The next thing I'd like to address in the world of Ghost in the Shell is the notion of a "limit of access" and where that boundary lies. Episodes four through six of the series highlight instances in which people are completely unaware of how they are sharing information with others, even sharing their existence as a human resource in some ways.
Episode Four:
Togusa gets a call from an old acquaintance who is suspicious about the goings-on in the police task force dedicated to solving a cold case known as the Laughing Man case. After the acquaintance's subsequent and sudden death, Togusa receives a file with pictures which he realizes are all coming from within the eyes of the task force. The entire police team was being spied on without their knowledge, cameras in their eyes watching their every move. The episode ends with a press conference concerning the illegal use of these "interceptors" - as the cameras are called - when it is interrupted by the Laughing Man cyber terrorist ghost-hacking one of the interviewees. In this case, "ghost hacking" is the term for hacking into the cyberbrain of the individual and manipulating their body "directly," even manipulating the mind of the victim. The Laughing Man threatens the corrupt police superintendent, telling him to resign or face execution.
Episode Five:
The team investigates the Laughing Man case in full force at this point, identifying a likely suspect and keeping tabs on him as he types away at a series of computers from a hotel room with police similarly watching him from an adjacent hotel room. Major Kusanagi, however, decides to examine the history of the Laughing Man's activities, profiling him, evaluating his hacking skills, motivations, methodology, etc. He blackmailed companies and hacked their industrial pursuits until their production went down and stocks dropped to the point that they had to cave in. And then he proceeded to do this repeatedly. Eventually, she decides to protect the police superintendent, and in the meantime, the suspect ends up getting shot in the head by mysterious man. In the assembly the superintendent attends, Kusanagi detects a strange signal operating somewhere in the room.
Episode Six:
The signal turns out to be a hacking process that targets one of the bodyguards. Kusanagi and co. jump in to fend off the hacking assassin, but soon after thwarting him, more assassin's appear from the crowd. Before long, it would seem that several people are spontaneously succumbing to the hack and joining in the fray, trying to kill the superintendent. By the time they can get the superintendent away and isolate the assassins, all traces of the hack are gone except that the people themselves have become delusional. Regardless of their past lives, they end up believing themselves to be the Laughing Man or a strong supporter of him, inspired with the singular motivation to kill the superintendent. Unable to comprehend the sequence of events, the team officially adopts the Laughing Man case, and the superintendent, lying in the hospital, decides to resign having already barely survived a bullet wound from earlier that day.
The main items of interest here are the "interceptors" introduced in episode four and the "ghost hacking" concept that becomes a cornerstone for the development of the series' themes. To start with, we first need to understand that our technology has always existed apart from us. It is highly likely that we will get to a point at which our technology fuses powerfully with our own physical development. Cameras are getting smaller and smaller, eventually fitting into our pocket. Then comes Google glass placing the camera just in front of our eyes. When we eventually devise a method of modifying or substituting our eyes for something else capable of digitizing the information our eyes would receive, we enter the realm of possibility concerning interceptors and their ilk.
As I've already discussed bodily manipulation in the first post, we'll simply start with the increased accessibility and lack of privacy such technology would invite. While the series makes it clear that it is illegal to have interceptors put into place without authorities' approval or foreknowledge, the fact of the matter is that such things will always happen. But what about the simple concept of gaining access to the digital sensory information of another individual? Can we assume that something like that would be illegal? Not necessarily. There are going to be people who, for convenience' sake, will want to leave such things open. Say someone wants to understand what it feels like to play the piano. A person could digitize the experience and then have that movement and sensory information downloaded and replayed, like a motion picture, except the person is in the picture, actually doing the thing they are "playing," automatically moving to match the musician's actions. Or as part of an educational experience, people decide to switch sensations in one way or another to be in "another person's shoes". You could even have the possibility of people renting out their bodies to others which gets into all sorts of trouble. All of these things would likely eventually be tried in one form or another, and they would be casual, everyday events, so how would laws be properly designed to avoid punishing such uses while still punishing "illegal" use, especially if the possibility of "hacking" in this way becomes standardized and easily accessible to others?
It is easy for us to determine what elements of this process would be considered Biblically moral as it is similar to the exchange of digital information as it exists today. Don't use other people's material without permission (Stealing/Plagiarism). Sharing online profiles is permitted (sometimes), but using that access for deception is sin (Slander/Misrepresentation). The real issue is where to extend the policy line: how do we define the laws that govern such a world? Is there any kind of Biblical basis for such laws?
