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Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex 1st GIG

Total Episodes: 26 (26 x 25 mins)
Genres: Action, Mecha, Science-Fiction
Year Published: 2002
Studio: Production I.G

AnimeNFO User Rating
8.9/10.0

Description
In the future, life between the digital and physical world has been blurred. The boundary of technology and humanity has been stretched beyond imagination with lives being led in both the electronic and physical worlds. With the melding of man and machine, a new cybernetic level of existence is being created--an existence that continues to redefine mankind. (In short, humans can become machines.)


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Awards and Accolades

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Wins Canadian Enterntainment Network Award

Best Animation Award - Anipike

SAC was voted Best Overall Anime, Best Animation, Best OP/ED Combination, Best OST, and Best Sci-Fi/Mecha Anime for 2003 by the members of the AnimeReactor (http://www.animereactor.net/) forums.

Download here (http://forums.ayonae.ro/naruto/?titleid=2).

Awesome, thanks Rybit.

Those of you who like this series, I highly recommend you watch the movie too. It is much better than the series.

Excellent. :) Thanks Rybit!

fildien, the first movie was incredible, but i hear that the second one pretty much only makes sense if you've watched the series inbetween. I know I had some troubles with it. If nothing else I didn't enjoy it anywhere near as much as I did with the first one. I'm going to watch the series now and then re-watch the second movie and see.

hmm I haven't seen the second movie yet.

I did buy the first DVD of the series and wasn't impressed so I stopped. But if the second movie is as you say perhaps I will start watching them again. The first movie was awesome!

Damnit I need more hours in the day, playing EQ2 and working is getting the way of me watching TV.

I'll always have a soft spot in my heart for GitS, since I saw its US debut in a little theatre somewhere in NYC when it first hit the States. It's also one of the only animes for which I've read the manga (which is both very good and illuminates the movie's events), but I've not been keeping track of SAC. Good to have the opportunity to do so.

I wonder what existentialists and Nietzschian philosophers would say about cyberbrains, cyborgs, et al. Do they make us more human? Or when we have machine in us, we become less human? I believe Nietzsche would say that cybernetic implants would make us more human, because the human race depends on extensions of their body (we're losers in society, we don't have claws, we can't run particularly fast), such as guns, fur, etc.

Some might argue that having machine in us makes us less human. I think it would make for an interesting debate topic.

Interesting, yes, but one first has to bridge the hurdle of defining just what "more human" and "less human" mean. I think we can look at a machine and say, "This machine is 'more human' than this other machine, by virtue of capabilities x, y, and z." But comparing humans to each other on that level seems difficult (usually such comparisons refer to a human's involvement in some atrocity or other -- i.e., "Dahmer was inhuman").

You might have more success saying, "That human is more machine like than that other human" if you quantify certain attributes of machines (mathematical acumen, cold rationality, and the like). But this might ironically foil Rybit's proposed debate, which asks, "Can human-machine complements be "more human" than unmodified humans."

How's that for a non-starter?

Can we define what is to be human at all?

You can bring up a lot of issues associated with being humane but do we have a definition for being human?

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human

There are 3 ways to define being human:

1. Biologically: genetics. Where do you draw the line between a human with implants (knee prosthesis for example) and a machine that merely incorporates human biomaterial to perform certain functions. In both cases the genes are present.

2. Behaviour: language, social cooperation, culture and social norms. Sooner or later machines will all exhibit these except maybe for the culture part.

3. Consciousness: Now this a tricky issue which even we humans have a rather limited understanding. Let us reduce it to the question of self-awareness and ego.

So, let me bring up the example of the human form robots of the new Battlestar Galactica. They look human, have a human like body (genetical material too even if synthetic), have emotions, self-awareness etc etc.

Are they human? What is (theoretically) the difference between us and them? Their origin (God created us, we created them)? Or their propose?

Are these episodes subtitled or in audible English?

Thanks for the download service Rybit!

Subtitled, and thanks for this Rybit.

I wonder what existentialists and Nietzschian philosophers would say about cyberbrains, cyborgs, et al. Do they make us more human?

Making us "more human" is something of a phantom argument since that is not a quantifiable set of states but instead a boolean question, with the term "inhuman" as used to describe other members of the species being both an insult and a defensive denial of their behavior rather than a true categorization. I think Nietszche would have been more fascinated by whether or not extensive self-replacement by machinery would have made us better in our ability to self-actualize or would have presented another barrier between a man's will and his life. I can easily see him being quite the proponent of cyborgs.

GiTS was both the last anime I could really stand watching and one of the few examples of real science fiction in popular media, instead of techno-fantasy. I wasn't aware there was a TV series until after it was already over and off most of the torrent swarms, thanks for collecting it.

Extended to the 22nd, second gig will be available if I don't go out with friends or a hot chick on friday/saturday. Thanks for the nice explanation, Malse!

How is the bandwidth coping? Download speeds have been fluctuating quite a bit for the last episode or two.

Bandwidth as of this post... (see picture attached)

I love you Rybit.

Hehe, I just re-watched the first five episodes of GiTS, and I'm so friggin' scared of cybernetic implants. What if the implants got hacked? It could force you to withdraw money, could force you to put a gun up your head.

Hehe, I just re-watched the first five episodes of GiTS, and I'm so friggin' scared of cybernetic implants. What if the implants got hacked? It could force you to withdraw money, could force you to put a gun up your head.

I wouldn't worry; they would have security on them! Like credit cards! You would at least have to sign your name to some paper before they... err you... can shoot yourself! Identity theft to the next level, taking over your whole body!

Supposedly the next-generation cars are safe from viruses and hacking. F-secure and Lexus/Toyota said so: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4536307.stm

That's reassuring. In other news, award-winning experts have upgraded a major Intel computer operating system's virus security rating from "Criminal" to merely "Laughable" when they proved that it was invulnerable to virii designed to attack Apple Macintoshes running MacOS7 on 68040s as well as the Cabir virus currently running rampant on Symbian ARM-based mobile phones.

It's not really difficult to design systems that are resistant to external attack, but we seem to have this fascination with giving the world an open execution path on every possible device because ... well, I've never really figured that out. The possibility of an internal body-network being in any way exposed to automatable outside interactions is so far past absolutely stupid that it's all but inevitable. It's like no one can design something without thinking that allowing it to accept external data as potentially executable would be so incredibly nifty and useful. So yeah, we're screwed.

Biggest question when watching GitS SAC would have to be: How did they manage to get the fifth hokage to take the job as chief? :p