The “baseline” scene in bladerunner 2049 was written by Ryan Gosling (2022)

Like a lot of PKD concepts, it defies a simple explanation (by design). It hits on many of his common themes: consciousness, what it means to be human, the shifting and blurry nature of reality, the merging and melding of different minds, etc.

On its surface, it's a religion based on the Messianic "Wilbur Mercer" character, and the shared vision of him that people can enter through the Empathy Box. But then the book explores whether Mercer, and that shared vision in the Empathy Box, is actually "real" or "fake", in a way that closely mirrors the exploration of androids vs humans.

The Mercer box was something people could use to plug in and feel something, sort of like a Mega Church, rock concert, etc. that moves you; something positive in an otherwise negative place. But it's a programmed feeling, it's not real.

It contrasts with the hunting-and-retiring-androids thing, in that real people can't feel things unless they plug into a program, and are feeling something wholly artificial -- so how is that really any different from the 'droids?

Assuming the empathy box is merely an extension of ones self and using it requires obeying a relatively strict process (taking part in Mercer's "martyr walk"), what's left of you as a human being outside of it, is a biomechanical shell not much more capable or understanding of empathy than any android.

I wouldn't claim to like the movie as much as the author did, let alone write an article about, but I do like the movie a lot: I saw it three times in theaters (and it's long!). I read a bit of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" before getting bored, and have not read "Pale Fire", but I did recognize during my first watch that the lines of the baseline test were obviously a quotation, and the "Pale Fire" references were mentioned in just about every single movie review and discussion (because they were a bit ham-fisted).

I guess I just don't understand how you could enjoy a piece of art so much, (and write articles about it!) without first checking out the art that it's based off of, the art that it explicitly references, or even reading a small amount of online discussion about it.

Not much. That's not the only movie I've seen recently. Not all of them have been so forgettable. An alarming portion of them was. But not all, I can clearly remember many of them, even for series with many episodes, I can tell you what happened in each of them.

But the Starwars sequels, the fourth of Matrix (I liked it though) or anything superheroic (I quit those years ago) are a blank in my memory.

Edit: I believe that good story telling has something in common with spaced repetition. There are some rules that, if followed, make your story indelible. Likeable, relatable characters, a worthy quest a logical plot...

Edit2: The love for flashbacks, that become parallel timelines in their degenerate form is tiresome and now it's very difficult to find a movie without them.

For 2049, maybe its just my own personal struggles with personal identity and losing people I love, but K's struggles resonated with me. Its a story that mostly says, at least the way I interpreted it, that who you are doesn't matter so much as the actions you perform in life. K, for most of the movie, is doing what other people tell him to do. In the end he takes action and makes choices that are meaningful to him. It results in his death, but it was a choice between either being a dead man walking with no meaning in his life, or finding meaning even if it means dying for it.

I can see why someone might not like it...its slow and it focuses more on the internal struggles of the main character than action on the screen. Still, when I ponder what happens in the movie, it resonates with me and lots of other people. Its pretty much a modern cult classic...did poorly at the box office, but certain types of people(including myself) are crazy about it.

For Dune, I agree it could be a bit dry. I love the book and I was a bit disappointed that the interactions were not as passionate, especially between Paul and his Mother. Still, the cinematography was amazing and they did the best they could IMO. Dune is a slow book that is hard to adapt to the screen so I am quick to forgive it.

It's also a relatively short read, but packed with so much more to explore than the movie dug into. I really wish Mercerism had been brought into the film. It's such an insightful critique of religion and society, and quite prophetic for time in which the story was written.

You're pretty close in your plot summary, it's about a dystopian future where surgery, and specifically possession of surgical instruments, is illegal. The "Blade Runners" are couriers that deliver the scalpels to underground surgery clinics. The name makes a lot more sense for that than for an android hunter but I'm happy we got the Blade Runner we got.

It’s basically a rewrite of the trilogy in a single, short novel.

I quite like to recommend “A Maze Of Death” as a starter, and the short story collections.

There are some very weird (and IMHO great) concept novels like “Flow My Tears the Policeman Said”.

And of course there’s “A Scanner Darkly”

After a while you get a feeling there’s a sort of semi-coherent PKD reality out there, in which continuity is less important than the concept being played with, but the background is consistent in its own odd way.

When I walk around London and see large structures like St Paul's cathedral sat directly alongside skyscraping banking institutions, I can't help but wonder if in fact "the empire never ended". (https://urbigenous.net/library/how_to_build.html)

Then I shake the thought off and go uneasily to my workplace.

