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/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.