Ghost in the Shell- Random Ramble

This is a copy of my note on facebook

So for God knows what reason, I was fidgety and unable to sleep. "Oh sleep, why dost thou evade me?" . Lots of stuff roaming around in my head. So, I thought, alright, damn it- I'll just make a random status update to get over this urge to puke something out of my head. (Gross, i know). So, anyway, this is going to be a long one - just thought that I would write about something a friend and I were chatting about today- Ghost in the Shell.

For me, the anime (I was watching the first season of the tv series- Stand Alone Complex) was pure awesomeness. And of course, so is the movie. Now, I'm not writing a review about it right now, just jotting down my thoughts on a certain aspect of it (I seem to be in the mood for extempore, so pardon my uncontrolled English :D ).

As a piece of fiction, the very idea of Artificial Intelligence and that human consciousness can some day be completely digitalized, is extremely intriguing. It opens up a plethora of questions and possibilities - how do you define life? Does the soul, or as it's referred to in GITS, "ghost", exist? Can AI some day gain life? and so on. Similar concepts have been dealt with in many works of fiction till date, like in Isaac Assimov's novels and a lot of animes (for example, in Serial Experiments Lain, I am told- got to watch it soon!) and movies.

But let's take a look at this from a realistic perspective (someone recently told me that I should call it 'my perspective'. lol). It seems to me that this possibility, though quite romantic and exciting, is quite impossible, or extremely remote at best. There is just something about life and consciousness that artificial creations of humanity can never hope to emulate. Life is a beauty and a wonder to behold. You can program a robot to externally display the act of feeling pain, but can it actually "experience" pain like we do? Looking at it from a technical point of view too, digitalizing the human consciousness would require a perfect mapping of the human brain, and this is like eons away. The intensively complex neuron connections in the human brain have been hardly even scratched upon the surface by scientists today- imagine a drunk spider, weaving it's web like dizzy, in 3D, and that's just one path of neuron connections- so imagine a circus of spiders gone crazy (I am not going to explain what neurons are :p google it if you're curious. They're basically what the brain is supposed to be constituted of). Or to give you a simpler image- a jumbled mess of a twine of thread. To actually figure out how this complex network results in thought, manifests in decisions and feelings, is a humongous task in itself, if not nigh impossible. And on top of this, if the soul is considered to exist, it is by essence a non- material element. So can you describe consciousness simply in terms of brain structure? 

Okay, I guess that was a lot of jargon and a tad bit heavy for some people. :D So, on a slightly different note, I found another thing quite interesting in GITS, and this particular theme has been nicely integrated into the anime Psycho Pass too (although the ending was way below my expectations), and that is - how humans are becoming more and more robotic and impersonal as time passes. I have a lot to say on this too, but maybe later. I think it's about time I stopped rambling!