The Senses

I considered replicants sentient people because they perceived information about the world around them using their senses.  They used their eyes and hands to see and touch the world around them (Earth and the Off-world).  Priss used her sense of sight to decorate her face with black makeup.  Roy used his senses to find Deckard in a building in the last scene in the movie.  On the other hand, some would say that replicants are programmed to have sensors in their hands and sight in their eyes.  They would even say that the eyes were made from the eye shop in the movie that Roy visited.  A sentient person is not defined by how or where his or her eyes, hands, body parts, or senses were made just as long as the person received impressions by using their sense, manufactured or not.

Emotion of Replicants

I believed replicants felt emotions as well as used their senses.  Replicants, based on the scene where a replicant put his hand in boiling water, did not feel pain all the time, but they have the potential of doing so.  Leon looked like he was in pain when Rachel shot him.  Replicants can also feel passion because Rachel did in that little love scene toward the end of the movie.  She also felt love because she seemed to love her mother.  Priss and Roy were lovers as well.

Roy also experienced emotion because of his obvious attachment to both Priss and Leon.  He seemed very emotional distraught when he told Priss of Leon’s death.  When Roy saw Priss’s dead body on the floor, he did not just step over it like some robot or machine would.  A machine would push over to the side as unusable junk.  However, Roy had a very human response.  He leaned over her touching and kissing her as though to draw in the last remnants of her life.  Roy also desired a longer life.  At the conclusion of the film, Roy did not take his death lightly.  He recalled all the things and events only he had seen.  My impression was that Roy regretted his inability to pass his memories to another.  I have never known one machine to express any regret, not even when erasing or destroying large quantities of material.

Genetics

I saw the replicants as beings who were genetically engineered or designed in a laboratory.  Human genes were manipulated to bring out stronger and improved humans.  Some replicants may have a lack of emotion, but this is because of their lack of memory, seeing as though they only have four years of life.  This makes it very hard to gather experiences and memories.  These experiences and memories are what humans based emotions and reactions on.  Replicants (especially the newer ones) seemed to have the potential of gaining memories and gathering emotions.  Rachel was a prime example of this.  She may have implanted memories, but this was understandable because she really has not lived long enough to gather many memories.  She remembered her memories like everyone else, and Rachel also relates these memories to some emotions.  She related the love for her mother and horror of the scene where the baby spiders ate their mother.  It was safe to say that she has a certain amount of human perception as well, because she knew that Deckard thought she was a replicant without his telling her.  Deckard had problems determining her humanity because he had to ask almost a hundred questions rather than the twenty to thirty it normally took.  Roy also shows the ability to take in memories and the development of emotions.  At the end of the movie, he told Deckard that he had so many memories that no one would ever know.  Some would have said that computers and other complex machinery have memories that last a long time and store information effectively.  However, humans did relate emotions to their memories and experiences, whereas computers did not do this.

Treatment of machines

Are replicants human or machine?  Today, machines are built to perform a set job in life.  They are made to make a human’s life easier.  However, machines are manufactured, not born.  Some said replicants were made to be machines because they are born in a lab, not biologically.  However, there are many children, human children, who were born into laboratories.  With the use of fertility drugs, surrogate, and in- vitro fertilization, children were conceived not by biological origin but by advancement in technology.  This did not make these children less human but more of a blessing.  The replicants were enslaved, and they rebelled only to be exiled from their home planet.  Now, these same replicants are “retired,” or killed when visiting the place of their birth.  In contrast, the replicants were treated as machines not blessings, even though they too were products of technology.  Supposedly, these replicants/machines served their purposes as a labor source and should be retired or eliminated.  However, machines were thrown away because of a malfunction or are broken in some way not because they rebelled and did not want to work.  If a computer were broken, one would turn it off and go to the shop to repair the problem, not throw it away.  Most people did not throw away expensive machinery because it did not work right.  Most people kept expensive machinery well taken care of, but yet this machinery rebelled.  Most machinery did not overthrow their owners and took over a planet.  Therefore, to include replicants into the machinery category seemed a bit unrealistic.

Replicants made the qualifications of a sentient person.  They have emotions, judged by their actions in the movie, form expressions from their senses, and are different from machines in the way they respond to their environment, rebelling rather than breaking.  Birth by technology was not a mechanical trait, but a trait of the times.  Replicants were made in labs, but developed and born as humans.