When Blade Runner was released in 1982, it entered a philosophical conversation that stretches back to the earliest inquiries into human nature. The question at its center, what makes a being human, echoes through the writings of Descartes, Locke, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, each of whom grappled with the boundaries between consciousness, memory, and selfhood. The film’s world of artificial life and fading memory belongs to a long tradition of metaphysical reflection on what it means to exist in t