Spoilers - about continuity of consciousness, soulkiller, and biochips

+
Again, major spoilers in case that weren't obvious.

Now, I've seen this go back and forth in other threads along the axis of other main topics, but have not seen it specifically addressed at length.

Considering the teletransportation paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

It is ambiguous as to whether or not there is a continuity of consciousness with consciousness transfer, like soukiller-type programs, in the Cyberpunk universe. In other threads, I have seen people who fully believe that any 'engram' is nothing but a copy, and that consciousness transfer essentially entails death, followed by the generation of a believable replica of the original. This would mean that Silverhand, Saburo, and whomever else is involved in the 'secure your soul' program is just a copy, with the original consciousness going black - no continuity.

However, if this is true, then it wouldn't be securing one's soul as much as it is securing a replica of oneself - like a form of mind-cloning, after a voluntary death to secure the existence of the clone. This would be the case if there is no continuity of consciousness. The original would have gone black - done and virtually dead, while the replica would indeed retain the memories of the original, it would still be an imitation, granted possibly a perfect imitation.

Is there any more information on how this works as per this universe, to settle this question? As without continuity of consciousness, which is not even noted in game to my knowledge during the main quest, it would mean that any use of 'soulkiller' is functionally death.
 
I think ambiguity is the point. There's no straight answer to this question, and that's the 'hook' of this narrative. Each player is left to make their own conclusion, and none of them are objectively wrong because us as real life 2020 human beings are simply not advanced enough in our understanding of life to make definitive statements on the issue.
 
There's no straight answer.

Altered Carbon is basically people teleporting to different planets using "stacks" (integrated devices grafted into their spines that act as a consciousness). Their bodies are called "sleeves" which they can slip in and out of provided the stack is ok.

Star Trek outright uses technology that strips you down into pure energy and reassembles you on the other side. The question of whether Picard is still Picard after leaving the teleporter never comes up.

A lot of sci-fi shows skirt around the topic without really questioning it. It's just assumed that consciousness and/or the "soul" is intrinsically maintained during the process.

Anyways, I don't really think there's a distinction between V and engram V. Things to note is that:
  • V is never disconnected from Soulkiller (the way Alt is) and maintains a connection to his original body (hence why he's able to go back).
  • V maintains consciousness, memories, experiences, and emotions while in Mikoshi.
  • Alt mentions that it won't be the same but it's incredibly ambiguous. She could be referring to any number of things not being the same (like V's body basically killing himself whereas Johnny was assimilating it).
  • He isn't 'dead' dead. He's just a vegetable with little to no brain activity. It's implied SK can restore the original mind as well. Our brains use electrical signals like a computer, so I can imagine it's just the memories and experiences being restored to the husk through the already existing slots in V's skull. Like a clinically dead patient coming back to life miraculously.

This isn't really an objective thing though, as @Silariell mentioned. Sci-fi shows can't really answer this question and neither can Cyberpunk. In any case, the writers don't seem to make any allusion to V not being V.

I'll defer to typical sci-fi techno-babble that explains this stuff as unimportant to the overall plot.
 
Good points, the reason for this thread is that many folks in the 'endings' threads seem to believe that V dies no matter what - chiefly as a function of the Engramming process, which is believed to block a continuity of consciousness.
 
Good points, the reason for this thread is that many folks in the 'endings' threads seem to believe that V dies no matter what - chiefly as a function of the Engramming process, which is believed to block a continuity of consciousness.
Kinda depends on what you consider death to be. I dont beleve in soul for example so i have no problem with the concept of copying a "soul" to a memory device. Its treated as raw data pretty much. But can i call that raw data a person? What defines consciousness? are the shard conscious when its not in a slot of somebody? if not then is it "brain dead" when its not?

The whole point with not liking the endings i think comes from a lack of input and shaping the story of V. The choise is pretty much made for you.
 
Again, major spoilers in case that weren't obvious.

Now, I've seen this go back and forth in other threads along the axis of other main topics, but have not seen it specifically addressed at length.

Considering the teletransportation paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teletransportation_paradox

It is ambiguous as to whether or not there is a continuity of consciousness with consciousness transfer, like soukiller-type programs, in the Cyberpunk universe. In other threads, I have seen people who fully believe that any 'engram' is nothing but a copy, and that consciousness transfer essentially entails death, followed by the generation of a believable replica of the original. This would mean that Silverhand, Saburo, and whomever else is involved in the 'secure your soul' program is just a copy, with the original consciousness going black - no continuity.

