Ambiguity In Shirow Masamune

There is an agreement in society that generally the occurrence of death is to be viewed as a problem. It causes pain, suffering, and is often times an abrupt conclusion to progress. Though these ideas concerning death are true, they do not limit the concept of death to simply being a sorrowful complication. Rather than interpreting death as the end of life for one particular individual, death can be understood as a constant throughout the continuation of life in the grand spectrum. Information and discoveries made by people who will inevitably die are passed on to those who carry their genes. This idea of the perpetuation of knowledge despite the discontinuance of the individual human body is represented throughout Shirow Masamune’s graphic …show more content…
Defining humanity becomes a greater challenge when parts or the entirety of a person’s body, the thing that identifies them, is artificial. In response to Major Kusanagi’s concern that she is potentially just an artificial personality created by a cyberbrain with a miniscule amount of brain cells, her comrade argues: “I’m sure the number of parts needed to be human is more than two or three cells!” acknowledging also that “chemicals and mecha can substitute for a fair number of functions of the cerebrum today” . This conversation that takes place between two cyborgs demonstrates the ambiguity in defining a person that is present throughout the novel. The only way to even attempt at trying to convey one’s understanding of the world is by using the human body. It is impossible for one person to penetrate the mind of another as means of understanding life with their perspective. Rather people convey ideas through actions such …show more content…
“So you had the puppeteer dub himself and then killed off the original?” Asks Aramaki in reference to the criminal whose mind has been copied and then lead into a cyborg body. The situation with the puppeteer further blurs the line of what defines a human, as the puppeteer claims that he is indeed a “self-aware life-form--a ghost” , though he can’t prove it, seeing as how “modern science, after all, still cannot define life.” One could argue that the transferring of the minds of cyborgs to new bodies after old ones become unusable or unwanted represents the survival of a person’s ideas after the death of their bodies. A person in a sense lives on through the thoughts and ideas that they conveyed with their body to others while they were living. After somebody dies, the mind is not literally alive in the way that it is when it has a body to carry it around in, but, as the puppeteer reminds readers, science has yet to discover a source or reason for life and human consciousness. Because of this it is accurate to say that a person’s mind lives on long after that person is able to articulate his or her consciousness, or in other words, dies. Masamune uses the morphing of the puppeteer’s and Major Kusanagi’s ghosts to illustrate this idea. “Let’s fuse together like flowing clouds, become part of the uncertain but diverse world” the puppeteer tells the Major