on the question of consciousness and its relationship to the brain and, for some, the soul This essay addresses the dilemmas in the film, while keeping in mind the central question: What is a human being? (shrink)

In this essay I provide a reading of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner that focuses upon the question of the kind of creatures the Replicants are depicted as being, and the meaning that depiction should have for us. I draw upon Stanley Cavell's account of the problem of other minds to argue that the empathy test is in fact a mode of resisting the acknowledgment of others. And I draw upon Martin Heidegger's account of authenticity and mortality to argue (...) that this acknowledgment is crucial if one would become human. The film does not so much suggest that Replicants are, as such, human, but rather that humanity is won through the encounter with the inauthentic. (shrink)

This paper sets Scott’s original film Blade Runner (1982) and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ in order to provide critical analyses of both films with respect to some complex configurations of the body along two axes: bio-politics and the spectacle. We offer a reading of these configurations by focusing on the relationships between the human (organic), the non-human (android) and the immaterial (holographic); the eye (optics), the hand (haptics), and aesthetics; slavery, instrumental (...) labour and free-play; the politics of bodies and of memories; the potentialities of revolution and the transmission of ‘tradition of the oppressed’. In this, we foreground two seemingly marginal characters – J. F. Sebastian and Ana Stelline. These ‘little people’ embody and inhabit the convolutions of Blade Runner’s ‘more human than human’ world through ‘free use’ of the body and playfulness which, superficially innocent, nevertheless bear within them the promise of radical political change. (shrink)

This article critically engages with Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049, focusing on the relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. First, it discusses the connections between the film and the shifting status of biopolitics becoming thanatopolitics, prompted by advances in synthetic biology. It argues that the film’s preoccupation with the reproductive capacity of its replicants retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as (...) normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of devaluing of some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons. Second, and relatedly, the film reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics. The film thus doubles as a medium in which to grasp the centrality of colonial and racial logics to the ongoing real subsumption of life by capital, and the ways in which it continues to shape the present. (shrink)

Introduction -- Being human -- Persons -- Identity -- Consciousness -- Freedom -- Being good -- God -- Death -- Time and meaning.

Abstract:Frantz Fanon is best known as the author of two monographs: Black Skin, White Masks (1952), a literary and psychological account of Black experience and anti-Black racism, and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), a political manifesto arguing for the need to respond to colonial oppression with revolutionary violence. His critics contend that the disciplinary division evinces a failure to successfully integrate the psychological with the political, which detracts from his intellectual legacy. In this article, I employ criminologist Jon Frauley’s (...) theory of the analytic value of fictional film to demonstrate that Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) not only provides an empirical referent for Fanon’s psychological and political theories but also reveals an underlying coherence that is not always obvious. I begin with a summary of Frauley’s theory and then alternate between Fanon’s theories and the way in which the film provides those theories with empirical referents. My conclusion, which highlights an essential continuity between individual transcendence and collective action in Fanon, draws on both Blade Runner 2049 and the military tactic of pseudo operations, which was employed to devastating effect against anti-colonial struggles in Africa in the second half of the twentieth century. (shrink)

The chapter will look into the status of the artificial humans in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) by considering the manner in which their inhumanity correlates with their eroticization as well as the visual and tactile qualities of the film itself. It will be argued that much of the film’s appeal lies in its sensual complexity. Like the Replicants it depicts, the movie seems to have a deeper nature than it seems at first sight (or viewing). The film’s (...) attraction in the eyes of the public should not be taken for granted, since it has undergone a dynamic change from the time of its release in theaters to its achievement of the status of a cult classic on home video media. The chapter will suggest the reasons for this phenomenon. Moreover, the chapter will touch upon the eroticization of the Replicants, arguing that who they are is related to what they wear. It will be argued that the artificial humans can be associated with the looks and function of their clothing. By artfully stylizing the presented reality and the characters, using the textures of clothes, plastic, as well as the interplay between light and dark itself, Scott renders the city lifelike, and the Replicants dynamic: rebellious and sensual. (shrink)

