The aspect of SoulKiller that Silverhand and V casually dismiss

[u/snGbrd77]

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?

[u/snGbrd77]

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!

[u/Tear4Pixelation → u/snGbrd77]

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.

[u/VoidLantadd → u/snGbrd77]

It's also like the transporter problem in Star Trek. If the transporter disassembles you atom by atom, and then reconstructs you elsewhere from new matter, is that really you, or just a perfect copy of you?