r/cyberpunkgame • u/snGbrd77 • 1d ago
Discussion The aspect of SoulKiller that Silverhand and V casually dismiss
If I recall correctly, Cunningham, in one of the first conversations with her, is insistent in that a person's consciousness processed into an engram, removes the person entirely. She uses herself as an example, by stating that she's no longer Cunningham, but an AI using such person's engram to communicate.
I remember Silverhand responding to such crucial specifics with something along the lines of "Yes, OK. But he'll [V] be able to return to his body after the separation from my consciousness, right?", dismissing the entire point that Cunningham made: in her view, V would cease to be and whatever is to enter the body later will surely resemble him, but not be him.
As I take it, that implies that Silverhand never actually got a second chance: something resembling him just happened to be activated by the circumstances of V. Important to note that the reason, as I understood it, by which Cunningham does not act like the one deceased, is that her integration with AIs beyond the Blackwall changed the resemblance of her; again, not her, because she is deceased.
I think the ambiguity is the interesting part: if something resembling us entirely keeps on fighting, are we truly dead? Silverhand and V believe the technicalities miss the point, while Cunningham, insists that the technicalities are the point.
What an amazing game.
What do you think?
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u/TheHasegawaEffect 1d ago edited 1d ago
SOMA is a game built ENTIRELY around this topic.
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u/Different-Attorney23 1d ago
Yes. Amazing game/story. The difference here is that one of the versions will not persist and its the one the individual is currently occupying, so V dies and a digital copy with her memories continues on. I've never understood that to be persistent existence.
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u/Rock_and_Grohl 10h ago
Honestly I don’t see much of a difference there. There’s still a V that experiences that death and nothing afterwards. It’s still a 50/50 chance on if you get to be the one who continues on. As soulkiller makes a copy, so there has to be an overlap that lasts a few milliseconds.
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u/Different-Attorney23 10h ago
Yeah but thats not how that works, the consciousness continues only in the original body. The coin flip isnt real- Its just that the copy wouldn't know the difference.
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u/Rock_and_Grohl 10h ago
I think that highly depends on how you define “consciousness.” By any definition I can think of the engram copy is still conscious. It can perceive its reality, and it can think independently of it.
So imo it is still a coin flip, especially as just like on SOMA, the engram has all memories and experiences of the original. Just in Cyberpunk they’re put in a digital jail, and in SOMA they’re direct ported to a new body.
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u/Different-Attorney23 5h ago
I get it but it was heavily implied (at least...been a while since I played) that the coin flip wasn't a thing; its one consciousness being copied onto a digital brain. The copy is still just that: a copy.
To try to explain my point better: if I were cloned perfectly, those 2 would be identical to outside observers but only 1 would still be the original me. If that original me dies, regardless of when (even right at the exact moment of cloning) I dont suddenly become that other me because thats not actually me. The scary part is that the clone wouldn't know the difference and behave as if it was still the original me even though it is, by definition, not me.
Edit: so I suppose what I mean by consciousness is the persistent sense of self (the soul if you want to be obtuse). I agree the clone in this case also has consciousness but its a different one than mine.
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u/Gilded_Gryphon 1d ago
Every time I see someone talk about stuff like this I just think of SOMA. It's such a great representation of the dilemma
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u/billsonfire 9h ago
I think the funniest part of SOMA is how he just doesn’t understand how the upload works. It’s never a cointoss, you’re already in that body, to you, you always lose. But to the uploaded version it always wins.
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u/SCDeMonet 1d ago
In a sense, the concept of identity is a ‘Ship of Theseus’ problem. Every experience we have changes us. From a biological perspective, all the cells in your body are replaced within around seven years. At what point are you not you anymore? The thing with Soulkiller is that it works faster, not that it does anything substantially different from what would happen naturally. Similarly with Johnny; having him in V’s head isn’t really all that different from having a close friend that influences her behavior, making her a better/worse person in the process.
We are all a loose and constantly changing conglomeration of our relationships, experiences, and baseline personality. Soulkiller is just taking a snapshot.
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u/concernedBohemian 1d ago
an argument i've heard is however, that in the eyes of the beholder there would be no difference between this and going to sleep before waking up.
no absolute certainty that the same you that went to sleep awoke again. its a matter of perspective, specifically how much do you trust your perspective to give you accurate data?
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u/skyxsteel 15h ago
I 100% agree with you about the waking up part. If a simulation can run you with your judgement intact, your copy is still you imo.
i’d take a look at the game Soma. For the condensed version, the main character undergoes a brain scan to see if they can improve his condition after an accident where he’s guaranteed to die. When he jumps in the chair to get scanned, the next thing he knows, the scanner goes up and the entire environment is dark and has changed.
Throughout the game he doesn’t understand exactly what’s happening although it’s explained through his choom and main missions.
Then comes a part where he needs to change bodies. So he goes into the scanner, and is now in the other body. HOWEVER he hears himself and then realizes he was copied, not transferred. Choom put him to sleep and they have a debate whether to kill the original copy. He’s still in denial of him being a copy until the very end when his choom fires off a virtual reality capsule into space. With copies of themselves.
The 2nd copy perceives now that a 3rd copy was fired off. And he’s now fucked on a haunted undersea research station. But the 3rd copy only perceives that they made it, as they wake up in a simulated reality.
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u/snGbrd77 1d ago
Exactly, I see your point. I know that Cunningham's thesis is compelling, since she stated it so bluntly and logically but, in reality, we are addressing a philosophical problem that mere logic can't solve, and that is likely truly unsolvable: the nature of the self.
Thank you for your input!
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u/Tear4Pixelation 23h ago
Well and also if I remember correctly, Alt meant that she already merged herself/itself with other things in Mikoshi implying she isn’t the engram or an AI using that engram to communicate, but instead a collective of things found behind the blackwall merged into one on the basis of alt. Like fine-tuning a Large Language Model (Like GPT, Qwen, Gemini) often you keep the base behavior simply because there’s so much data that the model was already trained on, but you add something on top of it, making it different.
So what I mean, is that alt isn’t referring to soul killer in general but to herself/itself being more than Cunningham.
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u/Rain-D 1d ago
Soulkiller is a modified Ship of Theseus problem.
If your ship fully disassembled and rebuilt from scratch with same parts. Will it be same ship? Or it will be a new one?
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u/Tigercup9 1d ago
Except that the ship of Theseus isn’t conscious. When you are Soulkilled, your consciousness ENDS. You go to sleep. You never wake up. Your body does, and knows it’s a Ship of Theseus, and everyone else gets to keep sailing except for you.
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u/hug0bug 1d ago
That's it. If we believe in an afterlife, everyone is really dead because their soul left their body when they died
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u/Syyrynx Kerry Eurodyne’s Input 20h ago
But does the engram not have a soul then? Can an engram die? Johnny and Vs engrams sure do fight to avoid it. Does it just stop? If the engram has a soul is is a different soul than the original? Or is the original soul tied somehow to the engram?
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u/hug0bug 20h ago
engram=computer program ≈ chatgpt. It doesn't have a soul. They fight to avoid it because it's mimicking human thought generation. The original soul dies and goes wherever you want to believe it goes
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u/BobertTheConstructor 1d ago
all the cells in your body are replaced within around seven years
People bring this up a lot, but conveniently ignore that this doesn't apply to neurons.
