Overview

How do you know you’re human? No, seriously, how do you know that you are a person? Emotions? Personality? Consciousness? While these things do contribute to your humanity, when you enter the cyberpunk world, this is turned upside down. Artificial intelligence longs to be recognized as life, and humans want to escape their physical forms. The lines are blurred, and the scriptwriter determines your fate. The integral cyberpunk works we have studied in class, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, build worlds that give the reader the opportunity to truly question what it means to be human. Through challenging cognitive, biological, and physical definitions of humanity, these works contribute to an integral concern of the cyberpunk genre: what counts as consciousness?

Questioning Artificial Consciousness

Neuromancer follows a drug addict and skilled hacker, Henry Case. In this dystopian future, he is living as a hustler in Chiba City with a damaged nervous system that prevents his entrance into cyberspace, where he was able to use his skills. He is given an offer to fix his nervous system and enter cyberspace in exchange for agreeing to pull off a heist for an ex-military officer, Armitage. He fixes his issue but is also implanted with a poison that Armitage will only disarm if the job is completed. This is the setup for the great plot that we see play out in the book. Looking specifically at our main character, Case, he devalues his physical body, referring to it as meat and preferring the liberating feeling of being in cyberspace. Although we might think that our physical body makes us human, he values the humanity of his consciousness. Looking at the artificial intelligences that he interacts with, Wintermute and Neuromancer, they have different personalities (if you would call them that), with a goal of merger to be more whole and autonomous. However, the Tessier-Ashpool family, via the Turing Registry, aims to restrict this merger. Allowing these AIs to merge would allow them to be above human authority, which disrupts the current hierarchy of this world. AI is meant to be a tool for humans to use, not to have a true consciousness of its own. In Neuromancer, we see the questioning of artificial minds. However, Blade Runner questions artificial bodies.

Questioning Artificial Bodies

Blade Runner was created in 1982, yet is set in 2019 in Los Angeles. However, this is a dystopian version of the city, where our main character, Rick Deckard, is a retired “blade runner.” In this job, he tracked down replicants, which are humanoids that are bioengineered. He is tasked with hunting down and killing four replicants who are illegally on Earth: Leon, Roy, Zohar, and Pris. This sets our plot in motion and follows Deckard on this hunt. In this film, we see multiple instances where humanity is tested and examples of the script at play. Looking at the Tyrell Corporation, the creators of replicants, they designed these humanoids essentially to do the bidding of “real humans.” Whether this is for labor, combat, or pleasure, the replicants are tools for humanity rather than real humans. They have implanted memories, emotions, and other things that you might define as human; however, this is essentially product design and does not count as real humanity. Another literal test of humanity in this film is the Voight-Kampff Test, which is administered to distinguish replicants from humans. It measures responses physiologically and emotionally to determine the empathy of the test subject. While replicants are given memories and other things, they do not have the capacity for empathy, which diminishes their humanity in the eyes of the scriptwriters, the Tyrell Corporation.

Both of these works contribute to the cyberpunk genre’s goal of blurring the line between machinery and humanity. Cognitive, emotional, and biological lines are crossed and call for readers and watchers to truly reflect on what it means to be human. These works push us to think past our view of humanity as a set of physical and biological facts. Being human is determined by who is in power in these worlds, and the unsettling truth is that we could be facing that same control in our future.

References: Gibson, W. (1984). Neuromancer. Ace Books.Scott, R. (1982). Blade Runner: The Final Cut. In vudu.com. https://www.vudu.com/content/movies/details/Blade-Runner-The-Final-Cut/129093

AI Attestation: I used AI to edit this post. https://chatgpt.com/share/6987f068-2770-800d-b360-57cd4fe788e3

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Identify Yourself

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What makes you…simply you? Is it how you look or perhaps how you think and see the world? AI can mask itself to give humanlike emotions and responses within a few seconds. AI has been by far the fastest growing database used by millions of people around the globe. The Neuromancer and Blade Runner allows you to see the reality of artificial intelligence way before it made its big impact in our day to day lives.

Blade Runner, More Like Our Reality

Blade Runner is based on a dystopian sci-fi film showing the TRUE reality of polluted living conditions over taken by technology and artificial intelligence while replicants that are bioengineered humans were created for labor. In Cyberpunk a familiar name Rachael, works as an assistant of the Tyrell Corporation and initially believes she is human. Rachael felt every emotion from love to fear. Rachael's question "If your memories and feelings feel real to you, does it matter if they're artificial?" Thus rendering the idea that there really is a difference between AI and humans?

Neuromancer: High Tech, Low Life

Neuromancer is a cyberpunk novel, to demonstrate this realm of high-tech futures where corporations rule, artificial intelligence is under watch, and the human mind can connect to cyberspace to live out a completely different life. A hacker by the name Case who often visits this realm to feel a sense of "detachment". Neuromancer is essentially about the mind vs. body where Case prefers cyberspace over the true reality.

