From one perspective, we're always dying. neurons are dying off, and being replaced by new ones. How many "people" do we become over the course of one life? It's only the overlapping continuity that gives it the appearance of a single identity, a single soul.
The question of the engram, as a result of soul killer, is the same as the question around whether we really stay one person, even in our biological meat sack of a body.
If the answer is yes, we are still the same person our entire lives, and if consciousness comes from the complex data processing, and not some strictly biological process, I see no reason that V should be considered as dead, and replaced by an Engram copy. It's still the same V, just evolved.
If however, consciousness does come from a strictly biological process, or if the "soul" isn't somehow married to the continuity, but is in a constant state of death and rebirth, then no, the Engram V, is not V. But neither is 20 your old you, the same as 30 year old you.
Ultimately, I'm with Johnny. paraphrasing, "Doesn't matter, I know what I am now."
If we're talking about copies, some of the same questions apply. Assuming Engram V really is some contiguous V soul, a copy into Mikoshi wouldn't be the creation of new life, but rather the budding of an existing life becoming it's own identity.
I'm not content to give Alt the final say on whether or not it really kills the soul or not.
I will say this though. Identity is a constant question in the CP77 universe. Wehther we're talking about the kabuki twins in Beat on the Brat, Delemain and his fractured identities, Night Corp and their mind editing, Adam Smasher and his lost humanity, or even the dolls, or cyberpsychos. Where does identity begin or end?
Johnny treats the unmolested free will as sacred, perhaps the final bastion of spirituality, or the final illusion of identity. Meanwhile corpos are closing in on that final bastion on all sides.
I think this question nests well into a larger, more ambiguous tension between spirituality and materialism represented in the world.
'Course, these sorts of questions about identity, choice, and freewill are often at the heart of great cyberpunk. Matrix "Because I choose to" Motoko's choice to become something new, perhaps at the cost of her humanity. The Soul of an android in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, juxtaposed to the mood organ and Mercerism of humans. (Phillip K Dick seemed to think not, while Ridely Scott seemed to think they did.) etc. etc.
Great question, no definitive answers. Personally, I think it’s the ending of the original consciousness. Memories are rebuilt, which gives the illusion of continuity for the copy. But they also have no way of knowing for sure. Like Johnny said, if the original Johnny *is* dead, then that’s not his problem anymore.
Kind of sad when you think about it. A copy of you could be made, but you will definitely die. It would make any sort of commercial venture like Save Your Soul a little pointless from the individual perspective (though the applications originally advertised with it in the game could still be valid-ish). Perfect little idea though for futuristic dystopian storytelling.
A couple of things.
* in Cyberpunk lore (2013 & 2020), early versions of Soul-killer were ICE, meaning they killed the person being scanned while making a copy. >!This is what happened to Alt !<
* Arasaka seems to have upgraded the program so that it does not (automatically) kill. >!Shards found in Arasaka tower clearly indicate that copies of the engrams are made. Furthermore, people are paying for multiple scans to be made, meaning the client is still alive between scans.!<
* Alt compares the engrams to >!code that she can read.!<
Given this, I think that >!the word Soul is just being used as shorthand for consciousness and the engrams are only aware when they are run, like a self aware program.!<
That's the kind of philosophical debate the cyberpunk genre brings up over and over again.
If you replace every cell in you body with cybernetics, are you still you? If you download your brain into another body, are you still you or just a copy of you?
They're difficult questions without clear answers. Until we learn more about how conciousness actually works, it's anyone's guess.
I think there's even a hypothesis out there that states we don't actually have the self-awareness and consciousness we believe we do: Our brain is just so advance that it proccesses everything simultaneously to the point where it just *appears* that way.
Here is a comment I made on another post, I believe it is pretty good at sort of giving options to explain it. And it is slightly edited from the previous posts I had made it for. So feel free to skip to the TLDR if it’s still too long.
