Ghost in the shell – 1,2, the series and Solid State Society

Last week I watched :

• Ghost in the Shell
• Ghost in the Shell 2 – Innocence
• Ghost in the Shell – Man/Machine Interface – the series
• Ghost in the Shell – Solid State Society

Ghost in the Shell is a extraordinary collection of movies that illustrate different philosophical problems like :

• personal identity :
  • what makes you a person – is it the body, you memories or your inner ghost (something like a cartesian soul)?
  • The memory approach is streched to the limit : i can download/upload/change/erase someones memories (the ghost hack scenario). Is he the same person or not?
  • The body approach has the same problems. Body duplication creates person duplication?

• philosophy of mind :
  • are we mind and body (do you have a ghost inside you?) or is there nothing more than a complex body?
  • We have people who keep a part of their biological brains but everything else inside them is replaced by cybernetic parts (some of them have replaced even their brain with a cyber-brain). They have a ghost in them. But what about the evolving AI’s (like the Project 2501) and the ones that help Section 9 in combat? Can a sufficient complex AI acquire a ghost, as the 2501 pretends?

For a more detailed philosophical discussion of the whole series see Wikipedia – Ghost in the Shell (philosophy).

Besides that, the animation and music is just brilliant. For anyone who didn’t watched … it’s a must see.

Anime – Serial experiments : Lain

Today I saw Serial Experiments : Lain. This is a really cool anime. The story is that of a world where there is less and less difference between the real world and The Wired (a nickname for Internet). At first the whole thing looks really weird. But I really appreciate the fact that there are a lot of philosophical issues mingled among the naration.

The narration seem to consist in a continous experiment in which you (and the characters of the story) have to make sense of your/their understanding of personal identity (who am I?). There is a lot of discussion (in a certain way) about the role of memory in the problem of personal identity and at some point even the reality of the existence of the self is directly dependent on memory (i.e. I exist as long as I appear in the memories of others).