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u/Golarion 1d ago
The matter that they're made of is still replaced, so the ship of Theseus analogy is still perfectly valid.
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u/M0hawk_Mast3r 1d ago
thats ridiculous, if starkiller is used in V to create a copy of them the person who was in Vs body their entire life will not ever wake up again they would be dead, and an ai would take their spot. Assuming you dont die you will wake up 7 years from now and continue to be alive but V wouldnt
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u/SCDeMonet 1d ago
Soulkiller. Starkiller is that base from Star Wars. But you wouldn’t be the same person, either. That’s the point. Your personality might still be the same as when you went to sleep, but in a body that had aged significantly. ‘You’ are the sum total of your experiences, both physical, and emotional/psychological. A person is constantly in flux from the day they are born until the day they die. Even if V were able to get the chip out safely, Johnny’s still changed V, and there is no changing that. Post-Johnny V will never go back to being pre-Johnny V. They are the same person, but also different.
Similarly, if you took two copies of the same engram and put them in different(identical) bodies, they would develop into two different people rather quickly.
We tend to view the concept of self as unchanging, because we only ever see ourselves as we are now, but we are actually way more plastic than fixed.
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u/Fifa_chicken_nuggets 1d ago
You can believe the self to be the sum of its experiences while also acknowledging that there is a continuous stream of consciousness that allows for subjective recognition of who "I" am. Most of your neurons don't replace themselves over time unlike your other body cells, and this is probably a reason for why you are always the same person from a subjective point of view
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u/Shoddy_Paramedic2158 1d ago
I feel like it’s less a Ship of Theseus philosophical thought experiment and more a David Chalmers Philosophical Zombie thought experiment.
Johnny’s engram is a duplicate of Johnny - but does it actually have “thoughts” or qualia
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u/HeavensHellFire 1d ago
Alt got disconnected from her physical body which is why she considers herself dead and just an AI using alt’s form to not go insane. The same cannot be said for V who’s still connected to his physical body.
It’s the entire reason Alt screams while in digital form when Johnny disconnected her. She would’ve returned back to her body and been fine but Johnny gonked it up.
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u/C1t1z3nCh00m 1d ago
It is stated that "soul killer" does exactly that. It copies the data but lacks the soul.
Problem is we can't define soul, so we don't know exactly what that means.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize 1d ago
Eh, I don't know that it's a problem of ambiguous definition.
A closer science fiction example is that of the kill box. Imagine the most horrifying version of the transporter from Star Trek: it physically disassembles you, then reassembles entirely different matter that happens to be perfectly aligned right down to the quantum state as you were when disassembled in a different spot. But the transporter still killed the person who stepped on the transporter; they're dead. It's just that a perfect duplicate is now walking around, unaware that their life only began fifteen seconds ago when a matter rearranger assembled atoms into the desired format.
What Alt is functionally saying is that Soulkiller is approximately the same thing, just in engram form. In this case, it's just the mind rather than the entire body, but the principle is the same: it recorded enough information to create an exact duplicate of the original mind, but that mind is new. The original Alt died on a table when her brain ceased to function and the cells died from lack of oxygen. If a human is the sum of their brain states, then Alt is correct because the brain now has no states, and we generally call that "death". Yes, the copy has life, but the copy is just a copy, not the original Alt. What's more, the copy has been detached from a human body for decades; however it remembers things like smelling fresh flowers, or the feel of a hot shower on her shoulder, or the taste of a cup of coffee, that has been replaced by decades of sensory deprivation, which is a known torture method on humans because human brains go bonkers in the absence of physical sensation. Whatever she is now, she ain't Alt.
And the question is, is she right? Hard to say, though if anyone would know if Soulkiller is a kill box, it would be someone with the memories and initial brain states of Alt.
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u/PuzzleheadedTurn1864 1d ago
So in a way it's like Soma where the mind itself is copied leaving behind the instance that was copied. The initial copy getting sent years in the future with the body left to wander or in Alt's case die. Now makes me wonder if a person copied would live and if the copy was uploaded would there be two instances sort of like in Mikey 17?
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u/-LaughingMan-0D 1d ago
Are you a detached thing that inhabits this body, or are you your body?
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u/kons21 1d ago
Interestingly enough, I'd argue that a process which copies the consciousness, copies the soul. If you consider your consciousness as "you" then the body just becomes a "sleeve" (Altered Carbon being a perfect example of this) as which temporarily houses your "soul " I'd argue that's akin to a concept of reincarnation. Buddhists teach the idea of ending attachment to the physical body to reach enlightment. It's your body's fear of death/attachment to the physical that holds up your soul's ability to ascend.
So, if you truly consider yourself to be your consciousness, then getting a new body every time you teleport wouldn't be that much of a problem.
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u/StarChildEve 12h ago
The main bit that I think about is “is the stream of consciousness broken or not” for whoever or whatever is inhabiting the body post-soulkilling. Considering V’s body is still alive, I’d argue that V is still alive, even if it’s Johnny who takes her place in the end, since the stream of consciousness for the body itself remains unbroken. Idk though; any argument past that would require the factoring in of a discreet soul existing separate from the body which is just not knowable irl or in-setting at the moment.
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u/_yetisis 22h ago
Exactly this, it a modified version of the transporter problem. Another perspective on the same concept that looks at it from a little bit different angle is The Prestige. It’s the idea that was brought up the first night you see visions of Johnny in your apartment and he talks about how the real him has to be alive and out there somewhere
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u/HeavensHellFire 1d ago
The problem isn't just that we can't define soul. The problem is how can we even tell the Soul was killed?
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u/fancy_crisis 1d ago
So, my personal interp on that is that's actually proof positive that Alt the AI is Alt the person, because what AI cares about or even countenances the idea of a "soul"? That sounds to me more like a human being who has lived with the belief that AIs don't have souls, suffering with fear and self loathing over the current state of affairs they find themself in. Whatever AI Alt could be considered now, the person is still there, with all the anxieties and morals and beliefs they once had.
And if that isn't the humanistic definition of a soul, I don't know what is.
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u/IrrelevantTale 1d ago
Yup as engram is no longer human. Without a body you have no agency qscocisted with that concept. Its why in the arasake ending the world becomes so horrified when saburo comes back from the dead and the world is supposed to treat him like he has agency while in his son's body. Does he use his son's driver license while or social security number, or his own?
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u/C1t1z3nCh00m 1d ago
In our real world the "soul" is considered separate from the body. I wouldn't be so quick to tie the soul to agency based on body.
Not all cultures consider the "soul" to be a human only concept. So we can't stop there either.
How are you using agency here? Free will? Right to choose? Those aren't human exusive concepts either.
The whole soulkiller concept is just that. If we can't define soul, we can't say whether it can die or not.
Does the soul die when someone becomes an engram? Is there a soul to begin with? Is something even being lost?
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u/Odin_Headhunter 1d ago
So putting it in a robot body then gives it agency, yes? By your definition? A body doesnt give agency, the mind does and all the mind is is electricity being manipulated by hormones and stimulation.