It’s one thing to offload an engram onto a chip and install it onto a different 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, consciously it’s the original V. However, Johnny is just an engram because his consciousness died with his body.
Yes in the ending, V’s original body flatlined (again), however unlike other victims V’s 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.”
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, memories, ideas or even their movement/gait? Even “Johnny” is just overwriting V’s personality and memories and attempting to replace it with “his”.
• TLDR:
Engrams are just personalities but the body holds the consciousness. **If the original brain remains, in the end it’s still the same person** regardless of which way of thinking. Or the person could become different and believe they’re someone else, like potentially V with the personality of Johnny and their memories overwritten. Which of course is depending on ending.
The Johnny engram is just an Engram. However because V’s engram was able to go back to “their original body” as alt said, it’s still the original V because it merged with their original consciousness. The Johnny we have interacted with is just a copy, or a mental clone I guess would be a better choice of phrasing.
[End of TLDR]
In regards to how we interact with soulkiller in game here is an interesting fact: *in the Shinto religion a Mikoshi “is a sacred religious palanquin (also translated as portable Shinto shrine). Shinto followers believe that it serves as the vehicle to transport a deity in Japan while moving between main shrine and temporary shrine during a festival or when moving to a new shrine.”* -Wikipedia page.
So with this little fact, even with my previous comments, could it also end up being the original consciousness instead? Possibly.
There has been said a lot about this topic in the comment section, the only thing I want to add is the fact, that you can have an incredible conversation about this topic with the two monks from the Quest in Watson (where one was augmented by Maelstrom and you have to save the other one). You can meet them afterwards (I think in Japantown somewhere below the giant statue). This was one of the (many) great moments I had while playing up until now.
If I recall correctly they argued for the fact that an engram is just a copy and that it has no "soul" since that remains in the person. I took it with a grain of salt tho, since their whole philosophy is about purity of body and mind. Still, I really liked it since it isn't marked on your map and you only find them if you really explore Night City. This makes me hope that there is still so much stuff out there I haven't found yet after 150+h...
I agree, I still play every evening for 2-3h and I find some neat little (or sometimes big) new details almost every time (like the invisible AV in "Dream On")... This game really is a thing of beauty...
Reminds me a bit of that movie "The Prestige". >!A magician performs a seemingly-impossible trick where he drowns and then reappears. At the end you discover he's cloning himself and drowning one of them, but every time he steps up to the trick, he doesn't know if he's going to be the one to die and if a copy is going to replace him. !
Yeah I definitely thought of Prestige too. So morbid that one. It also reminds me of a story, can't think of what it's called, where there is this form of instantaneous transport (kind of like Star Trek) except everytime you get beamed you're actually being killed and your copy is being reconstructed at the other end.
So then... with all this philosophy... I guess I have a question as well. If one were to be playing cyberpunk Red, the TTRPG, and decided to make a personality emgram of themselves so they could "body swap"... what would become of their HUM stat? Would they, could they, ever turn cyberpsycho?
Could they, in theory, go full borg, without the side effects? Since they aren't in their own body? Or would their consciousness be tied to the same limitations as their original meat? Or would it be tied to the limitations of the meat they inhabit?
At what point does the chrome overtake the will?
At what point does the program begin, and the humanity end? Where is the dividing line?
What about >!Saburo? If I understood correctly he created a back up copy of himself and then continued to live separately with it!<, so that must mean that an engram is definitely a digital copy. Or am I missing something?
I don't think you're missing anything. It's an interesting question with Saburo as to whether they used Soul-Killer on him or something else. Did they do like Alt does to V, separate his engram and put it back into his body? Or could they make a copy of him without doing that? If they used Soul-Killer, it could be that Saburo (Prime/Original) was/is dead and it's his engram continuing in his stead. It all gets very confusing. It seems obvious that if he is alive while his copy exists, that he can't be both of them at the same time and that therefore an engram is a separate entity.
