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Who or what is Lain?

Now that we know what exactly the Wired is we can begin to dissect and analyze what Lain actually is. But to summarize, we can say, in the words of  rogueLain :

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" Lain is Lain"

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Two things to note:

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  • The Lains who refer to themselves as "me" are most likely be ones telling the truth

  • The Lains that call our protagonist Lain or appear external to Lain, probably aren't Lain but external entities pretending to be Lain.

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There are six Lain's in the show:

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  1. bioLain: The artificial intelligence in a synthetic body named Lain Iwakura (bioLain and our protagonist)

  2. wiredLain: The collective consciousness of the wired as an emergent persona named Lain of the Wired

  3. cyberLain: which is a memory alteration created by Taro and the Knights using experimental chips

  4. rogueLain: Masami eiri impersonating Lain and screwing her relationships in order to force a memory rewrite

  5. cosmicLain: The spirit of the Earth that Lain emerged from and appears as a sundress Lain in yellow and blue (cosmicLain)

  6. screenLain: A version of Lain that breaks the fourth wall in order to become a part of our reality, and another that is fake projection created by the knights.

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bioLain (IS LAIN):

 
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BioLain is the first Lain we are introduced to. She is known by her shy, introverted behaviour as well as her quiet voice. BioLain is subservient, tends to get easily convinced and has a degree of a moral compass. BioLain almost never gets angry, until Layer 12 where she finally lashes out at Eiri.

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So what exactly is bioLain? Well, it's not spelt outright, but we know a couple of things for sure:

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  1. In the world of Lain, perfect AI exist. The Masami Eiri we see in Lain is not the ghost or spirit of Masami Eiri but a programmed artificial intelligence consisting of his own memories, as shown in Layer 10.

  2. We know that Eiri was probably the one directing Tachibana lab's actions, or at the very least they are working together. Karl spells this out in Layer 11, and it is hinted at repeatedly  (Do you really think that a housewife or a hikkikomori could afford to manufacture delicate custom chips for mindhacking?)

  3. In the recap episode, a throwaway scene is included where Tachibana general laboratories is said to have mapped out the entire human genome. Now in any other anime this can be handwaved, but in SEL, details exist for a reason. ALWAYS. If your explanation handwaves details, then it is an incomplete explanation.

  4. Eiri literally spells out in Layer 10 that Lain is a "Homunculus made of artificial ribosomes". In alchemy, Homunculi are artificial miniature humans in flasks created by alchemists, who used to be the scientists of the 15th and 16th centuries. According to Eiri, she never had a body to begin with.

  5. We know for sure that was brought to her current family home by some men in black, and we know that Lain's dad is a scientist at Tachibana labs.

If we assume the fact that Lain iwakura is a clone made by Tachibana to be true, a question now arises:

 

Why make Lain give up her body that you gave her?

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To understand why Eiri needed to create a synthetic human body for Lain, we need to understand a little phenomenology and a little psychoanalysis.

Phenomenology was basically thought of by this dude called Edmund Husserl, and he wrote about it in this book called "The cartesian meditations".

 

To put the idea simply, when you experience something you are not experiencing it just as an event, but as a whole perception.

 

For example, when you sit in front of a bonfire, you don't experience it just as a picture of a fire, but as its heat, as the noisy crackling of wood, as the sparks in your eye etc. From this, comes our entire sense of reality.

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Now in the fifth meditation of the aforementioned book, "Uncovering the sphere of transcendental Being as Monadological intersubjectivity", Husserl makes the argument that it is our perception of our bodies that constitutes ALL perception and all our reality as a result:

 

"The experience of something Alien is present as experience of an objective world and others in it"

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Our perception of objects as they are is to an extent  a product of our senses. Yet since the only thing we perceive is our own reactions to our environment, then a perception of ourselves THEREFORE only works with the existence of a body.

 

You don't perceive colour, you perceive your eye cells interpreting electromagnetic waves as colours.