A literal law exists ("You shall not steal; you shall not deal falsely; you shall not lie to one another." Lev 19:11), but a better example for the essential motivations of the law lie in Ephesians 4:28, "Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest
work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with
anyone in need." Through a critical analysis, we can observe a need for several things:
1) The fruits of one's work must come from one's own efforts ("work with his own hands").
2) The process of doing that work must be legitimate ("honest work").
3) One must be willing to share what they have earned with those in need.
Therefore, actions that oppose these priorities fail to uphold the desired principles in the text.
Should a person choose to offer up their own efforts for others to use, it's fine for people to use them so long as they don't attempt to masquerade those efforts as their own, much like plagiarism issues of today's society. Laws regarding motor function and sensory "files" would probably have similar laws regarding their distribution and use.
While not a belief that the law would mandate, the third principle is not something we should ignore. The church has a long history of supporting the notion of giving to the poor, and people have long interpreted this in the form of giving money to the church or to the poor for the sake of benefiting the impoverished. A form of "giving" for this type of reality would be for people to supply to the poor access to the information that only those with cyberbrains have access to, perhaps even generating analog conduits for the digital information for public use, i.e. a machine that does the motor control for you forcibly, externally, that way your muscle memory adapts and the person "learns" the file contents (just as an example). These would be possible albeit complicated methods in which someone could fulfill the third aspect of the criteria (those with the abilities could also just use them for the benefit of those without).
The morality regarding this issue would come extremely close-knit with the piracy controversies of today's digital world, especially because someone could go to watch a film and simply record the experience. Even the movie theaters would lose their ability to reel in people because the literal experience of sitting in a theater could be transmitted to someone via the Internet. To the extent of our knowledge, there would also be no method of stopping these things from happening. The ability to prove whether someone had done wrongdoing (i.e. recording one's sensations in a movie theater) would probably require scanning techniques that we today wouldn't be privy to, so at the very least, we can't make a definitive determination as to whether such activities would be detectable in the first place.
Finally, the concept of "ghost-hacking": This is, by any use of the idea, grossly inhumane and directly in opposition to God's moral reality. Ghost-hacking implies an overwhelming of the will of an individual and replacing their mind with another persona, possibly even indefinitely modifying the nature of the original mind. Ideas can be inserted, removed, and manipulated to such an extent that absolute control over another individual becomes completely plausible. Since God cares about the nature of our own will and judges us based on how we confront and deal with the various stages of our life, intentionally re-writing the history of a person's actions and forcing them to believe certain things overrules God's development of this mind.
Where people might think the morality gets a little more gray is when people intentionally begin brainwashing themselves and each other as members of a society. It's a given that doing it without someone's permission would be immoral, but if someone simply requests that you hack them and turn them into a different person...how does God feel about that? Is this essentially "suicide" because we are taking the easy way out and re-writing the behavioral code for our soul (if indeed the mind and soul are tied together in some way. Seems somewhat reasonable considering the effects of brain modification on the psychological behavior and ideologies embraced by an individual)? Or is this a legitimate shortcut to one's salvation?
The question can be answered in the illumination of two ideas: Romans 10:9-10 and the Biblical narrative itself. Firstly, if a person were to be influenced by a ghost-hack to become a Christian and to love God, God would accept them, for "if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe
in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved." The Romans passage clearly affirms that regardless of the method, if the person believes themselves to be a Christian and dedicates their life to sincerely seeking God, then even if they acquired that motivation through external manipulation, they will be saved, so long as they aren't complicit in said manipulation. If, however, a person is aware of the intentional re-purposing of a person's beliefs manually, then they have conducted themselves sinfully. Why? Because the entire Biblical narrative is about setting people free of oppression, ensuring that a person's will is not bent by another person or by a society of people. God praises those who remain true to Him in the face of people bending their will.
As for the argument that ghost hacking could be a legitimate means of evangelism, let's examine God's motivations for creating humans. He designed humanity not merely to love Him outright, but to have free will. Eventually that free will turned into a weakness when it caused humanity to become sinful through the Fall. Despite this however, God expects humans to attempt to better themselves, to mold themselves to be like Him. The only reason for this is because He wants humans to develop, on their own, an internal motivation for the pursuit of love, joy, righteousness, and the other Fruits of the Spirit.
If someone is mechanically forced to become faithful to God, then the person(s) who are aware of it and who don't work against its occurrence is/are guilty of bending that person's will, violating their free will, and violating the nature of that which God has designed. This is as much an argument against genetically forced Christian-dom as for ghost hacking due to the similar abstract ties it has with the oppression of an individual's free will.
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