The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film

The replicants in Blade Runner and most of the inhabitants of Dark City illustrate complex philosophical questions about the relationship between mind and body, as well as the role played by memory, on the one hand, and the emotions and desires, on the other, in our understanding of human life.

Blade Runner also suggests that it is not the cognitive aspect of memory that is the uniquely defining feature of humans but rather the emotional aspect. The Tyrell Corporation seems to have anticipated that this is the real long-term problem for its replicants, hence their four-year lifespans

How central is memory in establishing human identity? Arguably, memory is essential for coherent, ongoing action. If you can't remember who you know or what you value, how will you be able to decide what to do? Not to mention, if you don't remember who you are, how will you be able to make any practical decisions except as contingent responses to circumstances you don't fully understand?

At what point should humanly engineered creatures such as the Nexus 6 replicants count as persons

philosophy and science fiction are thematically interdependent insofar as science fiction provides materials for philosophical thinking about the logical possibility and paradoxes of time travel, the concept of personal identity and what it means to be human, the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence, the moral implications of encounters with extraterrestrials, and the transformations of the future that will be brought about by science and technology

For anyone living in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, science fiction cinema is one of the few art forms that attempt to predict the future of human nature and civilization—a future filled with space travel, nanotechnology, genetic engineering, and widespread surveillance.

conflict between modernity and modernism.

A key insight in his “Imagining the Future, Contemplating the Past: The Screen Versions of 1984” is that “imagined worlds hold an immense usefulness for a symptomatic analysis of the present.”

1984 has appeared as a feature film twice, in 1956 and 1984. R. Barton Palmer focuses on the two film versions of the novel as a way of illustrating science fiction's futurism as a response to its historical context.

As a diagnosis of the ails to which modernity is subject, however, it might be argued that the ominous strains in the Enlightenment conception of reason can be attributed to the uses to which technical mastery and scientific control can be put. Adorno and Horkheimer's critique conveys an attitude toward the aims, strengths, and achievements of science and technology that is strikingly similar to that in Heidegger's critique of instrumental rationality and technology. These critiques might more appropriately be directed toward the aims, limitations, and betrayals of those who control these wonderful mechanisms of reason and understanding.