Are anime characters conscious?

Deknijff said:
Isn't this kind of like asking if toys are conscious honestly?

UnpopularAnime said:
Well sort of, but toys don't do anything.

Lord_Sithis said:
I like this. But anime is just a drawing. A drawing doesn't have consciousness or a mind.

UnpopularAnime said:


Is the character only conscious of the frames that are currently being created?

Is the character conscious whenever the anime is watched?

Or does the character get a mind of its own, after the anime is finished he lives his own life, which the creator is oblivious to.

Or something else?

zombie_pegasus said:
While you could consider us to also not have pure free will and instead act on instinct and only develop a personality based on what we have observed to be useful, we still do make decisions on our own and our minds are complex. It is indeed possible to make a video game character who passes the Turing test but an anime character makes no decisions on its own, the writer makes the decisions for it. Therefore the anime character cannot possibly be conscious. Even a bee or ant who sort of makes decisions is not considered to be conscious because they are really just a part of a higher consciousness which is the colony.

YeAhx said:
I don't really understand what OP means to say. Isn't consciousness something that is alive ? Then that's just from creator's point of view.

Rei366 said:
It depends on the writer's will. There is a type of meta-fiction relying on that, here are two examples in written and video media:

- Uchû's universe

- Stranger than fiction

I don't remember any example in the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead movie but my memories say it happens in it too. No idea about the original theater stuck. (out-of-topic: the film is great, fantastic, whatever adjective who might push you to watch it)

UnpopularAnime said:


But what if we are just a cartoon too? And our free will is just an illusion, and some writer already wrote out what will happen to us, and we can't change that?

Can consciousness create consciousness? If I have a rock, I give it a name, I pretend to talk to it, I imagine a whole personality that the rock has, will I project consciousness onto the rock? Will my thoughts about the rock come true?

I don't really think so, but it's interesting to think about.

zombie_pegasus said:
You can't simply will something into having a consciousness. You can have a kid and guide them in a way for them to have the personality you want them to. You can also program a character to be the way you want them to be, but for them to truly be conscious takes a lot of work.

Rei366 said:
@UnpopularAnime Well, the Uchû example uses exactly the same start idea. I suppose the various Gintama anime series have a bit of that too because in the manga, at times, a character may talk directly to the readers. (but it's a very limited type of awareness, present in so many comedies I don't think it is noticeable)

UnpopularAnime said:
When an anime character is created, is part of the creator's consciousness put into that character, and the character thinks everything he is experiencing is real?

If yes, then how does it work?

Is the character only conscious of the frames that are currently being created?

Is the character conscious whenever the anime is watched?

Or does the character get a mind of its own, after the anime is finished he lives his own life, which the creator is oblivious to.

Or something else?

UnpopularAnime said:
Not that kind of consciousness, a better word would be "quallia". It's the thing that seperates us from the robots, we can actually experience things, while a robot, even if it can imitate a human, is just running off of code.

flannan said:

One can think of anime characters as simulated people. The "computer" that is simulating them is the author's mind. As long as the author is thinking about them, they are, to a certain extent, alive. The resulting anime is a presentation/documentary of their life.
Note that some writing styles are probably not in line with this concept, but some are.

Now that we have this concept, we can have answers:
Yes, the character thinks everything he is experiencing is real, unless the author wants otherwise. He may or may not be aware of any shortcuts the writer takes, for example a lot of characters seem aware of the difference between important people and the masses. But if they are aware, they rationalize it as the way their world works.

The character may perceive time differently from us, being capable of setting up a joke while other parts of the joke should not yet be visible to him/her. The classic example is harem protagonists walking in on girls changing - MC gets the impulse to go wherever he tries to go because the girls would be changing there, even though he is not consciously aware of that, because he has a property of "accidental pervert".

The character is only conscious when the original work is planned, or when a work is re-arranged during adaptation. You're watching only a record of the characters' existence, no better than a documentary.

The creator might simulate the character's life even after the work is done. For example, while we never knew what happened to Negi Springfield after the ending of Negima (and how did his love life worked out), the author has worked it out, and included elements of that in his next work, UQ-Holder.
Unless the creator does it, the character's simulation stops, and he/she is frozen in time, to eventually erode and be forgotten.

Depending on your point of view, the same character featuring in doujins, fans' imaginations and other places might be the same character, or merely a copy that is not the same as the original. In either case, he/she will have a lot of copying errors beyond any inflicted intentionally.


Note that not everyone believes in qualia, and that there is any principal barrier between humans and sufficiently advanced robots.

UnpopularAnime said:
Well sort of, but toys don't do anything

UnpopularAnime said:


Not everyone believes in qualia? Well... I'd call that person crazy, how do they think they are conscious, if they don't believe things can be conscious? lol

Much of the debate over their importance hinges on the definition of the term, and various philosophers emphasize or deny the existence of certain features of qualia. As such, the nature and existence of various definitions of qualia remain controversial.