In the interests of transparency, while this post will be in part a review of the Netflix series Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, this post is going to go far and beyond the show into the philosophical concepts of mind/body dualism. In particular, an argument as to why mind/body dualism is nonsensical in the first place, much as the namesake was attempting to convey. That all said, this is your fair warning that there are likely to be spoilers ahead, for those who have not yet watched the show or the related films.
Let us begin with a brief history. The term “Ghost in the Machine” is credited to the philosopher Gilbert Ryle who was using the phrase in 1949 to describe Cartesian dualism, one of many interpretations of mind/body dualism. Ryle was arguing against dualism, his essay attempting to prove that dualism simply makes no logical sense. Later in 1967, the phrase would be popularized by the author Arthur Koestler in his book entitled The Ghost in the Machine, where like Ryle he would argue against mind/body dualsim.
If it is not already obvious, Masamune Shirow was inspired by the preceding and altered the title ever so slightly for his story. Thus, where we begin is that the phrase “Ghost in the Shell” is a literal and direct reference to mind/body dualism. The “Ghost” is the representation of the mind, whereas the “Shell” is the representation of the body. This is incredibly important to delineate right now, as there often seems to be a bit of misunderstanding by many that “Ghost” is instead referring to something like spirit or soul. Of course, that sort of misunderstanding may be understandable as the difference between these two ideas may itself not be clear. So let us clear that up.
What is the difference between “mind” and “soul?” The answer is rather simple: measurability. That is, things dealing with the mind are in some fashion measurable, whereas those things dealing with the soul are not. At least not directly. It can be argued that even the mind is strictly unmeasurable in a direct fashion, but that would require much more clarification on what “mind” means. If I assume that my mind is the part of me that relates to my conscious self, where activities like my thinking and my decision making take place, then it should be clear why these things are indeed measurable. After all, my mind’s activities manifest in reality through my actions, activities which are quite measurable in their nature.
My soul, on the other hand, is not measurable. There is even debate as to whether it exists at all. I am not convinced I have a soul of the sort most people have in mind. If I did, I would describe it specifically as “that part of me that is unmeasurable.” And then, as René Descartes quickly discovered, a lot of people would rightly beg the question of how something unmeasurable could possibly affect something measurable at all.
As I am fond of describing these things differently, I will now invoke determinism and talk of causes and effects. The body, then, is a thing that is rooted deeply in determinism. The body is affected by all sorts of things, and it causes all sorts of things as well, simply bumping into the atoms of the world at virtually every moment. The mind is a little more difficult to delineate. In a lot of ways, the mind is also rooted in determinism, being affected through sensory inputs and then causing through expression and manifestation of actions, typically through the body. However, if one is fond of ideas of freedom and free will, they might also suggest there is an element of the mind that is an uncaused cause. That is, a part of the mind that itself is not affected by the world, and yet is capable of affecting the world, through decision making for example.
The soul, using these sorts of descriptions, is a thing that is entirely outside determinism. That is, it is unaffected by the world, nor does it affect the world. Or, by some interpretations, perhaps it is affected by the world, but is left unable to affect the world. Like a caused uncause? The very idea is difficult to grasp as it is so far outside the realms I am familiar with.
Therefore, the term “Ghost” referring to mind as opposed to soul is a significant distinction. And so, it is with this distinction in mind that I now refer to the show Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045. I found the series to be extremely entertaining. Especially visually and audibly. The closing song to the episodes of the second season, millennium parade‘s “No Time to Cast Anchor” is stuck in my head even now. As a fan of the original films, I found this representation of the familiar characters quite stunning.
But then we get to the story, and I am still not entirely sure how I feel about things. The first season brought the group back to Section 9 in order to deal with a new existential threat known as the “posthumans.” A posthuman, we are told initially, is an individual who has undergone a transformation or evolution, whereby their intellectual capacities appear to far exceed even the greatest supercomputers of the time. Even the use of three Tachikomas, sharing their collective processing and computational abilities, is still insufficient to really go against them.
Where the first season spends its time introducing all the players and setting up the threat, the second season is still a bit of a mystery. It is even suggested that perhaps the entire second season is essentially just a dream. Faced with an unreliable narrator throughout the second season, and even at the end, it is entirely unclear what happened and what did not. The finale seems to suggest that the antagonist, Takashi Shimamura, was busy infecting the world’s population in order to push humans to their next evolutionary stage through a process he refers to as “double think.” The concept itself is a bit confusing.
