I recently watched Ghost in the Shell and thought it was very good. I think it's trying to incorporate the Ship of Theseus issue into the work, so I wanted to share my opinion

There is a very interesting thought experiment. It's about a ship that has been at sea for hundreds of years, and in order to repair it always has to get parts changed, such as decks or masts. If one day all the parts on the ship were changed over, would the ship still be the same?

There are many interesting extensions to this question, such as the idea that people can't cross the same river, such as is a band whose entire crew has been replaced still the same band? The essence of all variants of the question remains the same: how do we recognize the sameness of the object of change. That is to say: in the midst of constant change, how can we be sure that the object is still the same after the change?

Let's take an example: Cells in the human body die and are renewed every moment, and every few months the cells of the whole body are replaced. Will I still be “me” after a few months? Or, for example, is a band that has had all its members replaced still the same band?

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Many philosophers have answered this question, and the ideas on which they answered it varied greatly, and there were even many opposing answers. This article is not intended to be a profound exposition of each answer, but simply to take you on a journey through how the age-old philosophical question was given new life in Attack on Titan.

In May 1989, Masaru Shiso began serializing Attack on Titan. The manga portrays a future with a slightly grayish tone, where people can become more like terminals by modifying their brains so that they can connect directly to the Internet. At the same time, prosthetic technology is advancing at a rapid pace, allowing people to replace any part of their body.

This is where we get a glimpse of the Ship of Theseus. If all of a person's parts were gradually replaced, would they still be the same person? More broadly, one could ask this:

If all of a person's body parts are gradually replaced with machines, is he a human or a robot?

The reality is that a person who has a prosthetic leg replaced because of a broken arm will undoubtedly not lose his identity as a human being just because he has a prosthetic leg. Nor would we call a robot human just because it had a hand attached to it.

But what happens if this replacement continues?

Use this process to push the limits. Replace all his muscles and organs with machines, and in the end keep only his brain, would he still be human?

Some would say that the brain, as well as the soul, is the mark of what makes a human being human, and that intelligence distinguishes us from beasts. Let's switch this corollary around a bit, if a person replaces the hippocampus in his brain due to an accident, is he still intact as a human being? Is he more like a human or a robot at this point?

Or maybe we create a chip that mimics human consciousness. We replicate the consciousness of a brain-injured dying man and use it to manipulate the dead man's physical body, so is he a human or a computer at this point?

By this time, the Ship of Theseus problem has begun to show its hideous fangs; there is nothing sacred about man and there is nothing nightmarishly special about machines.

It denies the uniqueness of human beings, that there is not much difference between us and our creations, that organic matter is not much more noble than inorganic matter. The fragility of the concept of “man” begins to be exposed, and we wonder: what makes a man a man?

At this point, in order to save the precarious “human being”, in order to ensure the nobility of the human being, we must turn to a more sublime force. That is the soul.

Let's take the ship of Theseus from the beginning of the article and row it here.

At this point in time, after a long voyage and repairs, we have replaced all the planks of the original ship A, and we have used the replaced planks to build ship B. So which ship is the original “ship of Theseus”?

One answer is that it is undoubtedly A, because A has something higher than matter, something that we can refer to as “soul”, which defines A and does not change with the change of the object. To extend this answer, “I” will still be “I” a few months from now, because “I” have an indestructible soul.

However, the concept of souls seems to be the same as that of God; it seems that we have carved out a place for them in our minds, and they can only exist in our minds. We can't prove it exists, nor can we prove it doesn't exist. It's like ghosts: we've heard of them, but we've never seen them.

The “soul theory” obviously doesn't hold up to scrutiny, but there are better answers to the problem of the Ship of Theseus, such as the “space-time theory”. This theory says that we should take into account the spatio-temporal continuity of things that change, and that if a changing object has spatio-temporal continuity, then that object is the original object. As long as a person is continuous in the process of change, then he is the same person, even if his cells are newborn and die, or change limbs.

The “space-time theory” is obviously not as easy to understand as the “soul theory”. If we were to make a movie about the ship of Theseus, the smart thing to do would be to choose the “soul theory” over the “space-time theory”.

Attack on Titan also adopts the “soul theory”. What is the advantage of this? It brings the audience into the narrative very quickly. In real life, we all understand that the soul is a theological concept. And it's such a distinct concept that it saves the movie from having to explain the background and devotes the limited time it has to characterization and the main narrative.

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The protagonist works for Public Security Section 9 to track down a hacker who has invaded the human brain. The hacker has invaded the human brain and turned normal people into puppets by manipulating their memories, when the human “soul” does not help them retain their free will.

As the protagonist and others pursue the hacker, they discover that the hacker himself is a robot. As he evades capture, he continues to think about life and death. The fact that the machine cannot nurture a “soul” does not prevent him from becoming a self-thinking human being.

A sharp contrast emerges: the self-proclaimed noble human being is manipulated, loses his freedom, and becomes more like a robot. The demeaned robot, on the other hand, begins to think nobly, and perhaps it is thinking that defines his existence.

This also provokes the protagonist to think: what defines us, what makes a human being human?

What does a successful commercial movie look like? I think first of all, the box office is high enough, and at the same time it can leave something worth remembering.

If something is too profound, the director has to be careful, the audience will probably not understand it, and only a small part of them can appreciate it. If something is too frivolous, the audience will have to scold you for treating people like retards.

Both give those who want to relax a space to hide for a while, and at the same time allow those who want to think to find interesting points. When the show breaks up and the audience lines up to exit, there are still two people who will unconsciously wonder: what makes people human?

Maybe the movie will have served its purpose.