this may be a stupid question as i don't know all of the lore and i've also forgotten some things, since i've only recently picked this game up again after a couple of years.
but is it not johnny's actual consciousness on the engram…? i always thought it was! and that we were genuinely interacting with HIM in that sense…
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Well. Depends on what exactly do you mean by “him”. Its him, for sure. Just the same as the copy of your uni’s essay sent to professor is the essay you wrote. But yes, the “main” copy, the original, was deleted, thats why it is called “Soulkiller”. That was the specific of 1 generation soulkillers.
The funny thing is that while Alt lost all her humanity in the digital world beyond Blackwall, Johnny, trapped in Mikoshi, did not, and developed as a person while interacting with V and world, experiencing emotions such as sorrow and suffering. Which, according to cp2077 buddhism, means he is pretty much alive and has actual soul.
There is a degree of philosophy involved here.
Is a digital replication of a person’s consciousness that person? That is a question the game deals with quite a lot.
Eh, it’s semantics really.
It’s the same idea of, if you get “teleported”, are you still you? Because all forms of teleportation tend to revolve around the concept of your body and consciousness being broken down into basic particles and then re-constructed in a new location.
To outside observers, there’s no difference. But you can argue that the person being teleported died at the moment of teleportation, and the person that arrives at the destination is only a clone with perfect memories.
There’s an argument that the “soul” dies this way.
Same with these digital consciousnesses. Once you leave behind your body, the “real” you effectively dies. What’s left is essentially a digital copy of your fleshy brain signals.
The engram of Johnny is basically a perfect copy of his mind, of his consciousness. Is he less of Johnny than the original was, just because he’s a digital copy? Is he soulless?
A fun debate but I don’t think there’s any clear answer. You’re welcome to believe what you want.
It’s not technically him but I might as well be. I’m not sure if you’ve finished the game so I’ll be vague, someone else gets turned into an engram and they don’t even realize it, that’s how accurate it is, it still feels like they’re themselves
It’s his conscience just not his soul so a clone
IIRC, a conversation with the digital Alt clears that up a bit when asked if she’s the real Alt or something like that .
The Soulkilker basically makes a digital copy while destroying the squishy original. There’s no getting around it being a copy, however precise.
But it boils down to something like this:
If you make a digital backup of your brain, make a clone body, and implant that backup into a clone, making basically a perfect replica. Then if you eliminate the ‘original’, the backup thinks they’re you, and everyone else treats the backup as you, isn’t the backup functionally you?
To me, no. But to many others, the answer is yes.
For a similar situation, I’d suggest watching the movie ‘The Prestige’.
We are talking with a new Jhonny (Engram); created from the original Jhonny’s consciousness (Who is 3 meter underground in the wasteland)
As far as I know,
He’s different from all Cunningham for one very simple reason.
Alt has had free connection to the internet and the ability to rewrite herself freely for decades while Johnny has been “off” on the Mikoshi server. He went from being in his body to being a parasite in V with no conscious anything in between,
I suspect that alt Cunningham lost her humanity turning into something much much more and yet less than she was while Johnny stayed Johnny safely stashed in a tin can unchanging.
I mean that’s how I understand it.
well i feel like thats kind of a ship of theseus situation, especially if you give him your body lol
Wow, that happened 50+ years before the game faked place?
Well for one thing, Smasher didn’t kill him, He “died” when soulkiller copied his consciousness.
There is some philosophic sort that asks you:
If a ship is being torn apart piece by piece and at the same time these pieces get swapped out for similar pieces, for how long can you continue this process while the ship is still the same?
In other words: how much has something to be changed until it is not itself anymore? Is johnny still himself?
Same for persons: does 1 critical situation change you as a person? does 1 year change you? does swapping out bodyparts, like a kidney or prosthetic, change you?
For anyone interested in this idea of a copy losing its soul, try out Soma. Great horror game, but it also talks a lot about this subject.
The main point of this thing is not that there is a correct answer to the question ‘is the engram actually Silverhand or not?’ but that the existence of this technology creates the question at all. People without this tech don’t have to deal with this particular aspect of the problem of ‘what is a person?’
