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Comment by chromaton | Hacker News Reader

I saw two of the series and liked the plot, action, setting, etc.

That said, I didn't appreciate the title conceit and thought the stories got weak whenever they approached it.

There is no ghost in the shell, not in the real world. A person's thoughts, character, and emotions come from neurons, hormones, and sensory input. There's no way to take a person's unique consciousness out of their body, keep it in a jar, and move it somewhere else.

At best it might be possible to emulate someone's brain, but that's not what they did in Ghost in the Shell.

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That was kind of the point of the idea though - it's a world on the precipice of digitizing consciousness - but they haven't yet achieved it.

The series has at its core that question.

that was exactly the whole series was about, both in the original movie and in stand alone complex.

the premise of the series is that they acknowledge that you can't just beam someone's brainwaves or other things and expect that "shell" to be the same exact person. throughout the series they use dummy bodies and even hack into other people's bodies, but they never transferred their consciousness into a machine. there are people with robotic parts, but they all always have an original brain. a lot of the series discusses this aspect of how it makes humans unique in the world they live in and a lot of the episodes revolve around that situation.

i feel like if you only watched 2 episodes, you are not giving the show a fair shake. it's also one of those series that requires multiple viewings to get everything.

The title makes better sense for the original movie, where dummy cyborg bodies (shells) are taken over by a rogue AI. The movie asks what role our biological consciousness plays when our lives are so intertwined with technology (the cyborgs in the movie possess cyberbrains where neurons are fused with circuitry). The ending of the movie is particularly stark to this end as well.

The TV series is mostly about the second title, the "Stand Alone Complex," a phenomenon where some behaviors and movements arise within unrelated groups of people with no identifiable source.

I agree, there is no ghost. Consciousness is an emergent behavior of those elements: neurons, their interconnections, neurotransmitters, etc.

However, in theory it may be possible to reproduce those elements down to a molecular level, allowing the emergence of the "original" consciousness from new matter.

So, if you imagine that "ghost" is metaphorical speak to, say, to summarize, the film is not strictly wrong.

That was the whole point of the series, though.

Is the Major the same Major as she was at the beginning of the film?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus

i think they are referring to the self in the philosophical sense. if you only see things in a literal light, the world will seem very narrow.

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