"I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulderof Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tanhauser Gate. Allthose… moments will be lost… in time. Like… tears… in rain. Time… to die." . With these lines Roy testifies to his memories and to his death, a death that has, in a sense,already taken place, and one that is, by definition, prohibited. While one cannotexperience one’s own death, death is not strictly a limit (...) on the ‘other side’; it comes to usfrom the grave, haunting our lives here and now. If there is a being-towards-death, there isa death-towards-being, and in this interminable aporia, Roy, the ‘replicant’, testifies toDeckard, the ‘human’ – who might himself be a replicant. Roy gives his memories, and doesnot ask for return. He gives, he dies. And he has become immortal, `tears in rain’ havingbecome the film’s signature to which the fans continue to countersign,attesting to Roy’s testimony. Between the signature and countersignature there is aresonance and an affiliation, to the point, as paradoxical as this may seem, where it cannotbe properly distinguished which came first. Did Roy’s signature call for itscountersignature, or did Roy and the film ‘follow’ the fans? Frankly, there is no‘first’ here. This is not a sequential history. This is a story about ‘humanity’–technology. (shrink)

We introduce a construct called “humanness sensitivity,” which we define as the ability to recognize uniquely human characteristics. To evaluate the construct, we used a “concurrent study design” to conduct an internet-based study with a convenience sample of 42,063 people from 88 countries (52.4% from the U.S. and Canada).We sought to determine to what extent people could identify subtle characteristics of human behavior, thinking, emotions, and social relationships which currently distinguish humans from non-human entities such as bots. Many people were (...) surprisingly poor at this task, even when asked simple questions about human relationships or anatomy. Participants were best at identifying subtle aspects of human cognition and worst at identifying subtle aspects of human communication. Test scores were good predictors of whether someone was employed and modest predictors of other self-reported criterion measures. We also found that people identifying themselves in marginal societal categories (e.g., in the “other” category for gender or sexual orientation) identified themselves as less human and also scored lower on our test. As computers continue to become more human-like, our study suggests that the vast majority of humankind will likely have great difficulty distinguishing them from people. Can methods be devised for improving this ability? Might humanness sensitivity help people to make such distinctions? Will people who excel at differentiating humans and non-human entities—like the “blade runners” in the 1982 and 2017 feature films—someday hold a special place in society? (shrink)

This article delves into the themes of fictional androids and (im)mortality portrayed in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982) and the HBO television series Westworld (2016–2022) created by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan. Throughout the history of cinema, there has been a significant presence of robots, a theme that has been explored in various ways such as the “Maschinenmensch” from the 1927 film Metropolis directed by Fritz Lang, or the recent high-tech Ava from the 2014 film Ex Machina directed (...) by Alex Garland. Given the emergent interest in an interdisciplinary perspective of the relationship between films, AI, and death, I propose a posthuman thanato-film analysis of complex AI characters such as replicant Roy in Blade Runner and hosts Dolores and Maeve in Westworld as representations of self-aware AI androids. This selection is driven by two main reasons: firstly, film itself acts as a cognitive apparatus, prompting viewers to engage with its ideas and perspectives, often transcending individual human thought, and secondly, the depiction of androids as sentient beings within the cinematic realm serves as a direct exploration of mortality and the existential contemplation of death. Therefore, the objective of this article is to explore a potential intersection between film and AI regarding the themes of death and (im)mortality. This exploration aims to investigate the relevance of the concept of death to fictional android machines, which serve as innovative entities capable of interaction and learning. These machines not only exhibit seemingly eternal qualities but also possess the capability to terminate the lives of other living beings. (shrink)

Seventy-five years before Niander Wallace brutally kills a newborn replicant in Blade Runner 2049, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research was formed. Its formation led to the creation of the Belmont Report, which established guidelines for the treatment of human subjects. Wallace uses a scalpel as the instrument of disposal, of the newborn replicant, stabbing her in the womb, thereby ending her life moments after wishing her a happy birthday. The (...) conjunction of 2049 and the Belmont Report leads us to important questions concerning biomedical research, given that replicants are “bioengineered humans.” For example, is the “defective” replicant a human subject, and thus protected by research guidelines, or is she a product or consumer good that did not meet expectations? (shrink)

This chapter studies Ridley Scott's _Blade Runner_ (1982). In this movie, Deckard is a blade runner, a cop charged with capturing rebel androids (replicants). To find out whether a suspected replicant is really a replicant, Deckard deploys a sort of lie detector test: he poses emotionally loaded questions to them and uses a device to measure a telltale physiological response. Deckard's hard-cop detachment is deeply incompatible with the kinds of relationships—even romantic ones—that he himself carries on with replicants. (...) This brings us to the argument of the movie: in treating others as if a physiological response is called for to decide if they count or not—in taking up a detached attitude that is willing to call their very humanity into question—Deckard convincingly puts his own humanity in jeopardy. This is driven home when we learn that Deckard himself, unbeknownst to him, is probably a replicant. Although Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly do not discuss _Blade Runner_ in their important book _All Things Shining_, they might have. Deckard's is just the sort of perversion they investigate. Dreyfus and Kelly warns us not only of the dangers of our hubris but of its basic incoherence. (shrink)

