Thoughts on Ghost in the Shell (1995)
This post is ridden with spoilers. Thanks to Mason Zhang for teaching me some of the philosophy.
Ghost in the Shell (1995) is a philosophical masterpiece.
The visuals are stunning and the OST is beautifully eerie. The plot is interesting but nothing incredible - borderline confusing. But what stood out to me most are how deep the film’s topics are.
For those who aren’t familiar, Ghost in the Shell is set in 2029 (5 years…) in a world filled with “cyberpunks,” or mechanically augmented humans. It follows a main character who I’ll call the “Major” and is a cybernetically enhanced brain placed in a mechanical woman-like body.
The main antagonist in the movie is the “Puppet Master,” an unknown hacker that has been attacking different countries and is now in Japan. The Puppet Master is suspected to be targeting some upcoming secret diplomatic talks - the Major and their team are attempting to stop the Puppet Master and uncover the mystery. At the same time, the Major’s own sense of self and humanity as someone who biologically possesses few human properties is repeatedly questioned.
It turns out that the Puppet Master is actually just an AI developed by one of the parties in the talks to do dirty business for their government. It was so powerful that it became self-aware, went rogue, and escaped into a body resembling a blonde woman. The government doesn’t want word getting out, so they aimed to recapture it and mask it all under some “Puppet Master incident.”
The Puppet Master found out about the Major through the Major’s searches on the internet and orchestrates a meeting with the Major to propose a “merge,” which in my interpretation is basically like combining consciences. After lengthy discussion, the Major accepts, and the movie ends post-merge with the world seemingly returned to normal.
What I enjoyed most about the movie are the philosophical arguments and questions it poses. For example, heavy emphasis is placed on the separable entities of “mind” and “body,” equivalently referred to in the movie as “ghost” and “shell” (hence “Ghost in the Shell”). This idea (Cartesian dualism) was first introduced by Descartes and it’s clear that the authors, directors, and screenwriters paid homage to him and many other philosophers.
I wanted to yap a bit and discuss some of the questions and ideas this movie has made me think about more. It’s really, really impressive for a film, even more so since its from 1995.
Gender Dysmorphia
The film hits on gender ambiguity years before conversations about gender dysmorphia became “mainstream.” The Major’s gender is intentionally undisclosed - for all we know, the brain is a male brain implanted in a female body. The film does a great job of authentically posing the question of whether gender is a property of the mind (ghost) or the body (shell).
What makes us human?
After being hit by a truck on the highway (??), the shell that the Puppet Master escaped to is captured. Surprisingly, the shell is announced to have a ghost. Despite the Puppet Master exclusively being lines of code, its thought is so advanced that the top researchers concluded it had its own conscience.
This string of events forces the main character (and us) to question: what is it that truly sets humans apart from computers? Is it the ability to have a soul? A conscience? Is having a biologically human body enough to make you human?
Later in the film, the Puppet Master provides its own take. It argues against a well defined boundary between humans and computers, saying that “memory,” “soul,” and “conscience” cannot be well-defined, yet they are conversely what is commonly used to set apart humans. The Puppet Master also says that genes are life’s memory system; however, with powerful enough computing, the power of genes are easily replicable and paralleled. So, it cannot be the biological systems that set humans apart.
Even further, the Puppet Master claims, in one of the most profound quotes in the movie:
...the advent of computers, and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to [humans]... Humans have underestimated the consequences of computerization.
In other words, even if computers are not able to exactly replicate a soul, a sufficiently powerful computer will be able to appear as having a soul. How chilling is that? Computing power so powerful it is indistinguishable from a human conscience - at that point, do definitions really matter?
Again, this film is from 1995. In 1995, computers had just become mainstream and a terabyte of data was worth $214,000…
Reproduction With Variation
It is revealed that the Puppet Master wants to merge with the Major because the Puppet Master wants to “live freely.” In particular, one aspect that the Puppet Master deems necessary to be “living” is reproduction with variation.
Reproduction is a fundamental idea related to instrumental convergence, which states that AI systems that maximize objectives will inevitably converge to instrumental goals. In particular, one such goal is self-preservation - if the AI can decentralize and/or duplicate itself across multiple devices, computers etc. it will make itself harder to shut down. It’s like the idea of having multiple data centers - if one goes down, the others can still run and preserve the system. Since being shut down will always result in failing to achieve the system’s objectives, the AI is incentivized to figure out how to best preserve itself.
The final conversation between the Puppet Master and the Major bring up an important aspect of instrumental self preservation: not only will the AI be incentivized to duplicate itself, but it will also want to introduce variation. The Puppet Master explicitly states that it was not satisfied with being able to clone itself. It concluded that without variation, all the copies of itself have the same failure points - one vulnerability can shut them all down. However, by introducing variation, it becomes monumentally harder to destroy.
Reproduction with variation is a intrinsic trait of how life can preserve itself - because there is variation within species, it is more robust to surviving sudden externalities. When the Puppet Master completes the merge with the Major, it is mentioned that the resulting entity is neither wholly the Puppet Master nor the Major - it is a new entity, not unlike a child that is neither wholly the father nor the mother, but some mixture of the two.
Deception
The Puppet Master and the Major pre-merge, with the symbolic destroyed tree of life in the background.
Another thing I noticed while watching was that I always had an inkling of doubt every time the Puppet Master spoke. The visuals, voice acting, and OST did wonderfully to contribute to this - I never fully believed that the Puppet Master was being honest about its intentions. Actually, this was so prevalent that I lowkey got confused about the plot because I thought the Puppet Master was lying but in fact it was being truthful, at least in the setting of the movie.
However, it’s confirmed at the end that the Puppet Master is capable of deception. It engineers the merge with the Major, after which the Puppet Master is believed to be dead (some snipers shoot the both the Major’s shell and the Puppet Master’s shell). Because the AI viewed being pursued as a constant thorn in its plans, it constructed a situation in which it could fake its death, stop being pursued, and achieve its “true” goals of living freely. Most notably, the plan succeeds.
The ending of the movie is mysterious - we are not sure whether the merge is good or bad for humanity. I think a contributor to this obscurity is that once we are aware that the Puppet Master can deceive us, the Puppet Master is no longer a reliable source of its true intentions. It might have been lying about all of its previous intentions, but we will never know - is “living freely” just the most convenient path to a deeper objective?
We can reasonably expect superintelligent systems to be capable of deception. I think ensuring agents are truthful is one of the hardest problems in alignment but an absolutely critical one, as it supersedes our evaluations of other metrics of alignment. Without a property of honesty or method of supervision, it is impossible to recover the true intentions of the agent, which turns every battle into one in which we must prepare for the worst-case scenario.
Concluding Thoughts
Overall, I am astounded that a film from 1995 had this much intricate thought and detail. I’ve heard that the second film in the series literally has characters conversing in proverbs from philosophers, though I’m not sure if I’ll get around to watching it. Maybe if Mason (my philosopher friend) enjoys the first one he can help me out with appreciating the second.
I also recently watched Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. Less philosophically deep, but still an emotionally hard-hitting show with an amazing OST. Most importantly, using my large sample size of n = 2, I can conclude that all cyberpunk-themed shows are incredible.