Academics sit around sounding cool and talking about how stupid everybody else is.
As an academic myself, I can confirm that this is not a very accurate portrayal… (Somehow Classroom Crisis of all things was much more accurate)
But anyway, great first episode. Maybe a bit over the top with the philosophizing but enjoyable nonetheless. I especially like how for once the characters are actually quite good at reading each other emotionally. Normally anime characters are so obtuse they can’t even notice when somebody is head over heels in love with them…
Also, it has a Lisp program and cellular automata in the ED. That by itself is enough to make it one of the best anime of the season.
“As an academic myself, I can confirm that this is not a very accurate portrayal…”
Of academia in general, no. Of a single, relatively more eccentric individual inside it, discounting for the cinematographic necessity of having him expose most of his life philosophy in the span of fifteen minutes rather than across months of time you know him? I’d say it could absolutely be. Some of the things the prof said are frighteningly similar to my own thoughts in fact (especially the bit about waking up and wondering whether I really am the same person, it’s been a pet peeve of mine since I had an understanding of the idea of consciousness how exactly I could define the continuity of my own self, and warrant that I’m not dying and being reborn as someone else with the previous self’s memories all the time – or if asking such a question even has meaning. I guess being religious in this sense helps: the idea of soul works perfectly as a single thread binding tightly all these snapshots of self together in a single entity).
On another note, all this talk of conscience, identity, death combined with academia and programming and such makes me think this is going to be either about AI or about brain uploading. Colour me positively thrilled. I’m sure to keep watching this.
Yeah I agree, it’s definitely going to have some stuff about AI and identity. Can’t wait.
Also I didn’t mean the professor specifically, I just meant the idea that academics spend all their time sitting around and talking about how much smarter they are than ordinary people. There is some anti-intellectualism about “ivory tower academics” that you’ll hear, and this kind of portrayal doesn’t help.
That is true, but it seemed to me he had to pass through also as the “eccentric genius” type. As in, not just your average academic, but an especially talented yet socially awkward kind of type, who happens to also be an academic. In this sense I don’t think it’s too bad (after all his colleagues are all academics/students too and they all looked pretty normal people).
Yeah, I’ve definitely seen worse. It’s just everything in aggregate creates this pattern.