There is no coin toss. It's copy + paste. The old Simon always stays himself and a new one spawns from nowhere, thinking it made a transfer from an old body when in fact it's only 1 second old. We were Simon 3.0 the entire time. What happened before didn't really happen to us. It was just the memories he and we were implanted with during our creation. The moment the screen flashes and we teleport to the new body is our first moment of existance.
The problem with your interpretation is your definition of existance. In your definition existance is inseperably coupled to a vessel and not only the accumulation of information that is reseived and proccesed by your consciousness. I see no good reason why this would be the case. Just a thought experiment for you: Just imagine you could cut out small parts of your brain and replace them with computer parts that work just the same and have the exact same information implanted. Now you slowly change part after part untill you replaced your hole brain. At what point did you stop existing? Keep in mind that you feel just the same as before after the replacement.
That is the message that Catherine was trying to tell Simon/you. Having Simon's/your conscience transferred into the copy of Simon/you, cannot & will not happen because it is a copying. It's own being. Separate, but similar to you. It's like having a mirror being put up to you then the mirror reflection walks away on their own, since it's it's own separate being now and you are wondering why you're still staring at that mirror instead of having the point of view of that reflection. The failure of Simon to understand & acknowledge this concept, is what caused Simon to lash out & lie to himself that Catherine lied to him. When, in fact, she told him, in more ways than one what they were doing and how it works. "The coin toss" idea was a reductionist analogy to try & help Simon/you understand that. It wasn't meant to be taken literally. This inability of Simon to acknowledge/understand this concept is what doomed him to the bottom of the abyss of his own isolation. Alone. Instead of using his last moments with Catherine to say "We did it. We gave hope & a future to the last of human existence"
@@Darkota122 I don't think anyone has a good answer for this thought experiment. Luckily the SOMA scenario is more clean cut, and my answer stands. To me, the SOMA scenario proves the concept of falsified memories better than anything else. Sure, the same could apply to us every night when we go to sleep. What if we die every time we lose consciousness and someone else wakes up the next day? What if we die every time we blink? I guess there is a case for that too, if we think the past is an illusion, but if you ask me that's just solipsism, and that gets us nowhere. But in short, it's not I think therefore I am, it's really just I think I think, therefore therefore.
@@Gurrehable i agree that there is currently no real use for thought like this in our real world. But I don't get how you define existence or consciousness. A lot of people have the idea of a soul linked to the body and you mind that defines you. But this concept is not convincing to me and I guess it's not convincing to you aswell. One could argue that existence is connected to our physical body. But then again our body is changing replacing cells to a point where I don't have any cells left from my body 10 years ago. Yet I would still consider this to be me with my memories dessisions etc. So to me the only thing that is really making me me is the information, memories and the way these are connected in my head. If one could replicate that he would really replicate me. Since you disagree with my last sentence I would like to know what part of existence cannot be copied and why it is essential to you. :)
That's debatable. Humans are living versions of the ship of Thesus. Is the ship the same ship if you replace 10% of its parts? What about 50%? 99%? at what point is the ship no longer the same ship? As humans, our cells are constantly dying and being replaced. The only thing that remains is the "stream of consciousness". The human that went to sleep last night is arguably not the same human that woke up this morning. It is absolutely a coin toss.
And further, deleting isn't an active process. A deleted file is simply marked by the system as being available for overwriting. A deleted file on your PC can exist whole or in part for a long long time, and if that file is a person the thought of a mind laying dormant likely being slowly destroyed by new data is a whole level of disturbing. From thebdatas perspective the difference probably lies not in if the data is intact so much as is the program that is their mind being actively run after the paste. Off is likely as good as dead, and arguably even if the data is retrieved and program run at a later date the break in continuity means that you have yet another new version of that mind.
Dude stop making the existential horror even worse for me, imagine the pain the partially 'deleted' individual would feel as they gradually lose their mind is unbearable
There was this episode of old tv show outer limits. It dealt with teleportation. Teleportee went to machine but accidental power outage happened. So he was told to wait a while for the fix till next day or so. During his waiting period he found out he was transported alright. Yet now he was asked to step into the teleporter again.
Not necessarily true. I think most modern systems merely change the "location" data on a file while leaving the file itself untouched, so long as you're moving them from one folder to another on the same partition of the same drive. But yeah that's absolutely true whenever you're moving a file from, say, a hard drive to a USB stick, etc. So if you meant that, you were completely right.
I think it's inappropriate to use "chance" here. The thing is, everyone wins the coin toss. What matters is from what perspective we as a player are experiencing it. The ending is essentially the same event as when you upload yourself to Pressure Suit Simon 3. The ending hits harder when you realize that this happened to all the previous Simons as well. Oh, and yeah, SOMA gave me existential crisis. One of the best games ever made in my opinion.
@@manart6506 Yes, you're right. From "yours" perspective you are always losing the coin toss. From "their" perspective it's always a transition. But yeah, it's all happening at the same time.
While technically true that there's no chance involved, it sort of _feels_ like there is: you sit down in the chair to be scanned, and then you're either still in the chair or in a new body. Of course there's no "either" since both happen, but for the you before the scan it feels like a coin flip: you expect to perceive only one of these outcomes and you don't know which, and indeed after the scan you'll perceive only one of these outcomes, except there's now two "you"s, one for each outcome. You continue on in a new body _and_ you're left behind.
Finally a human that understand! There is no reason for your consciousness to stop existing in the old body, but there is also another consciousness that thinks that it was it that existed in that body moments ago. And it also totally thinks that it is you. From an outer perspective it has just appeared, but from it's own it has all the same backstory as the original one. So it IS the same. Rather hard to explain... The thing is, at this moment you think that you exist. The new consciousness does exactly the same. So if there is no difference in the very moment, just 1 consciousness before and 2 consciousnesses after, why do you think that you will be in the first body? In reality you must equally be in both of them at the same time. In this case a copy IS the same as original. So the coin toss just always give you both outcomes. You are the same AND you are the new. Only these two you begin to see different things from now on. upd. Maybe there is a better way to put it... You are the person you are, therefore there is a possibility to BE you. If you consider your copy as also conscious, there should be a possibility to BE him. Because being conscious effectively meens BEING someone. So as you can be someone who has just woke up and remember his life of yesterday, you must also be able to be someone who has just woke up in another body. Because there must be SOMEONE who wakes up in that new body. So it is possible to "win" the coin toss, it's not just a "you always lose, your copy wins" situation.
@@manart6506 "there is only you and there is a new person who is a clone of you". You seem very attached to the particular piece of hardware you're running on, which is up to you but really only Simon 1 has any special claim there and he wasn't really even part of the main events of SOMA. I consider "me" to be my mind, the software running in the moist computer that's inside the skull of my body. If you copy my mind to new hardware, that copy is a mind that at the moment of copying is identical to me, and therefore the copy _is me_ ... just another me (who will slowly become less and less "me" but that's equally true from his perspective).
And now, your life experiences, background and other stuff have determined that you would respond to such a factoid confrontationally, deciding to shut it out and write a mildly humorous comment.
Leadhead obviously hasn't studied much actual philosophy, causal determinism is so last-century. Quantum Indeterminism , and Eastern ontological indeterminisim that evolves out of spontaneity is what's in these days.
@@ChrisJones-rd4wb seeing how their pfp is the same as other non comments im sure its just a child or a tired stale attempt at humor. Maybe its even s t o l e n
@@cheezburgrproduction Ah yes, the most intellectually stimulating form of critique, ad hominems based on profile picture. No, actully, im a phliosophy student at a university, much worse than your average epic redditor. I was just saying that traditional hard determinism has been dead for a long time. Determinism asserts that the universe is transparent, knowable, and conforms strictly too traditional forms of cause in effect. This phliosophy died with positivisim in the early 1900's, when the heisenburg uncertainty principal threw a wrench into the idea of being able too "know everything about a specific moment", and genaral quantum theory threw a wrench into the idea that cause-and-effect is non-probabilistic. It's an argument against determinism, but not necessarily for free will. The last part of my statement "Eastern ontological indeterminisim" is just my description of the taoist approach too free will. I was just saying that based off their view that the present (aka the "spontaneous"), superceeds all other reality, both ontologically, and epistemologically, one could quite easily preserve free will. This is argument has been growing in popularity ever since postmodern psudo-eastern philosophy took over.
Omg the replies people posted for this comment are just mind boggling. These people obviously take themselves too seriously 😂😂😂 Yoshia, keep doing what you’re doing.
I think there's one thing you missed. Something absolutely vital: The coin toss is a lie. There is no coin toss. If you survive after being copied, then you still exist as you. Not in the new body. This is just a concept to make the game seem more dramatic.
Starham2000 honestly I always thought it was the AI girl lying to the protagonist, since he’s not the smartest and wouldn’t know it’s impossible for his consciousness to “transfer” in a copy and paste.
Kinda yes and no... There is no reason for your consciousness to stop existing in the old body, but there is also another consciousness that thinks that it was it that existed in that body moments ago. And it also totally thinks that it is you. From an outer perspective it has just appeared, but from it's own it has all the same backstory as the original one. So it IS the same. Rather hard to explain... The thing is, at this moment you think that you exist. The new consciousness does exactly the same. So if there is no difference in the very moment, just 1 consciousness before and 2 consciousnesses after, why do you think that you will be in the first body? In reality you must equally be in both of them at the same time. In this case a copy IS the same as original. So the coin toss just always give you both outcomes. You are the same AND you are the new. Only these two you begin to see different things from now on. upd. Maybe there is a better way to put it... You are the person you are, therefore there is a possibility to BE you. If you consider your copy as also conscious, there should be a possibility to BE him. Because being conscious effectively meens BEING someone. So as you can be someone who has just woke up and remember his life of yesterday, you must also be able to be someone who has just woke up in another body. Because there must be SOMEONE who wakes up in that new body. So it is possible to "win" the coin toss, it's not just a "you always lose, your copy wins" situation.
@@AbsoluteHuman it's the continuity of consciousness! If Everytime you die your consciousness is transferred to a universe where you DIDN'T die then you would be dead in one continuity, stopping that line, or you would be ALIVE in another! In this there is a fork off and it's a toss up on whether you get to perceive the world through the new copy, who is the exact same as your current state of mind prior to realization, or the elder copy, who has not realized their fate
the straight up copying and having it be impossible to transfer is indeed a core part of the game. it goes even into more detail about it in the part, where the people talk about killing themselves after they transferred their consciousness. this killing after the copying being the full transfer then in a way. them being doubled and then one of the 2 getting removed. very fascinating part of the game, pity it wasn't addressed in the video.
The fact that I still think about this game constantly, over 5 years later, is a testament to how fantastic it is. This is a kind of horror that sticks with you, a kind of horror you will never forget.
I've always said (and unfortunately, will probably always say) SOMA is massively underrated and overlooked. It deserves the same amount of attention and praise that Firewatch receives.
This is a great video. Though I personally believe the entire 'coin toss' premise was a lie Catherine told Simon to get you to help her launch the Ark, like how you manipulate the crew member to get the password. Did you spare or destroy the WAU? Basically all the friends I've talked about the game with thought there wasn't a choice when you can literally just walk past it and then that big asshole gets eaten by the shark.
I killed the WAU but let everything else live. well not quite, I did kill the last living human, but only because she clearly wanted that. as for the other brain scans and simon 2 I thought it was possible, however unlikely that they might come out of that nightmare in some other fashion. even if it was something like being discovered and brought back by aliens a million years later. Let em have their longshot.
I mercykilled most everyone I came across, as existence from them was nothing more than waiting for entropy to make their continued functioning impossible at the bottom of the sea of a maimed planet. I also poisoned WAU because it had gone amok, leaving behind twisted mockeries of life and trapping the last living humans in torment. Sometimes death is preferable to continued existence, especially since there is no hope of succor in the depths, except the inevitable slow waiting for entropy. The woman in the tunnel was alone in a forgotten corner of Epsilon. The robot outside Theta was merely a copy in mild discomfort repeating the same patterns over and over again. Robin was a copy stuck at the gates of an overrun facility. Simon 2 was stuck in an overrun facility with no way of making it back, especially since Simon 3 kept the omnitool. He would be abandoned by Catherine and left alone to face the monsters and his only ways of proceeding would've involved climbing the scaffolding at Omicron or jumping into the abyss and being crushed.
Hot take: You always lose the coin toss. You’re always the one left behind. The one who wins the coin toss is just an entirely new person who’s had all your memories imposed onto them.
@@biker3982 some people are confused about what the coin toss means. It's cope, basically. Your "experience" unique to you will always be left behind, it's the equivalent of living a real life coin toss into what kind of individual you're born as: healthy, rich, poor, ill, etc. That decision was set in stone before you were even born.
I imagine that after Simon3 gets done screaming alone in the dark at the bottom of the ocean, he makes his way back up, probably to the surface with Catherine. I don't think Catherine abandoned him or died or anything, she just got disconnected because the area she's plugged into lost power. In my playthrough I only killed the first robo person I encountered, only because he was essentially stuck in an endless loop of suffering. I didn't even kill the WAU, imo its probably the next and only form of sustainable existence on the doomed earth of soma. Very few people I've been able to find that have played/talk about Soma rarely if ever bring up the topic of the "Mind Coral" which is apparently the name of that stuff Simon3 was trapped in that caused him to have dreams/hallucinations. For me it raises more questions than the existentialism stuff. What is that stuff? How did it come to be? Is that split headed guy in control of it? As Simon wanders through that area we can see actual human beings essentially plugged into that shit and unable to get out of it, so how did simon escape? Is it like its own biological version of Catherine's simulation? Why can Simon can hear the humans speaking/muttering in his head while their plugged into the mind coral?
The way I understand it is that the mind coral is some sort of mutation created by the WAU (on purpose or not) and lives as a separate species in the game. I doubt that Akers has any control over it. More likely he's madness from consuming structure gel resulted in him believing that WAU is some sort of god and the coral is it's gift for humanity to "live on" (like the WAU does by many different means).
If I'm going to write Soma 2, I'll set it in a world where Simon and the cyborgs scratched out a place to un-live and a simulated world the PC will explore; the PC will be an AI sent back to check if Earth is habitable
My headcanon is that simon climbed back up to delta, looted a functioning omnitool from one of the many corpses lying around pathos II, and got to work with his original copy to find a suitable body to plug catherine's cortex chip in. And they fuckin' took the place over by kicking other wau monsters asses because simon 3's literally in a suit of power armor. ...That or the dunbat comes and kills them all cause he wants revenge against catherine for turning him into a submarine.
When I first played the game, the ending had me in literal tears as I sat late at night in front of my PC crying, thinking of Simon 3's continued existence on earth and how he's sitting alone on earth, no-one to talk to, everyone else is dead or gone insane. This game fucked me up man.
@@luciusartoriusdante No he can't; the Abyssal Climber can't be raised from the bottom. It has to be called back from the top. The trip to the Abyss was a one-way ticket.
I have to say, Simon as a Protagonist was a character that I got into in a way, I never have before in any other game other Frictional titles, protagonists always maintained a slight detachment from their environment (mostly due to their complete lack of present speech), but playing as Simon and being able to witness everything through his eyes, and only his eyes , with those that observe you playing as him commenting your actions really made me find and build his character and assume it as my own while playing, so of course, I felt this bittersweet feeling of regret when the screen faded black and the final conversation with your only friend ended in insults and banter and when the last Simon then awakes in the arc, I felt detached from him, as if I was stuck there too on the bottom of the ocean and was merely observing from afar... this was a bit melodramatic, but I hope I managed to make some sense with this
The "twist" of being a robot was kind of similar to the clone "twist" in the movie Moon. You could work it out and feel clever from the trailers but the whole story is far weirder.
At least with clone, you have some kind of physical link towards "original" - your genetics. In Soma, literally only thing connecting you to previous version of Simon is memories - your new body isn't even male, it's dead female body with robotic chip to store your memories in.
@@feartheghus They partially define what you are, however. In game, people put inside robots go crazy and lose any sense of reality, because biological part of what is considered "you" is suddenly gone. Consciousness is partially shaped by "hardware" it operates on, so only someone like Catherine with her specific mental issues can remain somewhat stable for a while in robotic body without going delusional.
Loved this game! Amongst other things, the encounter and full conversation with Karl was brilliant. Karl, who utterly believes he is "human" when clearly not even gets pissed about about Simon's questions about his current state. Then later you realise you are just like Karl. Looking back at that conversation from that moment of realisation was just brilliant because even Simon was even in denial about what he really was. Karl trying to convince Simon he's a real human, while Simon has no clue he himself is not. This whole game is a psychological masterpiece.
