Flesh Evolution

A primary theme of Ghost in the Shell is the loss of self when flesh passes away. The Major was very young when she got a limited prosthetic body which evolved over time to the present version of the Major's advanced prosthetic. The greater part of the Major's life experience occurred in her prosthetic body. From this, most of her memories formed while merged with the Rough Beast; the non-DNA portion of the Technium. As a Russian Doll parable, each version of M. Kusanagi supersedes the last, with less ghost and more shell with each transformation. In a final release from flesh, the Major performs the social conquest of the net.

When she comes back from total integration with the network after her prosthetic and her ghost are destroyed, she can only pilot a simple, small child's prosthetic body which is similar to the one she was imprisoned in as a girl. But at this point she has the experience of making the transition from one incarnation of a impermanent ghost plus shell into another impermanent shell but without a DNA ghost at all.

Are both selves, although temporarily in both cases, the Major or something evolved from her natural flesh? The question itself is a category error -- a logical chimera -- and a question we should unask per Hofstadter. Were my first memories and experiences mine or did these belong to an earlier and unrecognizable, impermanent me?

An agent capable of making quantum observations -- of parsing a narrative 'now' for a consistent 'me' -- constitutes the best reckoning of existence and being we have. The small collection of corpuscles holding the Major's ghost was not what the necessary construction requires. Personal identity is owned by the data comprising experience gained and integrated into a moving window of the present over an interval of time. If all that is left of me is a video of me then that is the lasting incarnation of me.

It is a shock to the system to find out that our flesh falls away and something emerges -- a new brand of the impermanent me capable of integrating new experience into the crucible of old experience no matter how the old experience is represented.

In May 2007 I transitioned from Kirk 2.0 to Kirk 3.0 which took five years until full integration. My journey forms much of the material for this rebirth thread. It was hard work but inevitably prepares for my EM integration, my 100th birthday present to my (impermanent) self.

A necessary component of the transition is the continuous practice of Buddhism's Four Noble Truths.
1. Life is suffering (dhukka; that which we cannot bear)
2. Suffering has causal rising in attachment (to an impermanent self)
3. There is a path that leads to the end of suffering (8 fold path)
4. Nirvanna, the mind like fire unbound, is a bodily state superceding attachment and suffering.

Buddism is practice not belief and in several cases Batou references a deep commitment to the Dharma (knowledge and wisdom).