SOMA and the Non-Existence of the Soul

Suppose you had the power to breathe life into a machine. The power to burden that assembly of mechanical parts with the weight of a soul, enabling it to feel pain, experience trauma, know love and hate, and, importantly, be self-aware of its own fragile mortality.

Not an easy concept to grasp? Maybe it would be easier to imagine yourself in the body of a once inanimate robot. Instead of new life, simply visualise the sum of you consciousness being transferred into a different, metal body.

How would you grapple with your new existence?

Panic?

Denial?

Maybe acceptance?

"Would you wish to instead be terminated?"

A line from the game Soma, published by Frictional Games in 2015.

The quote comes from an in-game survey conducted for the last surviving members of the human race as their brains are scanned and digitalised into a computer-simulated 'world' known as the ARK.

For me, it depends on one's outlook on life: for someone who values its fragility and singular nature, digital immortality acts as an artificial purgatory; for others, paradise.

There are several human characters in Soma scattered throughout the underwater facility 'Pathos II'. All are in various states of damage; most are nothing but human minds in the bodies of the base's factory machines. A number of these people aren't even aware they are no longer in their own bodies - that they're no longer human, not-so blissfully ignorant of the situation, able to feel pain but unable to die.

Going back to the former hypothetical, would a brand new soul suffer the same dread, having never known a different existence? Perhaps the soul is inherently only a sum of its memories? Hence your own soul outweighs that of a new-born.

A turning point in Soma happens when our protagonist and player character Simon Jarrett, is in need of a diving suit capable of withstanding the pressure of the deep ocean abyss. For context, Simon at this point has already come to the realisation (much like us, the player) that he is not in his own body, but instead in a processing unit simply stapled to the corpse of a former Pathos II worker wearing a basic suit. Without unpacking that nightmare too much, we'll move on to how the depth situation resolves. Simon's digital companion, the consciousness of a Pathos II scientist in charge of the ARK project, Catherine, elects to 'transfer' Simon's mind into a new body... again. However the nature of the supposed 'transfer' is not as black and white as Catherine suggests. As we wake up in a different corpse, this time with a suit capable of withstanding significantly higher pressure, we hear Simon's voice: "There must be something wrong.".

Except our character is not speaking. The 'original' Simon is still alive briefly, believing the transfer to have failed. In reality, it's more of a copy-and-paste, where, in theory, multiple Simons can exist at any given time, like lines of code.

Now which soul weighs more? Does either have more value? Purpose?

Both are identical - both Simon, both from the same instance in time, with the same emotions, memories, and experiences.

We get the option here to kill the first Simon by simply unplugging him, or to leave him here, doomed to wake up confused and alone with no hope of escape aside from a grim method of self-destruction, much like those other characters around the facility.

A beautiful detail about this choice is that whatever we do here is the morally right decision. Since they're both Simon, whatever the new Simon chooses is whatever the old Simon would have wanted.

The infamous ending of this game presents a similar dilemma. We arrive in a position where we can be uploaded to the ARK - a goal we've been reaching for the whole game. We watch the upload bar fill on the screen. To 100%. The transfer was a success.

So why have we woken up right where we were? Stuck deep under the ocean.

By now you've probably worked it out, as have most of the players experiencing this moment. But Simon hasn't, and he wakes confused and panicking. Broken.

Of course what's happened is a copy of our consciousness made it to the ARK, we've simply woken up in the body of the original.

In the game, Catherine presents this as a sort of 'coin-toss', but in reality, if this were us, we would always wake up as the original, since any copy of us is not us, despite them believing to be. Any alternative the game presents is a sort of trick - creative liberty used by the developers to showcase the perspective of the new Simon, in order to progress the story.

In fact, the first and genuinely original Simon in the game lived 100 years prior to the rest of the events. He simply was scanned in 2014 to attempt to cure his brain damage caused by a car accident. His data was later found and used in the game we play, Soma. The human Simon dies weeks later of brain trauma, a century before the world ends.

Is it fair to call future Simon fake?

Lesser?

Both are identical and hence are they equal?

Suppose you're cloned, but only one of you gets to live.

Does either have grounds to argue for their own existence?

I realise I've asked more questions than I've answered, but that's the beauty of Soma's themes. Humanity is in no position to answer the questions Soma presents. The conversations of morality and its links to the existence of a soul will echo throughout our species' future for eons. I'll leave you with one last crisis.

If your soul - everything you are now - wakes up in a knowingly fake virtual utopia, whilst your former self is alone in death, "would you wish to be terminated from the program?".