To be Human

The film Blade Runner has a direct link to A Cyborg Manifesto because Donna Haraway focused primarily on the concept of how years of changes in the world have caused the lines separating organisms to blur. She described how the boundaries separating the human vs animal, human/animal vs machine, and the physical vs non-physical have dissolved creating a blend between the ideas. This theme was strongly felt throughout the entire movie because many times, the viewers are not immediately sure of who is a human and who is a replicant. In Rachel's case, she herself was a replicant yet believed she was human. This begs the question, who is to decide what is human and what is not?
Many people base security of their own humanity off of their previous experiences. They have memories of "human" experiences and emotional responses to those experiences. However, how much trust can we place in those memories? One of the most surprising things I have learned is how easy it is to alter, erase, and create memories. Memories are easily altered by the emotions one feels in the present. It can be compared to telling a story and each time that story is told, it is changed a bit depending on the way it is told. Even psychologists have faced scrutiny in their experiments by "planting" memories into people's minds accidentally by trying to bring up memories that don't exist so often that the patient believes it themselves.
Rachel is the primary example of the fragility of ones mind because she truly believed the memories put in her head. While she believed she was recalling her own experiences, she was really recounting the experiences of Tyrell's niece. Deckard was the one who shattered her false knowledge by showing her the truth. Immediately you can see the fear and confusion in her eye because while she believed she was living in a world full of loving experiences between people, she realized she had not experienced a single bit of it.
The eyes have much importance in the film because eyes are one of the most important ways to read body language, which is the primary source of communication in the world. In the beginning there is a man being interviewed by a test "designed to provoke an emotional response." Eyes reveal every emotion. Your pupils automatically give away your interest in the atmosphere around you based on their dilation and eye contact can reveal how comfortable one feels in an environment. Eyes are the one part of a person that cannot lie.