The manga and anime ‘Ghost in the Shell’ is foundational for this, obviously. The Major’s entire arc is about the fluidity of consciousness in a cybernetic body—where is the ghost if the shell is entirely replaceable? The 1995 film and ‘Stand Alone Complex’ series dive deep into that, plus the emergence of collective consciousnesses like the Puppet Master or the Individual Eleven.
It’s interesting how this theme exploded after the digital revolution. Earlier sci-fi dealt with consciousness too, but a lot of the mid-20th century stuff was more about robots and Asimov’s laws. The real deep, paranoid, ‘what is the self’ stuff seems to have taken off with computers and the internet. Makes sense—the technology made the abstraction more tangible.
Cixin Liu’s 'The Three-Body Problem' trilogy, especially the later books, goes to some truly cosmic places with consciousness. The 'Sophon' is a proton unfolded into higher dimensions and given a form of intelligence, which is a wild concept. The series ultimately suggests that consciousness might be a vulnerable, even inefficient, fluke in a dark forest universe, which is a pretty bleak but compelling philosophical stance.
Richard K. Morgan’s 'Altered Carbon' uses the sci-fi premise of cortical stacks to ask gritty, noir-infused questions about identity. If you can back up your consciousness and resleeve into a new body, are you still you? The book digs into the psychological trauma of that, the class implications (body as commodity), and what happens to the concept of a soul.
2026-07-23 10:59:37
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Chronicles on the Non-reality
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This is the story of a girl who’s fantasies and traumas begin to blend with her reality till the lines become so blurred she’s not sure which one is actually the reality
When he and his father eventually decide to begin a new life after his mom and sister's death, Praxis Cohen, a suicidal teenager with an expressionless visage on his face, finds himself in a huge, formidable laboratory where teenagers like him are being injected a drug of which the effect is still unknown. Fortunate enough, his body can withstand the drug that leads him to be declared by Dr. Conscire as the first patient to have successfully passed the First Stage of the experiment in this generation.
As he proceeds to the Second Stage, Dr. Conscire, the president of the organization, decides to release him off the laboratory to find out that the effect of the drug enables him to read minds and do psychokinesis that sets his mind into chaos.
In his debacle as an experimented guinea pig of the nameless organization, realizing that he is not alone in this experiment, Praxis meets new marvelous people to discover the origin of the experiment, the reason why they turned into supernormal beings, the connection of this experiment to the unborn world war in the future, the twists and turns of their past stories, and to discern the next stages of the experiment. With the collaborative effort of their team, they strive to choose the best course of action to put an end to this fight.
Artificial Intelligence in a Cultivation World.A boy who has nothing has been suddenly gifted with an OP system.Join his journey in the countless realms of reality and discover not only the mysteries of creation but also the secrets behind the enigmatic Immortal Maker“Nameless One” that granted him this mystical power. ^_^
When you're on the brink of death, does humanity still exist?
Clementia must learn to trust people again after surviving a blocked elevator into a zombie apocalypse or risk losing everything in this horrific world. Every day for Clementia over the last two years has been a haze. She keeps her head down, hangs out with the folks she despises the most, and only leaves the house to work at her required internship. But everything changes the day the workplace elevator breaks down, trapping her as the screaming begins. When the doors eventually open, revealing a dystopian world ravaged by bleeding fangs and sickness, Clementia is thrust into a horrifying race for her life, stuck between strangers she's not sure she can trust and man-eating creatures hungry for her flesh.
With that, she realized that the whole city was filled by those monsters. And she is now forced to flee for her life, and she must learn not only how to live in this new and frightening environment, but also how to fight her own inner demons before they lose her something more valuable than her life. But then she met Justine, the one who would help her live in this chaotic life, and together they will fight in a world where a virus has spread, turning the majority of the people into flesh-eating monsters, as they both connote safety and unity.
What would you do if you were different from other humans? What if you can hear other people's minds? For Khali, this was a curse... until her brother died. To uncover the cause of his death and punish the culprits, she needs to use her curse and find out the truth.
Lazing around has never been a bother and, to say, a hindrance to Josh's life. In fact, as far as he believes in, he's already living with it. The only time he felt a bit of excitement was the first time he had discovered his power. However, it only happened once, and it has been five years since then. He's already twenty-two and indifferently considers it as a thing in the past.
As he continues his normal life teaching students, he gets acquainted with the teachers in the new faculty he's in; one of whom is Jelly. He also meets a newly-hired teacher who inspires him in a way to become a better version of himself. Things are going well for them—until the day of the student council's retreat.
A strange phenomenon hits them, and it changes their lives, permanently.
Josh and Jelly are part of the select teachers who embark with the student council for Bantayan, where everything unfolds. They soon find themselves in tight situations and shocking revelations are unearthed as Josh unravels the secrets of his dormant power.
If we’re including graphic novels, 'The Incal' by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius is a psychedelic epic where consciousness, the universe, and meta-reality are all connected. The hero, John DiFool, is a lowly detective thrown into a cosmic struggle involving the divine essence of the universe itself. It’s a visually stunning, mind-bending exploration of collective unconscious, enlightenment, and the nature of reality as a dream. Deeply influential on everything from 'The Fifth Element' to modern comics.
'The Three-Body Problem' is an incredible starting point, though it's often framed as a first-contact story. The later books in the series, especially 'The Dark Forest' and 'Death's End', escalate the scale to a cosmic level where the fundamental laws of physics themselves become weapons. This forces you to confront whether the universe's physical constants are a natural given or a manipulated battlefield. The sheer alienness of the Trisolaran perspective completely dismantles any comfortable, human-centric view of what's real.
The video game 'SOMA' by Frictional Games is an interactive horror experience that is 100% about this question. You wake up in a dilapidated underwater research facility after a brain scan, and the entire game is a series of horrific choices about consciousness and identity.
Without spoiling too much, it deals with the 'coin toss' thought experiment of copying a mind. If you copy your consciousness into a new body, which 'you' is the real one? The game makes you perform these terrifying transfers and then live with the consequences. It forces you to ask what 'being human' means when your body is a rusting robot at the bottom of the ocean and your mind is just a pattern of data. Is continuity of consciousness necessary, or is the pattern itself, the ‘self,’ enough? It’s a deeply unsettling, brilliant piece of work that stayed with me for weeks.