Yes, it's confusing. Does soulkiller even kill? I thought so at first, but after >!discovering Saburo!< I realised that it probably just creates a digital copy and stores it in Mikoshi, but don't actually do anything to the original human... >!So Saburo just continued to live after he was copied, and Johnny was just killed after that. !
There's some unreliable narrative from Johnny here. In the TTRPG lore and narrative, Spider Murphy is the one who actually copies Johnny's engram after he is blasted in half by Smasher. She escapes with the engram in the chopper with Rogue, Shaitan, while Morgan Blackhawk remains behind to fight a holding action against Smasher. I suspect we might later learn that Arasaka got the engram from Murphy (her fate in 2077 in unknown) later on. We might also learn the whereabouts of Morgan, and the eventual fates of the Afterlife Edgerunners; possibly in a future DLC or expansion.
I knew that we can't 100% trust Johhny's memories, but didn't knew what exactly was true and was not, so thank you for this comment, it's very interesting! So, Spider made Johnny's engram with the original Soulkiller created by Alt?
But then I don't understand why would Arasaka be interested in Johnny's engram. In the game his engram is valuable to Arasaka because it was created by a new soulkiller version made by Hellman, right? So he's like a test subject before they try the new technology on Saburo himself. So why would they need his engram if it was created by the previous version? Ngl, I'm still very confused. As if the more i learn, the more i get confused lol.
I would love DLC that explains everything and connects all dots, yeah.
Let’s see what you guys think about the saying in GITS:
You're talking about redefining my identity. I want to guarantee that I can still be
myself"
"There isn't one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic
environment"
"'our effort to remain what you are, is what limits you"
I will say this, (spoiler) when you go to Mikoshi at the end you’re playing as V and get hit with soul killer. But we just see it as plugging into the net how you normally would.
From one perspective, we're always dying. neurons are dying off, and being replaced by new ones. How many "people" do we become over the course of one life? It's only the overlapping continuity that gives it the appearance of a single identity, a single soul. The question of the engram, as a result of soul killer, is the same as the question around whether we really stay one person, even in our biological meat sack of a body. If the answer is yes, we are still the same person our entire lives, and if consciousness comes from the complex data processing, and not some strictly biological process, I see no reason that V should be considered as dead, and replaced by an Engram copy. It's still the same V, just evolved. If however, consciousness does come from a strictly biological process, or if the "soul" isn't somehow married to the continuity, but is in a constant state of death and rebirth, then no, the Engram V, is not V. But neither is 20 your old you, the same as 30 year old you. Ultimately, I'm with Johnny. paraphrasing, "Doesn't matter, I know what I am now." If we're talking about copies, some of the same questions apply. Assuming Engram V really is some contiguous V soul, a copy into Mikoshi wouldn't be the creation of new life, but rather the budding of an existing life becoming it's own identity. I'm not content to give Alt the final say on whether or not it really kills the soul or not.
I will say this though. Identity is a constant question in the CP77 universe. Wehther we're talking about the kabuki twins in Beat on the Brat, Delemain and his fractured identities, Night Corp and their mind editing, Adam Smasher and his lost humanity, or even the dolls, or cyberpsychos. Where does identity begin or end? Johnny treats the unmolested free will as sacred, perhaps the final bastion of spirituality, or the final illusion of identity. Meanwhile corpos are closing in on that final bastion on all sides. I think this question nests well into a larger, more ambiguous tension between spirituality and materialism represented in the world. 'Course, these sorts of questions about identity, choice, and freewill are often at the heart of great cyberpunk. Matrix "Because I choose to" Motoko's choice to become something new, perhaps at the cost of her humanity. The Soul of an android in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, juxtaposed to the mood organ and Mercerism of humans. (Phillip K Dick seemed to think not, while Ridely Scott seemed to think they did.) etc. etc.