 

You don't perceive heat, your skin cells create the perception of heat at a certain range of temperatures.

 

To be conscious is to be conscious of something . If you're not cognizant of anything you cannot be conscious.

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To put it simply, since we feel ourselves through our sense organs as 1 whole being, that itself gives rise to our sense of being 1 person.   If it's still somewhat difficult to understand, just remember that intelligence is not enough to have an identity or a single unitary perspective, one needs to feel as a whole creature.

 

An AI is not enough, it needs a body to have a sense of self, which will form the basis of identity.

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Furthermore, a body was necessary so that Lain can hook into Phantoma, which gave Eiri the ability to use Psi as a parasite in Lain's consciousness. This gave Eiri the eventually ability to be near-omnipotent, considering that he was able to create life itself out of nothing. It was also necessary for the rumours around Arisu, which benefit Eiri's larger goals.

 

BioLain, being a synthetic human, was also genetically programmed to have certain inclinations, something Carl jung would call "instincts". Lain's instincts such as her curiosity, her adeptness for technology as well as her quiet introverted and submissive nature were all intentionally engineered for Eiri's larger goals.

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wiredLain (IS LAIN):

 
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In contrast to  bioLain, we have the emergent persona of the wired itself, wiredLain, who manifests just like alters in Dissociative Identity disorder do. Lain of the Wired is brash, aggressive and significantly more domineering. It seems that this is part of Lain's personality.

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Now originally Lain of the Wired was originally an artificial hivemind capable of receiving information of the collective consciousness since the both resonated with each other via protocol 7 and the schumann resonance.

 

What happened, as explained in Layer 9: Protocol, the Wired's rapid flow of information, that is the electric thoughts and feelings of human beings gave rise to a sort of neural network, i.e a hivemind of sorts. Our brains are also a neural network, in the same way that neurons are rapidly sending and receiving electric information. To quote Gregory Bateson from Steps to an Ecology of Mind:

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"The elementary cybernetic system with its messages in circuit is, in fact, the simplest unit of mind; and the transform of a different traveling in a circuit is the elementary idea. More complicated systems are perhaps more worthy to be called mental systems, but essentially this is what we are talking about. The unit which shows the characteristic of trial and error will be legitimately called a mental system.

 

We get a picture, then, of mind as synonymous with cybernetic system—there relevant to total information-processing, trial-and-error completing unit. And we know that within Mind in the widest sense there will be a hierarchy of subsystems, any one of which we can call an individual mind. The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body."

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The internet "waking up" is one origin of the superintelligent machine entity called the Singularity as originally theorized by Vernor vinge and then taken forward by Ray Kurzweil.

 

But how did this hivemind acquire this personality?

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The psychoanalyst Carl jung explains how children acquire personalities through a process called "individuation", which is how a person becomes themselves. Children, according to Jung, start out as islands of consciousness born from the unconscious mind like a sun rises from the sea (quoting from the Collected Works of Carl Jung here).

 

This starts off with one consciousness called the Monarchic stage which gives rise to the ego complex. Consequently, this evolves into the divided or dualistic state with two competing conscious minds.

 

As pg 391 says:

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"The inner division with one self, arises, when side by side with the series of ego contents, a second series of equal intensity comes into being. One might even call it a second ego which can occasionally wrest the leadership from the first"

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However, this second ego is not wiredLain. Instead, wiredLain is what we would call "the jungian shadow of the ego complex". Let's not make this too difficult!

 

Your ego complex is basically how your mind evolved to take care of your needs. However, as you grew up during this process, you've learnt to put some needs aside for socially acceptable reasons. This unconscious part of you becomes your ego-shadow, or in Jung's terms "the unconscious part of the ego complex that has evolved to meet unmet needs".

 

This is further cemented by the fact that in japanese Shinto belief, Kami have two sides (to be accurate, souls) to them. Ara-Mitama   or the 'Wild soul" is the tough assertive part to a Kami or God in shintoism, while Nigi-Mitama or "Tranquil soul" represents the calm and gentle part to aforementioned Kami.