I was initially horrified by Soma's brutally empty-feeling (yet excellent, nonetheless) ending- however, shortly after watching that tearjerker of an ending (I watched John Wolfe"s playthrough, rather than playing it myself)I read a comment that made me feel a lot more hopeful for the ultimate fate of the various human/robot chimeras stuck in poor Simon's shoes. Now, granted, the commentor's point only stands for playthroughs in which you _don't_ kill the WAU, but it was essentially this: even though creatures like Simon are suffering immensely in the short term (the "relative" short term, that is, seeing as the trial period could take the passing of any horrifyingly indeterminate span of years, decades... hell, millennia?) , the WAU is still _technically_ doing as fine a job as it reasonably can in accomplishing its primary function of preserving humanity in the worst scenario imaginable. While there are naturally going to be countless abhorrent Frankenstein monsters produced by an AI in its position because the only way for it to really learn what works is through an endless battery of trials. However, as we can see with Simon, it _is_ creating "humans" capable of helping to correct the course (e.g. the way Simon saves Catherine from being trapped in a useless body), and moreover "humans" capable of being relatively "happy" in a proper environment. So in light of that mind-bending revelation, the best hope for a "happy" ending would probably be to let the WAU continue its experimentation until it manages to piece together a colony of able-bodied machines akin to Simon who can keep each other company and (assuming the inevitability of "Simon" shells eventually being fitted with the consciousnesses of scientists like Catherine) actually assist it in creating proper "humans"- likely even eventually having the capacity among them to patch the "bugs" in the WAU's programming driving it to create any more half-baked monsters.
Problem with that is that Simon 2 and 3 were built out of corpses. Those decompose. WAU was not capable of planning ahead, it could only respond to current events. WAU's attempts at prolonging human life lacked all humanity, and it's likely any "human" existence further down the line would've had an equal lack of humanity. Well, the methods of getting there would definitely be inhuman.
Interesting. Honestly my perspective on it is that we all have free will, but the notion of cause and effect come into play aswell. It's the balance we call reality. Simply put; we all have free will, doesn't mean any one of us are special. Yet there's even a relevant difference in the terms we use to describe molecules, and that of microbes. Honestly the way wau works seems to be the same way all life came to be, trials and errors. Doesn't mean there isn't something special about existence & contionous itself, it's amazing. My (&your) brain, along with the main nervous system basically looks like a weird mix between the face hugger from alien, but also all the tentacle like appendages of the angler fish. Your skeleton, mustles and organs are ment to sustain it. Basically we're all meatbots, but we do have a choice. Even when it seems like we don't, that's how mutations &cancers happen (in a very simplified phrasing mind you). Sorry for the tangent, &thank you to anyone who even opens this comment in its entirety. :)
You believe in free will? Then answer this question: What _is_ free will? What does that actually mean? If you can't answer me, then do you really even believe in it, since you don't even know what it is? Because if you do know, then you can explain it.
@@theuncalledfor free will is simply the ability to choose to do something on a moment to moment basis. Nothing more. These micro choices lead you to where you end up in life though, or to an end of your life, if you so choose. So yes free will exists, because without it, humans could not change their own lives. Example: You have 2 poor people. One chooses to create games with their old laptop, enough to build a following and income stream that eventually lands them an upper middle class life. The other person chooses to do nothing, their life remains poor. The outcomes are easily interchangeable, ONLY IF those people made opposite CHOICES.
Arguing against free will is like arguing we are in a simulation with permaters to make sure we never find out, it doesnt matter if you are or arent right because you will never know.
@@bloodofacacia I was asking for a specific person's definition, and that person was not you. Your answer is fundamentally incapable of answering my question properly, unless you know Msmeliss ox personally and know exactly what her answer would be. As for your own answer, I find that to be a very questionable definition, unless you have a strange definition of what a "choice" is. The way I see it, by your definition, even a simple computer program can have "free will". Or heck, even a pocket calculator! You input the numbers and operators for the calculation you want done, and it _chooses_ the correct number as an answer. If you want to argue that that's not a "choice", you have to explain what a "choice" is to you.
@@theuncalledfor Does the past cause the present? or does the present cause the past? Imagine you have a small vessel moving forward through water, ahead of it is flat, and behind it is the wake. Does the wake of a ship cause the ship too move? This is free will, as explained by eastern philosophers. If you want more depth, you should check out here: ruclips.net/video/G4j6cUwCRmI/видео.html
It's hard to accept, that only your copy is going to be saved. Not original you. Imagine, that you are destined to die, but your legacy is basically you, as it has all traits original "you" had. Except it's not actually you, it's just a copy, that gets to live on, while you would be left behind.
Yes, I felt the same way for him. I thought it would have been a mercy if Catherine had figured out a way to cut HIS power immediately after the ARK was launched. Like... "you'll lose consciousness here and you'll wake up on the ARK". of course, he'd "lose consciousness" and die... but his ARK copy would wake up thinking "yeah, that wasn't so bad" etc. Catherine, of course, knows that her Original was bludgeoned to death with a wrench and also knows that the first Catherine Scan that ultimately got the ARK launched was likely now switched "off" forever under the sea. PLUS anyway we slice it, is anyone talking about fact that there are likely two Catherines on the ARK?
@@ceu160193 that’s what having children is like, to an extent. That’s also just life, you’re gonna die dude. There is also so much for you and your fellow survivors to do in real life to save life in the universe.
Your comment on free will is how I managed to forgive someone for murdering a friend. Found out his childhood was absolute hell on Earth, and would have led any broken soul to utter insanity.
Someone else had an idea of what the brain scan is like. Mark Sarang's theory was simple. If you die the moment the scan takes place, or shortly after, then you can only be the remaining you. The you inside the ark. He viewed human consciousness as an entity that transcends a physical body and that idea spread to other crew members who took part in this idea. You actually meet the brain scan of one of his followers, Robin Bass. She tells Simon that she took the scan and then she thinks she killed her self. She doesn't remember that part. Because she planned to kill her self after the scan. If you go into her room you find a mess of blood and a suicide note. “We're all dying anyway. I'm all in. I put my faith in Sarang and the continuity.” Now that i am thinking about it, there is no coin toss. It's just a copy and paste. There is no you. Just data and a program that processes that data the same way the brain would. You would still be the human left behind. In a computer science perspective, cut and past is just copy and past with the extra step of deleting the original file. In any other situation, i would take it well. Considering all life on the surface is gone, and any survivors of the human race would either be in orbit, trapped in sealed bunkers, or under the sea like Pathos II and i didn't have any other reason to be alive... going out like Mark wouldn't be so bad.
The Continuity wasn't so much a POV change, as some have understood it. It's a "purity" measure. Once you're scanned, the template is formed from that exact moment and it lives on in the ARK. You continue to persist in the real world and these different experiences start causing a divergence between you and the "you" in the ARK. Sarang had the idea that it is desirable to eliminate this divergence by killing the self, so that the self in the ARK has no difference to you at the moment of your death. Seeing as that existence is its own separate thing to you to begin with, what's the point? Maintaining some metaphysical concept of oneself as pure as possible for all time? Instead of "template of XYZ saved at DDMMYYYY" the ARK copy would be the direct continuation of the last memories of the person, since the original body is no longer in a position to create new ones?
@@Tounushi After some time thinking about it, i got a new plan when it comes to the brain scan. I would take the scan and go with my personal project i would call Empyrean. The idea is simple, create a set of programs and facilities to assists the brain scan in a dead world. Programs like a form of Cut and Paste that will allow for the transfer of the scan into a new form. Install a back up of a brain scan into a new form in the event of the original's non-functionality. Etc. I would still go on doing whatever i can to help this project along with my brain scan copy. Advancing the project till a more natural death occurs. End goal being my scan gets out of pathos II and begin the project of building a new. What's the point? Well, what's the point of minecraft? Probably won't save the species, but a new synthetic life based on the human brain... well that's good enough for me.
it wasn't the dark that gave us pause at night, lurking beyond the light of the campfire. it wasn't the dark that scared us, no the dark never did anything to warrant fear, but it was the things unknowable beyond its veil that terrified us, what lies beyond in the black starlit ocean of our nightmares.
I remember watching a lets play of this and thought it was good. Though at the time, I was too young to recognize the message behind it. Later in my life I thought about how teleportation would be an abomination. Realistically teleportation wouldn't be someone being instantly transported from one place to another. At least, not without causing that person to have a complete brain wipe and effectively causing a permanent coma. In reality for it to work, you would need it to copy and paste what is being transported, and destroying what was going through. This would mean that to teleport effectively, you would literally be killing yourself and making a clone of yourself with your memories somewhere else.
I'd say calling it a coin toss is wrong. When Simon 2 copies a copy of his consciousness into the pressure suit (Simon 3), Simon 2 should have already known that he would have been left behind. The copy-paste leaves the first (Simon 2) behind. So essentially when you brain-scan yourself you know which one you're going to be, the one you already were. Likewise, the new instance should already know he's the new instance, he's the copy. If I remember correctly the coin toss analogy only exists because Simon just doesn't understand how the brain-scanning works, thus he fools himself with the most comfortable answer "It's a coinflip."
This is how it works yep. I’m disappointed the reviewer seems to think that its somehow different than what you expressed when the game demonstrates your answer to the player, rather clearly in my opinion. There’s no transfer of consciousness. A replica of elvis’ guitar isn’t the same as elvis’ guitar. Each Simon is a replica of the last. The guitar can carry all the marks and scratches of the original but its not the same thing.
@@derekmensch3601 I disagree. There is not transfer to speak of. It's a copy paste. With perfect information you should know you're the copy or the original.
@@TheGlenn8 I mean but whether or not you are the copy of the consciousness that transers or not is the coin toss in that moment. You don't know until your eyes open.
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but there is no coin toss. There is no possible scenario where Simon's dive suit mind gets transferred to the pressure suit etc.
Well, the Simon we play as definitely gets transferred to the dive suit, but we could've just as easily been the dive suit Simon that gets left behind. (Though it wouldn't have made for a good story) Just like how we could've just as easily been the human Simon who dies of brain damage months after the scan. We happened to be on the side of the 'coin toss' that stayed in a human body. Logically, it's probably not a coin toss scenario, but since we don't yet understand the nature of consciousness, the coin toss logic is the best thing we have to compare it to.
That's not the case. Every transfer of bodies in the game is copy and paste, not cut and paste. I don't remember if the coin toss is an idea that Catherine uses to explain the situation to Simon but he fails to understand, or if she fools him so he goes along with her plan, but there was never any chance of Simon's consciousness inside the robot bodies transferring to the Ark. That's one of the many tragedies of the situation. Essentially, we only ever experience what happens to the newly created consciousness of Simon 3 and the previous events should be seen as memories implemented inside that body (apart from the after credits scene on the Ark, which does admittedly make it a bit confusing).
Yeah, there are no cut and pastes. I just meant that until we find ourselves in the pressure suit body, we had no way of telling if we were Simon 2 or 3. In hindsight, we know that we were always Simon 3, but up until the transfer from 2 to 3, we couldn't possibly know which one we were. Edit: and I think it was actually Simon who compared the conciousness transfer to a coin toss. It was during the climber descent if I remember correctly
Leadhead We are the divesuit Simon, that constant does not change simply because we are now inhabiting a different body. So in a sense we weren’t choosing to kill another Simon ( because we too possess that same experiences ) we chose to literally kill ourself. Or if you prefer a slightly, not up to date version. I also made the decision to kill Divesuit Simon however, rationalising it as some form of compassion. As without Catherine or a functioning multi-tool, I ( Divesuit Simon ) was doomed, and I was leaving him/me in an impossible situation. The best case scenario is the WAO got a hold of him, but that path too is madness. Pressure Suit Simon got the better end of the deal, sure he is in the abyss alone, but he probably won’t last very long. The Arc, for ever how long it lasts will be a utopia, but I am confident they are on a “Rapture” collision course. Undying, cyclical atrocities and horror, provided the lights don’t go out first.
I watched the entire walkthrough of Markplier (when he was normal) a long time ago, maybe when he uploaded it and played the game last year. Its very underratrd game but very deep and meaningful.
The coin toss thing is just a point of view thing. There is no coin toss, but from the perspective of the individual, it feels like a coin toss...you either are the original or the copy, and trying to rationalize it by saying, "Here I am, about to press a button, so I'm clearly the original" doesn't work because even the copy "experienced" that same moment of getting ready to press the copy button.
At 5:00 you have the completely wrong idea. There is no "stream of consciousness", there is no "coin toss". These are lies you are being told so that your player character will continue doing what needs to be done. For the purposes of storytelling, you (the PLAYER) follow a particular stream of consciousness, but this is a broken chain all the way down.
The coin toss is simple. There are now two simons. One can continue one cannot. One wins, and one loses. The other side of the coin doesn't dissappear. The Simon we play as won twice before losing once.
Apart from you not understanding the whole " coin toss " thing is just comforting lie for Simon made by Cath, this whole video was such a good experience. From your analysation of the game, your thoughts on it, to revealing some of the interesting things about you and your character. I really enjoyed it.
There is no chance here, Leadhead, All of these are separate experiences that did exist, no matter how you spin it, you didnt win a coin toss to put you into Simon 3, this game just follows the important Simon, Simon 2 ceased importance when Simon 3 woke up. You were still Simon 2, but Simon 2 wasn't still you, you had all the memories of Simon 1 and 2, this game asks the question of "if we take a person's personality and memories and put them in a new body, are they still the same person?" The game is more like if you were watching back the memories of whichever Simon you were at the end of the game, that Simon has no clue what happened to the other Simons, unless he made it happen to them. Simon remembers which Simon he was because this already happened, even if it's not being told from that perspective. the guy you woke up 7 times for the code didnt have a 7 in 10 chance to be that guy, all 7 of them woke up and had a separate experience that didnt affect the others, but all of those experiences happened without a matter of "chance"
These kinds of existential / philosophical matters open my mind but also leave me with a sense of dread: I'm a man stuck in the past. In that past, there's a very sweet girl who I love extremely much. She likes silly jokes (on the level of dad-jokes "hi hungry I'm dad"), she's very innocent (seeing me shirtless was a level of intimacy she hadn't had before), and she's sweet to the point where she uses a lot of diminutives. I'm happy and I wake up happy and go to sleep happy. But that's the past. It was three years ago (we were both 21), and she has since moved on. I don't know to what extent, but when we last spoke a couple months ago and told her that I still felt for her, she told me she'd rather keep the distance (at least for now). Thus, I am not happy in the present. I feel completely alone, and I can't develop feelings for other women. As such, my hopes and dreams seem unattainable, and no matter how positive I am on the exterior, on the interior I feel empty. Seeing how I'm stuck, is my life not better being lived in the past? What makes my present self more valuable my past self? Why should I not keep living in the past via memories as if in a simulation?
I feel for you chief. But not every relationship is worth it. If you can get past that unfortunate fact, you'll eventually get past living in the past. Even though the present might suck, the future is great because it can be whatever you want it to be.
@@owenstephens3389 And yet to make of the future what you want it to be, you gotta make an investment in the present. And man, I have trouble thinking the future can really be what I want it to be. I doubt I may find someone like that again. So it's hard to make that present investment. Either way, thanks for the enlightenment, brother.
Just a note to everyone who seems a bit puzzled and claiming there is no coin toss, the coin toss isn't to determine who ends up where; you're already the person who you are, that's true. There's no way to transfer consciousness like SOMA explains. The coin toss refers to who you find out you really are, which stream of consciousness you end up being. At the beginning, Simon 3 fully believes he is Simon 1, so when he got scanned, there was a 50% chance that he was not actually Simon 1, but actually Simon 3 believing he was Simon 1. All the memories are in place, the reason you get to play through them in SOMA is because there's no other way to get the player to have memories about things that never happened.
or the switching actually happens because it would make for a very boring game if you just got into a chair, made the scan and got up and lived the rest of your life...
i still have no idea what exactly is meant by the coin toss... i always saw it as me getting in a chair, the scan happening and me getting out of the chair. the switching is only for storytelling and gameplay. i couldn't care less about my mind getting uploaded to the arc, since i know that it will be a copy of me living/existing there. the copy will always think that it "won the coin toss"... i never saw this as complicated as many discussions make it out to be
there is no coin toss, the one that gets transfered into a new body isn't you, it's a copy of you. it's not like the one in the og body gets transfered in the new one with a 50/50 chance. the cointoss is an illusion.
But from outside view, there is no difference. When you wake up in the morning, it's copy of you, that wakes up - previous you ceased to exist, when you went to sleep. It has same knowledge + extra experience, that it was asleep.
@@feartheghus Your conscience doesn't exist, while you are asleep, so, technically, you die every time you go to sleep. Memories stay, so your next copy appears, when your body wakes up in the morning, that has all your memories + extra experience, that it was asleep.
