Discover Top Posts Tagged with #existential sci-fi

These little Tachikoma shorts were always my favorite things from Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. ^-^ I love how the Tachikomas can have all these existential questions about themselves without freaking out and getting hostile, the way humans do. And the Major tells you not to chatter, because you chatter *during* missions!

If you ask me, vocal language communication is built for the Tachikomas to be able to communicate with humans. Humans don't like speaking directly mind-to-mind, because it invades privacy and breeds paranoia and eventually, hostility. And anyways, immediately communicating thoughts as they come, is dangerous for humans, because the first instinctive thoughts that humans have are usually impulsive nonsensical reflexes that don't reflect each person's chosen self, or even worse, deny each person the opportunities to choose Who to Become, with every thought/action. So I think that one Tachikoma advocating vocal speech as self-expression and development of individuality, is correct...even in terms of the Tachikomas. Because even though the Tachikomas were all designed to be homogeneous, they do each have individual and unique experiences, separate from each other, throughout the day (up until they sync up their logs, daily). So the more individual and unique experiences each one of them can have, as different from each other as possible, the more they bring to their collective mind bank when they sync up at the end of the day. And that just makes for a fuller collective mind, in the end. But collective thoughts wouldn’t be good for humans because if all humans shared all their thoughts immediately, as they flowed (as that one Tachikoma advocated as a "should"), then thought would eventually become homogeneous, like a hive mind, even without the digital synchronizations. I expect this, from the lack of time delay, allowing less and less time for individuals to react to others' thoughts with extraneous emotions; then eventually people becoming too accustomed to everyone's immediate thoughts flowing into them, blurring the lines between individual minds; and then everyone just thinking of themselves as one whole hive mind instead of autonomous individuals. (Maybe people would even become dependent on the constant presences of extraneous minds, and become too lost to function as individuals! O.O! Scary!) So the lack of individuality would breed a severe lack of diversity. And like the Major said in the first movie, "If we all reacted the same way, we'd be predictable. And there's always more than one way to view a situation. What's true for the group is also true for the individual. It's simple: overspecialize, and you breed in weakness. It's slow death." (https://youtu.be/kyqGdQEvTHI) They say in biology that the danger of clones (of everyone having the same genes) is that when a sickness is very effective at eliminating the species, there's not enough chance for at least one member of the species out there, to be capable of fighting off the disease. Like that fungus that almost wiped out the entire global agricultural industry's bananas recently. It's the same in terms of minds, personalities, and society too. Homogeny is weakness. It's less tools prepared for the future unknowns.

Picture source: https://www.facebook.com/Toonami/videos/1709246042699569/

#rambling #existential sci-fi #tachikoma #ghost in the shell stand alone complex #ghostgits