Philosophy Now Forum

What philosophical questions can I get from the blade runner movie

Is this some homework you want us to help you with?

What does it mean to be a person?

What is a person?

Is personhood defined properly by others or by the (presumed) person him- or her-self?

Thread doesn't belong here... Anyways, Henry summed it up well enough.

I refuse to accept Deckard is a replicant, so there could be a deeper theme of denial running through this movie. Maybe what forces us to ignore certain realities in order to finally move on?

I prefer to think he was a replicant...his being one highlights the questions I posted up-thread.

Try to write a description of a human being for a non-human, it's not as easy as you might think. Science fiction writers have been struggling with this issue for years.

why there is something rather than nothing?

yagmursozluk wrote:why there is something rather than nothing?

Whilst its my favourite question, where is this discussed in the film?

yagmursozluk wrote:why there is something rather than nothing?

...because nothing is even more inconceivable than something aside which there is always something hiding in nothing. Personally, I prefer nothing over something since the something you get is not usually what you wanted in the first place. The human race is a perfect example of a spiral staircase hinged on nothing and going down.

henry quirk wrote:
What is a person?

95% asshole and 5% human.

Dubious wrote:

henry quirk wrote:
What is a person?

95% asshole and 5% human.

You just physically described my ideal lover!

It's largely about the Turing test - is there a level of operation where machines will have genuine animal-like experiences?

Love the movie but I don't think it's realistic. Another interesting idea in the film was how Tyrell contrasted living fast and dying young with living slowly but for longer.

Greta wrote:It's largely about the Turing test - is there a level of operation where machines will have genuine animal-like experiences?

Love the movie but I don't think it's realistic. Another interesting idea in the film was how Tyrell contrasted living fast and dying young with living slowly but for longer.

Turing test is about computability. Chinese room is more in line with what you're thinking, though that's only about convincing the tester, not the tested.

Dalek Prime wrote:

Greta wrote:It's largely about the Turing test - is there a level of operation where machines will have genuine animal-like experiences?

Love the movie but I don't think it's realistic. Another interesting idea in the film was how Tyrell contrasted living fast and dying young with living slowly but for longer.

Turing test is about computability. Chinese room is more in line with what you're thinking, though that's only about convincing the tester, not the tested.

Thanks Dalek - I hadn't heard of the Chinese room idea before. Searle would see replicants as unrealistic because they clearly do experience their lives. Then again, we all thought the movie was unrealistic - didn't we? :)

Even if it's theoretically possible to create perfect simulants, by the time humans would be capable of making them, they themselves would probably not be recognisably human any more. In that case, a perfect AI in the future would be a recreation of the primitive animals that humans once were, probably closer to us than their creators.

Chinese room is an interesting idea, positing AI as just a processing link between two minds - the programmer and whomever is at the interface. Still, as AI interacts and learns it will be influenced ever less than its programmer and more like its environment, just as a child becomes less influenced by its parents.

Also, Searle's view does not acknowledge emergence. It is hypothetically possible that information density and integration can reach a threshold where actual experience occurs. Stars emerge at a certain mass and, similarly, life (as we recognise it) emerges when the processes or organic chemistry reach a certain level of complexity and integration.

Consciousness is obviously similarly emergent, so for me the main questions* are whether the complexity and integration required to achieve consciousness is possible, and also whether silicon and electricity can be used to precisely replicate the connective and erosive processes of carbon, water and sunlight, or if there are special qualities to the natural ingredients that make replication especially forbidding? If so, what might those qualities be?


* aside from whether we will survive that long.