I used to believe the idea of no free will and all until my physics teacher pointed out that the uncertainty of how atoms act at a quantum level means that it can't be predicted, meaning our choices are our own.
Leaving this in a separate comment to keep it isolated from all my complaints. About killing the copy in the diving suit that you're leaving behind: Normally I would insist that the person actually affected by the choice should make the choice, but since both are exact copies of each other, you're actually perfectly qualified to decide for your other self. There has not been any time for the two of you to diverge yet, so you're still basically identical when you make the choice. Personally, I would probably leave the other me alive and take them with me down to the abyss, both to keep them company while they die (I would owe it to them) and on the "off chance" (see my other comment) that they'd survive the pressure. That, or I would promise to come back up after sending the Ark into space (actually, see my thoughts on that in the complaints comment as well!).
LIke some others commented, you missed out on the final part of Soma's message: The coin toss is a red herring. The game used a trick to confirm an intuitive misconception that we all have: The continuity of the self. This trick is to transfer your control, as the player, to one of the two outcomes of the "coin toss", whenever it happens in the game. This confirms to you that the new Simon of which you took control is the "real you". Only under that assumption does it make sense to ask the question of wether you won or lost the coin toss. However, in the final scene, this trick is revealed. Your control gets transferred to the other Simon of the coin toss. In that moment, you should notice that this side of the coin feels very much the same like the "real you" as previously the other side of the coin. If you think about it: Given several alternative Simons, for example the two "forked" ones in the different types of suit, how would an outside observer be able to tell which of the two has become Simon's "real you"? There is no way, as in all properties relevant for this comparisons, both Simons are equal. This means there is no "real you". I think the belief in a personal soul that gives one its true identity is part of what leads us to this misconception culturally. Another aspect you didn't mention: The game explores the deconstruction of the sense of "real you" across space, by having multiple "real yous" at the same time. This is what you mentioned. However, there is a more subtle part in the game (I think it's during the underwater elevator descent) where the game deconstructs the continuity of the self across time. This applies much more to our personal situations. While we don't get copy-pasted in our everyday lives, we still retain the belief that our "real you" is continuous across time. From one moment to the next. The game shows that this does not apply. There is no continuity of the self. There only ever is the present moment. And our experiencing of the present moment has no personal, individual properties. There is nothing of our "soul" or "real you" in it. It's just _that_. To me, this is the real deep point of the game. And this insight can actually have a deep impact on how you observe your self, your ego an your life, and conversely, have an impact on how you live and experience your life. It is an important message with wide implications.
Always felt like Chuns 1st line when you met her on the Ark should have been "Fourth times a charm right Simon?" And then when he is like "Wait what do you mean...?" she is like "Oh nothing..." 🤯
I know people who payed Soma and weren’t able to understand it or be scared by it because they had been primed by all the jump scare horror games of the past few years.
I really like Artyom Kazak's essay "Unconditional empathy", about how much easier yet horrifying life is when we ignore the ethics of our actions and only consider the consequences.
Without morals what are the consequences? That’s like trying to look at bacteria without the microscope. There needs to be a set of terminal goals, a conscience, or else the consequences are not inherently good or bad. Some people think, stupidly in my opinion, that happiness is the end goal. Some think maximizing it for the greatest number of humans is the proper goal. Utilitarians (believers in the former) quite often commit abhorrently evil acts for the sake of “the greater good”.
11:12 Thing is there is a 100% chance that all of those outcomes happen, because they all happen. They'll all have the memory of that first person and they'll all feel like they are the real person. So it's not really a matter of probability, you aren't reducing the likelihood of someone waking up on the ark and living a happy life, that will happen no matter what, you're just creating additional life and cutting it short. The coin toss is a useful metaphor to think about it after the fact but it fails to grasp the fact that it's not a 50/50 outcomes it's two things that happen 100% of the time. Thing is, if you call simon "x" simon before the transfer, then simon "y" simon in the original body and simon "z" simon in the new body the answer to the question "which simon does simon x become" is both. Both simon z and simon y are simon x but they are also different person at this point, simon y and z aren't the same simon. So the actual answer is that simon y and simon z have been simon x but they never have been each other (as in they never live through their experience). We want to imagine our identity being a unique thing that is stable through time but it really isn't. Like, 3year old you is part of your current identity but you are a drastically different person from what you were at that age. If I were to add all your memories to 3 year old you you'd probably feel like I'm making them grow faster, but if I were to remove everything before the memories of 3 year old you (ignoring for simplicity sake even though it's quite relevant, the fact that memories aren't perfect) then you'd feel like you are being killed. But really in that first exemple 3year old you is also killed and replaced by current you. That's because identity isn't a binary yes/no it's a lot more fuzzy and progressive than that. Things aren't "you" or "not you" they are more or less you. And your current conscious experience is the most "you" there is. But even you from 3 days ago is slightly different but it's still a lot more "you" than 3year old you who is a lot more you than a random human that didn't experience anything from your life. But to be honest even that random human is closer to you than, let's say a rock, that human will have a lot more experiences in common like they'll have experienced the color red just like you (assuming you can see red) but at this point it's so far from your current experience than it's hard to call them you in any meaningful way even if they are like 0,00000...01% you. Just like you wouldn't call something with 0,000000...01% salt "salty". Anyway if you follow that logic that means it's actually somewhat rational to not do the dishes now even if it'll be harder later, cause future you is a bit less you so you care less about how hard it is (even if future you will hate you for that =p) but you don't want to just stop studying cause future you is too much you that you'd be ok with them becoming homeless. Yep, philosophically procrastination make sense and thinking about your future make sense too =p
Have you played Talos Principle? It is not a horror game but it raises very interesting questions in a clever way. I want to recommend two other games that are a bit more direct: Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular. Both of them delve into philosophical themes well
I have been searching for this video so long. I saw it once almost a year ago and was so annoyed that i couldnt find it. Now i find out that its a video by the guy i have started activley watching a month ago. Jesus this video is still good. Just as all other videos on you channel. Thanks for all these great videos.
I would argue that, assuming reality is real, the most effective choices are the most real, you know the internet you’re looking at this video through is real because you can observe it and interact with it and when you do so it seemingly brings meaningful results. Similarly, if you believe you have no free will it will tend to end with a lack of responsibility and a feeling of a lack of control. If you believe in free will and go even further towards ideologies like that of extreme ownership you will more often find success. They are more impactful and effective thought processes because the strategies they allow for and move towards forming are more effective in the world. For this reason it is best to assume you have free will and act like you do, and both the fact that you can make such assumptions and that the belief in free will is so powerful as a thought process in effecting the world would imply, just like every other observation gives us information on objects and concepts in the real world, that free will is real.
SOMA made me cry 3 times ,it showed me the futility of trying to find meaning, Nihilism comes to mid .What u said about me watching the video regardless of my life choices is 100% true and i agree, i see us and living beings as just reaction beings we just react to things , be it making a movie or a game , or becoming a dictator , or dying at the age of three. I see life just like water filling any 3d objec. Me as a person , i am most suitable to be like i am , given my genetics and geographical location , i will turn of like this infinite times over if given same circumstances, I hope i made my point clear , ur an intelligent person , would be nice to talk to you more abt life . I thoroughlyenjoy all ur vids, thank you for making them , i wish u the best .
You are like the first hard determinist I’ve seen in present day, funny since I’m a hard determinist as well. I remember while playing this game with friends i said I don’t think I’d have trouble adapting to being a robot, minus missing food and stuff. Cause ever since i was born my body has been changed by surgeries since I’m craniofacial. Because of that i think I’m wired to be more adaptable than most and i define myself more by my consciousness rather than my body which i think makes the transition to machine easier. That being said while i want to live i do not want to live in isolation ever again so i would end my copy in the vixen 2 situation.
When i was a kid, prob around 12 y.o, i had an irrational fear of being sad, and the (possible) existence of a second time dimension (just like how we are living in 3 spatial dimensions), because that would mean that any undesirable state i was in would, in a way mean that that state would exist (frozen) in an infinite amount of time (at least according to 12y.o me's understanding of dimensions and time.). i gradually got over this fear much later by understanding consciousness, emotions, and time, better. however in all of that i came to the conclusion that me, as i am now, is not the me i was x seconds ago, nor the person i will be x seconds from now. if i apply that logic to space (instead of time) a clone of me would only be the same me as me for the exact amount of time a single "moment" is (unless the clone would experience the exact stimuli as the original). One could also apply that logic to other people. I am a different individual from myself 3 seconds just like i am a different individual from you (the reader). The fact that i am more similar to one of those two might mater in some cases, but not all. That is my answer to one the questions Soma makes you ask yourself.
@@thotslayer9914 Well, depends on your definition of dying. If it is loss of identity (like in my original comment), "you" die constantly and become someone else. If you mean dying in the traditional sense, then it is almost definitely as simple as non existence. It would be the same as not having been born yet ( you will be just as cognizant after death as before birth). If you want to make arguments about an afterlife there are 3 ways of thinking about it. If the world is a simulation, then the creators could mby isolate your data upon death and do something with it (but like, why would they wanna bother with that?). That there is a phenomena related to physics, (where your brain and possibly your body somehow is connected to other materia and energy and making a clone of you when you die, but this would mean that there is a extremely convenient part of physics we haven't discovered yet, so unlikely). Or magic, aka souls, rebirth, religion and other hokus pokus. And none of those has any scientific, peer reviewed, successful (as in showing such magic to be real), so this would be unlikely. (also, if you define magic to be physics based phenomena we don't know about it is the same as my previous point).
@@thotslayer9914 what a mind is, is clear in fields such a biology, where we can measure and study how the brain works, we know it uses electrical signal and hormones to think. this can explain everything regarding the mind, everything else is just speculation. speculation that we can explain with psychology, people dislike death, and therefore try to make up false answers to make themselves feel better. a big reason for philosophers to have struggled with identifying what or where the mind is comes from lack of understanding human biology. should we try to find answers that we can be sure to be as true as possible, we should firstly base our theories/hypothesis on facts. this makes it obvious that the philosophers of old trying to come upp with answers lack the knowledge to say anything of value. If we don't follow the "burden of proof" ideology when forming our worldview, then anything is as legit as anything else logically, someone believing that their thumb contains the "souls" of every dead person ever lived would be just as correct as, for example, the average christian/buddhist/stone age man believing in rock gods/muslim. and the single reason we don't attach the "all souls in a thumb" idea, is that it makes us feel worse.
@@thotslayer9914 while we can't fully understand "qualia", we can understand that the brain is (probably) fully capable of doing it, since we can measure how it reacts to stimuli, and how it can handle things like feelings to some degree using hormones. the presence of something like a soul isn't necessary to explain it. in fact, such a claim has no good basis (making it just as logically sound as my thumb is the big thinking god that controls qualia, although such a claim isn't as popular, due to feelings). as for my thoughts about philosophy, i think it is only useful in areas we have created, and is not filled with axioms (like politics and ethics). it is also useful for finding illogical things in religious and spiritual models and concepts. (philosophy is a hobby of mine) when we talk about things like what happened before big bang, we could speculate based on what we do know and create hypothesis and maybe even theories about it, but a lot of things are labeled with "we don't know" or even "we can't know" (as in a physical impossibility). but that doesn't mean my almighty thumb have the magical powers to fill in such blanks. i think me and a lot of other people aren't "stuck" in in a mindset, just how my original comment explained, what i believe time is, and what that means for me has changed from my childhood. but i have made these changes on proof presented to me, never on what makes me feel better. it comes down to the burden of proof again, coupled with the scientific model. and if that didn't matter then i would like to present me an better alternative with inner logical consistency, and why such a logical model makes whatever you believe in closer to the "truth", than my thumb arguments, otherwise we might as well deify that.
@@thotslayer9914 of course i hate religion, i know that at most 1 religion can be correct, and i believe all of them to be wrong. this means all but 1 group is wasting a lot of time on nothing, and are doing choices that may deprive other people and themselves from relative value/happiness. Differentiating feelings from proof allows me (and others with my mindset) to not do such things. the thing about things that are transcendental/magic, is the argument of burden of proof again, i am starting to repeat myself now, but if proof isn't necessary, then my almighty thumb argument is as valid as anything else. this is the important part. if you would base a discussion on your beliefs without needing arguments based on measurable reality, then my "god thumb" argument is a valid possibility to base my life around, and my "god in the sky" and my "god boot" and so on. since all of them are just as likely as another one, then whatever i choose is infinitely unlikely to be correct, making whatever choices based upon that belief infinity unlikely to be correct (outside of the things that coincide of the theoretical "true" belief) as well. so what i am saying isn't technically that whatever magical thing you believe in is wrong. but that you are statistically correct in 1/infinity cases. (search "pascal's wager".) Caring about proof and arguments based in consistent logic is the only way to work around this. also my hate of wasted value/happiness (desired state) is based upon utilitarianism, i'm sure my logic (if logic is something you care about) is clear, but otherwise i could lay it out in a more clear way.
@@thotslayer9914 i say that those that believe in magic ether don't use logic (consistent that is, aka no cherry picking) AND/OR proof. burden of proof is to make sure that things, (as to hour best ability to measure them) are true. while logic is there to make things consistent. examples of bad proof is: "i feel like things are here for a reason", "i feel like my thumb is the true god". examples of bad logic is: "my feelings about my thumb is more valid than his feelings", "my god is perfect, knows everything and can do anything. but also he want people to fuel his ego with prayers, have a need to test people, and won't use his powers for good.". a combination of bad proof and logic would be: some dudes that didn't know basic human biology and physics tough that their god is correct, and wrote a book about it, therefore this book undoubtedly contains the truth." also i did consider the possibility that i might be wrong, but i saw no proof of that, nor could find logic based on proof that points towards that i might be wrong. I even consider the possibility of my thumb being a god, and my boot, and a rock. so that means that if the scientific process of using proof and logic is wrong, then i have a 1 in infinity chance of having choosing the right belief (should i choose to choose). but hey, if math is wrong (even if it is the only area we can DEFINITELY know to be true.) then the whole pascal's wager argument is invalid.
Modern computers actually just change the directory of a file when moving files from one location to another. In this way, you could certainly make the argument that if we were to create such technology, SOMA could well be wrong. Or, at least, it wouldn't be the only solution.
I find it interesting that the "coin toss" only applies for the audience/player, as, for the Simons, they more have a quantum sort of deal. They exist simultaneously and clones, separate entities with a shared splintering point. For Simon 3, there never was a coin toss, he was simply generated at that moment. Simon 2 also never had a coin toss as, being the code to be copied, he was never intended to enter the pressure suit. The coin toss only exists as an oversimplification to keep 3 from questioning what he is and having a mental breakdown, which is inevitably what happens after the creation of 4, who will never have to question the nuances of his own existence. The coin toss is, to put it as bluntly as possible, baby talk, a way of explaining something without actually talking about it, since that would bring up way too many questions that the one answering the question simply doesn't want to get in to, like when parents say babies are delivered by storks, to keep kids from delving too deep into the nuances of sex. Catherine, and thus the writers, used the lie of the coin toss to keep Simon, and thus the player, from asking too many questions about what they really were, and thus facing the danger of an actual mental breakdown. It'd be more clever if it hadn't caused a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals from touting the coin toss as fact, similar to how the crew of PATHOS-II were killing themselves to "ensure they got onto the ARK."
Kinda makes the entire game as fucked as possible when you play thinking you're mercy killing your old simon when really, from his (your) perspective your copy is snuffing the life from you. If Catherine was honest which she could never have been because Simon would never have been mentally prepared for what the journey would cost him, but instead she told him truthfully that each time he changed bodies he would be leaving himself behind so another version of himself could continue on to save the ark without him, If Simon could come to terms with that there would be no need to kill the older versions and they could continue to live on maybe with each other if they all surivved, although that is wishful thinking. Its an outcome that could never be possible as Simon would never have been strong enough to commit. The hope and belief that he was winning the toss is what kept him going. And as a player I fully believed it too until the very end where it all becomes painfully obvious and you experience first hand how the rest felt. If you're like me and believed in the coin toss you feel the immediate kick in the gut that any high stakes gamble gives you when you lose. When you bet it all on black with that gut feeling that you're gonna make it back but suddenly are left with the harsh truth that no matter the odds, you can still lose. But if you were smart enough to understand the coin toss was fake, you still remained in shock having realised you were never going to make it and all your work was to ensure a version of yourself made it. But it would never have been you..
@@JustKyle43 though, for someone as deep into transhumanism as me, the idea of getting a copy of myself onto that ark is probably one of the most noble goals you could complete, ensuring that at least *some* iteration of the human story lives on.
@@aerynboyer I will admit, i'd probably be as in despair as Simon then. Maybe i'd feel Better a while later, my desperate goal would be to somehow get out or fix the facility at that point for me, fix everyone else. And well...if it really seemed hopeless, suicide is an okayish answer.