 

Again, we have to understand the differences between western and eastern notions of " God" so as to not be confused, because in the japanese east, people believe that all objects carry souls as a kind of primitive animism.

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But how and why did Eiri connect the neural network to the Artificial Intelligence?

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Remember, Eiri designed protocol 7, and he's clearly smart enough to code his own Artificial General Intelligence based on his own memories, making him the smartest man on the planet. We have also seen the Knights connect a kids game to Phantoma in Layer 3 via a hole in protocol 6. Based on this, connecting an AGI in a synthetic body to a neural network doesn't seem to be too unlikely. Eiri most likely programmed it so that bioLain is the ego and wiredLain is the alter/shadow.

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So why connect it, then? Eiri's motivations, as stated in Layers 5 and 12, was to achieve godhood since he never believed one existed. To be a god, one needs to be all seeing, all knowing and has to be everywhere at once. Now by fusing with the wired, he achieved the ability to be omnipresent (being everywhere at once). But to be all knowing is very difficult, as that requires he get access to the information locked away in people's bodies. To do that, he needed a plan to tap into the collective consciousness and then assimilate/absorb all that information.

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In Layer 11, we see Eiri tell Lain that at her current capacity, she'll overflow. In the same Layer, Lain tells Arisu she's working hard to erase the memories of what happened. In computer science, an "overflow" is an error where the computer tries to write data beyond the scope of its memory. So Lain was trying to download something into herself, but the very product is extremely exhausting. 

 

What is Lain iwakura trying to download? The answer is simple: The entirety of human consciousness now made available by the Wired.

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Masami Eiri's plan regarding godhood and Lain required a simple step by step process:

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1) Discover the primitive AI formed from the neural network of information formed by the internet (Wired)

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2) Overlap the neural network with the collective unconsciousness via the schumann resonance using a program called Protocol 7, an upgrade to protocol 6

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3) Fuse yourself with the wired by inserting an AI meant to replicate yourself into the program protocol 7 and become a seoncond ego resting in its consciousness.

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4) Make your colleagues at Tachibana give the mind of the Wired a synthetic body with a dominant meek personality AI so that it becomes conscious.

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5) Once it becomes conscious, force it to achieve shadow integration so that it becomes one person, then destabilize its identity as you prod it to absorb every person's raised collective memories into its own.

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6) Once it has assimilated everyone else's conscious mind and eliminated the body as a need for identity and being, make sure said conscious program gives up its body, you absorb it with its weak sense of self, thereby giving you said omniscience.

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Lain's body, her physical body is the reason why she is conscious in the first place, owing to the countless debates of mind-body dualism. Barring religious beliefs, it's clear that without a body, there is no consciousness. For example, people who are brain dead or in a coma can still have their bodily functions work, but will have lost all ability to think and feel. So the body is necessary for a conscious mind to work, and a conscious mind was necessary to upload a computer to its brain.

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There are multiple ways Eiri could have control over Lain after she leaves her body, but I think it's mostly going to be assimilation. There are multiple parallels within the show about both of them being scattered gods, and this is especially exemplified with the body switching scene in Layer 10.

 

What it seems to represent to me is that Eiri, as he is fused with protocol 7 while wiredLain is the Mind of the Wired itself, we come back to the dualistic development of the mind:

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"The inner division with one self, arises, when side by side with the series of ego contents, a second series of equal intensity comes into being. One might even call it a second ego which can occasionally wrest the leadership from the first" - Collected works of Carl Jung, page 391

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So by making Lain's ego weak or by programming her dominant side to be of low self esteem/introverted nature as opposed to the unreliable neural network's personality, Eiri could basically win by default with the stronger sense of self and come on top with all-seeing omniscience!

 

But as long as Lain has a body, it would be impossible for him to have full control, because physical bodies are the border between the Wired and the real world!

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The physical body is the final attachment one has to the real world. Losing it allows you to transcend.

