Thursday, May 22, 2008

Blade Runner - P.K.Dick


A dystopian future

Blade Runner is based on the science fiction novel by Phillip K. Dick “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.”

Bladerunner is described as the definitive Cyperpunk film & pulls no punches in asking the most troubling questions about artificial intelligence and cloning. What is a human? If it looks just like one, but we made it, can we kill it?

This distinction between humans and replicants underpins a major moral issue.

One of the more dramatic philosophical points made in the movie is that we can’t trust our memories.There is truth in this and that makes it all the more disturbing.Memory, and its reliability, is a major issue in many of Dick's stories. As well as being a major feature of Blade Runner it also plays a crucial role in both Paycheck and Total Recall. We all know that we can forget things that have happened to us, and there is reason to believe that we can 'remember' things that never happened to us at all, either via hypnosis, or simply by being mistaken. Dick takes this further in many of his stories by describing a future where memories can be surgically implanted or removed and this actually raises questions about our conceived present!

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