Classes 5 &6

During these classes we studied Metropolis by Fritz Lang and Ghost in the shell by Mamoru Oshii. These movies are very different partly because they were made sixty eight years apart, in different countries. Furthermore, the second is an anime. 

But they have in common their theme: hybrid bodies. In Metropolis this is the android that looks like Maria. It looks so human that is confuses even the ones close to Maria.  In Ghost in the shell, the main characters, Major and Batou, are cyborgs. They’re enhanced humans. By definition, a cyborg is a being with both organic and biomechatronic body parts. The fantasize of someone half human half machine is very common in science-fiction. They’re usually represented as stronger than humans. 

Major and Batou are partly humans. However, there’s nothing human about the android of Metropolis. It’s a robot version of a human. It is conditioned to act like Maria. It has no free will,  and no real human feelings therefore it’s not human.

But how much free will does cyborgs have ? How much are they human ? To be fair, they're human by nature, they just were given robot parts. We have the same problem in Blade Runner, for example, except that replicants are NOT humans, much like robot-Maria.

In all these movies, the machine, technology, has a strong impact on human lives, and each one of these hybrid bodies leads us to ask : at which point can we say that a body partly mechanic is “like” a human and therefore have a soul, self consciousness, memories and feelings of its own ?