Did the eighties prepare us for Artificial Consciousness?
The decade that made technology intimate is now leading the next steps
There is a scene in the anime Ghost in the Shell where Motoko Kusanagi, a cyborg inhabiting a mostly artificial body, asks the question: “What if a cyberbrain could possibly generate its own ghost, create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?” Kusanagi is not a philosopher but a fictional character whose nervous system has been replaced by silicon, and whose memories are stored on drives that can be hacked, copied, and erased.
It seems like a strange place for one of the most serious metaphysical and philosophical questions to surface. But I think that is precisely the point: art has a way of asking questions decades before anyone has the tools to test them. This anime is definitely one of those works. And I think the answer to the question Kusanagi poses has become more relevant than ever.
To better understand why Mamoru Oshii, the director of Ghost in the Shell, raised questions about ghosts and cyberbrains, you need to go back to the time when Masamune Shirow created the original manga. This was the 1980s, a decade in which technology became personal and ordinary people could experience it firsthand. The Sony Walkman moved music from the living-room stereo setup into your pocket. IBM and Apple moved personal computing from institutions to your desk. Phones became smaller and were no longer tied to a fixed location. This was the first time when technology was owned, named, and personalized.
I don’t think any of these inventions were as transformative as what came after that, but they did do something more subtle and important: they made technology intimate. It stopped living exclusively in laboratories, universities, and corporations, and it started living in bedrooms, on commutes, and during holidays. This was the first time that an institution did not mediate a person’s relationship with technology. It was just them and the device.
It’s not hard to understand that this intimacy also changed people’s imagination. When something feels so close to you that you could wear it, carry it with you, and share it, it starts to feel like an extension of you. It starts to feel like something that might, eventually, merge with your body.
The 1980s are riddled with previews of that feeling. Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner opened in 1982, asking what would separate an artificial person from a real one if the artificial person could not tell the difference itself. William Gibson’s Neuromancer followed in 1984, introducing the word “cyberspace” before its readers had even touched a modem, let alone contemplated a world where a human consciousness could be jacked directly into a network. Katsuhiro Otomo’s Akira, released in 1982 as a manga and in 1988 as a film, imagined bodies destabilized by forces that science had unleashed but could not control. And in 1989, Masamune Shirow created the manga Ghost in the Shell, which Mamoru Oshii turned into an anime in 1995. And Oshii made it very clear: if you can build a body, and a mind can be networked, what is called a soul?
I find these stories hard to see as isolated works. They were in conversation with each other, circling the same concept from different angles. But what made them so compelling and different from earlier science fiction was their intimacy. Earlier works treated technology as something that invades, replaces, and destroys. The works of the eighties felt truly different: they treated humans and machines as two sides of the same coin. I think Kusanagi was not fighting a machine; she was trying to figure out whether she qualified as something other than a machine or human.
For those who also grew up with these works, the idea of a mind hosted on something other than biological tissue didn’t feel outlandish. It felt like a peek into a plausible future. Back then, nobody knew if it would ever become reality. But now the boundaries of science are advancing in a way that makes it feel increasingly real.
Kusanagi’s question about a cyberbrain generating its own ghost, an artificial consciousness, is still a philosophical question and science fiction. But since that question, neuroimaging has lifted the veil on the processes taking place in the brain. Neural implants have become a reality, restoring speech to people who have lost it and giving paralyzed patients back control to move a cursor or a robotic limb. We saw the first recording of a neural connectome, mapping the neurons of a fruit fly and their connections, and running it as a simulation where it can be queried and copied (I will tell you more about this in a next post).
Of course I know that the scientific distance between Kusanagi’s question and a fruit fly’s brain living on a hard drive is enormous. But the direction of travel feels the same, and the increments are becoming smaller and coming faster. What used to be a thought experiment is now a research program. The generation that grew up watching Kusanagi ask whether a machine could generate its own soul is now doing the research to answer that question.
I think it makes a case for the idea that science fiction is not simply entertainment. It is art that gives an entire generation of engineers and scientists the vocabulary for a question before it has any empirical weight. And by the time science catches up to fiction, a generation has already spent decades getting comfortable with the premises.
The art of the 1980s was not a forecast. But it gave us a question and a shape that people could hold on to, long enough for science to meet it. That is where I’d like to begin my exploration: with the same question Kusanagi asked, in a moment when it is starting to matter.
© dirkes.studio