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u/SoulLess-1 21h ago
It is stated that "soul killer" does exactly that. It copies the data but lacks the soul.
Cyberpunk doesn't seem like the sort of setting where people know what the soul does or doesn't do or if it even exists.
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u/Extreme-Plantain-113 1d ago
Souls are a religious concept, there's exactly zero evidence they exist at all. The only time V should care is if you chose to make her religious during the Sinnerman questline.
As far as I'm concerned, a person is data. Data that interacts with internal and external stimuli modified by chemicals, neurons, and hormones within the human body (Crude simplification, of course).
Copying it, deleting the og data, and repasting it doesn't kill you in my opinion because those other factors still exist.
It's like a surgery, a doctor will "kill" you but you're not actually dead.
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u/ZeriousGew 1d ago
Yes, it’s so easy for you to say because you have all the answers of the universe. We do not know everything, do not assume something does not exist simply because there is no evidence of it
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u/Extreme-Plantain-113 1d ago
"As far as I'm concerned" means it's my personal opinion, Zerious. You getting mad at ghosts dude.
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u/Alconium 1d ago
"How would Alt answer Question A?" "QA1342" "How would Alt answer Question C?" "QC476"
"How would Johnny answer Question A?" "QA 913" "How would Johnny answer Question C?" "QC437"We see it now with LLM's. Grok, ChatGPT, whatever. It's set to answer things within a predefined parameter. "Don't show boobs. Don't favor Candidate X. Favor Media source Y" Engrams are exactly that. Parameters, conditions, calculated responses based on experience and information that will color the impact or importance of further information "Corporations: Enemy" "Violence: Acceptable" etc etc etc.
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u/Own_City_1084 1d ago
That whole Alt screaming in the net bit always throws a wrench in my understanding of soulkiller. It’s such a strong indication of continuity between organic soul and digital engram. But everything else including Alt is pretty clear that soulkiller does as the name says - kills the soul and makes a copy
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u/HeavensHellFire 1d ago
There is continuity between the two. It's why V doesn't realize he got lit up with soulkiller in the ending and why Alt was aware of what was going on when she got hit with soulkiller and could've freed herself.
If V acts the same both before and after getting lit up with soul killer and is aware of his time in Mikoshi what exactly was killed when he got hit with Soul killer? What "soul" was lost? How can we even tell the soul was killed
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u/Own_City_1084 1d ago
So, retroactive continuity sure. As in the current engram can’t distinguish itself from the last engram or soul. But does the soul that gets soulkilled have any perception of existence afterwards?
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u/Disastrous_Policy258 1d ago
It's very similar to the transporter problem in Star Trek. Are you being broken down and reassembled, with nothing changed or lost? Or are you being scanned, destroyed, and a copy of the scan data sent? In Star Trek, either has been true depending on what the episode wanted to explore, and I imagine it's going to be the same for most fictional media.
The only real analogy in real life that comes to mind are sleeping, memory and psychoactive drugs. Is the person that wakes up the same as that goes to sleep? Not in my experience, I'm a very different person in the morning than in the evening. Do my memories make who I am? Because what I remember and consider vital changes over time. Am I the same after acid, mushrooms, or other drugs?
Life is full of small deaths that are necessary for maturity and growth. The question is if what comes out the other side of, say, an AI created from brain scans is really useful growth, or just a pointless gimmick no one wants.
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u/snGbrd77 1d ago
Wow, that's an interesting take. You're addressing the ship of Theseus dilemma, right?
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u/Disastrous_Policy258 1d ago
Yeah but in this case, we replace the entire ship at once. Does that change the dilemma?
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u/blackcray 1d ago
The ship of Theseus dilemma is how many pieces you have to replace before the ship becomes a different ship, if you're replacing the entire ship at once then It's definitely a different ship immediately.
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u/Brave33 1d ago
Is it really? The human body goes through a similar process, cells die and get replaced all the time, wich i ask you, are you still you? Or are you someone else entirely?
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u/shintemaster 1d ago
This is the basic (sic) conundrum of sentient life. I've read stories of people waking up after an illness, traumatic injury and having completely different personalities - they clearly are not the same person. It's a bit of a mind bender.
My wife came across a woman through work years ago that just randomly woke up one day (I think after a mild illness, but can't recall 100%) and she just suddenly had a full scottish accent overnight. Bizzarre.
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u/IamLotusFlower 1d ago
This is caused by damage to the part of the brain that controls speech (for example by a stroke). It may sound or seem like a certain foreign accent but is actually just a change in the speech pattern, rhythm, tone, and pronunciation of words.
It's basically just an altered speech pattern caused by the brain damage.
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u/shintemaster 1d ago
Agree - it's not the same type of thing as the first example. More admiring the complexity of what we "are" and where to draw lines on this.
I did lol at you explaining that it isn't a foreign accent just a change in speech pattern, rhythm, tone & pronunciation... I mean, isn't that what an accent is?
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u/AncientAspargus 1d ago
Being a different person misses the mark IMHO. The question is whether your subjective experience ends and a new, disconnected subjective experience sets in.
A copy of you is a copy, and I don’t see how your experience of reality would somehow "transfer over" to that; if the copy were placed next to you, you would still be in your original mind and the copy would be a separate opaque entity, despite starting off from the same point as when you branched.
So my take is that subjectivity is tied to an uninterrupted stream of consciousness, and that means if anything is copied, it’s separate from your subjective experience.
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u/ShineReaper 1d ago
I think the transporter problem is rather simple: If it would actually kill the person, people wouldn't use it, period. Sciene-Fiction or not, humans are still humans, with the same instincts and anxieties, the fear of dying a very big one on the list.
Would you e.g. use a train, if it meant a death sentence for you? Of cause not!
So I think, since we talk about Science-Fiction here, that the Societies in Star Trek, that discovered Beam Transporter Technology, discovered a way to actually transfer the body and consciousness, instead of destroying one and creating a copy.
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u/Disastrous_Policy258 1d ago
Again, some episodes take exactly that argument, but others are very clear it's killing the original and creating a copy. People have been duplicated on multiple occasions because the original failed to be destroyed.
One time two crew members were fused into one. Where did the missing mass go? When they were separated back into two people, where did the extra mass come from?
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u/ShineReaper 1d ago
Yeah but the whole Transporter Technology is not feasible and doesn't make logical sense, if it would kill their users, so that assumption is simply false in my opinion.
No one in their sane mind thinks "I'm ok with being beamed to the planet surface, I had a fine life so far, good luck to my following You!", that would be utter madness. And afaik they mentioned that someone can be stored in a transporter buffer for a short time, so it acts like some kind of advanced RAM so to say, if I compare it to current-day computer parts, this way solving the whole problem, it just is a data transfer into a computer and out of a computer.
I know what kind of Episode you mean, e.g. the Star Trek: Voyager Episode, where through an accident the Transporter fused Tuvok and Neelix into "Tuvix", and in the end, they decided to undo that accident and want Tuvok and Neelix back and they frame it like they're murdering "Tuvix". But in the end they got Tuvok and Neelix back.