Memory is everywhere in Blade Runner 2049. From the dead tree that serves as a memorial and a site of remembrance (“Who keeps a dead tree?”), to the ‘flashbulb’ memories individuals hold about the moment of the ‘blackout’, when all the electronic stores of data were irretrievably erased (“everyone remembers where they were at the blackout”). Indeed, the data wiped out in the blackout itself involves a loss of memory (“all our memory bearings from the time, they were (...) all damaged in the blackout”). Memory, and lack of it, permeates place, where from the post-blackout Las Vegas Deckard remembers it as somewhere you could “forget your troubles.” Memory is a commodity, called upon and consumed by the Wallace Corporation, purchased from the memory-maker, Dr Ana Stelline, who constructs and implants “the best memories” in replicants so as to instil in them real human responses. Memory is ubiquitous in Blade Runner 2049, involving humans, replicants, objects, and machines. Even “God,” we are told, “remembered Rachael.” Nowhere, though, is the depiction of memory more important than in the attempt to solve a question of identity. Officer K has a memory of his past. Even though he knows it is an implant, it is a memory he is emotionally attached to, frequently narrating it to Joi, his digital girlfriend. But it is a memory that starts to puzzle and trouble him. When K discovers the remains of a dead replicant, a female NEXUS-7, he uncovers a secret—this replicant was pregnant and died during childbirth, a discovery that could “break the world.” K is charged with hunting down the child and making the problem disappear. Yet as K starts seeking answers to the question of the child’s identity he gets inextricably caught up in the mystery. Is he merely Officer K, or is he Joe, the miracle child of Rachael and Deckard? The answer to this question hinges on K’s memory. But is the memory genuine? Is the memory his? Blade Runner 2049 encourages us to think deeply about the nature of memory, identity, and the relation between them. Indeed, the film does not just serve as a starting point for thinking about philosophical issues related to memory and identity. Rather, as we show in this chapter, the film seems to offer a view on these philosophical issues. Blade Runner 2049 offers us a view of memory as spread out over people, objects, and the environment, and it shows us that memory’s role in questions of identity goes beyond merely accurately recalling one’s past. Identity depends not on memory per se, but partly on what we use memory for. (shrink)

In the film classic Blade Runner, the story explores the notion of personal identity through that of carefully crafted androids. Can an android have a personality; can androids be persons? The title of the original story by Philip K. Dick is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The story suggests that our sense of being a person depends on our having memories that connect us with our childhood. In the movie, the androids are only a couple of years (...) old, but have adult bodies. To complete them as persons they are given simulated memories of childhood. Some psychiatrists have decided that even humans dream only of electric sheep. I explore how Popper’s world 3 can help to defend a notion of personhood that can be used to criticize the thesis that persons are simply complex physical processes and that all their serious life-problems can be conceptualised as a form of physical illness. (shrink)

The enactive approach provides a perspective on human bodies in their organic, sensorimotor, social, and linguistic dimensions, but many fundamental issues still remain unaddressed. A crucial desideratum for a theory of human bodies is that it be able to account for concrete human becoming. In this article I show that enactive theory possesses resources to achieve this goal. Being an existential structure, human becoming is best approached by a series of progressive formal indications. I discuss three standpoints on human becoming (...) as open, indeterminate, and therefore historical using the voices of Pico della Mirandola, Gordon W. Allport, and Paulo Freire. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation we move from an existential to an ontological register in looking at modes of embodied becoming. His scheme of interpretation of the relation between modes of individuation allows us to understand human becoming in terms of a tendency to neotenization. I compare this ontology with an enactive theoretical account of the dimensions of embodiment, finding several compatibilities and complementarities. Various forms of bodily unfinishedness in enaction fit the Simondonian ontology and the existential analysis, where transindividuality corresponds to participatory sense-making and Freire’s joint becoming of individuals and communities correlates with the open tensions in linguistic bodies between incorporation and incarnation of linguistic acts. I test some of this ideas by considering the plausibility of artificial bodies and personal becoming from an enactive perspective, using the case of replicants in the film Blade Runner. The conclusion is that any kind of personhood, replicants included, requires living through an actual history of concrete becoming. (shrink)

