In the Mar. 8 group activity to design questions for distinguishing humans from replicants, I had an idea that involved a series of repeated questions, slightly modified each time and appearing at regular intervals. It wasn’t appropriate for the exercise we were doing, but I still tried to describe it to my group. I wasn’t articulating myself well. I think I came across as wanting to measure accuracy and catch lies the same way that some interviews already do, by asking the same question a number of ways, and tripping up the subject. As a group, we followed that idea to ask a question about lying, with the assumption that the subject would have already lied by that point in the interview. Some interesting discussion followed.

But that’s not at all what I meant when I first blurted out my half-formed idea.

I’ve thought about it more and I think I was trying to accumulate similar questions in the subject’s mind to test whether or not the subject created a narrative out of it. My idea was that for a human subject, related questions would line up in the brain to become parts of a story, even if random unrelated questions were interspersed between them. My thinking was that forming narratives, linking events (or questions) first into causal relations and then into meaningful stories, was a uniquely human habit. I have no idea, really, if a replicant could do this. But I think I was clinging to it as an idea because I see it as so very human.

Of course, this idea of mine would have failed, just as the questions should have failed, which is in fact the success of the experiment. We don’t have a definition of humanity, much less a test of it.

But the narrative as proof is still intriguing to me, especially as I see the relationship it has to memories—both real and fabricated. In Blade Runner, replicants need memories, even if they are made up, to develop a story of themselves and therefore to create their own sense of identity and subjectivity. The ability to do this, create a story from a sequence, might not be proof of humanity, but it still might be the way that anyone—human or replicant—creates personhood.

The ability of the human (and newer model replicant) to create narrative from memory is crucial to identity and subjectivity. Memory, whether we call it prosthesis or not, and whether it is based on actual events or simulated, creates a trajectory. The brain puts memories into a sequence, (often somewhat linearly but not definitively so), and that sequence creates a trajectory of a life. It creates a past that can be carried through the present and lets an individual carry a sense of self through time. Without memories there could be no sense of a unique and individuated self that stays together through time.

The trajectory created by memories creates a past, spreading out from the present in a straight(-ish) line. The line doesn’t stop at the present, however, but carries through to the future. The trajectory which leads to the future also leads to death, which creates the dread of death. Without the trajectory created by the narrative of the past (which is created by the sequence of memories), you can’t know of your own death. And you must suspect an impending death in order to dread it. But there’s more to it. The trajectory is also required to see death as a bad thing. If memories, which are unreal, become a part of you and feel real, think about how they reflect across the line of the present you. Death destroys that future and therefore destroys a part of you that currently exists.

In my current understanding of memory as prosthesis (which is not very sophisticated) I think these ideas apply to the way we can see memory as prosthesis and certainly to the way “the future” is really another type of prosthesis. I’m fully expecting later course to material to contradict and complicate these opinions.