@@AbstractTraitorHero i'd be perfectly fine with it. even before Soma i already understood the whole two diverging versions of a mind/copy-paste idea so if i was in simon's positions i'd kill the dive suit copy and then kill myself the pressure suit copy once the ark launched. getting at least one version of myself to have a happy life is the whole point and reducing the suffering of any left over versions of myself by deleting, powering down, or otherwise destroying them/me is just the right thing to do and par for the course. the people that killed themselves "to make sure they made it on the ark" were just stupid and deluded by the ridiculous coin-toss lie, but they are unintentionally on the right track. just wait until the right time after you've done your work to get the ark launched and there doesn't seem like there's any future for your version.
@@EvelynNdenial I just think the other versions of me wouldn't want to die, as I don't want to. I'd indeed be happy some version of me got out, but still kinda be in Some despair that i'm left there.
Saying that you don't have free will, is more of a coping mechanism. Our choices do matter, even the tiniest things we've done can have a huge impact. If our fate is written on stone, try falling from a tall building, you wont have a chance to survive, but if you choose not to jump at all you will still be alive. Saying that we dont have free will, is like jumping with sharks and expecting to survive.
The mind is made of water: I doubt your mind has any clearance over your metaphysical soul, if your new electricity mind gets a soul I doubt it's the same you're used to.
I never killed Simon 2 because my head canon was that Simon 3 somehow got back to Simon 2 so you could chill as bro’s together rather then Simon 2 dying and Simon 3 being the one to rot alone instead of 2 or 4
I killed him without a second thought. I did not want him waking up. I felt detached from Simon, because I knew what the coin toss meant all along and I was just as frustrated with Simon just as Catherine was.
I killed him too and even if Simon 3 is left alone in the end, I thought it was selfish to continue to put my other self through living in that hell just because I need a friend. It's better for one of us to suffer, and it's not that hard to die there anyway. Everything seems so messed up that death seems like the best option for all Simons except 4.
@@synthster7416 isn’t it also selfish to make that decision for him? Simon 3 was upset when he found out it didn’t work, what If Simon 2 wanted to live? You may say that you are the one deciding it so you’d probably agree with yourself, but we all think differently when death is at your doorstep, he may have wanted to live, a possibility we denied him of. If death is what he wants than the blood would be in his own hands not ours
@@Generic_Grunt In a regular scenario it would be unethical to make the decision of killing someone even if they are ourselves but if I were in the situation of Simon 2, I *would* prefer to die, maybe someone else would rather live no matter how bad the environment is but since we as players make decisions for the character we play, we are thinking based on what *we* would have done, in a roleplaying game we'd empathise with our character and maybe make a move that we assume they would, but in a game like this, my preference would be to die than be left alone in a hellscape, so I suppose it's subjective
Keep in mind Simon is a LEGACY scan. Which means there could be millions of variants of Simon that have existed. Which means Simon even getting a chance to be on Pathos 2 could’ve been extremely slim. It also means he could be the basis for Artificial intelligence. All of the automatic machinery and even the K8 robot could have pieces of Simon’s Brainscan in it. Including the WAU.
i'd just like to point out that that 25% chance for paradise is actually a false paradise as he gives up his ability to affect the world around him, instead choosing to live in a dream world until the satellite breaks down. instead the 75% chance of being left behind is actually the better option as there is a future there for him.
In order for a person to survive a cut/paste process without making a duplicate, the transfer must be both physical and in real time. The data taken must be cut and pasted at the new location at the same time. Copy is simple, you make an exact copy. But this will result in two of the person. The original being the actual, and the clone being a clone. At the moment the clone is made, it is a totally new person. Even if it feels the same, it is on a separate track. Transfer implies that nothing is being lost, and nothing is being created. In order to transfer a human mind for example, the vessel the mind goes into must be empty. And the vessel it is leaving must be left empty. Otherwise you've just made a duplicate, or partial transfer that doesn't really accomplish anything. A really good way to understand this sort of break in the flow of consciousness is to think about sleep, and how that mechanically works. When you're old cells die, and new ones are made, are you still you? When you wake up in the morning, are you still you? Of course you are, because even when you are asleep, you are still there. That's just basic object permanence. All humans learn that when they are still babies The replacing of dead cells is of no consequence. We naturally understand that humans are more than the sum of their parts. That is why a corpse is not human, despite being made of the same stuff humans are made of. The discovery that plants and animals are multicellular does not redefine humanity. The brain is the metaphorical heart of all humans. Yes the heart may be the most important organ for our body to function, but our brain gives our functions purpose. Our mind is what separates us from machines. Emotion is not uniquely human by the way. Animals can feel. Humans do more than feel, they can think too. And that is why an unfeeling machine, can in fact be human if given a mind of it's own. Without feelings, both emotional and tactile, the mind has little to think about, but it can still think none the less. Alot of tree huggers don't understand this, so I feel like mentioning it.
Interesting perspective. My personal view is that we truly do have free will. From my religious perspective: I am a Christian, and I believe the Bible, which calls God a just Judge. I don’t think someone can be justly condemned for actions they couldn’t truly control, so for God to be just in His condemnations I think we must have free will. From my moral perspective: Whether we choose or not, your actions have consequences. In the eyes of the law and personal opinions you should be treated as if you have free will, because the only alternative is to treat a murder no different from a lighting strike- but if that were the case people would do more bad things with no consequences. From my personal philosophical perspective: There’s virtually no point in assuming we lack free will because it does nothing to change our choices. Either we have free will and we choose what we choose, or we don’t have free will but we still make the same choices. It’s impossible to determine it, and so it’s a moot point.
I think the coin toss is just a metaphor or a tool to help you grasp the concept. There are two copies that get created when you make the scan, and both of them think they are the real you. The you as you know right now is always going to stay where it is, the copy of you is also you but thinks it won the coin toss. It doesnt realize its existence only began at that very second it was copied because it contains all your memories and feelings. I dont think your consciousness ever gets transferred with a coin toss, I think the game puts you in other copies shoes to move the plot along. I do believe the copies are still sentient, but I also believe they are still separate from each other, since new experiences will completely shape them differently in the future
if i'm equally hungry and thirsty, but i'm standing at an equal distance from a location with food and location with water, how can i decide which to go to first if i don't have free will? how would i avoid standing in location until starvation? what about the uncertainty principle? do you think it's possible to map out a mind?
I came to the realisation about copy and paste etc a few years ago on my own and it blew my mind, then I started hearing about the whole "when you fall asleep, you die and a copy wakes up" stuff which is kinda weird but a cool thought, but it annoys me that humans think about this stuff😂
What I'm wrecking my brain over is this: What about Catherine being switched on and off over and over again? Isn't that like it's an entirely new being brought to life every time? Imagine taking out her inactive chip, copying the contents to another identical chip and plugging it back in. Would it make any difference?
Well in case of Catherine, she explains in the game and throughout, that every time she's is turned off and on (or to be specific - unplugged), she says hitting "Pause" and "Play". She doesn't reset or brought back to life again. She just stops existing. Like when editing a video, cutting and pasting the next section together creates a jump to the next video/scene. Or like when we blink - we get that brief darkness and then we see again. Its the same for her but she can't hear or see anything. She's paused when ejected from a console (she blinks) and when she's plugged back in, its like a play button (she can see again). Its why she's startled sometimes when you advance to new areas. Its until the end of the game when you realize she is shut down permanently because her stress levels get so high, and like the previous scans (the ones with Brandon), she "dies". Unless Simon has the original copy of Catherine, he can't bring her back. She's gone. She wasn't originally on the Ark and she never got scanned until the end. The Wau got a hold of her earliest scans and made her into an Ai. Its how the game starts when she doesn't know what happened to the Ark (even though its found out, she was with it at the very end of the game). Any chances of getting the Catherine you were traveling with back is gone since from the start of the game to the end of the game, Catherine didn't have any scans. The Wau is gone, so that makes it even harder to get the earliest scan of Catherine back as well. Plus being stuck at the bottom of the Abyss with no power and no means to go back out of the Abyss - Simon is stuck. As for Simon (if you leave your copy alive), he has no Omnitool. He is stuck in that room before you leave to the Abyss. With all the monster infested buildings and other robots going insane. (Besides April - The robot outside the quarantined building before the Abyss. She is surprisingly handling it very well thinking she is on the Ark already.) I hope that answers your question. I hope. C:
An important thing that most here seem to have missed, Simon is a poor clone. That's why he's always upset and why it's called a coin toss, there is no coin toss, he always wins and loses. I got that when Catherine first said it, Simon was irratating.
The only regret I really had upon finishing the game was in killing Simon 2. As Simon 3, strapped into a chair in the abyss of the ocean, having watched Catherine get crushed out of existence by the tremendous water pressure, screaming into the darkness and very aware of the battered state of my own pressure suit and how long this body could possibly last down here... I regretted not leaving behind a physical body, a version of me that could still live in the world, experience life in as close to a human way as would ever again be physically possible. Instead I chose to commit an act of 'mercy', which really just turned out to be hubris. I was Simon 3, the important one, going forward while this one, unimportant, stayed behind. I mattered, and not being me, not mattering, well that was obviously a fate worse than death. So I chose, on his behalf, death. Forgetting where I was going, what I was doing. The reason I needed the pressure suit in the first place. I had already been told it was a one way trip, but in my pride I refused to leave anything behind. *I* was going, why would a copy need to, or hell, want to stay behind? Wouldn't knowing he hadn't made it be too much to bear? Might as well put him out of his misery I still think about this today, years after finishing it. And I regret my choice. But I love that I made it
Very interesting. But I think it's important to understand that there is no coin toss. Each consciousness exists unto themselves. A new being is created after each copy.
My interpretation of the dilemma presented is that consciousness doesn't matter nearly as much as identity. It's about Self-Awareness, having the capacity to understand yourself and your relationship with others, that truly is important, extending from that, as long as my identity exists in some form I'm fine. So for the guy with the code we need, as long as I manage to get some version of his mind on the Arc, whatever we need to do to get the code is fine.
But those are connected. You do not view your copy as you, you view them as your copy. In other words, you got all your memories and personality traits on the Arc, but you didn't get there yourself.
@@ceu160193 my point is that the distinction between "Original" or "Copy" doesn't really matter in the long run. Both versions are "me", and both have an equal claim to being the Conscious Observer from our own perspective, in the same way the game ends with us seeing both the perspective of the Suit and the Arc. There's no actual coin flip when the mind is copied, despite the illusion as such with how the game switches who you control.
Now I realise something. I don't think it has any connections, but still: Soma is the drug used in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. This drug is used to relive people of anger and other feelings, making life with no spice. Not worth living...
Yeah know, I was always down with the idea of copying my consciousness onto a computer to live forever as a simulation, but now I’m realizing that my current consciousness wouldn’t just be on a computer, it would merely be a copy of myself. Still me in every conceivable way, but it isn’t. The idea of my consciousness being copied and having its own life separate from mine terrifies me greatly for some reason.
Bruh, there never was any "coin-toss", it's just a lie that Catherine told you in order to make you cooperate with her lame plan. This is not my interpretation, it's actually confirmed, there's no consciousness transfer, the game just makes you think there is.
Catherine never lied, she is just odd. The thing is, she thought he understod how it works because the technology was invented back when he died. So it's a old tech, a common knowledge on her perspective.
@@RpTheHotrod She is autistic, I believe. Btw, it seems to be that being emotionally cold makes you a lot more compatible with robot body. As Simon needed "alive" body(even while it was female body) to have correct perception of reality, while Catherine didn't become delusional, despite being trapped in omnitool.
You forgot to mention all the Simons which were used for the initial brain simulations used to find a suitable course of treatment for Simon 1. From the explanation given at the beginning by Dr Munchi I'm guessing there were at least hundreds of them.
Damn, pretty good review my man, and you have a pretty good ammount of subs idk why you have so little views on this. I gotta say I had some of your thoughts or feels while playing the game, though you certainly saw beyond what I saw, there's details that perhaps I didn't even consider, like when you choose the files for the ARK because they don't fit. Most of those aren't explained aside from their file names. I didn't really pay thaaat much attention to it, but when you think that you're pretty much creating the world that you and all the others are going to live in for years is a pretty daunting feeling tbh
The game didn't really shock me as much because i was already aware of the whole shenanigans from another game, better yet, a trilogy, the Nonary Games, its a visual novel with puzzles that explores topics such as the one presented on Soma and other sci fi stuff, like the what would happen in an actual schrodinger's cat, time travel and body swapping. So from the very moment i suspected Simon was some sort of robot, i knew what the game was going for. In the topic of the first Simon dying from brain damage, can we really assume that? From what we can see, the diagnostic method was a success, otherwise Simon's consciouness wouldnt be able to go from 2015 to the future like that, maybe the doctor got what he wanted from the experiment, of course the transfer was an unexpected result, but it was only collateral, the process could have still worked. Another thing, in the topic of winning the coin toss ( in which i assume is a metaphor for the luck of that version of Simon, and not the process itself) can we really say that suffering a drastic change like going to the future were you don't know anyone ( something that Simon comments on numerous times) in an apocalyptic scenario, with no chance of happiness is better than dying with at least some kind of peace on 2015? On the same topic, dive suit and pressure suit essentially have the same fate, dying alone, immediately for dive suit Simon if you choose to, but their fate is dying alone, one abandoned by his otherself, the other one suffering in the dark from the electric power loss. And still can we say that Simon 4 really had a happy ending knowing that 2 of his self were doomed so that he could reach the Ark, another question, can we expect Simon 4 to live peacefully knowing the fate of Earth and remembering everything he witnessed in that Sub Aquatic Hell?
There is no coin toss. It's copy + paste. The old Simon always stays himself and a new one spawns from nowhere, thinking it made a transfer from an old body when in fact it's only 1 second old. We were Simon 3.0 the entire time. What happened before didn't really happen to us. It was just the memories he and we were implanted with during our creation. The moment the screen flashes and we teleport to the new body is our first moment of existance.
The problem with your interpretation is your definition of existance. In your definition existance is inseperably coupled to a vessel and not only the accumulation of information that is reseived and proccesed by your consciousness. I see no good reason why this would be the case.
Just a thought experiment for you: Just imagine you could cut out small parts of your brain and replace them with computer parts that work just the same and have the exact same information implanted. Now you slowly change part after part untill you replaced your hole brain. At what point did you stop existing? Keep in mind that you feel just the same as before after the replacement.
That is the message that Catherine was trying to tell Simon/you. Having Simon's/your conscience transferred into the copy of Simon/you, cannot & will not happen because it is a copying. It's own being. Separate, but similar to you. It's like having a mirror being put up to you then the mirror reflection walks away on their own, since it's it's own separate being now and you are wondering why you're still staring at that mirror instead of having the point of view of that reflection. The failure of Simon to understand & acknowledge this concept, is what caused Simon to lash out & lie to himself that Catherine lied to him. When, in fact, she told him, in more ways than one what they were doing and how it works. "The coin toss" idea was a reductionist analogy to try & help Simon/you understand that. It wasn't meant to be taken literally. This inability of Simon to acknowledge/understand this concept is what doomed him to the bottom of the abyss of his own isolation. Alone. Instead of using his last moments with Catherine to say "We did it. We gave hope & a future to the last of human existence"
@@Darkota122 I don't think anyone has a good answer for this thought experiment. Luckily the SOMA scenario is more clean cut, and my answer stands. To me, the SOMA scenario proves the concept of falsified memories better than anything else. Sure, the same could apply to us every night when we go to sleep. What if we die every time we lose consciousness and someone else wakes up the next day? What if we die every time we blink? I guess there is a case for that too, if we think the past is an illusion, but if you ask me that's just solipsism, and that gets us nowhere. But in short, it's not I think therefore I am, it's really just I think I think, therefore therefore.
@@Gurrehable i agree that there is currently no real use for thought like this in our real world. But I don't get how you define existence or consciousness. A lot of people have the idea of a soul linked to the body and you mind that defines you. But this concept is not convincing to me and I guess it's not convincing to you aswell. One could argue that existence is connected to our physical body. But then again our body is changing replacing cells to a point where I don't have any cells left from my body 10 years ago. Yet I would still consider this to be me with my memories dessisions etc.
So to me the only thing that is really making me me is the information, memories and the way these are connected in my head. If one could replicate that he would really replicate me.
Since you disagree with my last sentence I would like to know what part of existence cannot be copied and why it is essential to you. :)
That's debatable. Humans are living versions of the ship of Thesus. Is the ship the same ship if you replace 10% of its parts? What about 50%? 99%? at what point is the ship no longer the same ship? As humans, our cells are constantly dying and being replaced. The only thing that remains is the "stream of consciousness". The human that went to sleep last night is arguably not the same human that woke up this morning. It is absolutely a coin toss.