How Must One Prove its Real

The central idea is what makes someone human? Is it our thoughts? is it perhaps our memories or what we are born with? Cyberpunk allows us to merge these ideas of AI and humans together to shift our gears and question ourselves. As a human it was never a thought to think about what really makes me human and being a position where you are seeing things in an AI perspective its a little challenge to answer in the "right" way. While AI is certainly on a skyrocket path, will we are get to see the end of AI if it truly makes it easier for humans to go about our days? Think about it, if AI can make the lives of humans easier, why even end the idea of AI? The risk we take with AI and can be seen with Blade Runner and Neuromancer, is reality simply being reality less. Less greenery more neon lights, less outside feeling more skyscrapers, less human activities more replicants on the streets doing what humans fear the most...using their own brains to simply be more free and with more time. So yes in the case of a human to use less of their brain and to just hand it over to AI that already has studied you...it may be an option, but the fear of Blade Runner and Neuromancer will soon be near in our future, just like the title states "objects may appear closer than they appear."

Reference

Farrar, J. (n.d.). What does it mean to be human?. BBC Earth. https://www.bbcearth.com/news/what-does-it-mean-to-be-human

The meaning of being human. how the film blade runner make us… | by Eduardo Ayres Soares | film | movies | stories | medium. (n.d.-d). https://medium.com/film-movies-stories/the-meaning-of-being-human-e78d96db875a

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Imagine discovering that the things you thought made you you could be designed, implanted, or uploaded. Your memories, your emotions, even your fear of death could all be designed. That is the discomfort that lingers long after watching Blade Runner or reading Neuromancer. These stories are often remembered for rain-soaked cityscapes or glowing digital worlds, but their real power lies in how they quietly shake our confidence about what separates humans from what we create.

Feeling Alive: Consciousness as Experience

One way to approach this discomfort is through consciousness itself. Philosophers describe consciousness as subjective experience, which is the sense that there is something it feels like to be a particular being, and not as raw intelligence or problem-solving ability. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy emphasizes this idea, noting that conscious beings are defined by inner experience rather than by how they are built (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2014).

This distinction is important in Blade Runner. Replicants are faster, stronger, and engineered for obedience, yet they could experience love, terror, and loss all with great intensity. Roy Batty’s final moments are not frightening because he is powerful, but because he is aware. He understands that his life is ending and that his memories will disappear. His famous reflection on moments “lost in time” resonates precisely because it captures an experience most humans recognize, which is the fear that a lifetime of meaning can vanish in an instant.

Memory and the Thread of Identity

If consciousness tells us that we are alive, then memory helps explain who we are over time. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy outlines a psychological account of personal identity in which continuity depends on memory, beliefs, intentions, and character rather than on a particular body (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, n.d.). This view becomes unsettling once memories themselves can be manufactured.

In Blade Runner, implanted memories give replicants emotional depth and stability. Rachael’s memories feel real because they function as memories do. They shape her reactions, her sense of self, and her understanding of the world. If identity is grounded in psychological continuity, then her humanity becomes difficult to dismiss, even if her past never truly happened.

Leaving the Body Behind

Neuromancer pushes this logic further. Instead of artificial bodies, it imagines minds that slip free of physical form altogether. Case feels most alive not in the physical world but while navigating cyberspace, where identity becomes fluid and disembodied. The book suggests that the body may be less essential to selfhood than the patterns of thought and perception carried within it.

This idea aligns with how scientists still struggle to fully explain consciousness. Writing for Scientific American, Christof Koch describes consciousness as lived experience, including sensations, emotions, and awareness, that cannot be easily reduced to mechanical function (Koch, 2018). Intelligence can be simulated, but experience remains mysterious. Neuromancer exploits that mystery by imagining consciousness as something that persists even when flesh becomes optional.

What These Stories Reveal Together

Taken together, these works point toward a shared anxiety: that the qualities we rely on to define humanity, such as feeling, memory, and continuity, are more fragile than we like to believe they are. One story gives us artificial beings who feel too deeply to ignore. The other imagines selves that no longer require bodies at all. Both challenge the assumption that humanity is anchored in biology rather than experience.

What lingers after engaging with these stories is the apprehension that comes with the realization that if consciousness and identity can be replicated, transferred, or redesigned, then being human is not a fixed category. It is, now in fact, a condition, one that can be questioned, copied, and maybe even lost.

References Koch, C. (2018, June 1). What is consciousness? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-consciousness/ Van Gulick, R. (2014, Jan 14). Consciousness. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/ Korfmacher, C. (n.d.). Personal Identity. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/person-i/

AI Attestation The content of this post is my own, and AI was used only to assist with planning and editing.