[Mini Me]Do you have a little clone in you? Would you like to?[/mini me]
Looked at closely enough, could any of us really pass a Turing test? If we did, would we really be human?
I think we are over-thinking the movie. Everyone in it is human, even if they are artificial in whole or in part. But nobody is perfect. Being perfect would exclude one from being human. Creating flawed creatures to exploit them is wrong. So is exploiting any creature. Tyrell deliberately created humans to enslave them and made them flawed. This in itself was human hubris. He was no more or less human than his creations.
Not willingly.
It would only be me if the consciousness(for lack of a better word) from this body made the trip. If my consciousness is destroyed with the rest of my body I’m dead. If I don’t physically(again for lack of a better word) wake up in the destination, the reconstructed body, no matter how much it resembles my body or my personality, is somebody else.
If I’m not there, it’s not me.
I am not talking about the pain, how do you fake the scalding and blister? Note that the girl in your article was still burned, she just didn’t feel the pain.
In the book, Deckard gets a bounty for each kill. But to confirm it, they have to test the bone marrow of the ‘replicant’.
Also Deckard is saving money so he can buy an electric sheep. The religion in the book tells everyone they should have a pet but animals are very scarce. So there are electric animals, with gears and such but most people can’t tell the difference. His neighbor has a horse, which lives in a pen on the roof of the apt building. Deckard doesn’t realize it is not a real horse.
You are mistaken, there is no mention of a bearskin rug, you must have subconsciously filled that in. And since there are lots of manufactured animals in the movie, it might not really matter, what if it was from an artificial bear? You might be more inclined to think she blew the question about killing the wasp on her arm. Except, these were among the first few questions, Deckard said it took over a hundred. And really, he was not really looking for answers, he was looking for autonomic responses. Correct answers can easily be trained for.
High heat resistance might not be a standard feature on all replicants. Note that Roy doesn’t stick his hand in the water - he has Leon do it for him. Leon was a heavy labor model, who was used in dangerous working conditions. The other replicants probably don’t have this modification.
I don’t think being resistant to burns is a feature of each and every replicant. Of course, Pris is a “standard pleasure model”, and she can reach into boiling water.
But even if the cops can’t use “not resistant to burns” as an indication that the subject is a human, they could use “resistant to burns” as an indication that the subject is a replicant.
Anyway, it’s a minor plot discrepancy. It makes more sense thematically for the VK test to test emotional response. If they have a DNA sequencer then it isn’t as interesting.
I think there would be ethical problems with subjecting humans to a test where they would have to be physically harmed to prove that they’re not replicants, and I don’t know that the physical response to such an injury would be consistent enough among humans to make a reliable test.
FWIW I have seen some fan speculation that Pris and Zhora were mixed up by the police, and that Zhora was actually the pleasure model and Pris was the one with superhuman strength and endurance.
You’re right, I just checked YouTube and it’s not in the movie, but it is in the book. It’s made explicit in the book that Rachel’s failure to react to the bearskin rug is what makes Deckard begin to think of her as a replicant. He was already suspicious and he’s not totally certain even after the bearskin rug question, but this is the first question where he thinks “An android response.”
As I mentioned before, the cultural significance of animals is largely dropped from the movie, but in the book the possibility of an artificial bear presumably wouldn’t have made a lot of difference in a human’s emotional response to the question. Killing an animal would be as offensive to them as killing a baby, maybe even worse. A human probably would not have thought “Well, maybe it’s not a real bearskin”, and even if they did the notion of decorating with synthetic animal pelts would be about as grotesque as decorating with synthetic baby corpses. Another VK question included in the book involves a room decorated with bullfighting posters, and this is supposed to upset a human even though they’re just illustrations and bullfighting hasn’t existed for many years.
The look Deckard gives her after the wasp question in the movie suggests to me that he’s surprised or offended by her answer, but there’s variation in the level of empathy among humans and one missed question apparently isn’t enough to prove someone’s a replicant. In the book there’s a hierarchy of animals with some being more valuable than others, and the correct response to the banquet-of-oysters-and-dog question is apparently supposed to be that both are offensive but eating a dog is worse. So it may be that killing a wasp is considered bad, but not inhumanly bad.
As for training for the correct answers, this could only be done if replicants knew what the correct answers were supposed to be. Replicants may know enough about humans to correctly guess what they’re supposed to say in response to *most *of the questions and Deckard is thus primarily interested in measuring their emotional response, but if someone gives the wrong verbal answer then of course Deckard is going to notice that too.
I’ve always thought she was throwing a tantrum.
I assumed the replicants had enlarged adrenal glands and the like which under stress would release ridiculous amounts of hormones, causing the squashed bug like reaction to someone fatally injured.
Which I think is a tenuous point. There really are more differences between the book and the movie than there are similarities. One really has to discuss one or the other, not try to force them into a unified story.
I made it clear in my first post in this thread (written more than a year ago) that I was going to talk about the book as well as the movie. The VK test as presented in the movie doesn’t make a lot of sense, so I thought some Dopers might be interested in the greater context provided by the book. If you have a problem with that then you are welcome to ignore my posts.
OH, these are zombie replicants.
This reminded me of a Dawkins quote:
Regarding the movie, I do remember seeing storyboards showing an early version of the opening of the movie, after a replicant is shot its jaw is removed by the Blade Runner and it clearly had a serial number or trade mark in the bone.
Ridley Scott reported that that scene is very likely to show in the new Blade Runner movie that is on development.
This of course points to me to another problem the march of science is making for the idea that replicants can blend with the population, I know that better resolutions will be available for body scans, it will be hard to miss the relief text or “engraved”* number trademarks.
- Not likely to be engraved, as 3d printing is already being developed for biological materials like bone, any trademarks or serial numbers will be added right away in the printing process.
The Blade Runner video game actually delves deeper into this idea. You play a rookie Blade Runner who’s working at the same time the movie takes place — and your first case is investigating an “animal murder” committed by replicants. A tough female Blade Runner scoffs that “those goddamn skin jobs have no respect for anything that truly lives and breathes”. While the game isn’t “canonical”, it definitely implies that killing animals is a very big deal in a future where real animals are very rare.
Honestly, having seen “Prometheus” I’m a lot less inclined these days to think Ridley Scott is a subtle uber genius working on multiple levels, to thinking he was simply lucky enough to have done an entertaining film with a structure people can read a huge amount into re intentionality.