So the thematic point is to undermine the question of ‘what is a person?’ and show that the problem itself is contingent on material and technological circumstances which can be changed by people. Allowing greedy capitalist assholes like Saburo to be the ones to shape these questions and feed us preferred answers is tantamount to giving up our freedom to determine how our lives should be lived.
This is the real reason Night City is a terrible place and why it destroys people’s lives—there’s no way to have a decent life as long as people like Saburo are defining all the questions and answers for everyone.
I mean Johnny himself says that about himself the first 30 seconds he meets V in their apartment, and he wanted to find his original self.
Well, to be honest, we don’t really know what couscousness is. We gave it a name and reference to it when making our actions, but it’s not really a detectable thing.
If it’s his councousness its only a copy of it, like how if you take a picture, it has metadata about when and where it was created, but if you take a printscreen of that picture and send it onwards the main part will be unchanged but it’s metadata will not be the same.
The engram is everything but the “soul” and even then Johnny’s engram is either incomplete due to the rush job of copying him while he was dying, degraded because of the relic’s case getting breached, or tampered with at Mikoshi because of the false memories he has like him being sat down and interrogated. Nah dude, you were a corpse when the tower detonated.
It’s basically a digital copy of his mind/ soul.
This essentially boils down to the ship of theseus. If every part of the ship of theseus is replaced over time, is it still theseus’ ship?
It’s the classic clone hypothesis that you can’t TRANSFER your conciousness, only COPY it. From the perspective of the new-you and everyone else everything looks like a transfer but you-you are bound to the original brain and is still dead
Soulkiller flashes an image of your mind, your OS if you will, and saves it as a file somewhere. The main body and mind dies, maybe now maybe later, and that new image can be uploaded. I like it to an operating system because every single one out of the box is going to be the same image but slowly but surely you personalize it and customized to be your own.
So in a way that Johnny isn’t just a Johnny or the Johnny, it’s your Johnny.
It’s Johnny but not Johnny
Hard to explain, it’s like you’d copy yourself and kill the original, are you still alive then?
It’s only a copy of his psyche. The genuine original has been dead for over half a century by the time the engram becomes V’s imaginary friend. Something that seems to get overlooked whenever people debate >!certain endings where the engram is destroyed!<, this is only a copy and not the genuine article
No, it’s not actually Johnny, Johnny was bleeding to death and wondering where his torso was.
And even if he hadn’t been mortally wounded, as Alt says: “Soulkiller does what it claims to”. It doesn’t just copy the mind, it makes sure the copy is the only version left.
That said, from a “not Johnny’s meat self” perspective, the copy is as much him as the original was, it has his thoughts, feelings, vices, scant virtues, etc., the only difference is that it’s digital instead of chemical.
Think of it this way. If you went to the doctor right now and they did an MRI then you died 20 minutes later. Are you still alive? The only difference is the MRI in Cyberpunk takes such a thorough picture of your brain it copies your memories and personality. But it’s still just a picture, not the real thing.
It’s not him. Soulkiller created a digital copy of him with his memories and his personality that thinks it’s him but the actual him has died in the process and did not experience any continuation of his life.
You can’t transfer a persons consciousness it’s a hard wired function of your brain.
the center of this discussion seems to be “can consciousness be transferred” which is kind of at the heart of all transhumanism/immortality discussions. if you can imprint your mind onto a computer then you could exist forever, the question is if you actually occupy the mind on the computer or if its just a copy, how would you know? its just as likely the computer mind thinks its the same conscious because there is no way for it to know it isnt and then the real you still in your actual body just dies.
this is most likely what happens to jonny. he dies in 2023 and his engram is nothing more than a copy of his mind in that exact moment, its a snapshot, it cant contain his consciousness because it isnt him, its just data.
its like saying a digital scan of your body is “you” its not. its information about you being stored on a computer, an engram is just infinitely more detailed.
you never meet johnny in the game, its not him, its a program that thinks its johnny but at the end of the day, whats the difference? how much different is that experience vs. one where you actually WERE interacting with the real johnny silverhand?
thats where the real questions start coming up, does it even matter? does a real johnny silverhand exist at all?