However, if this is true, then it wouldn't be securing one's soul as much as it is securing a replica of oneself - like a form of mind-cloning, after a voluntary death to secure the existence of the clone. This would be the case if there is no continuity of consciousness. The original would have gone black - done and virtually dead, while the replica would indeed retain the memories of the original, it would still be an imitation, granted possibly a perfect imitation.

Is there any more information on how this works as per this universe, to settle this question? As without continuity of consciousness, which is not even noted in game to my knowledge during the main quest, it would mean that any use of 'soulkiller' is functionally death.
I like the direction you've taken this. Just a question, do you think continual consciousness is a necessary condition when talking about the nature of consciousness?
 
Last edited:
Good points, the reason for this thread is that many folks in the 'endings' threads seem to believe that V dies no matter what - chiefly as a function of the Engramming process, which is believed to block a continuity of consciousness.

I don't think it's a clear cut scenario which is why I have issue with the 'ending discussion' thread. I feel the assumption that the posters are taking of engram V being less than the "real" V is dismissive/reductive of the games ambiguity.

If you retain your mind, your memories and your notion of existence then I regard it as a 'perfect copy'. Something that sticks out to me is that when you're riding out with Panam at the end you have the choice to bring up Jackie and reminisce about him.

If a copy is indistinguishable from the real thing then how do you prove it's a copy?
 
There are different parts to this philosophical topic.
a) What makes a person a person. Is just our mind? Or is there something More beyond? - e.g. Soul.
b) Can you sperate software (mind) from hardware (brain) and how are they connected in regards towards the More one might ascribe to with a) - i think nowadays with the research into human memory that's a hard no in terms of seperation, might be wrong though - but it's also something Cyberpunk more or less foregoes as a topic, as far as i can tell.
c) What does externally enforced change towards our brain and therefore mind, mean in terms of what person we are? Or to put it differently, will the Johnny Silverhand persona gain a sould after it kills of the V persona?
d) Are we talking deleting/copying of software, or moving of the mind?

Alt tells us pretty much that at least parts of V are not retained. Therefore lessening the person. In actual terms she says the soul gets lost. And if i remember correctly goes - in laymans terms: 1) I'll rip your mind out with soulkiller (killing you) and putting that data on some hardrive, 2) disentangle Johnnies and Vs data as far as she can, 3) delete what's originally on the engram and reupload the edited copy.
-> So quite certainly sounds like deleting/copying.
Though Johnny disagrees somewhat.

Misty adresses point c) to an extend - you will die and Silverhand will be there. But i'm not exactly able to apply her idea of coming to terms with change would apply outside of accepting death as something inevitable. And it might be wierd in regards to the endings (not having seen the silverhand ending yet).

Then you've got the Zen Master and the Buddhist monks.
The master adresses the two Souls in one body. While with one of the two you can ask about if he considers engrams having souls when in a body or being persons.

But in the end, there's no definitive answer - as there cannot be one definitive answer.
Then again, the closest, imo, the game gives as an in-universe answer - is Alts, as the single character who knows all the specifics about Soulkiller (having lived and died through it and even designed it), Engrams and Co. Johnny could have been a close second, but he's a somewhat unexperienced Rockerboy . So what does he know? ;)

Seeing how R.Talsorian Games retweeted the following:
I'd say their stance would be applying the dystopia vision to it.. But who knows.
 
It actually is a fascinating philosophical debate. And It becomes a pretty interesting psychological discussion when trying to understand how the average human grapples with the concept. The sci-fi examples mentioned in this thread from Star Trek and Altered Carbon are still very speculative. We don't actually know how that technology would work in a real world scenario, or if it would even work at all. But, we can examine it in more pedantic terms.

For example, every time you quit out of a game of Cyberpunk 2077 and shut down your PC you are halting that specific instance of the game forever. When you start up Cyberpunk 2077 again, you aren't restarting an old process. That process is gone. You are creating a brand new instance of the process that is indistinguishable from the one you played earlier. As far as you are concerned, its the same game, it calls from the same saved data and that same assets. But its actually a brand new instance of the game rather than the one you played earlier. Most people probably don't even think about it, and those that do are unlikely to differentiate between the different instances of the game. To them its the same game . But, if you take a more tangible example, reactions are different. Suppose you purchase a brand new car and within days of purchase that car is destroyed. You then purchase another brand new car that is the exact model, trim, color, and layout of the previous. Created at the same factory, on the same line, engines and transmission cast from the same die. Identical in every way. Most people wouldn't view it as the same car, but as a distinct separate entity.
 
