A breakdown of the transhumanist lessons that SOMA has taught us, still relevant a decade after it was released. Spoilers after the Intro section.Music: All...
Simon and Catherine are the two sides of the debate. The emotional response, and its conclusion. And the intellectual response, and its conclusion.
Spoiler
The people who killed themselves, landed somewhere in-between.
Catherine had already thought about it a ton before she was copied, and came to intellectual conclusions well in advancea.
Simon is experiencing the feelings involved, after he’s been copied. Worse, he’s the kind of person who thinks people have souls, something intrinsicly unique and irreproduciple. He may never get past his emotional response.
We hear him voice his opinion several times, that to him, there is only one soul. He refers to original Simon as “real” Simon. He actively avoids thinking about it too much because the conclusion he’d come to is that his current existence is “fake”. And you can tell that Catherine picks up on it, pushing the subject only when she has to. Even when she does explain, it’s not that he can’t understand the way she thinks about it. It’s that he won’t.
They also do several things in the story that discourages Simon from thinking about the copies as “real” even as he is one himself. After getting a password from a simulated copy of a mind, Simon wonders if they just killed a person several times over just to get a password. It goes unsaid, but he undoubtedly lands on the side he is more comfortable with. That the copies aren’t “real”.
Cathrine does manipulate Simon into being copied the second time. She avoids explaining it in a way that would offend him. Only doing so when she fails to hide what happened.
And then Simon comes up with a rationalization, the coinflip. That when you’re copied, there’s a coinflip on whether “you” end up on either side of the copy. Just so he can accept his current existence as valid.
If you’re on the intellectual side, that’s BS. You end up on both sides. Both copies are real.
But if you think the soul is real, then the coinflip must be how it works. That, or only the original was “real”. But to the Simon we play as in Soma, that is not an option he is willing to even think about.
I think it’s extremely good writing. I just pitied simon, I wasn’t able to hate him for reacting the way a normal person might.
I couldn’t have said it better. This is it. Yes, you as a player might be someone who is more rational than emotional, but the vast majority of people living in the world in the 21st century are religious to some degree at least, and more sensitive than sensible. Let’s not forget that Catherine is not from the 21st century either, she is, from Simon’s perspective, from far in the future. Mind cloning for us today is impossible, not real, just a thought experiment. For Catherine, it was reality. Thinking that Simon is just “a big baby” is quite a wrong interpretation of the person he is supposed to be. He is not you, he is the 90%, a dude living a normal life in the 21st century, that, after going to get a brain scanner, wakes up in an abandoned underwater facility full of man-created horrors far into the future. He is not your self-insert. In a way, he is also a kind of empathy test for the audience, which the devs very much knew would be more on the rational side for this kind of game. Can you empathize with this “dumb” dude and understand his struggle? Can you understand his views and partake in his personal horror?
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Simon and Catherine are the two sides of the debate. The emotional response, and its conclusion. And the intellectual response, and its conclusion.
Spoiler
The people who killed themselves, landed somewhere in-between.
Catherine had already thought about it a ton before she was copied, and came to intellectual conclusions well in advancea.
Simon is experiencing the feelings involved, after he’s been copied. Worse, he’s the kind of person who thinks people have souls, something intrinsicly unique and irreproduciple. He may never get past his emotional response.
We hear him voice his opinion several times, that to him, there is only one soul. He refers to original Simon as “real” Simon. He actively avoids thinking about it too much because the conclusion he’d come to is that his current existence is “fake”. And you can tell that Catherine picks up on it, pushing the subject only when she has to. Even when she does explain, it’s not that he can’t understand the way she thinks about it. It’s that he won’t.
They also do several things in the story that discourages Simon from thinking about the copies as “real” even as he is one himself. After getting a password from a simulated copy of a mind, Simon wonders if they just killed a person several times over just to get a password. It goes unsaid, but he undoubtedly lands on the side he is more comfortable with. That the copies aren’t “real”.
Cathrine does manipulate Simon into being copied the second time. She avoids explaining it in a way that would offend him. Only doing so when she fails to hide what happened.
And then Simon comes up with a rationalization, the coinflip. That when you’re copied, there’s a coinflip on whether “you” end up on either side of the copy. Just so he can accept his current existence as valid.
If you’re on the intellectual side, that’s BS. You end up on both sides. Both copies are real.
But if you think the soul is real, then the coinflip must be how it works. That, or only the original was “real”. But to the Simon we play as in Soma, that is not an option he is willing to even think about.
I think it’s extremely good writing. I just pitied simon, I wasn’t able to hate him for reacting the way a normal person might.
He could’ve been nicer to Catherine, tho.
I couldn’t have said it better. This is it. Yes, you as a player might be someone who is more rational than emotional, but the vast majority of people living in the world in the 21st century are religious to some degree at least, and more sensitive than sensible. Let’s not forget that Catherine is not from the 21st century either, she is, from Simon’s perspective, from far in the future. Mind cloning for us today is impossible, not real, just a thought experiment. For Catherine, it was reality. Thinking that Simon is just “a big baby” is quite a wrong interpretation of the person he is supposed to be. He is not you, he is the 90%, a dude living a normal life in the 21st century, that, after going to get a brain scanner, wakes up in an abandoned underwater facility full of man-created horrors far into the future. He is not your self-insert. In a way, he is also a kind of empathy test for the audience, which the devs very much knew would be more on the rational side for this kind of game. Can you empathize with this “dumb” dude and understand his struggle? Can you understand his views and partake in his personal horror?