For those seeking out an explanation of this “double think” idea, here is how I understand it: through the hacking of an individual’s cyberbrain, they are placed into a state where they simultaneously exist in two realms. Saying exist is a bit suggestive though, so perhaps I might better describe it as like multithread programming. That is, in their minds, the individual is living two separate and mostly independent lives. One in the real world, and one in a virtual reality similar to a very immersive video game (as Purin Esaki tells us). Furthermore, the virtual reality is unique for each individual; a sort of solipsistic reality whereby the individual gets to live out their perfect, preferred existence allowing them to remain calm and happy.
Meanwhile, their real world selves get to continue doing whatever it is they are meant to do, benefiting from the calm and happy state received from the virtual aspect of their existence. We do not get too many examples of this to help us understand, only really seeing construction workers contentedly rebuilding Tokyo. So, at least for me, there is already a pretty big problem with this situation, and it stems once again in the ideas of mind/body dualism.
It is also important to point out that the reason Shimamura follows this course of action is that he is trying to eliminate conflict and war among his human brethren. His solution is derived from reading George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. It is also worth pointing out that the artificial intelligence that allows him to enact his ultimate plan is called 1A84, clearly a derivative of 1984. If you are not familiar with this incredibly influential novel, I suggest you read it or at least watch the film adaptation. It reveals a lot about what is happening in SAC_2045, and why it does not appear to be a happy ending at all.
Very briefly, Orwell’s novel is where the idea of “Big Brother” comes from. In that story, the world is overtaken by a rather overbearing government who watches and controls its citizens in such a way as to completely remove any possibility of freedom or free will. This should already start to sound like what happens in SAC_2045.
Putting aside the challenges in determining what does or does not happen in reality, the ending result of SAC_2045, that is referred fondly as a singularity that is the progression of the human species to their logical next level of their evolution, is that the freedom of every single human being across the entire planet is forcibly removed by the antagonist. There only appears to be two characters who are in some way immune to the affects. And one of those characters is outright dismissed because she doesn’t have a “ghost.”
As far as Esaki goes, if you take my interpretation of “ghost” at the outset, then it is suggested that she has no mind. This seems incredibly misguided as she clearly has some sort of intellect that she exercises throughout the latter half of the season. Which then forces viewers to start suggesting that “ghost” is instead referring to her soul. This too is incredibly misguided. Are we to believe that the only thing that differentiates Major Motoko Kusanagi and Esaki, the fact that Kusanagi has a human brain in her body, is the reason that one has a soul and one does not? If we follow this reasoning, then artificial intelligences (to use the terms in the show) cannot possibly ever have souls. Which is a bit presumptuous in my own opinion. Especially when there is strong evidence to suggest otherwise just a little later in the same episode.
And then there is the Major. Apparently she is the only human who is “romantic” enough to be immune. Only she has difficulty blurring the line between fantasy and reality enough to prevent her from being hacked and forced into “double think.” Out of nine billion souls across this planet, only she was able to resist. I guess that is why she is the protagonist. (Honestly, I do not buy it at all.)
Where I am left after watching the series is a bit annoyed actually. I do not like how the series ended. Do not misunderstand, I still liked the series overall. And I will still recommend it to other potential viewers. But I think the story has some rather significant issues. Maybe, with time, someone can enlighten me to what it was all about. I’m still “just trynna figure out what it’s about.”
Ultimately, I might suggest the best way to interpret the entire series is in the spirit of the ontology of its namesake. The show and the story are demonstrating to us the logical conclusions an individual might draw in a world where mind/body dualism is how it all works. That is, if it actually makes sense for the mind to exist without the body. Which leads us in very unexpected and terrifying directions.
The alternative is to suggest that mind/body dualism is not how it all works. That our minds are inexplicably linked to our bodies in a very, very intimate way. I am reminded of the thought experiment discussed in my Philosophy of Mind class where we asked the question of what would happen if you took my brain and placed it into someone else’s body. Who would awaken after that surgery? Me? The other person? Someone else entirely?
My answer was simple. What would awaken would be a new, unique individual who would bear some resemblance to me, and also some resemblance to the other person, but definitely not either of us. Of course, no one really knows the answer to this question because to perform such a surgery skirts the bounds of what is ethical in our world. So unless someone breaks all taboos and performs this illegal surgery, we may simply never know.