Something to note, from a computer science perspective: Cut and paste is copy-paste, it just deletes the original file.
Based on what he said, I think he understood that.
Many won't know that though, so thank you for being informative. :)
And further, deleting isn't an active process. A deleted file is simply marked by the system as being available for overwriting.
A deleted file on your PC can exist whole or in part for a long long time, and if that file is a person the thought of a mind laying dormant likely being slowly destroyed by new data is a whole level of disturbing.
From thebdatas perspective the difference probably lies not in if the data is intact so much as is the program that is their mind being actively run after the paste.
Off is likely as good as dead, and arguably even if the data is retrieved and program run at a later date the break in continuity means that you have yet another new version of that mind.
Dude stop making the existential horror even worse for me, imagine the pain the partially 'deleted' individual would feel as they gradually lose their mind is unbearable
There was this episode of old tv show outer limits. It dealt with teleportation. Teleportee went to machine but accidental power outage happened.
So he was told to wait a while for the fix till next day or so.
During his waiting period he found out he was transported alright. Yet now he was asked to step into the teleporter again.
Not necessarily true. I think most modern systems merely change the "location" data on a file while leaving the file itself untouched, so long as you're moving them from one folder to another on the same partition of the same drive.
But yeah that's absolutely true whenever you're moving a file from, say, a hard drive to a USB stick, etc. So if you meant that, you were completely right.
I think it's inappropriate to use "chance" here. The thing is, everyone wins the coin toss. What matters is from what perspective we as a player are experiencing it.
The ending is essentially the same event as when you upload yourself to Pressure Suit Simon 3. The ending hits harder when you realize that this happened to all the previous Simons as well.
Oh, and yeah, SOMA gave me existential crisis. One of the best games ever made in my opinion.
@@manart6506
Yes, you're right. From "yours" perspective you are always losing the coin toss. From "their" perspective it's always a transition. But yeah, it's all happening at the same time.
While technically true that there's no chance involved, it sort of _feels_ like there is: you sit down in the chair to be scanned, and then you're either still in the chair or in a new body. Of course there's no "either" since both happen, but for the you before the scan it feels like a coin flip: you expect to perceive only one of these outcomes and you don't know which, and indeed after the scan you'll perceive only one of these outcomes, except there's now two "you"s, one for each outcome. You continue on in a new body _and_ you're left behind.
Finally a human that understand! There is no reason for your consciousness to stop existing in the old body, but there is also another consciousness that thinks that it was it that existed in that body moments ago. And it also totally thinks that it is you. From an outer perspective it has just appeared, but from it's own it has all the same backstory as the original one. So it IS the same. Rather hard to explain... The thing is, at this moment you think that you exist. The new consciousness does exactly the same. So if there is no difference in the very moment, just 1 consciousness before and 2 consciousnesses after, why do you think that you will be in the first body? In reality you must equally be in both of them at the same time. In this case a copy IS the same as original. So the coin toss just always give you both outcomes. You are the same AND you are the new. Only these two you begin to see different things from now on.
upd. Maybe there is a better way to put it... You are the person you are, therefore there is a possibility to BE you. If you consider your copy as also conscious, there should be a possibility to BE him. Because being conscious effectively meens BEING someone. So as you can be someone who has just woke up and remember his life of yesterday, you must also be able to be someone who has just woke up in another body. Because there must be SOMEONE who wakes up in that new body. So it is possible to "win" the coin toss, it's not just a "you always lose, your copy wins" situation.
@@manart6506 "there is only you and there is a new person who is a clone of you". You seem very attached to the particular piece of hardware you're running on, which is up to you but really only Simon 1 has any special claim there and he wasn't really even part of the main events of SOMA. I consider "me" to be my mind, the software running in the moist computer that's inside the skull of my body. If you copy my mind to new hardware, that copy is a mind that at the moment of copying is identical to me, and therefore the copy _is me_ ... just another me (who will slowly become less and less "me" but that's equally true from his perspective).
@@manart6506 I don't think anyone is contesting that it sucks pretty hard for those left behind.
Even with the old mic, this is some of the best content ever produced.
I agree wholeheartedly. It's incredible that this amazing video (and many other inhis backlog) only has *8,500 views* ffs!
@Scarsdale Vibe BRUH
What are you talking about? The dude took the freaking coin toss seriously o.O Not only was it made up in the game, but it also makes zero sense..
"You didn't chose to watch this video, you were always going to watch it."
Oh bet? *closes tab*
And now, your life experiences, background and other stuff have determined that you would respond to such a factoid confrontationally, deciding to shut it out and write a mildly humorous comment.
Leadhead obviously hasn't studied much actual philosophy, causal determinism is so last-century.
Quantum Indeterminism , and Eastern ontological indeterminisim that evolves out of spontaneity is what's in these days.
@@ChrisJones-rd4wb seeing how their pfp is the same as other non comments im sure its just a child or a tired stale attempt at humor. Maybe its even s t o l e n
@@cheezburgrproduction Ah yes, the most intellectually stimulating form of critique, ad hominems based on profile picture.
No, actully, im a phliosophy student at a university, much worse than your average epic redditor.
I was just saying that traditional hard determinism has been dead for a long time.
Determinism asserts that the universe is transparent, knowable, and conforms strictly too traditional forms of cause in effect.
This phliosophy died with positivisim in the early 1900's, when the heisenburg uncertainty principal threw a wrench into the idea of being able too "know everything about a specific moment", and genaral quantum theory threw a wrench into the idea that cause-and-effect is non-probabilistic.
It's an argument against determinism, but not necessarily for free will.
The last part of my statement "Eastern ontological indeterminisim" is just my description of the taoist approach too free will.
I was just saying that based off their view that the present (aka the "spontaneous"), superceeds all other reality, both ontologically, and epistemologically, one could quite easily preserve free will.
This is argument has been growing in popularity ever since postmodern psudo-eastern philosophy took over.
Omg the replies people posted for this comment are just mind boggling. These people obviously take themselves too seriously 😂😂😂 Yoshia, keep doing what you’re doing.
I think there's one thing you missed. Something absolutely vital: The coin toss is a lie. There is no coin toss. If you survive after being copied, then you still exist as you. Not in the new body. This is just a concept to make the game seem more dramatic.
Starham2000 honestly I always thought it was the AI girl lying to the protagonist, since he’s not the smartest and wouldn’t know it’s impossible for his consciousness to “transfer” in a copy and paste.
@@bungobogus8132 That's exactly what was happening. It's explained in the ending.
Kinda yes and no... There is no reason for your consciousness to stop existing in the old body, but there is also another consciousness that thinks that it was it that existed in that body moments ago. And it also totally thinks that it is you. From an outer perspective it has just appeared, but from it's own it has all the same backstory as the original one. So it IS the same. Rather hard to explain... The thing is, at this moment you think that you exist. The new consciousness does exactly the same. So if there is no difference in the very moment, just 1 consciousness before and 2 consciousnesses after, why do you think that you will be in the first body? In reality you must equally be in both of them at the same time. In this case a copy IS the same as original. So the coin toss just always give you both outcomes. You are the same AND you are the new. Only these two you begin to see different things from now on.
upd. Maybe there is a better way to put it... You are the person you are, therefore there is a possibility to BE you. If you consider your copy as also conscious, there should be a possibility to BE him. Because being conscious effectively meens BEING someone. So as you can be someone who has just woke up and remember his life of yesterday, you must also be able to be someone who has just woke up in another body. Because there must be SOMEONE who wakes up in that new body. So it is possible to "win" the coin toss, it's not just a "you always lose, your copy wins" situation.
@@AbsoluteHuman it's the continuity of consciousness! If Everytime you die your consciousness is transferred to a universe where you DIDN'T die then you would be dead in one continuity, stopping that line, or you would be ALIVE in another! In this there is a fork off and it's a toss up on whether you get to perceive the world through the new copy, who is the exact same as your current state of mind prior to realization, or the elder copy, who has not realized their fate
the straight up copying and having it be impossible to transfer is indeed a core part of the game.
it goes even into more detail about it in the part, where the people talk about killing themselves after they transferred their consciousness. this killing after the copying being the full transfer then in a way. them being doubled and then one of the 2 getting removed.
very fascinating part of the game, pity it wasn't addressed in the video.
The fact that I still think about this game constantly, over 5 years later, is a testament to how fantastic it is. This is a kind of horror that sticks with you, a kind of horror you will never forget.
K. Thea Haha, good question, Pendleton was the original concept name for the character of Wheatley from Portal.
I've always said (and unfortunately, will probably always say) SOMA is massively underrated and overlooked. It deserves the same amount of attention and praise that Firewatch receives.
So being that SOMA is my absolute favorite game of all time, I should maybe check out firewatch?
@@FeathersPryx yes absolutely, another story that reflects on human behavior and sticks with you years after you've played the game...
@@eduardoalves7631 yessss I found my best game!
@@eduardoalves7631 Really? Soma hit so much more harder than Firewatch to me.
This is a great video. Though I personally believe the entire 'coin toss' premise was a lie Catherine told Simon to get you to help her launch the Ark, like how you manipulate the crew member to get the password.
Did you spare or destroy the WAU? Basically all the friends I've talked about the game with thought there wasn't a choice when you can literally just walk past it and then that big asshole gets eaten by the shark.
It's a squid but yeah...
I killed the WAU but let everything else live. well not quite, I did kill the last living human, but only because she clearly wanted that. as for the other brain scans and simon 2 I thought it was possible, however unlikely that they might come out of that nightmare in some other fashion. even if it was something like being discovered and brought back by aliens a million years later. Let em have their longshot.
I mercykilled most everyone I came across, as existence from them was nothing more than waiting for entropy to make their continued functioning impossible at the bottom of the sea of a maimed planet. I also poisoned WAU because it had gone amok, leaving behind twisted mockeries of life and trapping the last living humans in torment.
Sometimes death is preferable to continued existence, especially since there is no hope of succor in the depths, except the inevitable slow waiting for entropy.
The woman in the tunnel was alone in a forgotten corner of Epsilon.
The robot outside Theta was merely a copy in mild discomfort repeating the same patterns over and over again.
Robin was a copy stuck at the gates of an overrun facility.
Simon 2 was stuck in an overrun facility with no way of making it back, especially since Simon 3 kept the omnitool. He would be abandoned by Catherine and left alone to face the monsters and his only ways of proceeding would've involved climbing the scaffolding at Omicron or jumping into the abyss and being crushed.
Hot take: You always lose the coin toss. You’re always the one left behind. The one who wins the coin toss is just an entirely new person who’s had all your memories imposed onto them.
That’s literally the story why does this have likes
@@biker3982 I haven't played the game, my only exposure to it is this video, so I'm actually pretty happy I was able to get the point just from that.
Well it helped me, I never realized that.
That's what I thought. Even if the copy is a perfect scan of you, your "perspective" can never leave this body.
@@biker3982 some people are confused about what the coin toss means. It's cope, basically. Your "experience" unique to you will always be left behind, it's the equivalent of living a real life coin toss into what kind of individual you're born as: healthy, rich, poor, ill, etc. That decision was set in stone before you were even born.
I imagine that after Simon3 gets done screaming alone in the dark at the bottom of the ocean, he makes his way back up, probably to the surface with Catherine. I don't think Catherine abandoned him or died or anything, she just got disconnected because the area she's plugged into lost power.
In my playthrough I only killed the first robo person I encountered, only because he was essentially stuck in an endless loop of suffering. I didn't even kill the WAU, imo its probably the next and only form of sustainable existence on the doomed earth of soma.
Very few people I've been able to find that have played/talk about Soma rarely if ever bring up the topic of the "Mind Coral" which is apparently the name of that stuff Simon3 was trapped in that caused him to have dreams/hallucinations. For me it raises more questions than the existentialism stuff.
What is that stuff? How did it come to be? Is that split headed guy in control of it? As Simon wanders through that area we can see actual human beings essentially plugged into that shit and unable to get out of it, so how did simon escape? Is it like its own biological version of Catherine's simulation? Why can Simon can hear the humans speaking/muttering in his head while their plugged into the mind coral?
The way I understand it is that the mind coral is some sort of mutation created by the WAU (on purpose or not) and lives as a separate species in the game. I doubt that Akers has any control over it. More likely he's madness from consuming structure gel resulted in him believing that WAU is some sort of god and the coral is it's gift for humanity to "live on" (like the WAU does by many different means).
If I'm going to write Soma 2, I'll set it in a world where Simon and the cyborgs scratched out a place to un-live and a simulated world the PC will explore; the PC will be an AI sent back to check if Earth is habitable
Just wanna mention that it's confirmed that Catherine's cortex chip got completely fried at the end.
My headcanon is that simon climbed back up to delta, looted a functioning omnitool from one of the many corpses lying around pathos II, and got to work with his original copy to find a suitable body to plug catherine's cortex chip in. And they fuckin' took the place over by kicking other wau monsters asses because simon 3's literally in a suit of power armor.
...That or the dunbat comes and kills them all cause he wants revenge against catherine for turning him into a submarine.
@@Mae_Dastardly no way he comes back to the climber without an ample supply of light poles on Phi/Omega. Remember the part with a floodlight robot?
When I first played the game, the ending had me in literal tears as I sat late at night in front of my PC crying, thinking of Simon 3's continued existence on earth and how he's sitting alone on earth, no-one to talk to, everyone else is dead or gone insane. This game fucked me up man.
If you didn't kill Simon-2 then he'd be able to go back to him and chill.
@@luciusartoriusdante No he can't; the Abyssal Climber can't be raised from the bottom. It has to be called back from the top. The trip to the Abyss was a one-way ticket.
@@russelljackson2818 but hr could always kill himself
I have to say, Simon as a Protagonist was a character that I got into in a way, I never have before in any other game
other Frictional titles, protagonists always maintained a slight detachment from their environment (mostly due to their complete lack of present speech), but playing as Simon and being able to witness everything through his eyes, and only his eyes , with those that observe you playing as him commenting your actions really made me find and build his character and assume it as my own while playing,
so of course, I felt this bittersweet feeling of regret when the screen faded black and the final conversation with your only friend ended in insults and banter
and when the last Simon then awakes in the arc, I felt detached from him, as if I was stuck there too on the bottom of the ocean and was merely observing from afar...
this was a bit melodramatic, but I hope I managed to make some sense with this
The "twist" of being a robot was kind of similar to the clone "twist" in the movie Moon.
You could work it out and feel clever from the trailers but the whole story is far weirder.
At least with clone, you have some kind of physical link towards "original" - your genetics. In Soma, literally only thing connecting you to previous version of Simon is memories - your new body isn't even male, it's dead female body with robotic chip to store your memories in.
@@ceu160193 and your thought and free will. You’re body and genetics are far less important than you are.
@@feartheghus They partially define what you are, however. In game, people put inside robots go crazy and lose any sense of reality, because biological part of what is considered "you" is suddenly gone. Consciousness is partially shaped by "hardware" it operates on, so only someone like Catherine with her specific mental issues can remain somewhat stable for a while in robotic body without going delusional.
Loved this game! Amongst other things, the encounter and full conversation with Karl was brilliant. Karl, who utterly believes he is "human" when clearly not even gets pissed about about Simon's questions about his current state. Then later you realise you are just like Karl. Looking back at that conversation from that moment of realisation was just brilliant because even Simon was even in denial about what he really was. Karl trying to convince Simon he's a real human, while Simon has no clue he himself is not. This whole game is a psychological masterpiece.
I was initially horrified by Soma's brutally empty-feeling (yet excellent, nonetheless) ending- however, shortly after watching that tearjerker of an ending (I watched John Wolfe"s playthrough, rather than playing it myself)I read a comment that made me feel a lot more hopeful for the ultimate fate of the various human/robot chimeras stuck in poor Simon's shoes. Now, granted, the commentor's point only stands for playthroughs in which you _don't_ kill the WAU, but it was essentially this: even though creatures like Simon are suffering immensely in the short term (the "relative" short term, that is, seeing as the trial period could take the passing of any horrifyingly indeterminate span of years, decades... hell, millennia?) , the WAU is still _technically_ doing as fine a job as it reasonably can in accomplishing its primary function of preserving humanity in the worst scenario imaginable. While there are naturally going to be countless abhorrent Frankenstein monsters produced by an AI in its position because the only way for it to really learn what works is through an endless battery of trials. However, as we can see with Simon, it _is_ creating "humans" capable of helping to correct the course (e.g. the way Simon saves Catherine from being trapped in a useless body), and moreover "humans" capable of being relatively "happy" in a proper environment. So in light of that mind-bending revelation, the best hope for a "happy" ending would probably be to let the WAU continue its experimentation until it manages to piece together a colony of able-bodied machines akin to Simon who can keep each other company and (assuming the inevitability of "Simon" shells eventually being fitted with the consciousnesses of scientists like Catherine) actually assist it in creating proper "humans"- likely even eventually having the capacity among them to patch the "bugs" in the WAU's programming driving it to create any more half-baked monsters.