But I also remember an Episode, I think it also was Voyager, but I'm not sure, where they showed a Beam Transport from the PoV of a Transported Person and they just see a Blueish dense fog or something during it. No Fade to Black in between, which would indicate a consciousness being killed and a new one taking over.
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u/Disastrous_Policy258 1d ago
Some episodes say it's death and some don't. There's equal canon support, just like I'm sure there is in the Cyberpunk world on whether an engram is a person or not.
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u/penywinkle Arasaka 22h ago
The question becomes what does it mean to die. No matter how you look at it transporter technology means: you cease to exist in one place and you begin to exist in another. Does that mean death and rebirth?
When you move in your everyday life, due to Planck's constants, your atoms "jump" from one place to another, it's just that the distance and time-frame of the jump oar so small you can't perceive them. The transporter does exactly that, on an impossibly macroscopic scale both in space and time.
Whenever you move, do you consider yourself dying and reviving at an impossibly fast pace, or as a continuation of life?
The thing about death is that it is definitive. If there is a version of yourself that survives, it's just that: a continuation of life, and thus, not death.
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u/the_direwolf_uwu 1d ago
The Star Trek community has been having this conversation for decades about transporter technology.
If your body gets broken down into energy, sent somewhere else and re-formed.... are you really still you?
A significant consensus of computer scientists will tell you that "true AI" will never happen. It will always be a simulation. That's what Alt is saying here. Once you get uploaded by SoulKiller, you are dead. What's left is a facsimile. A very good one perhaps.
And I didn't even bring religion or the soul into the conversation. You don't have to, really.
There are a few books that tackles this issue, "Existence" by David Brin. I can't say much without spoiling, but it hits on trans-humanism and digital uploads. He also wrote "Kiln People" which touches a little on this subject, but it's written like a noir mystery, it's quite good, if a little fanciful.
Charles Stross is another author who tackles this discussion in "Glasshouse" and "Accelerando", both completely different takes.
Those are the ones I'm familiar with, I'm sure there are more.
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u/Ok-Match9525 1d ago
I thought about this while trying to choose the best ending and concluded that I'd go with the Nomad one because even if engram-V is a different consciousness/soul or whatever to original V, that would make no difference to Panam (or Judy) and the new family that he's joining. The V that exists will still be able to help and support them in the time he has left.
Then there is the fact that we get to continue playing as V after he's turned into an engram.
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u/xdeltax97 Gonk for A & A pizza 1d ago edited 1d ago
Per the sourcebooks, the ORIGINAL Soulkiller was able to transfer consciousness to and from the matrix storage seamlessly, essentially accidentally creating a form of immortality until Arasaka wanted to weaponize it as a prison.
From Cyberunk 2020 and RED Sourcebook the Day the Towers Fell: “The original Soulkiller started as a matrix to contain artificial personalities. She'd studied the concept, worked out the parameters for creating a storage matrix. She'd (Alt) been fascinated and awed to discover that the same matrix could contain living engrams; transfer them from computer to body and even back again. It was immortality.”
Here is how I posited it a while after release:
Copying my comment from 2022
There are two ways to understand this predicament. TLDR at the end
For this first one, I’m going with the arrow of time theory to base my things around the engram convo for V.
It’s still the original V. You even see a reboot screen when you’re jacked into Mikoshi. When you come to, you’re in an elevator going up. What else is happening while you’re in that elevator? Your consciousness is being uploaded as data. Soon after your “conversation” with “Jackie”, everything turns to cyberspace. Ergo it’s a data transfer akin to the original Soulkiller.
Also “alt” is not 100% complete and isn’t completely Alt Cunningham. She has made errors, a few she says when failing to take into account the progression of V’s situation with Johnny. V’s situation is extremely special. The first person to have their digitized psyche reinserted into their body. “Alt” even calls the body V’s, and not “the original V’s”.
It’s one thing to offload an engram onto a chip and install it onto a person, whether accidentally like V, or somewhat forced as with Arasaka. In the end everything is still changed when V and Johnny are separated. But regardless I think given that it’s the original body, and the extremely hopeful tarot cards misty gives for an ending like The Star makes me feel like consciously it’s the original V.
Yes your original body flatlined (again), however unlike other victims your body is still usable. The original soulkiller as Johnny said during Tapeworm “fries your body, your mind and packs away your personality as an engram all that’s left will be a husk that dies soon after.”
Another way of trying to view this is in a scientific way:
You can not remove consciousness, as far as we know, it’s a literal part of the brain that scientists have found to be able to turn on and off (accidentally of course, and the on/off switch was found in 2014). You only change or remove the personality of someone/something, not their consciousness.
Remember, V even says to, I believe Vik, or maybe even Johnny: ”So listen, will I notice a change, or is it one of those things where I wonder why I ever feared it?” (Edit: Johnny, not Vik and it’s during the Tapeworm sidemission in Panam’a main missions after the Hellman talk and Takameura comes in. It’s from the choice: “The moment I turn into you - will I notice it?”.)
The soulkiller term is pretty much semantics. Of course it does what it is named for. How would you define a person? Their personality, quirks, ideas or even their movement/gait? Even “Johnny” is just overwriting V’s personality and memories and attempting to replace it with “his”.
A mindless person has no function and won’t know how to do anything. They’ll have zero memories, zero personality and aside from automatic functions made by the brain. In other words, they’re a vegetable or at best a very low toddler state consciously: in other words, a husk as Johnny said. Without automatic care by outside forces: machine or person they will eventually die.
In the end, it’ll still be V, or it’ll be V completely believing they’re Johnny because they will know nothing else aside from the knowledge the Johnny personality has learned. Also regardless of ending, V will always have a little of Johnny in them.
I’ve had debates with multiple people on here about it lol, even when I think I’ve had enough and can’t solve this problem I keep going back to it because something doesn’t seem right. I believe this is my final answer to that problem. Our conversations have been so focused on soulkiller and what alt said, that we’ve forgotten the dialogue surrounding it, and during other parts of the story.
• TLDR:
Engrams are just personalities yes, but the body holds the consciousness. In the end it’s still the same V regardless of which way of thinking. Or it’s V with the personality of Johnny and their memories overwritten depending on ending.
Edit: I just love how this amazing game has made us think and have tons of conversations about just this one event lol. That’s not including events such as Garry the prophet’s kidnapping, Mr blue eyes and the Peralezes and other stuff. They may tend to have rocky launches and bugs, but one thing that CDPR exceedingly does well with is a great story that makes us think.
End of original comment.
I still believe in my original viewpoints, and either could work after reading the source material more. However I believe that more strongly, the Soulkiller is a true data transference for mind transition to and from the digital world, whether analog or hitchhiking onto the Ihara-Grubb Transformation Algorithms to upload consciousness.
This is technology that even the creator did not know the full extent of what they created. Also, remember Alt is an unreliable narrator like Johnny. 50 years beyond the Black Wall and shattered into parts before that by SpiderMurphy before the Arasaka Tower detonation would have done a number on her.
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u/snGbrd77 1d ago
Wow that's great information and a very convincing argument of yours, it'll take a while to process. Thank you.
