-Kusanagi Motoko
skyscraper, colorful lights, electronic music, police cars chasing on the highway, Cyber Punk.
This is the city of the future, and it is also a replica of the modern city.
Modern fashionable humans live in two spaces, one is the so-called real world at the physical level, and the other is the so-called online world at the virtual level. On the physical level, it is the human body; while on the virtual level, it is the human spirit.
What is spirit? What is the soul? Spirit is Spirit, soul is Soul, so what is Ghost in the Shell? Where does the spirit depend? Where is the soul sojourn? If only our spirit lives in the virtual space, where is our soul?
Human beings are a combination of body and spirit. In philosophy and religious systems, the subject of spiritual behavior is divided into two different concepts. In philosophy, it is Mind, and in religion, it is Soul. In fact, both consciousness and soul are built on the material basis of the body, and both consciousness and soul will disappear as the body ages and dies. Therefore, any religion will propose "immortality" and "eternity." Otherwise, since the spirit will disappear sooner or later, why believe in the doctrine? To obtain the so-called "immortality" and "eternity", one must achieve a certain "transcendence", such as the suffering of life and "ego grasping" faced by the Buddha, the all kinds of suffering and the final "suffering" faced by Jesus, etc. Wait. And "transcendence" itself is a philosophical term. Western philosophy calls it Transcendental, while in religion it is called "transcendent."
Where do they go beyond, and where do they go?
In ancient philosophy, "being" and "existence" are two opposite concepts. "Essence" is absolutely real, eternal and unchangeable; while "existence" is a kind of expression and expansion, either forward or outward, into this "formed world", and it also changes at the same time. this world.
And do we who call ourselves "human-being" really exist in our own essence? Is our essence our body or our soul? Is the body carrying the soul or the soul fulfilling the body? We are "human", is it because of our human body or because we have a "human" soul?
The so-called "transcendental" refers to the belief that the human spirit is higher than the material or can be separated from the material in some form. This is like a machine shell with a ghost hidden in the shell. "Life" refers to It's just the ghost, this is Ghost in the Shell.
But today's human society is entirely based on the framework of physics, everything can be explained by physics, but the human soul cannot be reasonably explained by physics. Because things naturally follow the rules of physics, while the mind does not follow the rules of physics, this naturally shows that the body and mind are separated from each other.
In "Ghost in the Shell", the physical world and the spiritual world, body and soul, finally overlap. The highly developed material technology finally materializes the non-material human consciousness. Through the transformation of the electronic brain, the brain’s memory is stored, copied, migrated, and modified through information technology, in other words, ghost information of the originally elusive soul It is transformed and digitized, and then the virtual space of the computer network gives it a free stretch of space.
However, after being copied and transferred, is the memory and consciousness still the "original" one? Even if one hundred percent of the memory can be transferred, has the "self" that recorded and controlled these memories been transplanted together? Just as someone asks: "Is the me of today the me of yesterday? Is the me of dreaming the me of yesterday?" The reason why people regard memory as their own soul is only because the future is unknowable and can prove their existence. It's just a memory.
In "Ghost in the Shell", there are three typical Ghost in the Shell cases.
The first case is undoubtedly the heroine Motoko Kusanagi. She was originally a human being. She underwent electronic brain surgery to transplant her memory into it. At the same time, the whole body was "prosthetized" (artificially strengthened body). Every part of her body, even her brain, is artificial, and even her memory and her consciousness are digital. So she constantly denies her existence, and affirms her existence again and again, because she herself cannot be sure whether there is a soul in her own shell, and whether the thing that occupies her electronic brain and directs her actions can still be counted as yes. soul? It was not until the movie version of the animation that she finally completely removed her shell and integrated her consciousness into the boundless information network, that she finally found her soul and entered the realm of ghost in the ghost.
The second case is the battle robot Tachikoma that appeared in the film. Tachikoma was completely unconscious at the beginning. All they have is the ability to understand human language. They don't know why they want to do something. They only know the meaning of human language and judge what response to take. And this kind of "judgment" has become "autonomous judgment" in them. In other words, when they make judgments and make decisions independently, they already have their own souls. In Ghost in the Shell, they first have their own character and consciousness, and then gradually become human with the plot, and finally at the end of the two parts, they complete the sublimation of their souls by self-sacrificing and saving mankind. In a sense, Tachikoma is no different from a human with a soul and a body, and this product is created and cultivated by humans. This involves a scientific and ethical issue-whether humans can create life. ? There is no doubt that Tachikoma is already a life in the true sense, even more pure than human life, because his soul is separated from his body from the beginning, and his entire survival process is a "transcendence" of himself.
The third case is the negative character "Puppet King" in the film. Can his existence, born entirely from the data stream of virtual cyberspace, be regarded as life? Because he has not had his own shell since he was born, in other words, there is no problem of opposition between soul and body, which is different from the previous two examples. Motoko obtains his ghost from his innate shell, and then migrates his ghost to the acquired shell (of course, we don’t know whether the ghost after the migration is still the previous ghost); while Tachikoma doesn’t have it. Ghost, his own ghost is based on an artificial shell and obtained through the sublimation of self-consciousness. The puppet king is different. He was born in nothingness and exists in nothingness, so he has nothing to prove his existence except his own consciousness (which cannot be called ghost). As mentioned earlier, he has only his own source. In the "essence" of nothingness, there is no "existence". Therefore, he can only continue to claim that he is an "independent life form, not a so-called artificial intelligence", because he himself has already agreed with the view that "a consciousness without a body is not a life" in the human concept.
As mentioned earlier, the emergence of the Tachikoma soul has already involved the issue of scientific ethics. In terms of religious ethics, this is already an act of blasphemy. Because having a body and a soul is life, and creating life has always been God's patent. Could it be that mankind already possesses the power of God at this time? The power of God is to create life and create the world. The world created by God is a material world in which multiple humans live together and influence each other. However, the spiritual world inhabited by ghosts in life cannot communicate and communicate with each other due to the limitation of the shell. Did not create the spiritual world. At this time, humans not only created the body, but also allowed the body to generate the soul, and allowed the soul to escape the limitations of the body and merge into the borderless virtual information network, allowing ghosts to freely move and communicate with each other in the network. This is the creation of human beings. Own spiritual world.
In "Ghost in the Shell", there is no clear definition of "life". However, it is obvious that this work still uses the "soul machine theory", that is, "Ghost in the Shell" is used as life. definition. And in the virtual space full of ghosts, countless information flows converge and collide, just as primitive life is produced in the primitive ocean. The information ocean gradually produces self-aware information bodies, and then gradually evolved into a puppet king. There is no "independent life body" without a body in the future. The existence of this pure ghost form is the product of the Stand Alone Complex. It is an independent body formed by the fusion of parts of the consciousness of countless ghosts, and this independent body is designed to match the "Ghost in the Shell" in the work. If the definition of life is the same, the independent body itself is used as a "shell", and the independent "ghost" will eventually become Ghost in the Ghost, which is exactly the same as the final result of Suzi.
In "Ghost in the Shell" OVA, Daisuke Aramaki describes such a realm, "I walk alone in the world, my heart is self-cleaning, without desire or demand, like an elephant in the forest." This is not exactly the freedom to roam in the virtual space. Is the true portrayal of the souls? And the bodies that once fettered and imprisoned them are like puppets, "life and death come, the shed-head puppets, when the line is broken, they fall into the ground".
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