In recent years, the question of human moral duties toward robots has gained momentum in scholarly research due to great advancements in the fields of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. Although the current machines fall short of the level of sophistication and human likeness portrayed in science fiction (e.g., the Westworld series or the movie Blade Runner 2049), they are increasingly assuming roles in our society in various important areas, including manufacturing, healthcare, education, customer service, entertainment, and many (...) others. This book makes a meaningful contribution to the ongoing philosophical discourse surrounding the moral treatment of robots. By providing a rigorous and systematic examination of key moral concepts (e.g., moral rights, moral status, moral considerability, and moral value) within the context of robotics and exploring other closely related issues (e.g., the moral implications of artificial consciousness and the associated epistemic challenges), this book offers fresh insights into the necessary and sufficient conditions for machine moral status and rights. (shrink)

:Within the literature surrounding nonhuman animals on the one hand and cognitively disabled humans on the other, there is much discussion of where beings that do not satisfy the criteria for personhood fit in our moral deliberations. In the future, we may face a different but related problem: that we might create beings that not only satisfy but exceed these criteria. The question becomes whether these are minimal criteria, or hierarchical, such that those who fulfill them to greater degree should (...) be afforded greater consideration. This article questions the validity and necessity of drawing divisions among beings that satisfy the minimum requirements for personhood; considering how future beings—intelligent androids, synthezoids, even alternate-substrate sentiences—might fit alongside the “baseline” human. I ask whether these alternate beings ought to be considered different to us, and why this may or may not matter in terms of a notion of “human community.” The film Blade Runner, concerned in large part with humanity and its key synthezoid antagonist Roy Batty, forms a framing touchstone for my discussion. Batty is stronger, faster, more resilient, and more intelligent than Homo sapiens. His exploits, far beyond the capability of normal humans, are contrasted with his frailty and transient lifespan, his aesthetic appreciation of the sights he has seen, and his burgeoning empathy. Not for nothing does his creator within the mythos term him “more human than human.”. (shrink)

Drawing on a wide range of films from around the world, and the ideas of a diverse selection of thinkers from Plato and Descartes to Marcuse and Foucault, _Philosophy Goes to the Movies_ introduces and discusses central areas of philosophical concern, including: *the theory of knowledge *the self and personal identity *ethics *social and political philosophy *critical thinking Ideal for beginners, this book guides the reader through philosophy using lively and illuminating cinematic examples including _A Clockwork Orange_, _Mulholland Drive_, _Blade (...) Runner_, _Modern Times_, _Wings of Desire_ and _The Lord of the Rings_. This fully revised and updated second edition features an expanded introduction providing guidance on teaching and discussing philosophy through film, as well as new material on notable philosophers such as Rousseau, Aquinas and Nietzche, and discussion of a wide range of recent films. (shrink)

The Philosopher at the End of the Universe demonstrates how anyone can grasp the basic concepts of philosophy while still holding a bucket of popcorn. Mark Rowlands makes philosophy utterly relevant to our everyday lives and reveals its most potent messages using nothing more than a little humor and the plotlines of some of the most spectacular, expensive, high-octane films on the planet. Learn about: The Nature of Reality from The Matrix, Good and Evil from Star Wars, Morality from Aliens, (...) Personal Identity from Total Recall, The Mind-Body dilemma from Terminator, Free Will from Minority Report, Death and the Meaning of Life from Blade Runner, and much more. A search for knowledge about ourselves and the world around us with a star-studded cast that includes: Tom Cruise, Plato, Harrison Ford, Immanuel Kant, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigourney Weaver, René Descartes, and Keanu Reeves. Rowlands anchors his discussions in easily understood everyday terms and relates them in a manner easy to identify with. Interspersed with a ready joke or two, he wonderfully explains why those SciFi movies we love so much are much deeper than they appear to be on the surface. Mark Rowlands's entertaining and stimulating guide is perfect for anyone searching for knowledge of the world around us. If Keanu can understand Descartes surely everyone can. (shrink)

A timely volume that uses science fiction as a springboard to meaningful philosophical discussions, especially at points of contact between science fiction and new scientific developments. Raises questions and examines timely themes concerning the nature of the mind, time travel, artificial intelligence, neural enhancement, free will, the nature of persons, transhumanism, virtual reality, and neuroethics Draws on a broad range of books, films and television series, including _The Matrix, Star Trek, Blade Runner, Frankenstein, Brave New World, The Time (...) Machine,_ and _Back to the Future_ Considers the classic philosophical puzzles that appeal to the general reader, while also exploring new topics of interest to the more seasoned academic. (shrink)

