Ghost In The Shell Moments Only True Fans Understood

April 2024 · 2 minute read

Ghost in the Shell fans owe a debt of gratitude to French thinker Rene Descartes for being so bloody wrong when he proposed his idea of how the mind and body co-exist. Cartesian dualism, as it's known, says that there's a body and there's a mind, two separate entities. Simple enough, right?

Simple, sure, but also wrong, according to Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle who, in 1949, wrote off Cartesian dualism as the idea of the spirit/mind/soul being a "ghost in the machine." Then in 1967, along came psychologist and philosopher Arthur Koestler. He named his takedown of the Cartesian mind-body relationship The Ghost in the Machine, a tribute we're sure Ryle just adored. It's Koestler's book which helped to inspire Ghost in the Shell — his ideas are lofty and aggravatingly dense, but the gist is that there is no separation between mind and body.

Add A.I. to this equation, and things get murky. The questions pile up, and soon you start to wonder if you're even in the same universe anymore. What does it all mean? Does the Major's ghost make her more human than machine? At what point does the Third Law of Robotics apply to cyborgs like her? Do androids dream of electric sheep? Deckard, have you ever retired a human by mistake?

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