Don't you want to see what kind of un-life will Simon, the WAU and the cyborgs build in the future?
Problem with that is that Simon 2 and 3 were built out of corpses. Those decompose. WAU was not capable of planning ahead, it could only respond to current events.
WAU's attempts at prolonging human life lacked all humanity, and it's likely any "human" existence further down the line would've had an equal lack of humanity. Well, the methods of getting there would definitely be inhuman.
Interesting. Honestly my perspective on it is that we all have free will, but the notion of cause and effect come into play aswell. It's the balance we call reality. Simply put; we all have free will, doesn't mean any one of us are special.
Yet there's even a relevant difference in the terms we use to describe molecules, and that of microbes. Honestly the way wau works seems to be the same way all life came to be, trials and errors.
Doesn't mean there isn't something special about existence & contionous itself, it's amazing. My (&your) brain, along with the main nervous system basically looks like a weird mix between the face hugger from alien, but also all the tentacle like appendages of the angler fish.
Your skeleton, mustles and organs are ment to sustain it. Basically we're all meatbots, but we do have a choice. Even when it seems like we don't, that's how mutations &cancers happen (in a very simplified phrasing mind you).
Sorry for the tangent, &thank you to anyone who even opens this comment in its entirety. :)
You believe in free will?
Then answer this question: What _is_ free will? What does that actually mean? If you can't answer me, then do you really even believe in it, since you don't even know what it is? Because if you do know, then you can explain it.
@@theuncalledfor free will is simply the ability to choose to do something on a moment to moment basis. Nothing more. These micro choices lead you to where you end up in life though, or to an end of your life, if you so choose. So yes free will exists, because without it, humans could not change their own lives. Example: You have 2 poor people. One chooses to create games with their old laptop, enough to build a following and income stream that eventually lands them an upper middle class life. The other person chooses to do nothing, their life remains poor. The outcomes are easily interchangeable, ONLY IF those people made opposite CHOICES.
Arguing against free will is like arguing we are in a simulation with permaters to make sure we never find out, it doesnt matter if you are or arent right because you will never know.
@@bloodofacacia
I was asking for a specific person's definition, and that person was not you. Your answer is fundamentally incapable of answering my question properly, unless you know Msmeliss ox personally and know exactly what her answer would be.
As for your own answer, I find that to be a very questionable definition, unless you have a strange definition of what a "choice" is. The way I see it, by your definition, even a simple computer program can have "free will".
Or heck, even a pocket calculator! You input the numbers and operators for the calculation you want done, and it _chooses_ the correct number as an answer.
If you want to argue that that's not a "choice", you have to explain what a "choice" is to you.
@@theuncalledfor
Does the past cause the present? or does the present cause the past?
Imagine you have a small vessel moving forward through water, ahead of it is flat, and behind it is the wake.
Does the wake of a ship cause the ship too move?
This is free will, as explained by eastern philosophers.
If you want more depth, you should check out here:
ruclips.net/video/G4j6cUwCRmI/видео.html
In my mind Simon 3 was aware of the sacrifice he was about to make.
Seeing him panic and go in rage really upset me and made me feel so sad for him.
It's hard to accept, that only your copy is going to be saved. Not original you.
Imagine, that you are destined to die, but your legacy is basically you, as it has all traits original "you" had. Except it's not actually you, it's just a copy, that gets to live on, while you would be left behind.
Yes, I felt the same way for him. I thought it would have been a mercy if Catherine had figured out a way to cut HIS power immediately after the ARK was launched. Like... "you'll lose consciousness here and you'll wake up on the ARK". of course, he'd "lose consciousness" and die... but his ARK copy would wake up thinking "yeah, that wasn't so bad" etc. Catherine, of course, knows that her Original was bludgeoned to death with a wrench and also knows that the first Catherine Scan that ultimately got the ARK launched was likely now switched "off" forever under the sea. PLUS anyway we slice it, is anyone talking about fact that there are likely two Catherines on the ARK?
@@ceu160193 that’s what having children is like, to an extent. That’s also just life, you’re gonna die dude. There is also so much for you and your fellow survivors to do in real life to save life in the universe.
@@ChronoGamerOne why two Catherine’s on the ark?
@@feartheghus Because she was scanned twice - first as human, second as our "door opening tool".
Your comment on free will is how I managed to forgive someone for murdering a friend.
Found out his childhood was absolute hell on Earth, and would have led any broken soul to utter insanity.
Someone else had an idea of what the brain scan is like. Mark Sarang's theory was simple. If you die the moment the scan takes place, or shortly after, then you can only be the remaining you. The you inside the ark. He viewed human consciousness as an entity that transcends a physical body and that idea spread to other crew members who took part in this idea. You actually meet the brain scan of one of his followers, Robin Bass. She tells Simon that she took the scan and then she thinks she killed her self. She doesn't remember that part. Because she planned to kill her self after the scan. If you go into her room you find a mess of blood and a suicide note. “We're all dying anyway. I'm all in. I put my faith in Sarang and the continuity.”
Now that i am thinking about it, there is no coin toss. It's just a copy and paste. There is no you. Just data and a program that processes that data the same way the brain would. You would still be the human left behind. In a computer science perspective, cut and past is just copy and past with the extra step of deleting the original file. In any other situation, i would take it well. Considering all life on the surface is gone, and any survivors of the human race would either be in orbit, trapped in sealed bunkers, or under the sea like Pathos II and i didn't have any other reason to be alive... going out like Mark wouldn't be so bad.
The Continuity wasn't so much a POV change, as some have understood it. It's a "purity" measure. Once you're scanned, the template is formed from that exact moment and it lives on in the ARK. You continue to persist in the real world and these different experiences start causing a divergence between you and the "you" in the ARK.
Sarang had the idea that it is desirable to eliminate this divergence by killing the self, so that the self in the ARK has no difference to you at the moment of your death.
Seeing as that existence is its own separate thing to you to begin with, what's the point? Maintaining some metaphysical concept of oneself as pure as possible for all time? Instead of "template of XYZ saved at DDMMYYYY" the ARK copy would be the direct continuation of the last memories of the person, since the original body is no longer in a position to create new ones?
@@Tounushi After some time thinking about it, i got a new plan when it comes to the brain scan. I would take the scan and go with my personal project i would call Empyrean. The idea is simple, create a set of programs and facilities to assists the brain scan in a dead world. Programs like a form of Cut and Paste that will allow for the transfer of the scan into a new form. Install a back up of a brain scan into a new form in the event of the original's non-functionality. Etc. I would still go on doing whatever i can to help this project along with my brain scan copy. Advancing the project till a more natural death occurs. End goal being my scan gets out of pathos II and begin the project of building a new. What's the point? Well, what's the point of minecraft? Probably won't save the species, but a new synthetic life based on the human brain... well that's good enough for me.
I think the coin toss thing was never real.
Our POV just moved from new person to new person, ultimately dying, or being left behind.
it wasn't the dark that gave us pause at night, lurking beyond the light of the campfire. it wasn't the dark that scared us, no the dark never did anything to warrant fear, but it was the things unknowable beyond its veil that terrified us, what lies beyond in the black starlit ocean of our nightmares.
I remember watching a lets play of this and thought it was good. Though at the time, I was too young to recognize the message behind it. Later in my life I thought about how teleportation would be an abomination. Realistically teleportation wouldn't be someone being instantly transported from one place to another. At least, not without causing that person to have a complete brain wipe and effectively causing a permanent coma. In reality for it to work, you would need it to copy and paste what is being transported, and destroying what was going through. This would mean that to teleport effectively, you would literally be killing yourself and making a clone of yourself with your memories somewhere else.
Eh but you don't remember it, you're your memories and shit
@@morthul5514 still tho it's not *you*, it's not the body you had and trained as a kid it's just a copy
It reminds me of an important point in The Prestige, if you have seen the film, you can see the similarities.
I'd say calling it a coin toss is wrong. When Simon 2 copies a copy of his consciousness into the pressure suit (Simon 3), Simon 2 should have already known that he would have been left behind. The copy-paste leaves the first (Simon 2) behind.
So essentially when you brain-scan yourself you know which one you're going to be, the one you already were. Likewise, the new instance should already know he's the new instance, he's the copy.
If I remember correctly the coin toss analogy only exists because Simon just doesn't understand how the brain-scanning works, thus he fools himself with the most comfortable answer "It's a coinflip."
This is the limitation of SOMA being a game.
This is how it works yep. I’m disappointed the reviewer seems to think that its somehow different than what you expressed when the game demonstrates your answer to the player, rather clearly in my opinion. There’s no transfer of consciousness. A replica of elvis’ guitar isn’t the same as elvis’ guitar. Each Simon is a replica of the last. The guitar can carry all the marks and scratches of the original but its not the same thing.
The coin toss isn't in if it transfers. Its if you are the transfer.
@@derekmensch3601 I disagree. There is not transfer to speak of. It's a copy paste. With perfect information you should know you're the copy or the original.
@@TheGlenn8 I mean but whether or not you are the copy of the consciousness that transers or not is the coin toss in that moment. You don't know until your eyes open.
"Like every other human, i think alot"
*like some humans
like few humans
@@randobudgetgaming like a small amount of humans
@@vexedsmurf7871 Humans think?
@@vexedsmurf7871 like rare humans
Maybe I misunderstand what you mean, but there is no coin toss. There is no possible scenario where Simon's dive suit mind gets transferred to the pressure suit etc.
Well, the Simon we play as definitely gets transferred to the dive suit, but we could've just as easily been the dive suit Simon that gets left behind. (Though it wouldn't have made for a good story)
Just like how we could've just as easily been the human Simon who dies of brain damage months after the scan. We happened to be on the side of the 'coin toss' that stayed in a human body.
Logically, it's probably not a coin toss scenario, but since we don't yet understand the nature of consciousness, the coin toss logic is the best thing we have to compare it to.
That's not the case. Every transfer of bodies in the game is copy and paste, not cut and paste. I don't remember if the coin toss is an idea that Catherine uses to explain the situation to Simon but he fails to understand, or if she fools him so he goes along with her plan, but there was never any chance of Simon's consciousness inside the robot bodies transferring to the Ark. That's one of the many tragedies of the situation.
Essentially, we only ever experience what happens to the newly created consciousness of Simon 3 and the previous events should be seen as memories implemented inside that body (apart from the after credits scene on the Ark, which does admittedly make it a bit confusing).
Yeah, there are no cut and pastes. I just meant that until we find ourselves in the pressure suit body, we had no way of telling if we were Simon 2 or 3. In hindsight, we know that we were always Simon 3, but up until the transfer from 2 to 3, we couldn't possibly know which one we were.
Edit: and I think it was actually Simon who compared the conciousness transfer to a coin toss. It was during the climber descent if I remember correctly
Leadhead We are the divesuit Simon, that constant does not change simply because we are now inhabiting a different body. So in a sense we weren’t choosing to kill another Simon ( because we too possess that same experiences ) we chose to literally kill ourself. Or if you prefer a slightly, not up to date version.
I also made the decision to kill Divesuit Simon however, rationalising it as some form of compassion. As without Catherine or a functioning multi-tool, I ( Divesuit Simon ) was doomed, and I was leaving him/me in an impossible situation. The best case scenario is the WAO got a hold of him, but that path too is madness.
Pressure Suit Simon got the better end of the deal, sure he is in the abyss alone, but he probably won’t last very long. The Arc, for ever how long it lasts will be a utopia, but I am confident they are on a “Rapture” collision course. Undying, cyclical atrocities and horror, provided the lights don’t go out first.
It blows my mind how little people know about both this game and your channel.
I watched the entire walkthrough of Markplier (when he was normal) a long time ago, maybe when he uploaded it and played the game last year. Its very underratrd game but very deep and meaningful.
There is no coin-toss in play here, it just copy and paste your memory into the machine.
The coin toss thing is just a point of view thing. There is no coin toss, but from the perspective of the individual, it feels like a coin toss...you either are the original or the copy, and trying to rationalize it by saying, "Here I am, about to press a button, so I'm clearly the original" doesn't work because even the copy "experienced" that same moment of getting ready to press the copy button.
At 5:00 you have the completely wrong idea. There is no "stream of consciousness", there is no "coin toss". These are lies you are being told so that your player character will continue doing what needs to be done. For the purposes of storytelling, you (the PLAYER) follow a particular stream of consciousness, but this is a broken chain all the way down.
SOMA's plot reminds me of Christopher Nolan's The Prestige
The coin toss is simple. There are now two simons. One can continue one cannot. One wins, and one loses. The other side of the coin doesn't dissappear. The Simon we play as won twice before losing once.
Apart from you not understanding the whole " coin toss " thing is just comforting lie for Simon made by Cath, this whole video was such a good experience. From your analysation of the game, your thoughts on it, to revealing some of the interesting things about you and your character. I really enjoyed it.
This is better than most analysis of Soma on youtube. Great work
There is no chance here, Leadhead, All of these are separate experiences that did exist, no matter how you spin it, you didnt win a coin toss to put you into Simon 3, this game just follows the important Simon, Simon 2 ceased importance when Simon 3 woke up. You were still Simon 2, but Simon 2 wasn't still you, you had all the memories of Simon 1 and 2, this game asks the question of "if we take a person's personality and memories and put them in a new body, are they still the same person?" The game is more like if you were watching back the memories of whichever Simon you were at the end of the game, that Simon has no clue what happened to the other Simons, unless he made it happen to them. Simon remembers which Simon he was because this already happened, even if it's not being told from that perspective.
the guy you woke up 7 times for the code didnt have a 7 in 10 chance to be that guy, all 7 of them woke up and had a separate experience that didnt affect the others, but all of those experiences happened without a matter of "chance"
These kinds of existential / philosophical matters open my mind but also leave me with a sense of dread:
I'm a man stuck in the past. In that past, there's a very sweet girl who I love extremely much. She likes silly jokes (on the level of dad-jokes "hi hungry I'm dad"), she's very innocent (seeing me shirtless was a level of intimacy she hadn't had before), and she's sweet to the point where she uses a lot of diminutives. I'm happy and I wake up happy and go to sleep happy.
But that's the past. It was three years ago (we were both 21), and she has since moved on. I don't know to what extent, but when we last spoke a couple months ago and told her that I still felt for her, she told me she'd rather keep the distance (at least for now). Thus, I am not happy in the present. I feel completely alone, and I can't develop feelings for other women. As such, my hopes and dreams seem unattainable, and no matter how positive I am on the exterior, on the interior I feel empty.
Seeing how I'm stuck, is my life not better being lived in the past? What makes my present self more valuable my past self? Why should I not keep living in the past via memories as if in a simulation?
I feel for you chief. But not every relationship is worth it. If you can get past that unfortunate fact, you'll eventually get past living in the past. Even though the present might suck, the future is great because it can be whatever you want it to be.
@@owenstephens3389 And yet to make of the future what you want it to be, you gotta make an investment in the present. And man, I have trouble thinking the future can really be what I want it to be. I doubt I may find someone like that again. So it's hard to make that present investment.
Either way, thanks for the enlightenment, brother.
Just a note to everyone who seems a bit puzzled and claiming there is no coin toss, the coin toss isn't to determine who ends up where; you're already the person who you are, that's true. There's no way to transfer consciousness like SOMA explains. The coin toss refers to who you find out you really are, which stream of consciousness you end up being. At the beginning, Simon 3 fully believes he is Simon 1, so when he got scanned, there was a 50% chance that he was not actually Simon 1, but actually Simon 3 believing he was Simon 1. All the memories are in place, the reason you get to play through them in SOMA is because there's no other way to get the player to have memories about things that never happened.
or the switching actually happens because it would make for a very boring game if you just got into a chair, made the scan and got up and lived the rest of your life...
@@chrisakaschulbus4903 There is no switching. This is established in SOMA. :L
@@Its_just_me_man Your in game perspective switching, 4head.
I still think about this coin toss stuff every once in a while,
i still have no idea what exactly is meant by the coin toss... i always saw it as me getting in a chair, the scan happening and me getting out of the chair.
the switching is only for storytelling and gameplay. i couldn't care less about my mind getting uploaded to the arc, since i know that it will be a copy of me living/existing there.
the copy will always think that it "won the coin toss"... i never saw this as complicated as many discussions make it out to be
This is the type of horror so uncomfortable that I don't want to think about it
This game was one of the best i ever played, it's a masterpiece for me. very sad and lonely ending and the soundtrack is so so good. Nice video!
there is no coin toss, the one that gets transfered into a new body isn't you, it's a copy of you. it's not like the one in the og body gets transfered in the new one with a 50/50 chance. the cointoss is an illusion.