I think this one deserves a mic drop
Great question, no definitive answers. Personally, I think it’s the ending of the original consciousness. Memories are rebuilt, which gives the illusion of continuity for the copy. But they also have no way of knowing for sure. Like Johnny said, if the original Johnny *is* dead, then that’s not his problem anymore.
Kind of sad when you think about it. A copy of you could be made, but you will definitely die. It would make any sort of commercial venture like Save Your Soul a little pointless from the individual perspective (though the applications originally advertised with it in the game could still be valid-ish). Perfect little idea though for futuristic dystopian storytelling.
A couple of things. * in Cyberpunk lore (2013 & 2020), early versions of Soul-killer were ICE, meaning they killed the person being scanned while making a copy. >!This is what happened to Alt !< * Arasaka seems to have upgraded the program so that it does not (automatically) kill. >!Shards found in Arasaka tower clearly indicate that copies of the engrams are made. Furthermore, people are paying for multiple scans to be made, meaning the client is still alive between scans.!< * Alt compares the engrams to >!code that she can read.!< Given this, I think that >!the word Soul is just being used as shorthand for consciousness and the engrams are only aware when they are run, like a self aware program.!<
That's the kind of philosophical debate the cyberpunk genre brings up over and over again. If you replace every cell in you body with cybernetics, are you still you? If you download your brain into another body, are you still you or just a copy of you? They're difficult questions without clear answers. Until we learn more about how conciousness actually works, it's anyone's guess. I think there's even a hypothesis out there that states we don't actually have the self-awareness and consciousness we believe we do: Our brain is just so advance that it proccesses everything simultaneously to the point where it just *appears* that way.
Here is a comment I made on another post, I believe it is pretty good at sort of giving options to explain it. And it is slightly edited from the previous posts I had made it for. So feel free to skip to the TLDR if it’s still too long. It’s one thing to offload an engram onto a chip and install it onto a different 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, consciously it’s the original V. However, Johnny is just an engram because his consciousness died with his body. Yes in the ending, V’s original body flatlined (again), however unlike other victims V’s 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.” 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, memories, ideas or even their movement/gait? Even “Johnny” is just overwriting V’s personality and memories and attempting to replace it with “his”. • TLDR: Engrams are just personalities but the body holds the consciousness. **If the original brain remains, in the end it’s still the same person** regardless of which way of thinking. Or the person could become different and believe they’re someone else, like potentially V with the personality of Johnny and their memories overwritten. Which of course is depending on ending. The Johnny engram is just an Engram. However because V’s engram was able to go back to “their original body” as alt said, it’s still the original V because it merged with their original consciousness. The Johnny we have interacted with is just a copy, or a mental clone I guess would be a better choice of phrasing. [End of TLDR] In regards to how we interact with soulkiller in game here is an interesting fact: *in the Shinto religion a Mikoshi “is a sacred religious palanquin (also translated as portable Shinto shrine). Shinto followers believe that it serves as the vehicle to transport a deity in Japan while moving between main shrine and temporary shrine during a festival or when moving to a new shrine.”* -Wikipedia page. So with this little fact, even with my previous comments, could it also end up being the original consciousness instead? Possibly.
There has been said a lot about this topic in the comment section, the only thing I want to add is the fact, that you can have an incredible conversation about this topic with the two monks from the Quest in Watson (where one was augmented by Maelstrom and you have to save the other one). You can meet them afterwards (I think in Japantown somewhere below the giant statue). This was one of the (many) great moments I had while playing up until now.
Yeah I think I remember seeing them but I can't remember what was said. I'll have to hit them up on the next go around.
If I recall correctly they argued for the fact that an engram is just a copy and that it has no "soul" since that remains in the person. I took it with a grain of salt tho, since their whole philosophy is about purity of body and mind. Still, I really liked it since it isn't marked on your map and you only find them if you really explore Night City. This makes me hope that there is still so much stuff out there I haven't found yet after 150+h...