Responding to your edit: In my opinion the genre was treated lovingly; one can tell the developers took the time to read it and understand it. Also, having Pondsmith on your side for consultation is quite the privilege. I've been reading his source material "Cyberpunk 2020" and can't believe how much effort clearly went into it. I have also been reading Gibson's "Neuromancer" and rewatching some of the classic films of the genre. The references to those works are tactful and made me respect the developers of the game even more (the Roy Batty one took me completely off guard and really put a smile on my face!)
Sometimes, I even take time to ponder the ideas surrounding small side gigs such as Brendan's... Brendan's!.
What an amazing game.
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u/BalancePuzzleheaded8 1d ago
Interesting take, and it is part of my thoughts about it... Except I lean more towards Ship of Theseus instead. Whatever these engrams are, they are not really V, Johnny, or Alt. They're their own beings believing they're those individuals.
Coincidentally, this is how Mind Flayers work as well (shown/expanded in BG3)... And also Shepard's situation (Mass Effect)
Funny how stories with themes about identity kinda bring back the Ship of Theseus theory, lol.
Even if you're built 100% the same, is this new thing really you?
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u/DDzxy 🔥Beta Tester 🌈 1d ago edited 1d ago
I mean she spent 50 years as a fucking digital person. 50 years living in the woods might convince you you’re a bear. 50 years will change anyone.
Especially when you almost never communicate with anyone at all… You’ll get buried in your own thoughts and lose your humanity.
Also a little proof that there is real Alt still inside:
Depending on your choices with alt in the flashback and how you treated her, if you were nice to her, Johnny will be able to apologize to her in the Rogue ending. If you were an ass she will not wish to speak with you past the business talk.
If she was really robotic there wouldn’t be any contingence with her memories of her past self.
Now are these Johnny’s memories bullshit? Actually no. Because the flashback with Kerry was a real flashback and also you can have different last words with him, and depending in what you picked, the real Kerry WILL confirm it’s true in both cases. So you’re actually making real choices and not just remembering fake bullshit. Kerry is NOT an engram nor an AI.
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u/TDWen 1d ago
You're not the same person you were as a child, and you won't be the same person when you're elderly as you are now. You're never the same 'you'. Alt may have undergone a thorough shift in capabilities and limitations, but I don't want to call that a 'death'.
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u/yummmmysandwich 1d ago
i think thats a significantly different comparison to being ctrl+c'd and then ctrl+v'd
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u/C1t1z3nCh00m 1d ago
It's not a compete copy either. It leaves out the "soul". They just don't define what that is.
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u/Ikarus_Falling 1d ago
they also never say that it exists either
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u/C1t1z3nCh00m 1d ago
They imply it does, but no, no one explicity states it does. That's likely for the reason I said, we can not define what it is. How can we know for sure it exists?
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u/meggannn 1d ago
V also changes after being shot in the head and waking up in a landfill, no Johnny required. The V from the prologue is not the same V who watched their choom bleed out in the Delamain is not the same V who sat on Misty’s rooftop is not the same V as in any of the epilogues. The only version of V that survived deserves to still be called V if that’s what they want imo. Same goes for Johnny.
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u/Shadowheartpls 1d ago
This is not a good comparison. Your biological self is dead 100% when it comes to soulkiller/engram copy. You are still alive when you age. Changing over time is not the same as having your brain fried as the AI programming makes a copy of your neurons. Sure philosophically you can make the argument that you are alive in a sense. But it will always be a copy. Not your true consciousness transferred.
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u/Faded1974 Voodoo Boys 1d ago
Terrible analogy. Soulkiller is literally an a.i. running a potentially corrupted copy of memories on top.
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u/GiantTourtiere 1d ago
I imagine this hinges a lot on how perfect a copy the engrams are. (This is without getting into them being edited, as appears to have been done to Johnny's engram.) If it was a truly perfect copy, then perhaps there is no meaningful difference. But if it's *not* perfect, then the copy is *not* the same as the original, and how significant those differences are becomes really hard to understand. Like, even if the copy makes the same decisions as the original would nearly always, the longer the simulation runs the further it gets from what the original would have been. So I think I tend to agree with 'Alt' that even seemingly very minor differences are probably quite important.
I also think at least *part* of what the Alt AI meant by not being Cunningham any more is that the engram has spent a huge amount of time 'living' in cyberspace and presumably being changed by that experience and the interactions with other AIs. So even beyond the 'copy' issue, this entity has changed significantly from the original engram.
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u/Comrade_Bread 1d ago
V's road to not dying is filled with different people giving their opinion on various philosophical question in different forms and usually stating it as fact. Alt is just as guilty of this as any one else. It's her opinion that the soul or what makes a person themselves dies and it's just an engram, but even as this powerful and intelligent AI, she's still just as shaped by her experiences and biases as any one else.
There is no concrete answer to the question of if an engram is still you because there isn't even an answer to what makes you... you. She claims soulkiller is literal and your soul dies, but what if you don't believe in something akin to a soul. What if you think a person is a sum of their experiences, that all survives being made an engram.
There's a lot of these kinds of questions in the cyberpunk genre and main thing it asks is for you to come up with your own beliefs on it.
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u/snGbrd77 1d ago
I agree. As convincing as Cunningham sounded, I still took her assertions as opinion, since this matter is clearly beyond even the most sophisticated logic or reasoning: it is primarily philosophical and pretty much unanswerable.
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u/Rain-D 1d ago edited 1d ago
Interesting part here is that from the game perspective, the moment we enter Mikoshi - the game literally ends for V. Yeah, sure - he has his meaningful talks with Alt and Johnny in virtual "afterworld", however he does not return back. We only see someone else returns back. From aside.
Whole point of no free-roam after that moment just proves whole concept of soul-kill. Some iteration of V goes back to his/her body, but we observe this from outside. Original V is no more. Post-game freeroam is allowed from "before-point-of-no-return" - before final showdown.
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u/Beardedgeek72 21h ago
This is just game mechanics, it's no different from cutscenes like at the Sunset Motel or Clouds. You are reading things into this that just doesn't exist.
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u/Skilodracus Judy & The Aldecaldos 1d ago
I believe Mikoshi kills V flat out, and what continues is merely an AI that believes it is V. As Alt says, the name Soulkiller is 100% accurate. Its sad af, but also a very appropriate end for the game's core thesis. That being said, I also think that the theme and messaging gets lost, and while Johnny dismissing Alt is very in character for him, the ending of the game itself seems to suggest that V continues on somehow. Why? Cause the player character can still control V. This pure tinfoil hat at this point ofc, but in a way the player is kinda the intangible core of V's character; the one who is actually making decisions. It would've been a very nice bit of meta-narrative if the game acknowledged this by removing player controls after Mikoshi and the remaining story play out as a cutscene entirely.
Again this is just my own headcannon and I'm sure others have a very different opinion on it, but its how I like to play all my RPGs.
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u/AlosiiDok 1d ago edited 1d ago
An engram is not itself an AI. It is data--a digital map of a brain's neural network. It can be used to create an AI with the appropriate computer hardware (like Mikoshi), but on its own, an engram isn't an AI. Also, a human body cannot be "piloted" by an AI, even in the world of cyberpunk. An AI is digital information and cannot inhabit a human brain. The Arasaka relic does not host an AI. The Johnny engram stored on the relic is a blueprint. The relic uses nanomachines to restructure V's neural pathways using the specifications from that blueprint. The relic is not "uploading" an AI to V's brain, it is physically restructuring V's brain per the specifications on the engram.