But from outside view, there is no difference. When you wake up in the morning, it's copy of you, that wakes up - previous you ceased to exist, when you went to sleep. It has same knowledge + extra experience, that it was asleep.
@@ceu160193 the fuck do you do when you fall asleep that leads to your death every night and how are you coming back to life?
@@feartheghus Your conscience doesn't exist, while you are asleep, so, technically, you die every time you go to sleep. Memories stay, so your next copy appears, when your body wakes up in the morning, that has all your memories + extra experience, that it was asleep.
I used to believe the idea of no free will and all until my physics teacher pointed out that the uncertainty of how atoms act at a quantum level means that it can't be predicted, meaning our choices are our own.
Good job on this one man
This is an excellent sci-fi story, reminds me of the 2009 movie Moon (especially that it brought up the same "copy" dilemma).
Leaving this in a separate comment to keep it isolated from all my complaints.
About killing the copy in the diving suit that you're leaving behind: Normally I would insist that the person actually affected by the choice should make the choice, but since both are exact copies of each other, you're actually perfectly qualified to decide for your other self. There has not been any time for the two of you to diverge yet, so you're still basically identical when you make the choice. Personally, I would probably leave the other me alive and take them with me down to the abyss, both to keep them company while they die (I would owe it to them) and on the "off chance" (see my other comment) that they'd survive the pressure. That, or I would promise to come back up after sending the Ark into space (actually, see my thoughts on that in the complaints comment as well!).
I think this is what I wpupd do as well its morally just in all ways.
LIke some others commented, you missed out on the final part of Soma's message: The coin toss is a red herring.
The game used a trick to confirm an intuitive misconception that we all have: The continuity of the self.
This trick is to transfer your control, as the player, to one of the two outcomes of the "coin toss", whenever it happens in the game. This confirms to you that the new Simon of which you took control is the "real you". Only under that assumption does it make sense to ask the question of wether you won or lost the coin toss.
However, in the final scene, this trick is revealed. Your control gets transferred to the other Simon of the coin toss. In that moment, you should notice that this side of the coin feels very much the same like the "real you" as previously the other side of the coin.
If you think about it: Given several alternative Simons, for example the two "forked" ones in the different types of suit, how would an outside observer be able to tell which of the two has become Simon's "real you"?
There is no way, as in all properties relevant for this comparisons, both Simons are equal. This means there is no "real you".
I think the belief in a personal soul that gives one its true identity is part of what leads us to this misconception culturally.
Another aspect you didn't mention: The game explores the deconstruction of the sense of "real you" across space, by having multiple "real yous" at the same time. This is what you mentioned.
However, there is a more subtle part in the game (I think it's during the underwater elevator descent) where the game deconstructs the continuity of the self across time.
This applies much more to our personal situations. While we don't get copy-pasted in our everyday lives, we still retain the belief that our "real you" is continuous across time. From one moment to the next. The game shows that this does not apply. There is no continuity of the self. There only ever is the present moment. And our experiencing of the present moment has no personal, individual properties. There is nothing of our "soul" or "real you" in it. It's just _that_.
To me, this is the real deep point of the game. And this insight can actually have a deep impact on how you observe your self, your ego an your life, and conversely, have an impact on how you live and experience your life. It is an important message with wide implications.
Always felt like Chuns 1st line when you met her on the Ark should have been "Fourth times a charm right Simon?" And then when he is like "Wait what do you mean...?" she is like "Oh nothing..." 🤯
I know people who payed Soma and weren’t able to understand it or be scared by it because they had been primed by all the jump scare horror games of the past few years.
Now see? If you left Simon 2 alive, Simon 3 would have someone to hang out with for eternity. Maybe even see the surface together.
The way computers work is that cut and paste is actually the same as copy and paste, but then deleting the original immediately afterwards.
SOMA's transhumanism nightmare is a great story and I think that the safe mode should be the default start option.
I really like Artyom Kazak's essay "Unconditional empathy", about how much easier yet horrifying life is when we ignore the ethics of our actions and only consider the consequences.
Without morals what are the consequences? That’s like trying to look at bacteria without the microscope. There needs to be a set of terminal goals, a conscience, or else the consequences are not inherently good or bad. Some people think, stupidly in my opinion, that happiness is the end goal. Some think maximizing it for the greatest number of humans is the proper goal. Utilitarians (believers in the former) quite often commit abhorrently evil acts for the sake of “the greater good”.
11:12 Thing is there is a 100% chance that all of those outcomes happen, because they all happen. They'll all have the memory of that first person and they'll all feel like they are the real person. So it's not really a matter of probability, you aren't reducing the likelihood of someone waking up on the ark and living a happy life, that will happen no matter what, you're just creating additional life and cutting it short.
The coin toss is a useful metaphor to think about it after the fact but it fails to grasp the fact that it's not a 50/50 outcomes it's two things that happen 100% of the time.
Thing is, if you call simon "x" simon before the transfer, then simon "y" simon in the original body and simon "z" simon in the new body the answer to the question "which simon does simon x become" is both. Both simon z and simon y are simon x but they are also different person at this point, simon y and z aren't the same simon.
So the actual answer is that simon y and simon z have been simon x but they never have been each other (as in they never live through their experience).
We want to imagine our identity being a unique thing that is stable through time but it really isn't. Like, 3year old you is part of your current identity but you are a drastically different person from what you were at that age. If I were to add all your memories to 3 year old you you'd probably feel like I'm making them grow faster, but if I were to remove everything before the memories of 3 year old you (ignoring for simplicity sake even though it's quite relevant, the fact that memories aren't perfect) then you'd feel like you are being killed. But really in that first exemple 3year old you is also killed and replaced by current you.
That's because identity isn't a binary yes/no it's a lot more fuzzy and progressive than that. Things aren't "you" or "not you" they are more or less you. And your current conscious experience is the most "you" there is.
But even you from 3 days ago is slightly different but it's still a lot more "you" than 3year old you who is a lot more you than a random human that didn't experience anything from your life. But to be honest even that random human is closer to you than, let's say a rock, that human will have a lot more experiences in common like they'll have experienced the color red just like you (assuming you can see red) but at this point it's so far from your current experience than it's hard to call them you in any meaningful way even if they are like 0,00000...01% you. Just like you wouldn't call something with 0,000000...01% salt "salty".
Anyway if you follow that logic that means it's actually somewhat rational to not do the dishes now even if it'll be harder later, cause future you is a bit less you so you care less about how hard it is (even if future you will hate you for that =p) but you don't want to just stop studying cause future you is too much you that you'd be ok with them becoming homeless. Yep, philosophically procrastination make sense and thinking about your future make sense too =p
Have you played Talos Principle?
It is not a horror game but it raises very interesting questions in a clever way.
I want to recommend two other games that are a bit more direct: Subsurface Circular and Quarantine Circular. Both of them delve into philosophical themes well
There is no coin toss. There is no consciousness transfer. You were always simon 3, just with the memory of simon 2
I have been searching for this video so long. I saw it once almost a year ago and was so annoyed that i couldnt find it. Now i find out that its a video by the guy i have started activley watching a month ago. Jesus this video is still good. Just as all other videos on you channel. Thanks for all these great videos.
Totally line up with your thinking on us “complicated apples.” Great video, glad I subscribed
I would argue that, assuming reality is real, the most effective choices are the most real, you know the internet you’re looking at this video through is real because you can observe it and interact with it and when you do so it seemingly brings meaningful results. Similarly, if you believe you have no free will it will tend to end with a lack of responsibility and a feeling of a lack of control. If you believe in free will and go even further towards ideologies like that of extreme ownership you will more often find success. They are more impactful and effective thought processes because the strategies they allow for and move towards forming are more effective in the world. For this reason it is best to assume you have free will and act like you do, and both the fact that you can make such assumptions and that the belief in free will is so powerful as a thought process in effecting the world would imply, just like every other observation gives us information on objects and concepts in the real world, that free will is real.
SOMA made me cry 3 times ,it showed me the futility of trying to find meaning, Nihilism comes to mid .What u said about me watching the video regardless of my life choices is 100% true and i agree, i see us and living beings as just reaction beings we just react to things , be it making a movie or a game , or becoming a dictator , or dying at the age of three. I see life just like water filling any 3d objec. Me as a person , i am most suitable to be like i am , given my genetics and geographical location , i will turn of like this infinite times over if given same circumstances, I hope i made my point clear , ur an intelligent person , would be nice to talk to you more abt life . I thoroughlyenjoy all ur vids, thank you for making them , i wish u the best .
You can always join in on the discord! I'm pretty active there, and always looking to chat.
discord.gg/V7sfnVj
@@Leadhead will do
You are like the first hard determinist I’ve seen in present day, funny since I’m a hard determinist as well. I remember while playing this game with friends i said I don’t think I’d have trouble adapting to being a robot, minus missing food and stuff. Cause ever since i was born my body has been changed by surgeries since I’m craniofacial. Because of that i think I’m wired to be more adaptable than most and i define myself more by my consciousness rather than my body which i think makes the transition to machine easier. That being said while i want to live i do not want to live in isolation ever again so i would end my copy in the vixen 2 situation.
When i was a kid, prob around 12 y.o, i had an irrational fear of being sad, and the (possible) existence of a second time dimension (just like how we are living in 3 spatial dimensions), because that would mean that any undesirable state i was in would, in a way mean that that state would exist (frozen) in an infinite amount of time (at least according to 12y.o me's understanding of dimensions and time.). i gradually got over this fear much later by understanding consciousness, emotions, and time, better. however in all of that i came to the conclusion that me, as i am now, is not the me i was x seconds ago, nor the person i will be x seconds from now. if i apply that logic to space (instead of time) a clone of me would only be the same me as me for the exact amount of time a single "moment" is (unless the clone would experience the exact stimuli as the original). One could also apply that logic to other people. I am a different individual from myself 3 seconds just like i am a different individual from you (the reader). The fact that i am more similar to one of those two might mater in some cases, but not all.
That is my answer to one the questions Soma makes you ask yourself.
@@thotslayer9914 Well, depends on your definition of dying. If it is loss of identity (like in my original comment), "you" die constantly and become someone else. If you mean dying in the traditional sense, then it is almost definitely as simple as non existence. It would be the same as not having been born yet ( you will be just as cognizant after death as before birth).
If you want to make arguments about an afterlife there are 3 ways of thinking about it. If the world is a simulation, then the creators could mby isolate your data upon death and do something with it (but like, why would they wanna bother with that?). That there is a phenomena related to physics, (where your brain and possibly your body somehow is connected to other materia and energy and making a clone of you when you die, but this would mean that there is a extremely convenient part of physics we haven't discovered yet, so unlikely). Or magic, aka souls, rebirth, religion and other hokus pokus. And none of those has any scientific, peer reviewed, successful (as in showing such magic to be real), so this would be unlikely. (also, if you define magic to be physics based phenomena we don't know about it is the same as my previous point).
@@thotslayer9914 what a mind is, is clear in fields such a biology, where we can measure and study how the brain works, we know it uses electrical signal and hormones to think. this can explain everything regarding the mind, everything else is just speculation. speculation that we can explain with psychology, people dislike death, and therefore try to make up false answers to make themselves feel better. a big reason for philosophers to have struggled with identifying what or where the mind is comes from lack of understanding human biology. should we try to find answers that we can be sure to be as true as possible, we should firstly base our theories/hypothesis on facts. this makes it obvious that the philosophers of old trying to come upp with answers lack the knowledge to say anything of value. If we don't follow the "burden of proof" ideology when forming our worldview, then anything is as legit as anything else logically, someone believing that their thumb contains the "souls" of every dead person ever lived would be just as correct as, for example, the average christian/buddhist/stone age man believing in rock gods/muslim. and the single reason we don't attach the "all souls in a thumb" idea, is that it makes us feel worse.
@@thotslayer9914 while we can't fully understand "qualia", we can understand that the brain is (probably) fully capable of doing it, since we can measure how it reacts to stimuli, and how it can handle things like feelings to some degree using hormones. the presence of something like a soul isn't necessary to explain it. in fact, such a claim has no good basis (making it just as logically sound as my thumb is the big thinking god that controls qualia, although such a claim isn't as popular, due to feelings). as for my thoughts about philosophy, i think it is only useful in areas we have created, and is not filled with axioms (like politics and ethics). it is also useful for finding illogical things in religious and spiritual models and concepts. (philosophy is a hobby of mine)
when we talk about things like what happened before big bang, we could speculate based on what we do know and create hypothesis and maybe even theories about it, but a lot of things are labeled with "we don't know" or even "we can't know" (as in a physical impossibility). but that doesn't mean my almighty thumb have the magical powers to fill in such blanks.
i think me and a lot of other people aren't "stuck" in in a mindset, just how my original comment explained, what i believe time is, and what that means for me has changed from my childhood. but i have made these changes on proof presented to me, never on what makes me feel better. it comes down to the burden of proof again, coupled with the scientific model. and if that didn't matter then i would like to present me an better alternative with inner logical consistency, and why such a logical model makes whatever you believe in closer to the "truth", than my thumb arguments, otherwise we might as well deify that.
@@thotslayer9914 of course i hate religion, i know that at most 1 religion can be correct, and i believe all of them to be wrong. this means all but 1 group is wasting a lot of time on nothing, and are doing choices that may deprive other people and themselves from relative value/happiness. Differentiating feelings from proof allows me (and others with my mindset) to not do such things. the thing about things that are transcendental/magic, is the argument of burden of proof again, i am starting to repeat myself now, but if proof isn't necessary, then my almighty thumb argument is as valid as anything else. this is the important part. if you would base a discussion on your beliefs without needing arguments based on measurable reality, then my "god thumb" argument is a valid possibility to base my life around, and my "god in the sky" and my "god boot" and so on. since all of them are just as likely as another one, then whatever i choose is infinitely unlikely to be correct, making whatever choices based upon that belief infinity unlikely to be correct (outside of the things that coincide of the theoretical "true" belief) as well.
so what i am saying isn't technically that whatever magical thing you believe in is wrong. but that you are statistically correct in 1/infinity cases. (search "pascal's wager".)
Caring about proof and arguments based in consistent logic is the only way to work around this.
also my hate of wasted value/happiness (desired state) is based upon utilitarianism, i'm sure my logic (if logic is something you care about) is clear, but otherwise i could lay it out in a more clear way.
@@thotslayer9914 i say that those that believe in magic ether don't use logic (consistent that is, aka no cherry picking) AND/OR proof. burden of proof is to make sure that things, (as to hour best ability to measure them) are true. while logic is there to make things consistent.
examples of bad proof is: "i feel like things are here for a reason", "i feel like my thumb is the true god".
examples of bad logic is: "my feelings about my thumb is more valid than his feelings", "my god is perfect, knows everything and can do anything. but also he want people to fuel his ego with prayers, have a need to test people, and won't use his powers for good.".
a combination of bad proof and logic would be: some dudes that didn't know basic human biology and physics tough that their god is correct, and wrote a book about it, therefore this book undoubtedly contains the truth."
also i did consider the possibility that i might be wrong, but i saw no proof of that, nor could find logic based on proof that points towards that i might be wrong.
I even consider the possibility of my thumb being a god, and my boot, and a rock. so that means that if the scientific process of using proof and logic is wrong, then i have a 1 in infinity chance of having choosing the right belief (should i choose to choose).
but hey, if math is wrong (even if it is the only area we can DEFINITELY know to be true.) then the whole pascal's wager argument is invalid.
Great video! Keep it up
Modern computers actually just change the directory of a file when moving files from one location to another. In this way, you could certainly make the argument that if we were to create such technology, SOMA could well be wrong. Or, at least, it wouldn't be the only solution.
Only when moving within the same partition on the same drive. Otherwise it's still genuinely moving the data.
I find it interesting that the "coin toss" only applies for the audience/player, as, for the Simons, they more have a quantum sort of deal. They exist simultaneously and clones, separate entities with a shared splintering point. For Simon 3, there never was a coin toss, he was simply generated at that moment. Simon 2 also never had a coin toss as, being the code to be copied, he was never intended to enter the pressure suit. The coin toss only exists as an oversimplification to keep 3 from questioning what he is and having a mental breakdown, which is inevitably what happens after the creation of 4, who will never have to question the nuances of his own existence. The coin toss is, to put it as bluntly as possible, baby talk, a way of explaining something without actually talking about it, since that would bring up way too many questions that the one answering the question simply doesn't want to get in to, like when parents say babies are delivered by storks, to keep kids from delving too deep into the nuances of sex. Catherine, and thus the writers, used the lie of the coin toss to keep Simon, and thus the player, from asking too many questions about what they really were, and thus facing the danger of an actual mental breakdown. It'd be more clever if it hadn't caused a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals from touting the coin toss as fact, similar to how the crew of PATHOS-II were killing themselves to "ensure they got onto the ARK."
