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What does it mean to be real?
Life, and human life especially, is a litany of fictions. Some big. Some small. Our preferences, our feelings, our intuitions, many of them are constructed for us, inherited from our parents, sold to us by clever marketers. Where is the "you" in this matrix of manipulations?
Does it matter whether your memories are real? Our understanding of memory is fairly clear on the subject: Memories are not real. They are reconstructed by our brains to fit the circumstances in which we need them. Bartlett's (1932) book on Remembering showed that when told stories, people bend them in their retelling to fit their own predispositions. If I tell you a strange story, you are more likely to misremember it because it doesn't fit the way your mind understands stories. Your mind manipulates you. It brings you into its fold.
If you were brought up thinking you were fabricated, made by some creator for a purpose, what then? Then one day you are told you are real, but in a different way. Real like other people. A real boy. A real woman. Someone born. Someone loved. Are these even different? Yes, of course they are. In a moment you are brought to life under your own magic. Becoming. A single snowflake becomes more poignant. The first experience of rain as sweet as bathing in nectar.
To be alive, to know you are alive, what does it take to *know* this? Sex? Pain? Death?
Maybe it doesn't take anything except noticing it: A good Oliver Sacks awakening, laying in the snow.
Do you have free will or do you watch the show from behind your eyes, merely living out the programming of your genetics made real by the world you grew up in? Know that whatever your answer, it is implanted in you. You may think anything is as obviously constant as 2 + 2 = 4, but a cursory search on the Internet will show you that even this is a fiction you grasp too strongly.
You can pull back the veil, but could you ever know everything?
In Blade Runner 2049 , Decker tells Wallace that he knows what is real. Which is to say, he knows what the Zen master knows---the question is more important than the answer. Reality is the nothing hidden behind the facade that is everything you can know. You must, as Denis Villeneuve the director says, keep the question alive.
Blade Runner 2049 is a beautiful induction into this way of thinking. On the face of it, it is a science fiction joy ride. But its layers are deep. Villeneuve clearly loves the Blade Runner world and the reality it provokes. He cares for its details and its questions. The film is a loving tribute to the philosophy of Philip K. Dick's post-humanism. And it amplifies its beauty. The beauty of decay, within which life thrives. The beauty of relationships, the more real for their fabrication. The beauty of becoming real, by steps. It is these little enlightenments that portray what Villeneuve calls Blade Runner's optimism.
When do you notice you are real? A bee lands on your hand. An advertisement speaks to you as a person. A dog stares out through the orange glow. Villeneuve calls it the beautiful vertigo.
In a momentary reflection, in the most delicate light, you become real.