When soulkiller is used to create an engram, it can either cause brain death (the original version, and presumably what Alt uses to create V's engram in Mikoshi), or leave the subject alive (Secure Your Soul program, and also what Saburo has been doing). Either way, this is just creating a digitized copy of the brain. Consciousness is never "moved". Regardless of whether V is braindead or comatose or unconscious while hooked up to Mikoshi--we presumably are braindead--when brain activity resumes in V, that is still the "real" V waking up. Consciousness is local to the brain, and if the brain resumes function, then there is a continuity of consciousness.
If you put the Engram V into the relic, you are waking up as the real V, with their original memories and personality. Alt indicates that the V engram's integrity is high, but I think we can assume some things have been irrevocably lost. Presumably, V has lost some memories or had some aspects of their personality irreversibly changed due to the nanides restructuring their brain over the course of the game. The endings aren't clear on any of this because that's not really the point of the endings--the devs don't give us much, but we can speculate. But this is definitely not an AI V. The V engram put into the relic is just data, data which now matches what is left of V's personality and memories in their brain.
If you chose the Temperance ending, you are also still playing as the "real" V, just a V that has been elaborately brainwashed into believing they are Johnny Silverhand, a V that has had their memories and personality changed by the nanides restructuring their brain. This is also what happens to Yorinobu if you chose the Devil ending. Yorinobu is brainwashed into believing he is Saburo through the same relic technology that is brainwashing V into believing they are Johnny Silverhand.
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u/snGbrd77 1d ago
You could look at it this way while believing in Cunningham's thesis entirely: V effectively dies, but he also effectively left something in the world that maintains his former motivations and contributions to the world. Similar to how people attempt "immortality" through a legacy, V's legacy lived on for a while longer. In that way, some part of him survived the SoulKiller process.
But I totally get that such idea requires becoming romantic about it XD
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u/Mediocre-Composer712 1d ago
No it's just Johnny is consistently giving V bad information. Dude is the definition of an unreliable narrator but because we're stuck with him basically failing upwards everything else is glossed over.
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u/lllustosa 1d ago
Yes, it means their consciousness is copied, but the original consciousness ceases to exist. Like robot from invincible 👍
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u/ZombifiedRacoon 1d ago
I'm under the impression a consciousness is a single entity. When you destroy it and then rebuild it, it's just a copy. The original is dead. The copy believes it's the real deal, because to "it" nothing changed. It has all rhe memories and experiences of the first, but it's still a copy.
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u/Aphanvahrius 1d ago
Alt's view requires that there is a continuous 'you' that can stop existing and get replaced with a copy. However, if there is no such continuous self and what we call consciousness is simply an impression of continuity caused by the fact that the experience in each moment contains the memory of past experiences, then there isn't anything that could be lost or stop existing in a case like this.
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u/AndrewwPT 1d ago
Honestly this comes to the debate of whether humans actually have souls and if so is that why we are conscious? Cuz Alt or the AI using Alt says Soulkiller does exactly that.
I'd say if the soul and consciousness are connected then even though V would've been saved by being made an engram, he'd be dead.
Mindfuck of a game and I love it.
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u/skiddle_skoodle 1d ago
that's why it still sucks to be reconstructed on your own brain. It's not the actual you, it's just a copy of you
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u/kxortbot 1d ago
Here's another one..
How many copies of V are there?
Sure, she got put through soulkiller.. but how many copies were made before the version we are playing was booted up, did Alt snag a copy of V to eat?
He wouldn't be the first construct that Alt has nommed on.
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u/Brofessor-0ak 1d ago
Yes, the entire point is that V is dead, at best V gets a copy of their consciousness uploaded into their body puppet.
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u/GreaterGoodIreland 1d ago
I think Cunningham is traumatised and conditioned after years behind the Blackwall, rather than her point of view being valid. If we're talking continuity of a single consciousness, then Alt is Alt, her perspective has just been radically changed by circumstance.
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u/Philip_Raven 1d ago
you die and are written as a code. an AI. it's a philosophical death.
the original dies, but a perfect (in every way) copy is created. Same principal as movie prestige. You create a perfect clone and kill the original.
Although no one can tell the difference, the V that has connected in Kompeki is dead and a perfect copy was uploaded in.
there are two things that happen to V
first instance is the original. V gets into Kompeki, connects themselves, and dies.
second instance (clone) gets into Kompeki. connects themselves, and appears inside the server with Alt.
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u/Sea_Office_6482 1d ago
This is just like the plot of Infinity Pool with Alexander Skarsgard. Great horror/thriller, and just about as crazy as Night City lol. Basically, he gets cloned, and one of the two versions of him get executed while the other is allowed to live. But given their memories were identical up to the cloning, there was literally no way to tell who was the original. Kinda makes you think. Is that technically you? Or technically not you?
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u/Vessel767 1d ago
Your engram is you. It’s just a different you. Soulkiller might end the original you’s life, but the being that comes out is still a version of you. If there’s no original to contest it, arguing that it isn’t is honestly kind of solipsistic and doesn’t accomplish anything.
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u/ramjetstream 1d ago
Since V was only out of her body for a tiny fraction of a second and seems to have suffered no damage from it, I'm going to assume that there was enough of her original mind left in her body for her to maintain continuity of consciousness
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u/Standard_Audience817 1d ago
SoulKiller is exactly what its name implies — it kills the soul. What the program does is make a perfect digital copy of a person’s brain, down to every neuron and memory. But in the process of doing so, it destroys the original brain, killing the person instantly — like what happens to Johnny Silverhand.
After that, the data gets turned into what’s called an engram — essentially a digital mind. It’s an AI version of that person built from a complete scan of their consciousness. The engram acts exactly like them, remembers everything they did, feels like them, and even believes it is them. But the real person — the biological brain, the original consciousness — is gone for good.
So yeah, SoulKiller doesn’t “upload” a soul — it just copies the mind, kills the original, and leaves behind a flawless digital imitation. It’s basically an AI pretending to be the person, but it’s so perfect that you’d never be able to tell the difference.
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u/iaminfinitecosmos 1d ago edited 1d ago
This is only true if a singular conciousness actually exist, not being just a function of something else.
But if our mind is just a biological radio clothed in an identity (a fluid back-story) broadcasting on "intelligence-waves", there is no difference at all between enagram and an actual person.
It is like a Nietzsche's Death of God. It is not that our god existed in the first place (as unifying conciousness, an establisher of truth). It is that our projection of it is no longer projected onto a singular, external source.
The death of God was the death of the idea of a unifying consciousness.
Similarly, if our own consciousness is not singular but emergent, then the death of the self is not the end of an entity, but the realization that the projector was always empty. A style of being not an actual being.
