There is No Ghost in the Shell ?!

Discussions about the first film (Ghost in the Shell) and the second (Innocence)

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Ghostless
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There is No Ghost in the Shell ?!

Post by Ghostless »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upwkqW6REpA

Here is a video analysis of the first movie.

Just when I thought that I somewhat understood the film I end up on this vid & get me all the more confused :lol:

Basicaly He's saying that Humans are essentialy machines & that there is no "Ghost",emotions & such is about "architecture & programming"

I Advise you to watch the vid!!

So What's your take on This ?
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Freitag
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Post by Freitag »

There is another thread here where the guy that made that video posted a link to it.

http://www.neomythos.com/gitsphpBB/view ... view#12456

It's good find though - even if we've seen it before. You bring a new interpretation. Just as the movies suggest diversification is the only antidote to slow death.

I still disagree with the assertion starting at 18:14 that says the evidence points to a lack of existence of a soul. At that point the author makes a disjoint connection. In my view the evidence stacks in exactly the other way. When the Tachikomas sacrifice themselves to save Batou (in the series) the Major observes that what she had thought to be a bug and aberration in programming was in fact a ghost soul) manifesting itself.

In the scenes chosen form the movie for the linked video what you see as the Major is essentially the child of the Major and the Puppetmaster. While the Puppetmaster could have copied itself and merged only a copy with the Major, so that now two distinct entities could exist, I think it is suggested that the sequestration of the mind of the Puppetmaster in a single body has replaced both original unique individuals with a new unique individual.

There is also the mis-characterisation of the intent behind the phrase The Ghost in the Machine. The interpretation posited in the video is that the conclusion is that there is no soul where the phrase itself comes from the the expression of Cartesian Dualism that says exactly the opposite (the phrase was coined by a guy on the other side of the argument, but nevertheless expresses well the concept that ind and body are not the same). That the mind (soul) and the body are two distinct entities.


Here is background on the phrase.

Start here and dig three levels deep
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Machine
A book by a guy that does not believe in dualism

through here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_Ryle
This is the guy that coined the phrase used as the title of the book. He started out with one belief (Cartesian Dualism) and then changed that to the opposite

to here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartesian_dualism

Adding my own spin here.
The mind is subject to what happens to the brain (body) in the same way that an operating system is subject to things that happen to the computer. Pull the plug and whatever programs you were running will cease. But you can run any one of a number of OS on the same hardware. Those in turn affect the way the programs run. Look at a word processor on one platform (say Open Doc on Linux) and compare to another (Word on Windows). The hardware limits how fast they can go, but different OS approaches to VM mean that one may hit a hard wall and stop while the other will merely slow down and start swapping until the physical hard drive becomes full. Compare these both to software that solves the same problem (and that is the key, what problem is being solved - be it wanting to send a letter or life trying to perpetuate itself, all of these are different ways to solving the same problem and the answer of course will have a lot of similarity because it's a single problem in a shared environment, but the approaches are very different) to how it's handled on Apple's OS and you get a third choice. Apple has eschewed the hibernate concept but has set up a system of ultra low power usage and the ability to restore everything to last used state when recovering from a power out. So the word processor is in these cases the "ghost" and the physical hardware is the "shell". The OS is merely the interface between the two - that construct that allows the program to run on the hardware. For us wet machines that would be the DNA (firmware/BIOS) and the way in which things are encoded as strings of proteins. We use language (written and oral) to be our long term storage and to communicate between different systems. Yup, we work like computers, because computers work like us - we used what we were familiar with to design them.
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moreorless
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Post by moreorless »

I have always rather felt that there was a good deal of Blade Runner influence here. Scots film and GiTs would I feel be less about claiming theres "no soul" and more what exactly "soul" is.

In Blade Runner especially I'd say that the replicants are intended as a stand in for modern humans in a world were science has taken over from religion as the central pillar of knowledge, Basically making the point that the replicants not having some "special" origin does not preclude them from developing humanity the same way many modern humans will view themselves as the product of evolution rather than especially creatred and favoured to be special. The "soul" ends up being a product of intelligence and experience rather than some god given mystical element independent on these.
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Freitag
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Post by Freitag »

Ooo, I like that tie in with Blade Runner.

On the no ghost side of the argument these days is Scott Adams who uses the phrase "moist robots" to describe humans. He's essentially espousing the clockwork universe view of the world where there is no free will (and consequently no need for a ghost)

Hmm, in GitS is a ghost an essentially spiritual thing? Or something more mechanistic?
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moreorless
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Post by moreorless »

Whilst they have spiritual/religious elements to them I think Oshii's films are more philosophically inclined personally as with Scotts and the "ghost" is more a self aware consciousness that machines lack more due to limit in tech pre puppetmaster.

In both cases as well I tend to think that the locations reflect these stories. On one level you could view them as negative views on reckless human development and its effect on the environment which perhaps they are to some degree but I don't think that's the main thing going on. Indeed I think in both cases I think the films are actually deliberately humanising the environment moving away from the future as some nightmare warning.

These locations aren't sterile and they aren't entirely monsterous but rather there packed with human touches on a small scale(small businesses, untidiness, layers of history, people themselves) and a lot of effort put into showing these things as beautiful though scenes such as the montages in the kind of way that's typically reserved for natural subjects or indeed much more calculated and less organic man made environments.
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