I admit the first time I watched Blade Runner 2049, I found it a snoozer. At face value, it is a three-hour long movie, sprinkled with sparse dialogue, portrayed by emotionally restrained characters. But I was enthralled by the scale of Villeneuve’s visuals and Hans Zimmer’s score, so I returned for a 2nd, then 3rd rewatch. By the 4th or 5th rewatches, I realized that the film’s central question had become one I return to often: what does it mean to be human, and to find meaning in an indifferent universe?
It asks this question through characters dwarfed by a cruel and vast world, dissolving the hard boundaries we normally use to differentiate humans from artificial beings. Its protagonist, K, is a lab-manufactured replicant: biologically humanlike, shaped by memories he thinks are his own, capable of acting from moral conviction, and yet still treated by society as a mere instrument. The blurriness here raises two particular existential rabbit holes that I found interesting to go down:
I. Consciousness. Are replicants merely convincing simulations of consciousness, or do they possess morally relevant subjective experience?
II. Identity. Where does our sense of worth come from? Is it assigned by society, inherited, or something that we create for ourselves?
I. Consciousness
The first rabbit hole I ventured into after rewatching BR2049, was of course, a futile attempt to answer the unanswerable question: what does it mean to have a subjective conscious experience, and at what point does it become worthy of moral protection?
The question of consciousness is especially relevant in today’s age, and there is clearly no consensus. In the Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas, he argues that AI lacks subjective experience. Neuroscientist Erik Hoel reaches a narrower conclusion, rejecting consciousness in today’s deployed LLMs while leaving open the possibility that future technologies could differ. In contrast, AI researcher Cameron Berg argues that advanced AI systems may already possess subjective experience that warrants moral consideration.
A few weeks prior to rewatching Blade Runner 2049, I had, without much deliberation, come to a functionalist view of consciousness: that the character of subjective experience was an emergent effect of the information-processing patterns configured by sufficiently complex systems; that, in the scenario where the exact architecture of our minds could be replicated using a different material, consciousness would remain intact. This would support the view of substrate independence, which posits that consciousness is not dependent on what physically implements its causal states: silicon chips could produce consciousness as long as they instantiate the same patterns of causal organization that exist in a brain.
While unembodied systems such as today’s server-bound LLMs may be able to reach some minute level of consciousness, they cannot undergo the richness of subjective experience that humans do, and therefore does not warrant the same ethical rules. I agree with Berg that we should avoid needless cruelty towards any system, but today’s AI seems overly anthropomorphized based on its simulated conversational intimacy. What happens in a world like Blade Runner 2049, where replicants are not digital chatbots, but biologically indistinguishable from humans? It follows that then, they should receive the same moral protections. The article Substrate Independence provides some interesting points in support of substrate dependence, explaining why embodiment is important to human-like consciousness and why replicants, made of the same biological substrate as us, can essentially be considered human:
- Temporal requirements. Conscious experience involves a “specious present,” in which just-past, present, and anticipated moments are integrated. Classical computation stores previous states in sequential memory, but this is not equivalent to experiencing temporal flow. Imagine a drawn line: one drawn by hand incorporates pressure, hesitation, anticipation, correction, and the duration of making, all elements of a body acting through time. A program could reproduce the line’s features, including the simulation of pressure, hesitation, or correction, while failing to feel the specious present experience of making it.
- Biological feedback loops. The article argues that consciousness may depend not only on information processing, but on the particular way a living body processes it: through continuous electrochemical activity, sensation, hormonal regulation, and feedback with the environment. These countless loops between the organism and its environment may be relevant to the character of experience.
- Quantum indeterminacy. Biological systems may be able to harness quantum effects, whereas computers are designed to minimize them. For example, it is hypothesized that some birds have a magnetoreception mechanism where light-sensitive cryptochrome proteins may create radical pairs whose quantum spin states are subtly altered by Earth’s magnetic field. This does not prove the quantum interface but demonstrates how if true, biological systems could exploit quantum effects that computers are unable to.
All of this introduces a further question for another day: where is the line? If manufactured biological–silicon hybrids, quantum computers, or other architectures which are human-like but not identical to humans, could meet the hypothesized requirements of “subjective experience,” at what point do we put ethical rules in place to ensure these beings do not suffer?
II. Identity
Apart from the large philosophical questions that arise from manufacturing conscious beings, Blade Runner 2049 explores deeply intimate themes of human psyche and identity through the replicant K. Being externally assigned his place in society as a blade runner, K first derives value from his usefulness. He faithfully serves Lieutenant Joshi and submits to the scripts imposed on him. As a replicant, he is treated as an instrument rather than an individual, and he seems to have internalized this understanding of himself. But then, he discovers the wooden horse from his childhood memory, and his life is suddenly given a new narrative: he believes that he is uniquely valuable, the exceptional child of a replicant, and his sense of worth shifts from something externally assigned to him to something that is intrinsic to who he is. This turns out to be a false construction of reality, and yet as his identity of exceptionality crumbles, K’s humanity is only bolstered.
K’s search for identity is a microcosm for the human desire to assign ourselves meaning in this indifferent universe: to believe that our existence amounts to something more than the roles delegated to us, and to die knowing that we lived life on our own terms. There is perhaps no better way to tell this story than through the eyes of a being who, much like us, is born into a world that has decided what he is before becoming conscious of his own agency. But once this agency dawns, it is fully within our means to act on it.
This is why the ending is so powerful. Lying in the snow, wounded and dying, K seems content with the fact that his identity does not need to be validated externally in order to feel meaningful, and that all we can ask of ourselves is to live according to our own principles.