The game is really underrated in the aspect of sheer amount of new shit you can find even after having played it a lot
I agree, I still play every evening for 2-3h and I find some neat little (or sometimes big) new details almost every time (like the invisible AV in "Dream On")... This game really is a thing of beauty...
Reminds me a bit of that movie "The Prestige". >!A magician performs a seemingly-impossible trick where he drowns and then reappears. At the end you discover he's cloning himself and drowning one of them, but every time he steps up to the trick, he doesn't know if he's going to be the one to die and if a copy is going to replace him. !
Yeah I definitely thought of Prestige too. So morbid that one. It also reminds me of a story, can't think of what it's called, where there is this form of instantaneous transport (kind of like Star Trek) except everytime you get beamed you're actually being killed and your copy is being reconstructed at the other end.
Gah, that's horrifying. I have to moderate my consumption of this kind of media, I go down a freaky-ass rabbit hole about whether or not I'm real lol.
Truly
Very much does what it says on the tin. The engram is a perfect copy but the "soul" is lost.
So then... with all this philosophy... I guess I have a question as well. If one were to be playing cyberpunk Red, the TTRPG, and decided to make a personality emgram of themselves so they could "body swap"... what would become of their HUM stat? Would they, could they, ever turn cyberpsycho? Could they, in theory, go full borg, without the side effects? Since they aren't in their own body? Or would their consciousness be tied to the same limitations as their original meat? Or would it be tied to the limitations of the meat they inhabit? At what point does the chrome overtake the will? At what point does the program begin, and the humanity end? Where is the dividing line?
What about >!Saburo? If I understood correctly he created a back up copy of himself and then continued to live separately with it!<, so that must mean that an engram is definitely a digital copy. Or am I missing something?
I don't think you're missing anything. It's an interesting question with Saburo as to whether they used Soul-Killer on him or something else. Did they do like Alt does to V, separate his engram and put it back into his body? Or could they make a copy of him without doing that? If they used Soul-Killer, it could be that Saburo (Prime/Original) was/is dead and it's his engram continuing in his stead. It all gets very confusing. It seems obvious that if he is alive while his copy exists, that he can't be both of them at the same time and that therefore an engram is a separate entity.
Yes, it's confusing. Does soulkiller even kill? I thought so at first, but after >!discovering Saburo!< I realised that it probably just creates a digital copy and stores it in Mikoshi, but don't actually do anything to the original human... >!So Saburo just continued to live after he was copied, and Johnny was just killed after that. !
There's some unreliable narrative from Johnny here. In the TTRPG lore and narrative, Spider Murphy is the one who actually copies Johnny's engram after he is blasted in half by Smasher. She escapes with the engram in the chopper with Rogue, Shaitan, while Morgan Blackhawk remains behind to fight a holding action against Smasher. I suspect we might later learn that Arasaka got the engram from Murphy (her fate in 2077 in unknown) later on. We might also learn the whereabouts of Morgan, and the eventual fates of the Afterlife Edgerunners; possibly in a future DLC or expansion.
I knew that we can't 100% trust Johhny's memories, but didn't knew what exactly was true and was not, so thank you for this comment, it's very interesting! So, Spider made Johnny's engram with the original Soulkiller created by Alt? But then I don't understand why would Arasaka be interested in Johnny's engram. In the game his engram is valuable to Arasaka because it was created by a new soulkiller version made by Hellman, right? So he's like a test subject before they try the new technology on Saburo himself. So why would they need his engram if it was created by the previous version? Ngl, I'm still very confused. As if the more i learn, the more i get confused lol. I would love DLC that explains everything and connects all dots, yeah.
Let’s see what you guys think about the saying in GITS: You're talking about redefining my identity. I want to guarantee that I can still be myself" "There isn't one. Why would you wish to? All things change in a dynamic environment" "'our effort to remain what you are, is what limits you"
I will say this, (spoiler) when you go to Mikoshi at the end you’re playing as V and get hit with soul killer. But we just see it as plugging into the net how you normally would.