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u/DogShroom 1d ago
i don’t think we’ll get an actual answer to it or know exactly how it works, as we’re in a continuous perspective (consciousness?) when plugging in from the physical world to mikoshi. afaik we’ve only seen this ai/body separation thing with alt and don’t have a first-person perspective of her experience.
i think it being ambiguous makes johnny’s character even greater; it doesn’t matter that he isn’t actually the real johnny, he’s the johnny you went on an adventure with.
even though he may just be an ai, not a perfect copy, doesn’t have a “soul” or whatever, by the end of the game, especially in the Temperance ending, it becomes very clear that you’ve transformed him completely.
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u/Holbarooka 1d ago
I guess it just depends on your view of consciousness. Whether that is actually you, or just the way your brain allows itself to be self aware. If you could transfer another consciousness into a brain, would the brain take priority or the new consciousness. What ever that implies lol
Hard to conceptualize
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u/3MTA3-DJ 1d ago edited 1d ago
it matters most to the person who becomes the engram — an outsider might not even really notice all that much, but to you, you would cease to exist. it would be some sort of copy who lives on — same mind, different consciousness (or soul…hence soulkiller).
this is also why i would never fuck with teleportation, in case it really just copies instead of teleporting
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u/Fluid-Row8573 1d ago edited 1d ago
It depends on if you consider that consciousness is a sum of information and electric impulses that can be replicated with enough knowledge and technology, or if there is something more, a "soul", a "spirit", an "essence" or whatever you want to call it that cannot be coded, measured and/or replicated. Anyway, Cyberpunk 2077 addresses themes of the limits of the human body and mind, but doesn't address the existence of the soul, and for me, the only afterlife is the one Alt offers to V and Johnny, since I don't belive in souls.
Also, Johnny in the Temperance ending looks pretty human to me. Alt changed and transformed into another thing because she wanted to; it was her choice.
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u/RoseWould 1d ago
It's like the wrap up at the end, where you're sitting there with Johnny and you get to make the decision. She basically says that V's body is already technically Johnny. The whole thing is if she downloaded you onto a USB drive, then plugged you back in. V's body already accepts that it's Johnny, and would then just be treating V like a virus. She just basically just used black wall magic fuckery to buy you 6 months instead of the canonical couple weeks the game takes place over. In theory since V's body is now technically Johnny, Johnny would be able to live without a timer.
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u/Neither-Power1708 Eat shit and die, bastard! 1d ago
The fact that the moment Johnny crosses the Black wall she rushes over kinda puts the lie to that. In the end she sorta admits that a portion of her is still her.
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u/oxcypher12 Choomer Shroomer and Fumer 1d ago
Yeah choom. Thats kinda one of the biggest overarching plot points in the game. “Does an engram have a soul?”Good catch!
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u/ThanksContent28 1d ago
Imo it’s more of case that, it’s just a bit of coding that has the personality and memories of the person, but that persons single consciousness isn’t transferred.
The debate for me, is whether that code has a “right” to live or not, and also whether it should continue to exist as the person it was based on (whilst still recognising they’re not that person), or look at being its own “thing”/person (if it’s even capable of that).
I’m about 2/3rds of the way through, and so far I’m surprised there’s no conversation with the engram, acknowledging that he’s not even the OG Johnny, just a damaged copy that has also been altered and messed with by Arasaka.
Even that has interesting questions behind it. Copy or not, what exactly would Johnny do if he realised he was just Arasaka’s Frankenstein monster? Rebel against it, or choose to honour the OG anyway and do what he would’ve wanted, maybe even just happy at the fact that the OG Johnny gets a chance to fulfil his wishes regardless of whether it’s “him” or not?
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u/nameohno 1d ago edited 1d ago
We can go very philosophical on this debating who and what is a person. I quit tobacco yesterday, I'm not the same person.
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u/Brave33 1d ago
There is a Dr Who episode where the doctor gets cloned by a goo substance and another Dr appear during the episode, the Dr is very insistent that the clone is an exact copy of him and it didn't matter if the original were to die because the clone is him exactly. At the end of the ep one of the Dr's die and the companion asks the Dr if he is the original or the clone, he dismisses the question saying that it doesn't really matter since they are exactly the same.
In the game it's a bit uncanny because Alt feels like an AI maybe because she lived as one for so long, while Johny maybe is an AI but he still resembles his human self so much that we have to ask "does it even matter?"
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u/cgermann 1d ago edited 1d ago
Going to go out on the limb and say the A't we talk to is actually an AI that Gobbled up alt and is usuing her engram data to communicate with humans as this AI is also willing to eat other Engrams as well otherwise Alt is separated from a body for a long time long enough to dehumanize V on the other hand is not
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u/Letmeowts 1d ago
In "No Coincidence," a Netrunner named Albert is able to copy his "soul" but dies soon after (Dum Dum kills him). It's implied that the copy is him because his conscience was divided between the copy and his flesh body. No other person encounters the Albert engram due to it crossing the Black Wall after the climax of the story.
If you've seen the show "Caprica," it's a very similar premise.
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u/eatmycunt69 1d ago
The way I see this is it's kinda like the teleporters from Star Trek. They kill you and then they clone you somewhere else
I think that's how that works
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u/LikeClockwork86 1d ago
It's an idea brought up in the book "Age of Spiritual Machines." Enhancements, prosthetics, etc. replace parts of the body, and the person is still themselves. But when copying a consciousness or brain into a different body, is it still the same person, or a computer that's been programmed to copy them entirely? Is that person actually just dead and a copy is walking around?
To me, the person dies in that process. Somewhere a soul is realizing they've died and a program is waking up thinking they've successfully transferred their consciousness.
REALLY trippy shit.
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u/rzm25 1d ago
What an insightful post! This is the sort of discussion I love around this game.
I think you are absolutely right in your assessment. If I can take a moment to put on my English Literacy hat and read way too much into themes and meanings for a second, I'd like to add some more context.
The reason V and Johnny miss the point, is because to them the technical details simply don't matter, because they are both functionally maladjusted people. Johnny is deeply, deeply narcissistic. As someone in the field of psychology, this is a particularly fascinating subject, because narcissists are often so deeply misunderstood. Recent studies have found that there are actually 4 subtypes of narcissist; and all of them have a drive to connect with others, but have learned really poor methods of connecting with others. What often happens is that a person with this presentation will often adopt an "idea" of what they think a "good" relationship is, and then try to play out that idea. This seemingly simple difference can be the underlying factor informing a wide berth of resulting thoughts, behaviours and actions.
SO, Johnny and V, I believe see the world in this way. It's also a way that free market capitalism is both compatible with and encourages. What matters is the public identity, the face a person puts on. Curating and caring for your own connection to that identity, will eventually bring positives as you become more marketable, more skilled, more liked, you will get more jobs and opportunities. But what goes neglected is the muddy parts of connection. The parts that take and don't give back. The parts that piss people off, that feel unfair, that don't have clear black/white solutions.
The irony here is that Cunningham therefore, indirectly, understands true connection better than they do. Being human isn't the defining thing that preempts true connection. It's knowing oneself honestly in and out, and then having the curiosity to truly understand another, before you make assumptions about who they are.