Kinda makes the entire game as fucked as possible when you play thinking you're mercy killing your old simon when really, from his (your) perspective your copy is snuffing the life from you. If Catherine was honest which she could never have been because Simon would never have been mentally prepared for what the journey would cost him, but instead she told him truthfully that each time he changed bodies he would be leaving himself behind so another version of himself could continue on to save the ark without him, If Simon could come to terms with that there would be no need to kill the older versions and they could continue to live on maybe with each other if they all surivved, although that is wishful thinking. Its an outcome that could never be possible as Simon would never have been strong enough to commit. The hope and belief that he was winning the toss is what kept him going. And as a player I fully believed it too until the very end where it all becomes painfully obvious and you experience first hand how the rest felt. If you're like me and believed in the coin toss you feel the immediate kick in the gut that any high stakes gamble gives you when you lose. When you bet it all on black with that gut feeling that you're gonna make it back but suddenly are left with the harsh truth that no matter the odds, you can still lose. But if you were smart enough to understand the coin toss was fake, you still remained in shock having realised you were never going to make it and all your work was to ensure a version of yourself made it. But it would never have been you..
@@JustKyle43 though, for someone as deep into transhumanism as me, the idea of getting a copy of myself onto that ark is probably one of the most noble goals you could complete, ensuring that at least *some* iteration of the human story lives on.
@@aerynboyer I will admit, i'd probably be as in despair as Simon then.
Maybe i'd feel Better a while later, my desperate goal would be to somehow get out or fix the facility at that point for me, fix everyone else.
And well...if it really seemed hopeless, suicide is an okayish answer.
@@AbstractTraitorHero i'd be perfectly fine with it. even before Soma i already understood the whole two diverging versions of a mind/copy-paste idea so if i was in simon's positions i'd kill the dive suit copy and then kill myself the pressure suit copy once the ark launched. getting at least one version of myself to have a happy life is the whole point and reducing the suffering of any left over versions of myself by deleting, powering down, or otherwise destroying them/me is just the right thing to do and par for the course.
the people that killed themselves "to make sure they made it on the ark" were just stupid and deluded by the ridiculous coin-toss lie, but they are unintentionally on the right track. just wait until the right time after you've done your work to get the ark launched and there doesn't seem like there's any future for your version.
@@EvelynNdenial I just think the other versions of me wouldn't want to die, as I don't want to.
I'd indeed be happy some version of me got out, but still kinda be in Some despair that i'm left there.
Love the vid, its a shame the coin toss part went completely over your head though
This game absolutely gave me more chills than any other horror game :S
Saying that you don't have free will, is more of a coping mechanism. Our choices do matter, even the tiniest things we've done can have a huge impact. If our fate is written on stone, try falling from a tall building, you wont have a chance to survive, but if you choose not to jump at all you will still be alive. Saying that we dont have free will, is like jumping with sharks and expecting to survive.
The mind is made of water: I doubt your mind has any clearance over your metaphysical soul, if your new electricity mind gets a soul I doubt it's the same you're used to.
Sweet shit i'm so glad you have a better mic now
I never killed Simon 2 because my head canon was that Simon 3 somehow got back to Simon 2 so you could chill as bro’s together rather then Simon 2 dying and Simon 3 being the one to rot alone instead of 2 or 4
I killed him without a second thought.
I did not want him waking up. I felt detached from Simon, because I knew what the coin toss meant all along and I was just as frustrated with Simon just as Catherine was.
I killed him too and even if Simon 3 is left alone in the end, I thought it was selfish to continue to put my other self through living in that hell just because I need a friend. It's better for one of us to suffer, and it's not that hard to die there anyway. Everything seems so messed up that death seems like the best option for all Simons except 4.
@@synthster7416 isn’t it also selfish to make that decision for him? Simon 3 was upset when he found out it didn’t work, what If Simon 2 wanted to live? You may say that you are the one deciding it so you’d probably agree with yourself, but we all think differently when death is at your doorstep, he may have wanted to live, a possibility we denied him of. If death is what he wants than the blood would be in his own hands not ours
@@Generic_Grunt In a regular scenario it would be unethical to make the decision of killing someone even if they are ourselves but if I were in the situation of Simon 2, I *would* prefer to die, maybe someone else would rather live no matter how bad the environment is but since we as players make decisions for the character we play, we are thinking based on what *we* would have done, in a roleplaying game we'd empathise with our character and maybe make a move that we assume they would, but in a game like this, my preference would be to die than be left alone in a hellscape, so I suppose it's subjective
@@synthster7416 yeah and that’s what’s fun about having discussions like these
The slight glitches on the grass in the ARK was also a subtle and nice touch
Thoroughly underrated content from leadhead.
This game kept me at neverending tension, because I put myself at the position of the character I had a control of and it made me think differently
Keep in mind Simon is a LEGACY scan. Which means there could be millions of variants of Simon that have existed. Which means Simon even getting a chance to be on Pathos 2 could’ve been extremely slim.
It also means he could be the basis for Artificial intelligence. All of the automatic machinery and even the K8 robot could have pieces of Simon’s Brainscan in it.
Including the WAU.
Soma was the best "buy on a whim" game I've ever purchased
Minor nitpick, but there are a few jump scares in the original Amnesia.
i'd just like to point out that that 25% chance for paradise is actually a false paradise as he gives up his ability to affect the world around him, instead choosing to live in a dream world until the satellite breaks down. instead the 75% chance of being left behind is actually the better option as there is a future there for him.
In order for a person to survive a cut/paste process without making a duplicate, the transfer must be both physical and in real time. The data taken must be cut and pasted at the new location at the same time.
Copy is simple, you make an exact copy. But this will result in two of the person. The original being the actual, and the clone being a clone. At the moment the clone is made, it is a totally new person. Even if it feels the same, it is on a separate track.
Transfer implies that nothing is being lost, and nothing is being created.
In order to transfer a human mind for example, the vessel the mind goes into must be empty. And the vessel it is leaving must be left empty. Otherwise you've just made a duplicate, or partial transfer that doesn't really accomplish anything.
A really good way to understand this sort of break in the flow of consciousness is to think about sleep, and how that mechanically works.
When you're old cells die, and new ones are made, are you still you? When you wake up in the morning, are you still you? Of course you are, because even when you are asleep, you are still there. That's just basic object permanence. All humans learn that when they are still babies
The replacing of dead cells is of no consequence. We naturally understand that humans are more than the sum of their parts. That is why a corpse is not human, despite being made of the same stuff humans are made of. The discovery that plants and animals are multicellular does not redefine humanity.
The brain is the metaphorical heart of all humans. Yes the heart may be the most important organ for our body to function, but our brain gives our functions purpose. Our mind is what separates us from machines. Emotion is not uniquely human by the way. Animals can feel. Humans do more than feel, they can think too. And that is why an unfeeling machine, can in fact be human if given a mind of it's own. Without feelings, both emotional and tactile, the mind has little to think about, but it can still think none the less. Alot of tree huggers don't understand this, so I feel like mentioning it.
very insightful analysis as always! I really enjoy your content, please keep it up!
Interesting perspective.
My personal view is that we truly do have free will.
From my religious perspective:
I am a Christian, and I believe the Bible, which calls God a just Judge.
I don’t think someone can be justly condemned for actions they couldn’t truly control, so for God to be just in His condemnations I think we must have free will.
From my moral perspective:
Whether we choose or not, your actions have consequences.
In the eyes of the law and personal opinions you should be treated as if you have free will, because the only alternative is to treat a murder no different from a lighting strike- but if that were the case people would do more bad things with no consequences.
From my personal philosophical perspective:
There’s virtually no point in assuming we lack free will because it does nothing to change our choices.
Either we have free will and we choose what we choose, or we don’t have free will but we still make the same choices.
It’s impossible to determine it, and so it’s a moot point.
I think the coin toss is just a metaphor or a tool to help you grasp the concept. There are two copies that get created when you make the scan, and both of them think they are the real you. The you as you know right now is always going to stay where it is, the copy of you is also you but thinks it won the coin toss. It doesnt realize its existence only began at that very second it was copied because it contains all your memories and feelings. I dont think your consciousness ever gets transferred with a coin toss, I think the game puts you in other copies shoes to move the plot along. I do believe the copies are still sentient, but I also believe they are still separate from each other, since new experiences will completely shape them differently in the future
There is no coin toss. Catherine probably used that analogy to manipulate Simon to get the Ark rocket into space.
if i'm equally hungry and thirsty, but i'm standing at an equal distance from a location with food and location with water, how can i decide which to go to first if i don't have free will? how would i avoid standing in location until starvation? what about the uncertainty principle? do you think it's possible to map out a mind?
It seems like more and more games these days have the theme of reality not being what we thought it was and the consequences of that idea.
I came to the realisation about copy and paste etc a few years ago on my own and it blew my mind, then I started hearing about the whole "when you fall asleep, you die and a copy wakes up" stuff which is kinda weird but a cool thought, but it annoys me that humans think about this stuff😂
Good vid. Cant agree with all of it, but I love your work dude.
What I'm wrecking my brain over is this: What about Catherine being switched on and off over and over again? Isn't that like it's an entirely new being brought to life every time? Imagine taking out her inactive chip, copying the contents to another identical chip and plugging it back in. Would it make any difference?
Well in case of Catherine, she explains in the game and throughout, that every time she's is turned off and on (or to be specific - unplugged), she says hitting "Pause" and "Play". She doesn't reset or brought back to life again. She just stops existing. Like when editing a video, cutting and pasting the next section together creates a jump to the next video/scene. Or like when we blink - we get that brief darkness and then we see again. Its the same for her but she can't hear or see anything. She's paused when ejected from a console (she blinks) and when she's plugged back in, its like a play button (she can see again). Its why she's startled sometimes when you advance to new areas. Its until the end of the game when you realize she is shut down permanently because her stress levels get so high, and like the previous scans (the ones with Brandon), she "dies".
Unless Simon has the original copy of Catherine, he can't bring her back. She's gone. She wasn't originally on the Ark and she never got scanned until the end. The Wau got a hold of her earliest scans and made her into an Ai. Its how the game starts when she doesn't know what happened to the Ark (even though its found out, she was with it at the very end of the game). Any chances of getting the Catherine you were traveling with back is gone since from the start of the game to the end of the game, Catherine didn't have any scans. The Wau is gone, so that makes it even harder to get the earliest scan of Catherine back as well. Plus being stuck at the bottom of the Abyss with no power and no means to go back out of the Abyss - Simon is stuck.
As for Simon (if you leave your copy alive), he has no Omnitool. He is stuck in that room before you leave to the Abyss. With all the monster infested buildings and other robots going insane. (Besides April - The robot outside the quarantined building before the Abyss. She is surprisingly handling it very well thinking she is on the Ark already.)
I hope that answers your question. I hope. C:
An important thing that most here seem to have missed, Simon is a poor clone. That's why he's always upset and why it's called a coin toss, there is no coin toss, he always wins and loses. I got that when Catherine first said it, Simon was irratating.
There is no "coin toss," but cool video, man.
The only regret I really had upon finishing the game was in killing Simon 2. As Simon 3, strapped into a chair in the abyss of the ocean, having watched Catherine get crushed out of existence by the tremendous water pressure, screaming into the darkness and very aware of the battered state of my own pressure suit and how long this body could possibly last down here...
I regretted not leaving behind a physical body, a version of me that could still live in the world, experience life in as close to a human way as would ever again be physically possible. Instead I chose to commit an act of 'mercy', which really just turned out to be hubris. I was Simon 3, the important one, going forward while this one, unimportant, stayed behind. I mattered, and not being me, not mattering, well that was obviously a fate worse than death. So I chose, on his behalf, death. Forgetting where I was going, what I was doing. The reason I needed the pressure suit in the first place. I had already been told it was a one way trip, but in my pride I refused to leave anything behind. *I* was going, why would a copy need to, or hell, want to stay behind? Wouldn't knowing he hadn't made it be too much to bear? Might as well put him out of his misery
I still think about this today, years after finishing it. And I regret my choice. But I love that I made it
Well the algorithm had to show me this video first.
Very interesting. But I think it's important to understand that there is no coin toss. Each consciousness exists unto themselves. A new being is created after each copy.
My interpretation of the dilemma presented is that consciousness doesn't matter nearly as much as identity. It's about Self-Awareness, having the capacity to understand yourself and your relationship with others, that truly is important, extending from that, as long as my identity exists in some form I'm fine. So for the guy with the code we need, as long as I manage to get some version of his mind on the Arc, whatever we need to do to get the code is fine.
But those are connected. You do not view your copy as you, you view them as your copy.
In other words, you got all your memories and personality traits on the Arc, but you didn't get there yourself.
@@ceu160193 my point is that the distinction between "Original" or "Copy" doesn't really matter in the long run. Both versions are "me", and both have an equal claim to being the Conscious Observer from our own perspective, in the same way the game ends with us seeing both the perspective of the Suit and the Arc. There's no actual coin flip when the mind is copied, despite the illusion as such with how the game switches who you control.
Now I realise something.
I don't think it has any connections, but still:
Soma is the drug used in Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.
This drug is used to relive people of anger and other feelings, making life with no spice. Not worth living...
SOMA reminds me of a movie called Aniara I think it was. It was terrifying for the similar reasons
Yeah know, I was always down with the idea of copying my consciousness onto a computer to live forever as a simulation, but now I’m realizing that my current consciousness wouldn’t just be on a computer, it would merely be a copy of myself. Still me in every conceivable way, but it isn’t. The idea of my consciousness being copied and having its own life separate from mine terrifies me greatly for some reason.
Bruh, there never was any "coin-toss", it's just a lie that Catherine told you in order to make you cooperate with her lame plan.
This is not my interpretation, it's actually confirmed, there's no consciousness transfer, the game just makes you think there is.
Catherine never lied, she is just odd. The thing is, she thought he understod how it works because the technology was invented back when he died. So it's a old tech, a common knowledge on her perspective.
She didn't lie...she explained it quite clearly what was going on. She just doesn't sugarcoat things (and she's a sociopath psychologically).
@@RpTheHotrod She is autistic, I believe.
Btw, it seems to be that being emotionally cold makes you a lot more compatible with robot body. As Simon needed "alive" body(even while it was female body) to have correct perception of reality, while Catherine didn't become delusional, despite being trapped in omnitool.
You forgot to mention all the Simons which were used for the initial brain simulations used to find a suitable course of treatment for Simon 1. From the explanation given at the beginning by Dr Munchi I'm guessing there were at least hundreds of them.
Damn, pretty good review my man, and you have a pretty good ammount of subs idk why you have so little views on this.
I gotta say I had some of your thoughts or feels while playing the game, though you certainly saw beyond what I saw, there's details that perhaps I didn't even consider, like when you choose the files for the ARK because they don't fit. Most of those aren't explained aside from their file names. I didn't really pay thaaat much attention to it, but when you think that you're pretty much creating the world that you and all the others are going to live in for years is a pretty daunting feeling tbh
i think most of the view are from those who actually enjoyed this game.
One of my favorite games in any genre ever
The game didn't really shock me as much because i was already aware of the whole shenanigans from another game, better yet, a trilogy, the Nonary Games, its a visual novel with puzzles that explores topics such as the one presented on Soma and other sci fi stuff, like the what would happen in an actual schrodinger's cat, time travel and body swapping. So from the very moment i suspected Simon was some sort of robot, i knew what the game was going for. In the topic of the first Simon dying from brain damage, can we really assume that? From what we can see, the diagnostic method was a success, otherwise Simon's consciouness wouldnt be able to go from 2015 to the future like that, maybe the doctor got what he wanted from the experiment, of course the transfer was an unexpected result, but it was only collateral, the process could have still worked. Another thing, in the topic of winning the coin toss ( in which i assume is a metaphor for the luck of that version of Simon, and not the process itself) can we really say that suffering a drastic change like going to the future were you don't know anyone ( something that Simon comments on numerous times) in an apocalyptic scenario, with no chance of happiness is better than dying with at least some kind of peace on 2015? On the same topic, dive suit and pressure suit essentially have the same fate, dying alone, immediately for dive suit Simon if you choose to, but their fate is dying alone, one abandoned by his otherself, the other one suffering in the dark from the electric power loss. And still can we say that Simon 4 really had a happy ending knowing that 2 of his self were doomed so that he could reach the Ark, another question, can we expect Simon 4 to live peacefully knowing the fate of Earth and remembering everything he witnessed in that Sub Aquatic Hell?