The writers of this game clearly couldn't be arsed to bother looking into even the most basic of philosophical questions when dealing with this subject matter, instead opting to hand wave it off with one or two sentences of dialogue. Whether it was due to them not being capable of explaining such concepts with any depth or thinking their audience would be too stupid to understand, I don't know though I suspect it is the former.

In any case they didn't bother to take it seriously so neither did I.
 
For example, every time you quit out of a game of Cyberpunk 2077 and shut down your PC you are halting that specific instance of the game forever. When you start up Cyberpunk 2077 again, you aren't restarting an old process. That process is gone. You are creating a brand new instance of the process that is indistinguishable from the one you played earlier. As far as you are concerned, its the same game, it calls from the same saved data and that same assets. But its actually a brand new instance of the game rather than the one you played earlier. Most people probably don't even think about it, and those that do are unlikely to differentiate between the different instances of the game. To them its the same game .

Yep, I guess the question is whether the process is gone (and another instance created), or merely interrupted and then resumed during the engram's creation. V already clinically died, yet we treat is as the same instance. Not even sure that instances are a thing when talking about consciousness, could be just a single phenomenon emerging from the collective data, regardless of copies.

The game treats it as a single instance to me in any case, given that after Soulkiller we go back to first person view and there's never any disconnection of continuity.
 
The writers of this game clearly couldn't be arsed to bother looking into even the most basic of philosophical questions when dealing with this subject matter, instead opting to hand wave it off with one or two sentences of dialogue. Whether it was due to them not being capable of explaining such concepts with any depth or thinking their audience would be too stupid to understand, I don't know though I suspect it is the former.

In any case they didn't bother to take it seriously so neither did I.

I think you are being dismissive and unfair in your assessment. It is far more difficult to convey esoteric concepts in a few succinct lines of dialog than in long rambling epistles. And given the context of Alt attempting to convey these ideas to a relative neophyte in V in simple easily digestible terms, I would argue that a lot of thought and discussion went into the fundamental concepts. Additionally, the entire game revisits the idea constantly, providing several different perspectives. You have you interactions with Johnny, which give you the option to accept him as a living soul, or dismiss him as a copy. If you do the latter enough, toward the end of the game Johnny begins to refer to himself as a tribute to the original. If you choose to help Hanako confront the board there are sections where she and the board confront an engram of her father and the game explores various reactions. There is even an option that Jackie will be present in Mikoshi and through V you have the option to accept or dismiss him as a shallow copy. The Idea is explored with the Dolls when it is implied that as long as you choose a similar body type, they can do the rest by downloading your ideal template to the doll and there really is no difference. Hell, its even explored with Skippy the talking gun when Regina resets it to factory defaults and as V you are given the option to argue she killed him. The theme is repeated again and again and again throughout the entire video game, it just isn't always blasted in your face with an unskippable cut scene from an NPC giving a speech.
 
Last edited:
This is a very interesting question - one that we as a species may have to seriously consider, too, with the rapid advancements in research and technology. Either way, it's also a cornerstone of the cyberpunk genre, so I thought it was a shame that the game did not dig too deep into this topic, only really scratching the surface. I also enjoyed the quest with Paralez, which also approached the subject of one's self and how this is affected by memories. Again, scratching the surface but not really committing to all that much exploration of the topic.

Anyway, from what I understood, Soulkiller essentally destroys one's consciousness, creating a digital copy in the process. Now, of course, this raises several interesting points, and interpretations can vary wildly based on beliefs. Does "rewiring" the physical brain with an exact copy of one's consciousness after "formatting" it first result in the continuation of the original's existence? Does it matter whose "consciousness" the brain is wired to replicate, if it's the same physical brain? Also, with the nanites in the chip already in the process of rewiring V's brain to replicate that of Johnny, at what point does V cease to be V and becomes Johnny? The questions go on... I'm glad the game raises these questions, but neither are they new nor did I feel like the game explored them deep enough or had anything new or interesting to say about them either, which was a shame. Funnily enough, I was rewatching The Prestige recently, think that story did a far better job at exploring these subjects than Cyberpunk 2077 did (although it did require a heavy dose of suspension of disbelief).