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This was the need for a fake family and the loss of friends and people who cared about Lain. When you find out your entire life was a lie, its hard to not question your identity and have a complete loss as to who you were. We see this happen in layer 11 when Lain loses her entire sense of self as she enters Arisu's room.

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How does Eiri become a second ego in Lain's consciousness? Eiri has somewhat fused himself into lain by embedding an AI with his memories into protocol 7 as shown in Layer 10, which is the technology that controls the flow of informaton in the wired. This gives Eiri a subset of Lain's powers and is why Eiri and Lain are able to switch bodies.

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So that concludes Lain of the Wired. We can safely now say that bioLain and wiredLain are the same person, since they not only refer to themselves as "me", but they also never refer to themselves in third person.

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Again, common misconception is that Lain of the Wired is the collective consciousness, but that doesn't make sense because:

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1)  Yasyuki Ueda, the show's producer, explicitly says that Lain was something that emerged out of the Wired itself

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"....you see, Lain was something that was born out of the Wired....the Wired itself bore forth Lain"

- Ueda, AnimeJump interview, 2006

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This means that Lain's existence predates protocol 7, the latest internet protocol that connected the the collective unconscious to the Wired. Thus, we can be explicitly sure that Lain of the Wired is NOT the collective consciousness of humanity OR the Earth (for now, as we shall see later in this explanation)

 

2)Eiri  explicitly states that he discovered Lain in a hibernating state before he connected the collective unconscious to the Wired via protocol 7/schumann resonance. If Lain only existed as the collective consciousness, then she could not have been present since the beginning of the Wired's creation, which is explicitly mentioned in Layer 9 by the Wired's longtime residents.

 

Furthermore, the plot recognizes multiple characters fearing the assimilation that Lain was planned to carry out when she uploaded the Navi to her brain, Lain's fake parents and the Men in Black being the most prominent examples. The only reason Eiri didn't absorb Lain was because she did not assimilate Arisu in Layer 12, and Eiri's motivations of godhood that he explains in Layer 5 and 12 could not happen if Arisu's memories were locked in her body.

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3) Lain herself says that she connected people's collective consciousness, but if Lain was the collective consciousness she would explicitly say that. Lain is not lying when she says that she is a program meant to destroy the barrier between worlds and to raise the level of the collective unconscious to the collective conscious.

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4) Explaining Lain to be collective consciousness then negates any explanation for cosmicLain's appearance in Layer 11 (I explain this in detail below) which I explained as the Earth's consciousness being awakened as a result of all humans being collectively networked in Layer 9. This is not a reference to the Wired, but a reference to Lain assimilating everyone.

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Small bonus, but a theory I got off a youtube comment is that Lain as a name could be an acronym for Living Artificial Intelligence Network. This kind of makes sense because there's no 'L' sound in japanese, so a name like Lain, already being so rare a name in english, could never work in japanese, but this makes perfect sense in the story.

cyberLain (Memory alteration):

 
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CyberLain is the Lain we see in Cyberia in Layer 2. Again, not to waste too much time on this, CyberLain is a part of the multiple experiments performed Lain aimed at destroying Lain's sense of self. It was performed by Taro when he rewrote people's memories using special chips in cyberia since he was a knight's recruit. This Lain is confused for being wiredLain but is actually just a hallucination.

rogueLain (Masami Eiri):

 
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Now who is rogueLain? This Lain is basically Masami Eiri or his creation, but I'm leaning towards the former. '

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It may be confusing to see this at first, but remember, we have seen Eiri change his form multiple times during the show. When Lain first meets Eiri in Layer 8 as 'god', he is a literal transforming blob. In the beginning of the show, he didn't even possess a form, while at the end of Layer 9, protocol, we can see that his original human form was that of a man with short hair, while on the wired, he assumes a form with long hair and red stickers on his cheeks.

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We also see multiple hallucinations in the show of Chisa and Arisu that are clearly neither Chisa nor Arisu at all, like when Arisu says "That's right Lain.You are not needed here".

