For now, the answer is that probably no human being has ever seen a soul. We describe ourselves, one detail after another, through information such as names, ages, occupations, search histories and purchase histories. Yet there are moments when we suddenly notice that the “me, here and now” looking at all this is nowhere to be found within it. Titles and numbers say a great deal about “me,” but who lives with the certainty that these things are their very self? Whenever we encounter a self we cannot fully explain, we recall the word “soul.” This is not because the word explains anything. Rather than explaining something we do not understand, it appears when our understanding comes to a halt.
The word “soul” often appears in religious contexts—its immortality, reincarnation or purification—and seems to be understood as a classical philosophical concept. A related word is “spirit.” In ancient Egypt, the soul was considered immortal and the dead were believed to rise again. You may also have heard the word psychē, which likewise means “soul” or “spirit” in Greek philosophy. In Homer’s epics, a person’s psychē was said to escape through the mouth or a wound at death and descend to the underworld as a shade. The concept appeared frequently in antiquity, but since the modern era, attention has shifted toward “mind” and “subjectivity”; today the soul is rarely discussed. In other words, the word has continued to be used to point to the very situation in which the self cannot be determined, rather than as an object of explanation. That is why, even after concepts such as mind and subjectivity replaced it in the modern era, the soul never disappeared entirely. Even with the development of psychology and neuroscience, and with the self explained as a process of information processing, the feeling itself that “I am here, now” repeatedly comes up in discussions as something not adequately explained.
One work that takes to an extreme a world in which the self can be explained as information is GHOST IN THE SHELL. Near its beginning, we see a man whose cyberbrain has been implanted with false memories, leading him to believe in a life with a family that does not exist. He had not been given happiness. He had simply been given a coherent self-image that spared him from questioning who he was. When that self-image collapsed, he did not lose reality; he lost his foothold for being himself. The scene often brings to mind Robert Nozick’s experience machine, but the issue here is not a binary opposition between pleasure and reality. The question is whether, if the self is consistent as information, a person can recognize it as “me” and go on living. If memories fit together and the story of one’s life is coherent, a person recognizes it as the self and cannot determine that it is fiction. In the world of Ghost in the Shell, this is no exception. Memories can be altered, bodies replaced, and personalities managed as data. The soul in GHOST IN THE SHELL is an unlocatable sense of unease left behind precisely because the self can be constituted by information alone.
Motoko Kusanagi is no exception: her self is constituted by information alone. Apart from her cerebrum, her only biological part, she is made of a prosthetic body. Her body can be replaced, sensations are processed through her cyberbrain, and even memories can be altered. Kusanagi does not lack a self; rather, her self has been externalized from the outset. Under these conditions, the question “Where is my real self?” becomes difficult to sustain. Every attempt to verify it refers back to a self-image described as data. Managed by the state and organizations, and defined by missions and positions, her self takes shape only through being observed. She is portrayed as someone unable to determine herself from within. Even so, she repeatedly asks throughout the film what she is.
“Just as it takes more than a few components for a human being to be human, it takes a surprising number of things for me to be myself. A face that sets me apart from others, a voice I am not conscious of, the hands I look at when I wake, childhood memories, a sense of the future. And that is not all: the vast information my cyberbrain can access, the breadth of the net. All of these are part of me; they give rise to my very consciousness as ‘me,’ and at the same time keep confining me within certain limits.”
These words show that the self is not some smallest unit, but is made up of a surprising number of elements. For her, the self is formed by the interweaving of body, memory, information and environment. These elements both form the self and act to regulate it. With this view of the self, the soul is not posited as a substance dwelling within it. If the word soul is used at all, it merely points to the feeling itself of still being “me,” despite being constituted by so many conditions.
Indeed, she voices her anxiety in these terms.
“Anyone who is a fully prosthetic cyborg like me thinks about it. […] ‘Is the self I am now just a simulated personality made up of a cyberbrain and a prosthetic body?’ […] If the cyberbrain itself could produce a ghost and house a soul, what do you think one should then rely on to believe in oneself?”
What is being questioned here is not whether the self is genuine or false, but that even if it were simulated, there is no basis anywhere for denying it. If a cyberbrain can produce a ghost, a soul no longer proves something uniquely human. At that point, the grounds for believing in oneself cannot be sought in either inner life or the body. The word soul has long been used as a component that guarantees a human being’s humanity.
Motoko Kusanagi is searching for herself, because someone must observe her for her to recognize herself. But is this something that happens only to her? Does it not apply to us as well?
How have we always proved ourselves? Or what allows us to be certain that the one existing here and now is ourselves? Are we not like her, able to confirm that we are “here” only through names, roles, evaluations and records? We begin to see that the self was never something hidden within, but something provisionally constituted in relationships with the outside world. Kusanagi’s anxiety is not a product of an extreme technological society. It is simply the exposure of the instability of the self that we have long tacitly overlooked.
When an observed self becomes the premise, people seem no longer able to choose freely. The information that shows who we are is already outside us, evaluated and managed. Under those conditions, “because I want to” is an exceedingly fragile basis for a decision.
Even so, Kusanagi has no choice but to decide which way to go, without being able to establish whether she is real. She begins that choice knowing that she has no conviction that “this is right.”
What matters is that this choice is not an illusion. Even when the self has been observed and exhaustively described as fact, people still make decisions—including the decision to do nothing. A subject is not a being who possesses a certain, assured self.
In a scene between Kusanagi and Batou, there is a quotation from 1 Corinthians 13:11.
“Batou, do you remember the voice we once heard out on the sea? Before those words, there is a line like this: ‘When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put away childish things.’ Here, there is neither the program called the Puppet Master nor the woman called the Major.”
The Japanese New Interconfessional Translation renders the verse as follows.
“When I was a young child, I spoke like a young child, thought like a young child, and reflected like a young child. But when I became an adult, I gave up the things of a young child.” (1 Corinthians 13:11)
What is being described here is not growth or maturity. It is the experience of the very standards of value that supported the self being invalidated through contact with a higher being. The New Interconfessional Translation makes this easier to see: when one encounters the perfect God, all one’s former values become useless. When we come into contact with a being of a higher dimension than ourselves, the values and prejudices we have cultivated are overturned, and a new self is born. It also means that we have moved to a new stage, different from the landscape we once saw.
In the end, what was the soul? What was the self? Perhaps there was never any distinction between Kusanagi and us to begin with. It was neither an essence dwelling within the self nor a mysterious core resisting conversion into information. Was it instead a word for the fact that, even though the self has become explainable without limit, the subject who nevertheless chooses and takes responsibility does not disappear?
There is probably no essential difference between Kusanagi and us. We too live each day without an assured self, making choices without a firm foundation through names and records. Yet the word soul does not disappear from our world precisely because, somewhere, we cannot help believing that this way of living is not an illusion. Or perhaps it stems from an original biological desire in human beings: to have the self acknowledged not by someone else, but by oneself.