The title of the paper is an allusion to Philip K. Dick’s book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which inspired the movie Blade Runner) and aims, at once, to highlight the (possible) relation between Criminal Law and Artificial Intelligence in its two dimensions of criminal protection (hence the reference to ‘electric crimes’) and criminal liability (hence the reference to the androids’ dreams), within the background problem of knowing whether Artificial Intelligence is truly mind. The purpose of this (...) paper is, precisely, to identify whether there is indeed such relation, in those two dimensions, and making use of a mediating concept, the concept of ‘mind (or ‘mentality’). I argue that Artificial Intelligence “specimens” do not have a mind and, therefore, its protection and regulation by Criminal Law is impaired. I conclude by presenting a choice between a total irrelevance model of Artificial Intelligence to Criminal Law and a model in which Artificial Intelligence emerges as object and subject of Criminal Law by analogy with persons. (shrink)

The discussion around artificial empathy and its ethics is not a new one. This concept can be found in classic science fiction media such as Star Trek and Blade Runner and is also pondered on in more recent interactive media such as the video game Detroit: Become Human. In most depictions, emotions and empathy are presented as the key to being human. Misselhorn's new publication shows that these futuristic stories are becoming more and more relevant today. We must (...) ask ourselves whether we are socially responsible enough to deal with the consequences of artificial empathy/awareness. If we create artificial life, we should be prepared to treat them accordingly as living beings with respect and no longer categorize them as objects. The author does not rule out the idea that machines might one day become more human than humans themselves and that we humans might even lose our own specific cognitive, emotional and social abilities. (shrink)

Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. It claims that while what has been called “postmodernism” has been preoccupied with cybernetic themes, cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic. The Gothic has always enjoyed a peculiarly intimate relation with the (...) fictional. Baudrillard's theories, meanwhile, suggest that, in a period dominated by simulation, fiction has a new cultural role. By putting “theory” into dialogue with “fiction”, the thesis examines Baudrillard's suggestion that the era of cybernetics “puts an end to science fiction, but also to theory, as specific genres”. The version of the Gothic the thesis presents is one stripped of many of its conventional cultural associations; it is a material Gothic.The machinery for re-thinking the Gothic comes from Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Deriving not from the familiar literary sources but from Wilhelm Worringer’s work on “barbarian art”, Deleuze-Guattari’s version of the Gothic departs from any reference to the supernatural. The crucial theme in Worringer, Deleuze-Guattari establish, is that of nonorganic continuum. Following Deleuze-Guattari’s lead, the thesis analyses key cyberpunk texts such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and William Gibson’s Neuromancer in terms of what it calls this “hypematuralist” theme. While these texts have often been analysed in terms of “postmodernism” and “cyberpunk,” they have rarely been discussed in terms of the Gothic. Here, though, it will be shown that these texts, and important precursors, such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, are centrally concerned with the breakdown of the boundary between the animate and the inanimate.. The thesis aims to demonstrate that, in its fixation upon catatonic trance, bodies that do not end at the skin, and agency-without-subjectivity, cyberpunk or “imploded science fiction” converges the Gothic with cybernetics on what, following Gibson, it calls the flatline. The flatline has two important senses, referring to a stale of “unlife” and a condition of radical immanence. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which considers the flatline under a different aspect. Chapter 1 concerns the flatlining of cybernetics and postmodernism; Chapter 2 deals with the flatlining of the body, paying particular attention to the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud concept of the Body without Organs; Chapter 3 focuses upon the flatlining of reproduction, opposing both sexual and mechanical reproduction to Deleuze-Guattari’s idea of propagation; Chapter 4 considers the flatlining of fiction itself in the context of hyperreality. (shrink)

This art-science interaction evokes two ‘neuroimages’. However, the term ‘neuroimage’ does not refer, as usual, to images that emerge from scientific practices that seek to gain insight into the structural and functional properties of brains. Rather, it is meant that the images considered have as their theme neurotechnologies: specifically, those that concern the control of neuroprostheses, and neuroprostheses themselves. The first neuroimage appears in a biosignal sensing cap catalogue, and the second appears in the science fiction film Blade (...) class='Hi'>Runner 2049. While neither neuroimage is actually included in the piece, each is described to the reader before being speculatively analysed, and therefore becomes a ‘mental’ image in the mind’s eye, calling upon the ancient art of ekphrasis. (shrink)