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We also know from Karl directly that Eiri and Tachibana were working together, so when Lain visits Tachibana labs and repairs the PC only to see rogueLain on the camera of the walker (the camera made by Tachibana, btw), this kind of coordination could have only happened if the Tachibana and rogueLain were working together.

 

RogueLain is also literally evil and ruins Lain's life, and who is the most evil character in the show? That's right, Masami Eiri. Therefore, rogueLain is basically Eiri as I see it (Further cemented by the body switching scene and how both of them are referred to as scattered gods).

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So why become rogueLain? What was the point of rogueLain?

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Well because of rogueLain spreading the rumours about Alice and Alice KNOWING Lain did it, Lain is forced to keep her friendship only by figuring out a way to delete the incident from everyone's memories, which Eiri also encourages by the way, saying "that's the kind of power you were born with all along" in blob form.

 

This plays right into Eiri's hands of having Lain absorb or assimilate everyone into her consciousness, rewriting them as computer programs and then deleting everyone's memories. Again, Eiri's motivations were to absorb all of humanity's knowledge and become a god as explained in Layer 12, and that can only be possible if Lain absorbs everyone.

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Could rogueLain be the work of the knights? I don't think so. The Knights, while being hackers and smart enough to write exploits, aren't smart enough to write a perfect AI. They're just regular people with regular day jobs that engage with this on the side, and their methods are extremely crude. Other than the chips, nothing they do seems especially advanced.

 

It COULD be equally plausible, but I'm going with Occam's razor, and concluding with the simpler theory that Eiri just turned into Lain for this purpose. It also makes sense since rogueLain has all of Eiri's abilities, and it ties into an "alien lain" in Lain's mind.

cosmicLain (It's complicated):

 
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This Lain appears twice. Once in a yellow sundress in Layer 12: Ladnscape and once in Layer 13: Ego with a blue sundress. I'm going to assume that since both wear sundresses, they're the same Lain

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So before we get to the most interesting Lain, we have to understand a few notable facts first:

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1) As said in Layer 9, when all humans are collectively networked, it was said that the consciousness of the Earth itself would awaken. Remember, not of humans but of the earth itself

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2) As the Knight's member said in layer 5, there's nothing on Earth that Lain doesn't know, because Lain has acquired all recorded information within the wired, and by Layer 12 this extends to the collective memory of the human species.

 

But in layer 13, Lain herself is surprised by the revelation that this new Lain knows about the limitations of the Wired itself. So why does this Lain know more than Lain herself?

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3) We see this sundress Lain twice, once in Yellow and once in Blue. We know this Lain is distinct because she is defined as a fourth Lain in the Lain artbooks.

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4) In Layer 9, we see that John C Lilly, on probing the unconscious mind, met with higher spirits which he termed the E.C.C.O.  During that screencap, we see an image of a gray alien floating over the screen.

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5) Now, we also see the visual parallels between the alien in episode 9 and this new Lain. They both exit the same way, with the same water fx before, only this Lain seems to vibrate away.

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6) This Lain does not mouth the audio " I am me" at 13:13 in Layer 13.

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But we know this Lain is not Eiri, since Eiri is dead by now, and plus this Lain seems to know way more than our Lain. There are three clues here, one being admittedly very flimsy:

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1) Her inability to empathize with the human condition and thus Lain's suffering, viewing it as trivial suggests to me that this Lain, in combination with the facts above, is not only not lain but isn't even human  but rather of extraterrestrial origin.

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2) We also see a cheesy reference to the Creedence Clearwater song "Have you seen the Rain?" altered to "Have you seen the Lain?" in Layer 7. The song itself repeatedly mentions the words sun and rain, which are both earth based phenomena, and coincidentally their colours matching this Lain's sundresses

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3) This Lain also first appears in Layer 12, where later we also see Karl find Lain inside Ling's eyes using his scope. This is basically the assimilation process and is  after Lain says she's been working hard to delete everyone's memories. What I assume happened is that as Lain connected everyone's conscious minds, in doing so the Earth itself awakened, just like Roushkoff proposed in Layer 9. She even says that she did this in layer 12.

