Spirit in the Cloud – Part 1

Course content

1. The machine kills a man and robs his brain
2. The brain is built into a cyborg
3. This produces the sharpest weapon “Major Kusanagi”
4. The feeling brain is the ghost in the cyborg shell
5. The Ghost has diffuse memories of his past life
6. Kusanagi wants to know who she was
7. She learns that she is the first working Cyberbrain
8. There have already been six wrong attempts
9. A Fehlexemplar survived and becomes the Puppet Master
10. The Puppet Master is at the same time the former friend of Kusanagi
11. They merge into one another
12. Both are united and fulfill their separate tasks

We now have another edition of “Ghost in the Shell” (GitS). The 2017 version is a real film with Scarlett Johansson as Major Motoko Kusanagi. The visual transformation from anime, from the year 1995, has done excellently. Unfortunately, the deeper content from the “root” part has been lost. These were sacrificed in favor of the action scenes. Therefore, the 1995 dialogues are used for further analysis.
The sequence of scenes from Chinese manga is different in itself than the usual Hollywood Actors. In the latter the scenes are very short and follow each other at a rapid pace. The viewer has no way to develop his own thoughts – there is no free space. Different from Chinese mangas. There is a significant transition between the individual actions. At GitS are the scenes from the city life of Hong Kong. As a viewer, you can relax a bit and get additional context information. The interplay of context and action characterizes the image of a dystopian society for the year 2029, the exact opposite of a utopia. The Puppet Master says: “Humanity has completely underestimated the consequences of computerization. The outsourcing of consciousness leads to the emergence of new forms of life. ”

Overall, the film deals with the problem of duality, the separation of body and mind. 2029 it is possible to build cyborgs. The company MagaTec has begun the monopoly, from production to maintenance. In these machines, software-artificial intelligence is then loaded.

In addition to the cyborgs, people still live without any technical expansion, but with access to the net. As a third life form and completely redesigned, there are cyborgs with a human brain as an addition. The cyborg then has a cyberbrain with a biocapsel – the shell – in which the human is contained. The human part is called a ghost because it also contains something unpredictable. Batou to Major: “Has your ghost whispered to you?” Major Kusanagi is the first functioning hybrid cyborg. Through the two ghosts, she experiences an internal struggle between feeling and intellect as well as between man and machine.

The essential question of Kusanagi is that according to the “Woher?” And her “Wozu?”. She talks about it with her creator and says, “I’ll find who I was.” In the 2017 version, she gets the address of her mother’s apartment from her creator. There she sees objects from her previous life. There is no direct memory, but it is moved emotionally. In our lives it also happens that we know something that we have never seen before. This would then be the case for incarnation theology. With the transplant of the “Brains in the Shell” that would be the final rebirth and immortality would be achieved. MagaTec is always building a new body.

In contrast, man is a distinctive individual with body and mind. Kusanagi says, “My face, my voice and my body make me different from others, but my spirit belongs to me. I define myself about my environment and only believe in my existence.”

Whether the environment is real or not, the garbage man philosophises: “Every simulated experience, every dream and all existing information are both reality and illusion at the same time. In any case, all the information with which a person comes into contact just comes as a drop in the ocean. “Life itself is then like a nodal point in this ocean. All independent forms of life are born in the sea of ​​information.

A fourth form of life is the Puppet Master. He is one of the failed predecessors of Kusanagi, who, however, has survived without his creators knowing it. As a revenge for his human assassination he decides to fight the system. To this end, he builds up a huge network of brains. These are more intelligent than anything else. This intelligence is bodiless, but can penetrate into other beings and use them (puppet play). Kusanagi has the mission to eliminate the puppeteer. When they meet, they realize that they both have the same fate, they merge into one consciousness, but go their own ways.

If a cyberbrain succeeds in producing a ghost, the entire human existence would be meaningless. The machine would have won the evolutionary struggle against humans and this would be a dystopia.