Explication of Lithium Flower: This comes from Ghost in the Shell, set in a time when world culture is coping with full cyborgs, and widespread AI inserted into humans through cyberization. Digital brains process information in linear=logical fashion. Thus linear / logical cyborg brains are fully capable of processing thoughts, including emotional thoughts, and physical feelings, but they fail at experiencing and appreciating gestalt brain functions such as pure emotions and interpersonal feelings because these are processed and stored in analog / parallel circuits. Consequently, full cyborgs and cyberized humans have a disturbing sense of inadequacy in situations that evoke gestalt pure emotions and interpersonal feelings, feeling less than human. The search to experience and understand these analog functions becomes a need to understand/become fully human or possessed of “a ghost.” This ghost is variously understood as a soul or god — it is the analog experience that includes what we understand as emotions and interpersonal feelings.
In this song, the Major (i.e., she) “does what humans do” — that is, she has all the linear / digital human functions that fit her well for the logical thinking required as a policeman and sometimes assassin in Public Security Section Nine (i.e., “she’s so Number Nine”). She is filled with “incredible math,” i.e., linear / logical abilities, but is inadequate without analog personal feelings — can she be “really human” without a heart?
Without analog emotional warmth (i.e., “so cold and human,” she experiences aloneness and she “stays so golden solo.” Without analog interpersonal feelings, she struggles with interpersonal relationships.
In a neural net model of AI, a synthetic brain is capable of forming analog / parallel connections without programing — if this is beginning to happen the Major might be “waking” and “about to bloom” with emotions and interpersonal feelings. Lithium is an unstable white metal thought to be formed in the Big Bang event. Lithium ignites in air and is used for pyrotechnics — a metaphor for burning like emotion. As an ion, lithium powers electrical mechanisms (like a cyberbrain?) but as lithium chloride it substitutes for calcium in brain cell membranes and stabilizes neurons so they do not fire too easily. In bipolar disorder, lithium chloride helps emotional excitement — in the Major, is a metaphor for keeping her new emotions under control. As full humans, we wonder how she can live in a vast inter -net, using its linear functions but never traveling in a random, nonlinear , i.e., “surfing” mode, leading us to wonder what she will do when she wakes up” to full digital/logical plus analog/gestalt emotional function.
Explication of Lithium Flower: This comes from Ghost in the Shell, set in a time when world culture is coping with full cyborgs, and widespread AI inserted into humans through cyberization. Digital brains process information in linear=logical fashion. Thus linear / logical cyborg brains are fully capable of processing thoughts, including emotional thoughts, and physical feelings, but they fail at experiencing and appreciating gestalt brain functions such as pure emotions and interpersonal feelings because these are processed and stored in analog / parallel circuits. Consequently, full cyborgs and cyberized humans have a disturbing sense of inadequacy in situations that evoke gestalt pure emotions and interpersonal feelings, feeling less than human. The search to experience and understand these analog functions becomes a need to understand/become fully human or possessed of “a ghost.” This ghost is variously understood as a soul or god — it is the analog experience that includes what we understand as emotions and interpersonal feelings. In this song, the Major (i.e., she) “does what humans do” — that is, she has all the linear / digital human functions that fit her well for the logical thinking required as a policeman and sometimes assassin in Public Security Section Nine (i.e., “she’s so Number Nine”). She is filled with “incredible math,” i.e., linear / logical abilities, but is inadequate without analog personal feelings — can she be “really human” without a heart? Without analog emotional warmth (i.e., “so cold and human,” she experiences aloneness and she “stays so golden solo.” Without analog interpersonal feelings, she struggles with interpersonal relationships. In a neural net model of AI, a synthetic brain is capable of forming analog / parallel connections without programing — if this is beginning to happen the Major might be “waking” and “about to bloom” with emotions and interpersonal feelings. Lithium is an unstable white metal thought to be formed in the Big Bang event. Lithium ignites in air and is used for pyrotechnics — a metaphor for burning like emotion. As an ion, lithium powers electrical mechanisms (like a cyberbrain?) but as lithium chloride it substitutes for calcium in brain cell membranes and stabilizes neurons so they do not fire too easily. In bipolar disorder, lithium chloride helps emotional excitement — in the Major, is a metaphor for keeping her new emotions under control. As full humans, we wonder how she can live in a vast inter -net, using its linear functions but never traveling in a random, nonlinear , i.e., “surfing” mode, leading us to wonder what she will do when she wakes up” to full digital/logical plus analog/gestalt emotional function.
@wesburg wow. :)
@wesburg wow. :)