I didn't manage to get into VALIS. It felt a bit mental-illness-ey in a way that other PKD work didn't, and as someone who had a loved one with terrible schizophrenia, it rubbed me a bit wrong. Maybe I'll try it again soon, I can see it on my shelf from here.

is one of the best thing you can gift yourself.

I think 2049 was great. I cant say it's better or worse because it's different but it fits and was more than I hoped for. Of course it has problems but so did the first one, and nothing is perfect especially in sci-fi. The Hans Zimmer score is fantastic.

Pretty sure it was the same summer he got frozen in carbonite.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syd_Mead

The freshness of the technology is what I like about the first film and makes the second film a more of the same feel to me.

Just read the Syd worked on both Blade Runners...

I adopted the book last.

Interesting that the score makes the difference, the score from blade runner 1982 is really unique to me and inseparable from the movie. If I hear a single note from it I think about the movie and if I see a frame of the movie, I think about the music. I can't remember a single thing about the 2049 score, except that at the time I thought every interesting part was a shallow clone of the original mashed up with the main theme from Terminator 2 because someone thought it was about robots.

Oh, this thing's not a humanoid computer. It's a clone. You've grown these bio clones with superhuman abilities and artificially limited lifespans.

So... why would they not have consciousness? Did you take the consciousness out? It doesn't seem like it. Also, why not give these mutations to regular people? (Ghost in the Shell contemplates this, btw. Major is a brain in an experimental synthetic body, and they tell her that someday everyone will have one as cybernetics become more common.) That they can self-replicate like humans is a nice feature, but why not have inorganic robots in all those offworld colonies, given the scarcity of food, water, and air in space and the havoc radiation wreaks on cells?

It's like some colonial dystopia where a company can grow humans and own them as non-personed property rather than machines sneaking their way into personhood by degrees.

Or it's some hyperliteralist Searle shit where anything that isn't of the human species isn't a person. Instead of taking the path of least resistance and using human DNA to grow the androids, maybe they used some proprietary ersatz DNA, and since it's sufficiently different from natural human DNA the organisms it produces aren't seen as people even though they approximate them almost indistinguishably. Or maybe they're afraid. The androids are superior; if not for their artificially limited lifespans, they'd take over.

My question to you then would be: how would you know for sure that a transistor/digital ”being” is actually suffering, and not just mimicking human suffering in order to fulfill whatever internal cost-minimizing process it follows? And by the way what does it even mean to suffer, concretely and unambiguously? For example, a breakup or a job loss causes people to suffer, but certainly we are not going to prohibit them.

And what if we make them unable to feel pain, would it then be acceptable…?

Humans were created by a natural optimization process that used to be entirely outside of our control. Concepts like for example freedom to choose your mate and reproduce are not religious, yet are philosophically ”sacred” at least in modern western societies. Why? Because we understand that we cannot ”design” ourselves.

This is key. The purpose of the scene is to establish within 30 seconds what K's relationship is to the agency he works for, and by some extension, to the rest of the society he lives in. And the scene is brilliantly effective at accomplishing that task.

The entire story...

This is a design flaw and sort of what I mean. I’m supposed to believe they have this synthetic organism so precise they can program lifespans and implant memories and don’t have a better way to debug it? Of course anything is possible as it’s fiction, but this is part of my belief is that they thought of something that looked cool and backed into the reasoning (ie, this Shakespeare memorization technique looks cool so they wrote this movie rationale of how this was precise and scientific [or at least the in movie characters think it is]).

Replicants were not accidental discoveries nor gifted by aliens, they were invented by Tyrell.

Today there are humans who can train to beat polygraphs. It seems like replicants can train on this much more easily so this test more likely measures if the replicant wants to be found out than is actually off.

I like how the author brings up this is more a flaw in how society is measuring.

There’s a fun game called Inhuman Conditions [0] where players pretend to be an inspector and either a human, passive robot, or angry robot that explorers how to measure this.

In our world there’s brain imaging and it seems likely that in the future there’s going to be some form of non-destructive memory reading.

[0] https://robots.management/

Perhaps. Of course I think, I get it, I just don’t agree with it, or think it’s poorly formed.

I’m glad lots of people enjoy it in a variety of ways and am certainly glad the films were made and hope there are more like them made in the future.

You can, but only through a very intrusive bone marrow analysis. It's mentioned (in either the movie or the novel) that they were hours into an autopsy before they realized it was a replicant.

VK is the alternative when you don't want to subject a suspect to dangerous and intrusive surgery.

Of course picking apart movies leads to cinematic anhedonia, but this is sort of my point. This test exists, in the movie, for REASONS that are a macguffin for cool acting and scenes.

One can assume an android in the hypothetical future with fully sentient AGI has a mind capable of retaining state and working senses, and thus is complex enough to be capable of willing deception.