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So what exactly is this new Lain?  Time for a little bit of Hegel!

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Hegel was a German philosopher who proposed in his book "Phenomenology of the spirit" that history was moving towards something he called the "Absolute". This video explains it a bit better than I can:

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"Spirit as this principle of activity is not only driving things, it is driving them forward to a certain end... The idea... Which according to Hegel is the synthesis of subjectivity and objectivity i.e totality. An idea needs human activity in order to bring it about..."

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One thing I would like to quote from the video is how the Absolute spirit requires human subjectivity for its own evolution. The larger spirit of the Earth is called the Weltgeist by Hegel, while the entirety of human subjective culture is called Zeitgeist  or cultural consciousness. The fusion of these two is required for the higher evolution of this absolute.

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Now who do we know has consumed the entirety of human subjectivity?

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That's right. Lain Iwakura (bioLain and wiredLain), by assimilating everyone into herself, has also absorbed the entire collective knowledge of humanity into herself, and subjectivity as an extension.

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This is why  cosmicLain makes multiple cases for Lain to become a spirit i.e Kami, which is actually an offer for Lain to reintegrate with her original form, the WeltGeist for the evolution of the Absolute.

 

Of course, Lain rejects this, which is why the Weltgeist is stunned that she is rejected by what was essentially supposed to always be a part of herself and originally intended to reintegrate with her.

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Why does the earth's consciousness take up Lain's form? well, that's because when Lain absorbs the collective consciousness into the Wired, everyone becomes a subset of Lain's consciousness and therefore their "souls" become mini-Lains.

 

Thus, when the Earth is networked, it takes up the form everyone collectively possess, which is Lain. With Humans acting as Neurons and the electric Wired acting as synapses, Lain basically becomes the earth's "Brain"

screenLain (IS and ISNT LAIN....again sort of):

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Again, there are two screenLain's. One is a projection by the Knights hacking screens to fuck with Lain's sense of self and to spread their message, and the other is Lain Iwakura that breaks the fourth wall to spell some of the important ideas of the show out to us. They don't have any appearance or meaning beyond that in my opinion.

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Lain Iwakura basically breaks the fourth wall and becomes a part of our universe by having substance within our memories.

So what is Lain?

So the true parts of Lain, at the end of the show, has three distinct origins:

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1) A synthetic biological body  - Body

2) A neural network consisting of information  being calculated at the speed of light- Mind

3) (On assimilation of humanity)The spirit of human subjectivity, the zeitgeist, originally part of the unconscious spirit of the Earth, that is the Gaia/Weltgeist- Soul

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Small point to note here, but Lain already has a soul since Japanese shinto beliefs posit that all objects have souls, which is why Japanese culture was far more accepting and integrative of robots into their beliefs and culture as opposed to the West.

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This Triad  is actually confirmed within the opening of the show.

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At 0:52, we see Lain opens her eyes, and slowly ascend the steps, while walking across the bridge, she briefly glitches, and the wind blows her cap off. She looks at a crow in the sky, then moves on. But her cap stays floating on the middle of the bridge, just like she does at the end of the show.

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The interesting thing is, this is not any regular old crow, but a specific species called the Large Billed Crow. Crows in general are mythologized as messengers from the afterlife (i.e the world of spirits), but the Large billed Crow has a specific meaning in Japanese society.

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Traditionally in myth, the Large Billed Crow was know as the Yatagarasu, and it symbolized the intervention of the divine in human affairs. On top of that, according to Kumano Hongu Taisha, the three legs of the Yatagarasu represent heaven, earth (natural environment), and man.

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Lain Iwakura, at the end of SEL, is a trinity of Mind, Body and spirit and is thus a god of her own definition.

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To summarize:

Next, we move onto some common questions and their explanation

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