Anyway, my interpretation was that the original V ceased to be when Alt used Soulkiller on his mind. The options, as I interpreted them, were V's brain being overridden by either Johnny's clone or V's clone (but neither of those would be the original V or Johnny). At this point, I decided it was best to let Johnny's clone inhabit the physical body, since it was already rewired to accept him anyway, while V's clone stayed in Cyberspace (bit unclear if he was going to get assimilated by Alt or not - I assumed not).
 
Last edited:
An example from some basic neuroscience/physiology textbook: Let's say we replace one neuron in your brain with an artificial one that performs exactly the same functions as the original one. Let's assume we could do this while you are awake and conscious. Would you still be the same person? What about if we continue this process, neuron by neuron. Would you at some point cease to be yourself or not? I'm a materialist, so I'd say not. There are lots of practical problems, like we would have to use really crappy conductors to replace axons if we use electricity (a signal in a myelinated axon travels roughly 100m/s), but it's an alternative future, so let's assume these problems have been solved.

Although this example is about replacing the actual brain, is there any reason why this couldn't - theoretically - be done via a brain-computer interface seen in the game or even wirelessly, destroying/rewiring the original cells as they are replaced remotely? There's already techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can activate or deactivate parts of the brain with magnetic fields (based on Faraday's law). While the spatial accuracy of TMS is currently poor, the principle is there.
 
An example from some basic neuroscience/physiology textbook: Let's say we replace one neuron in your brain with an artificial one that performs exactly the same functions as the original one. Let's assume we could do this while you are awake and conscious. Would you still be the same person? What about if we continue this process, neuron by neuron. Would you at some point cease to be yourself or not? I'm a materialist, so I'd say not. There are lots of practical problems, like we would have to use really crappy conductors to replace axons if we use electricity (a signal in a myelinated axon travels roughly 100m/s), but it's an alternative future, so let's assume these problems have been solved.

Although this example is about replacing the actual brain, is there any reason why this couldn't - theoretically - be done via a brain-computer interface seen in the game or even wirelessly, destroying/rewiring the original cells as they are replaced remotely? There's already techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation, which can activate or deactivate parts of the brain with magnetic fields (based on Faraday's law). While the spatial accuracy of TMS is currently poor, the principle is there.

I don't think this is necessarily in contrast with a non materialistic/reductivistic view of the world either.
 
I don't think this is necessarily in contrast with a non materialistic/reductivistic view of the world either.
Sure, not necessarily. Purely based on personal experience, I'd say it's more likely to be contradictory, but that's a really minuscule portion of all people who are dualist/religious.
 
Oh my, I've been looking for a topic like this, since I thought and hoped those would be the main things discussed here (or maybe I'm too naive~).

Sorry, just wanted to convey my joy and wanted to board the train <3

I'm also very intrigued by the concept of the esoteric or more spiritual side, the religious and the scientific side of this debate. There were already good arguments made.

As one stated before, and my opinion aligns with it:
What you define as V, or how you "answer" this very question of V being V, or being a Copy of V and stop being V.
This may be a consequence of ones very own experience and thoughts about these matters and outlooks on life.
If you're taking a more optimistic stance I guess you'd lean more to the "answer" that V might still be V.

There doesn't seem to be an answer, but there also is the answer everyone comes up with.
 
It actually is a fascinating philosophical debate. And It becomes a pretty interesting psychological discussion when trying to understand how the average human grapples with the concept. The sci-fi examples mentioned in this thread from Star Trek and Altered Carbon are still very speculative. We don't actually know how that technology would work in a real world scenario, or if it would even work at all. But, we can examine it in more pedantic terms.

For example, every time you quit out of a game of Cyberpunk 2077 and shut down your PC you are halting that specific instance of the game forever. When you start up Cyberpunk 2077 again, you aren't restarting an old process. That process is gone. You are creating a brand new instance of the process that is indistinguishable from the one you played earlier. As far as you are concerned, its the same game, it calls from the same saved data and that same assets. But its actually a brand new instance of the game rather than the one you played earlier. Most people probably don't even think about it, and those that do are unlikely to differentiate between the different instances of the game. To them its the same game . But, if you take a more tangible example, reactions are different. Suppose you purchase a brand new car and within days of purchase that car is destroyed. You then purchase another brand new car that is the exact model, trim, color, and layout of the previous. Created at the same factory, on the same line, engines and transmission cast from the same die. Identical in every way. Most people wouldn't view it as the same car, but as a distinct separate entity.

...basically every time I look away from my pc I am killing you.....shit sorry people:)

....sorry couldn't resist...very interesting threat:)
 
Top Bottom