Death Note and the pixel-soul

The Death Note anime revolves around the existence of “death notebooks”. Objects that look like ordinary notebooks, but with the power to kill the one whose name is written on the notebook while the writer mentalizes his face. In this way, the owner of a “death notebook” needs to know the name and face of his target to eliminate him with just a pen.

At this point, the name is very objective information. For example, my name is “Marcos Henrique de Paula Dias da Silva”. Any addition, variation, or deletion of a character will form a name different from mine. However, the need to know the target’s face gives space for several discussions, which will be the subject of this text.

A very common question for those who watch this anime is: suppose there are two identical twins, both with the same name, if you write the name of one of them, which one would die?

The explanation for this impasse begins in episode 9. In it, the protagonist Raito, meets in person with the detective and rival L. In this case, L presents himself as the namesake (person with the same name as another) of a very famous actor. The protagonist, although he doubts that this is in fact his real name, is afraid to test the hypothesis, because if at the moment of writing the famous actor involuntarily mentalizes, he could end up killing this actor, and this would indicate to the detective that Raito “took the bait” , providing evidence that he was responsible for the deaths.

Another essential aspect to understand this explanation, is present since the first episode. The fact that the target’s memory need not be in the present. That is, we can remember the target’s face as it was yesterday, the day before yesterday, or a month, a year ago… if we ever saw him and we will think of his face when we write his name in the notebook, the effect will occur . But this gives space for countless changes in his current appearance, the person may have cut his hair, suffered several burns that disfigured him, or even aged, had plastic surgery… the options are endless, but the effect of remembering the face remains .

With this, we can conclude that in a certain way each person has a “soul”, and when we remember his face, we are actually calling this “soul”, which is unique. Thus, despite identical twins, they are two distinct people, each with a “soul” and an associated life. Even if we are unable to differentiate them, the “soul” of the one we call would be the one affected.

However, something present since the first episode of the anime is reason for the interesting discussion that we have prepared in this text. Does this “soul” appear in photos?

In a poetic way, we could imagine the analogue photo as a piece of frozen reality (or actually burned in silver) and thus with a potential to preserve these elements that allow us to “call the soul”, or in a more practical way, to identify the target that we will write the name in the “death notebook”. But what about a digital photo?

In episode 1, Raito was doubting the notebook, and watching the news on television, he came across a criminal who held several hostages. Incredulous about the power of the notebook, he decides to “test it” lightly after watching the face of the criminal identified with his full name on television. Light writes and soon after the man dies. But then the question arises, what did Raito see that served as a memory on his target’s face?

At this point we need to analyze two hypotheses:

Hypothesis 1) No matter how bad the quality of the digital image is, the “soul” is always linked to the original image and the “death notebook” would still work.

Hypothesis 2) A low quality digital image does not allow the effect of the “death notebook” to be activated.

Analysis of Hypothesis 1

Assuming Hypothesis 1 as true, we can arrive at an absurdity of having the entire image reduced to the quality of a single pixel and still be possible by mentalizing that pixel, killing the target. For supposedly, your soul would be associated with this pixel, which derives from the original pixels of the image.

But what is a pixel? Pixel is the smallest unit of a digital display. In the case of common color monitors, we can say that each pixel corresponds to a combination of three colors, such as the RGB system (Red, Green, Blue). Which assigns each color an intensity between 0 and 255, that is, 256 options. In this way, each pixel is a square painted with a single color between up to 256³ different colors (this example does not generalize all pixels, only those in the RGB 8-bit system).

In this hypothesis, we could discard the very need of those who write the name in the notebook to keep a complete face in mind. For example, it would be enough to have already seen the tip of the target’s ear, which would be enough for the “death notebook” effect to work. Or in a more extreme case, if this hypothesis were true, the memory on a single square of an entire screen would be enough to write the target’s name and associate the name with the person.

Analysis of Hypothesis 2

Assuming Hypothesis 2 as true, we arrive that there are enough pixels to form the image of a soul. In this way, we can calculate from the size of an image, how many pixels it composes. This allows you to reduce the amount of pixels by isolating only the face of our target. Thinking of photos as they appear in social media chats, let’s say they are no larger than 100×100 pixels.