Lain's central mechanism collapses the moment you examine it.

The series posits that mapping neural connections with sufficient precision allows consciousness transfer — that selfhood is substrate-independent information — but neuroscience in 1998 already knew this was wrong.

The brain doesn't store memory like data on a server; instead it stores it through protein-level changes in synaptic efficiency and through patterns that emerge from chemistry. A perfect map of your connectome at one moment would not be you—it would be a photograph of you, frozen at that instant.

You would not wake up in the Wired — a copy would, while you would remain behind, aging, dying, alone. The show knows this fear, and watch the early episodes: Lain's crisis isn't whether transcendence is possible but whether it matters. When her classmates begin dying—or appearing to die—the horror isn't loss; it's multiplication, because their data persists in the Wired, they exist there, but they also don't exist here.

The production design confirms it: the real world grows increasingly saturated with NAVI devices while the Wired grows increasingly empty despite its data density, and this was 1998's actual terror—not that machines would replace us, but that perfect copying would make replacement irrelevant.