Blade Runner: What Does It Means To Be Human

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Being a person, thinking and acting as a Human Being, showing qualities that make us, Human. But what does it mean to be Human? Symbolic cognition, the ability for one entity to show empathetic emotion towards another. ‘Blade Runner’ explores the philosophical themes of what it means to be human, emphasising the difficulties humans have appreciating what makes them human along with the emotional and social complexity necessary to identify a person. The question regarding our humanity, or ‘what it is to be human’ is one of the most important questions to be addressed in Blade Runner, and in today’s society. In this essay I will argue that researching into what it means to ‘be human’ is a quite complex task, because of the various philosophical and biblical concepts - where an individual is a spirt simply experiencing the world in a material form. In order to support my statement, I will give examples of how ‘Blade Runner’ relates to different theoretical frameworks I will discuss in this essay.



Set in the dystopian future of 2019, Rick Deckard, a special police operative known as a ‘Blade Runner’, is given the task of hunting down and killing, or “retiring”, a group of rogue androids (called ‘replicants.’) …show more content…

The premise of the test depends on the assumption that humans feel empathy, and replicants do not. This is ironic, considering that most homo-sapiens characters in the film appear to lack empathy. The line between replicants and real humans gets increasingly blurry over the course of Blade Runner. Rachael and Roy Batty (both replicants) each save Deckard's life - showing that they are so sophisticated they have started to develop very complex emotions, including some level of empathy for Deckard. This goes back into the underlying philosophy of Blade Runner, which is "what makes us

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