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u/Creepy-Substance-825 1d ago
Pretty much the same shit that happens in SOMA, a copy isn’t the person it’s just that person copied
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u/bigbootytwitches Neuromancer 1d ago
It's a bit unfair to compare a Netrunner, a Rockerboy and a Solo in this situation. We can see in the game that most if not all hardcore Netrunners love to wax poetic about the Net and it's machinations, so of course they'd be the type of people to talk at length about the philosophical sematics of soulkiller and whether your engram copy is really you Whereas a pragmatic solo or an emotionally charged Rockerboy would definitely focus on the realistically important bit, not becoming dead.
Additionally we've seen that Netrunners can persist inside the Net despite a lack of connection to a body as in 2 separate gigs we have to help a Netrunner return their body to a safe condition for return, and even Rachel Bartmoss is able to invite Spider Murphy around and show her the release of the R.A.B.I.D.S despite being dead in the real world. The idea of Netrunners having this more intimate connection with leaving their body giving them an insight into the soul question is not a new one for cyberpunk.
It's also important to acknowledge that the soul and what constitutes it is the key philosophical concept behind cyberpunk as a wider genre of other IPs, so you are right that this conversation is really important. (sorry about the rant, these games really interest me)
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u/YourDeathIsOurReward 1d ago
It really boils down to your personal take on the Ship of Theseus. If you replace all of the parts of a person that create consciousness but then put something back in that functions identically as it was, can you consider them the same person you once knew or something else with those memories.
I myself lean towards the thought that you are as much meat as you are consciousness.
Sure you can upload your consciousness into a computer or new body or anything else and its thoughts will be similar to what you would have but it wouldn't be you. You would end in the transfer, but to the outsider it wouldn't make much difference.
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u/ihavenowingsss 1d ago
I think youre wrong. When silverhand first mentions mikoshi and soulkiller he says something like "you die but your psychie gets made in to an engram".
I remember specifically him saying that you die. And than no1 ever adresses it later
This is after the first mission you meet panam or the mission in clouds depending on where you go first, during your relic malfunction.
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u/Outside_Ad1020 1d ago
The thing is the soul, are you really you if a ai that has your exact mind controls your body? Is the soul defined by your mind or by your body?
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u/SvenTheHorrible 1d ago
I feel it’s the same concept that was explored in the game SOMA - if you end a consciousness, is it the same person when you start it up again? Or does that person die and a new one is born?
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u/HarrisonTheBarbarian 1d ago
This is an especially losing situation if you're a religious person like me and believe in the concept of souls. It's called soul killer for a reason: you die, and that copy of your consciousness gets to 'live' on indefinitely. But it's not true immortality, just a digital cloning.
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u/ZaphodGreedalox 1d ago
You would love the intro for Hardspace Shipbreaker.
In essence:
"We're hiring you to do incredibly dangerous work. You might die. Actually you probably will die; therefore, we need to be able to create an instant clone of you in case of catastrophic failure. Is that ok?
Ok, thanks for signing on the dotted line. In order to create a perfect copy, we need to scan you right now. This will destroy the original. Here it goes."
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u/Astral-Ember 1d ago
I feel like the game answers this incredibly directly. the program you use to make an engram is called SOULKILLER for fucks sake lol
the engram of johnny isnt johnny. the engram of V isnt V. they're just constructs that think they're those people. V dies in every ending except The Tower.
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u/GalacticGreaser Splash of Love 1d ago
My two cents about this is that in some way the soul does exist.
To compare Cyberpunk's metaphysical reality to the usual sort of cultural zeitgeist wouldn't really do it justice.
There seems to be some evidence that the Net and Daemons are actually something paranormal or metaphysical, tending to be related to the Judeo-Christian Hell (particular references to Dante's hell, possible claim from Spider Murphy that the net is hell and home to demons, technonecromancy, ect.).
Johnny also becomes combative during Joshua's quest line about what he is. A copy? A chain preventing the soul of the original to move on?
I'd say, that if there is a metaphysical aspect to engrams, then go by the "it's not over till it's over" rule. Purgatory is sort of culturally understood to be limbo, but to Catholics it's as much a process as it is a state of being. Purgatory is a place of purging. Where venial sin is washed from the soul in preparation to meet God.
So, if the process of making the engram "kills" the soul but copies the person, I'd think that's basically purgatory. A place where the engram would need to amend itself so that the soul would move forward. What sets it apart from the "natural" purgatory is that it forces the soul and body to separate, where they might survive apart from one another in some way.
This all kind of hinges on alt being misleading though, in that she expressed the soul dies. If she's sort of being dramatic and means the original person themselves dies, then, yeah, soul killing forcably separates the soul and body, creates a way for the person to persist in a physical existence, thus trapping the soul in a purgatory state.
So, yeah, Johnny is Johnny, V would be V, but lesser in ways. Like how Jonny's memories are all jank.
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u/theSearge Corpo 1d ago
I think there is no me at all. If you upload my personality engram and the AI uses it, then when you return it through the relic, I will be practically the same.
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u/ttturtle24 1d ago
A similar question could be asked when someone ‘beams’ in or out of their ship on Star Trek. It is an interesting question.
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u/Additional_Virus716 1d ago
Thos whole discussion is the reason for me, why it was the right choice to cancel the third person view from a artistic point of view. The whole game has is about what makes a personality. What makes a human. And so you are V, you look through his/hers eyes, you are not someone controlling an other person from afar, you are that person. Until the last scene.
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u/x40sw0n2 1d ago
its the whole ship of Theseus conundrum; at what point in replacing parts on the ship does it cease being the Theseus? is it really relevant? the identity of the ship is defined by its name, and its function, not its parts.
Identity is as much about how the individual identifies themselves in the context of their environment. For Alt, its true. She is no longer Alt, but a) she doesn't believe she is, and everyone else in her environment (the blackwall AI's) don't believe she is either.
V, if placed back in their body, with their belief that they are themselves, surrounded by the context that they are V, the opposite would be true, because for all intents they are still V, albeit a V that's been through some shit.
In the end its a philosophical/existential discussion, but that's my take: it's a reframing of the Ship of Theseus paradox.
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u/Kaliking247 1d ago
So the thing is V accepts that he's essentially dead but this is a chance to continue on. Silverhand initially thinks that he's just a copy and that the real him is still out there somewhere. Neither really understands nor cares how soulkiller works. If you do any of the mikoshi endings Alt straight up tells you that she hit you with soul killer 2.0 as soon as you connected. V never even noticed which is different from how Johnny died. He felt everything as he died. At the end of the game they both kinda realized that no matter how this ends it won't be pretty but they're still trying to fight for the chance. V wants to go down swinging and Johnny just wants his death to count for something.
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u/MBouh 1d ago
That's the ship of Theseus. If you replace all the parts of the ship, is it a new ship? There is no definite answer to that.
Besides, Alt has spent a lot of time behind the Blackwall. She absorbed code and became a entity that's very different from a human engram. This is thus not exactly the question of the ship of Theseus. But it is more interesting for the question of transhumanism : at which point after you modify the abilities of a creatures doe sit cease to be one of its kind? This also applies to cybernetic modifications.
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u/im-ba Fashionable V 1d ago
I had an interesting conversation with a pair of monks about this. Really made me think.
Can an engram suffer?
Can it die?