The concept of revolution remains relevant both for social-political debates and for academic studies. But at the same time many left thinkers as well as Neo-Marxist theorists have some problems with this concept, as it is nolonger possible to reflect on revolution in terms of laws of history. For this reason, supporters of revolution consider revolution as a kind of utopian condition. Another difficulty is connected to the fact that today it is no longer possible to make a bet on (...) this or that social class as the subject of revolutionary changes. Utopia once again becomes a helping hand for supporters of radical social transformations. At the same time cinema as well as technological forecasting suggest to researchers that at least in futurology one can consider the possibility of the subject of revolution being not humans but robots, cyborgs, or artificial intelligence. Seen in this light, revolution not just ceases to be a Marxist concept, but it also drops out of left political rhetoric. But what is more important - it becomes a matter of antiutopian phantasies. In this article the author relying on social philosophy and rich empirical material from contemporary sci-fi cinema reflects on the possibility of the revolution of the robots. He wants to understand under what conditions and why can artificial intelligence organize a revolution. He also reflects on the ethical problems connected to exploitation of machines and wide implementation of robotics in everyday human life. A special emphasis is laid on contemporary anti-utopias, as well as on early movies by Ridley Scott "Alien" and "Blade Runner", which, as the author claims, are very good illustrations of robots' disposition to revolutionary activities. (shrink)

Science, technology, and movies have been getting along very well since the beginning of cinema. Old questionable depictions of scientists and technologists have given way to better appreciations on the screen by part of the public. Scientists and technologists have directly or indirectly helped filmmakers by advising them in one way or another in the preparation of their productions. The cinema becomes a meeting point between science, technology, and society represented through the spectators, sometimes offering us an image of technoscience (...) far from reality. The conquests of science and technology are at the service of society, which receives, like all of nature, its benefits, and harms, its positive or negative consequences. It is curious that film makers resort more to the representation of negative aspects than to positive ones, although there is no film worth its salt that does not end up promoting the triumph of good over evil, the positive over the negative, opening a path to the hope. But cinema is entertainment, and it has to let viewers go home full of positive energy. Thus, it was not surprising that in Them! (Douglas, Them!, Warner Bros, 1954) humanity was in danger, because in the end it was going to be a song of hope. Human beings are diversely exposed to science and technology in different contexts and throughout their lives. Our homes, our cities, our work, and our environment are under the control of science and technology and the cinema almost constantly reminds us of this. It is not that a film tells us something that has really happened, but that it could happen, with the subsequent consequences for human beings in relation to what makes us human, what we want to be, or what we can be according to the circumstances, as shown by Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), Gattaca (Andrew Niccol, 1997), or Interstellar (Christopher Nolan, 2014). Nor is it that a film tells us something that has happened to someone, but that it could happen to anyone, although sometimes it is inspired by or tries to reflect what happened to someone, as Erin Brockovich (Steven Soderbergh, 2000) or The Social Network (David Fincher, 2010) with broad environmental or social repercussions that can affect all human beings individually or collectively. We will dedicate this chapter to these five films, after providing a theoretical framework of the interrelation of cinema with Science, Technology and Society. (shrink)

This chapter looks at the other side of the coin—dehumanization—and the processes of devaluating a being (mechanical or organic). I look at three examples of artificial beings: Cylons (Battlestar Galactica), replicants/androids (Blade Runner), and clones (The Island). The role of empathy is discussed, and whether this is a uniquely human feature. I conclude with the ultimate science fiction bogeyman, the Borg (Star Trek), which are set up as a socially acceptable species to dehumanize and vilify.

This paper considers Mulhall’s engagement with Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which he regards as “obsessed” with the question of what it is to be a human being. While Mulhall is surely right in identifying the film as so obsessed with this question, the answer that he develops out of his reading of the film is more problematic. Especially troubling is Mulhall’s enlistment of the concept of acknowledgment as a kind of linchpin for something’s securing human status. The appeal (...) to acknowledgment in this context faces a kind of dilemma: either what is acknowledged already is human (and so acknowledgment is not what secures that being’s humanity) or it is not already human (in which case acknowledging it as human would be a pointless exercise). Mulhall’s appeal also raises questions concerning the status of those who are doing the acknowledging: what secures their human status such that they can acknowledge another being as human (or withhold that acknowledgment)? These questions invite renewed consideration of the skeptical problem of other minds, in particular the issue of whether the replacement of knowledge with acknowledgment concedes too much or too little to the skeptic. (shrink)