this game and this video for that matter is so underrated bro

There's something about this video, i don't know why, but it helps me study for exams lol, it's my go to when i have to study late at night.

Your analysis are masterful. I will watch it later when I I can devote my full attention.

SOMA is a masterpiece. It changed the way I think about AI, being human and what that really means.

this was an amazing analysis! I always loved this game and it truly deserves all the love it can get

1:39:25 "But, for the WAU, this was a betrayal too far. The WAU put up with a lot throughout the station, but a threat to its existence must be dealt with."

2:16:11 "The WAU wanted Simon and Catherine to reach Phi..."

This is a key question to Understanding the WAU that I have been thinking about for a while now: Does the WAU have agency? Does it "think" as a conscious being?

Within SOMA(the game I haven't watched/read external material), different characters project different levels of awareness onto the WAU. Catherine treats it exactly as what it is, a complex algorithm blindly following its programming. In this way, the WAU operates much more like a modern LLM(chatgpt, Claude, Gemini, etc) or a Machine Learning model optimizing for a single variable("preserve life") rather than a traditional, Scifi AI like Ultron or Cortana(Halo). Though it does share some similarity with HAL 9000, as he struggled with conflicting orders, but conversationally he was depicted with some form of agency. Whereas the WAU is just entirely silent and unreachable for Simon(the player).

Whereas Johan Ross treats the WAU like it has a semblance of agency, with wants, awareness and desires. He claims the WAU "wants" to save its creators, that it "shrieked," etc. Even Julia Dahl falls into this a bit when she wonders if the WAU is trying to revive Ross because it "wants" something or is "mourning" people.

You mentioned Graey Philosophy's video, where he argues that the WAU is Sentient because it demonstrates fear. He attempts to prove this by citing the deaths of Raleigh Herber and the rest of the Omicron staff, framing the WAU's "shriek" as a deliberate attempt at self preservation to stop her from destroying it. (as well as using mere inference instead of textual evidence from Soma).

I have a major problem with this idea.

First, the idea of the "Shriek" is just the framing Ross uses when talking with Simon at Alpha. He is projecting agency to a mechanical event. If we look at the actual timeline of events at Omicron, the evidence points to something completely different. The Staff's death were collateral damage, not premeditated murder. Lets look at the timeline based on the Audio and Journal Logs:

Per Johan Ross's journals, when the Ark crew arrived at Tau, he had the opportunity to head back to Omicron to get the solution to kill the WAU the next day (the 27th):

"they scheduled for the climber to pick them up tomorrow. [...] I will finally get to warn Dahl and Sarang about the critical situation at site Alpha." (2103-12-26)

Ross dies on the climber, but the Omicron crew recovers his corpse:

"The dead man found on the Climber this morning has been identified as Johan Ross..." (Claudia Eames, Dead on Arrival)

At first, Ross is placed on a regular medical bed. But Paula Lansky notices massive system overloads occurring around the body. To stop the interference, she seals him in a glass case roughly a week later:

"Confirmed a correlation between the overload systems and the corpse of Dr Ross. I was able to shield off the corpse inside the glass jar for a couple of seconds and witnessed a massive drop in the readings. If we really have to keep Ross inside Omicron I suggest finding a way to erect a permanent barrier to avoid severe system malfunctions"(Paula Lansky, 2104-01-03, Ross and the WAU)

Almost 2 weeks later, Lisa Cameron explicitly connects these electromagnetic surges to the WAU attempting to revive Ross:

"WAU is definitely repairing Ross' corpse. It's the most insane thing I have ever encountered. Somehow the WAU, primarily relegated to the structure gel inside the walls, is bombarding the corpse with every system it can access. The glass jar is surrounded by an unhealthy amount of electromagnetism and radiation which seems to be instructing gel already stuck inside Ross' body. Nots surewhat the WAU expects to happen when it's restored, but at least all the crazy should stop when the body hits 100%."(Lisa Cameron, 2104-01-15, Ross Recharging)

This "100%" threshold is mentioned again the very next day in a conversation between Herber and Darby:

"Darby: Herber, do we have any painkillers left? This tinnitus is becoming crippling.
Herber: Sorry. We only have heavy stuff left—morphine level drugs.
Darby: I’ll take it. Feels like my head is about to explode.
Herber: No can do, that’s stuff for emergencies. Besides Cameron thinks the ringing will settle when JR reaches 100%.
Darby: Then tell them to hurry the fuck up.
Herber: Should be a matter of hours. Just hang in there.
Darby: Keep me posted.
Herber: Yeah, well… I have this thing I need to take care of… So, I’ll talk to you later, okay?
Darby: Sure thing, Herb."(2104-01-16, Omicron Annex Audio recording)

The "JR" they are waiting on is obviously Johan Ross.

Over this two-week period, the staff's symptoms escalate from tinnitus and headaches to severe nosebleeds. The WAU is pushing an incredible amount of power through the station's systems to bypass the dampening effect of the glass jar.

"The WAU has been getting more aggressive—pushing all systems to their limits. Ironically the dead Dr Johan Ross would be the perfect person to ask why the WAU is making such a big buzz about his passing. After all, the WAU isn’t supposed to want anything and definitely not to mourn people. The system overload affects the staff considerably—headaches, loss of sleep, unwarranted stress. and it seems to be getting worse. I could use some advice, if you can get through. Delenda est."(Julia Dahl, Undelivered Report #2)

This all culminates on January 16th, 2104, when Herber sets out to Alpha to execute her plan:

"Herber: Strasky? Are you there?
Strasky: I hear you, Herbie, what’s up?
Herber: Uh, just wanted to check in. I have to go do something. I might not be around for a few days, okay?
Strasky: Raleigh Herber leaving the listening post? Must be important.
Herber: It is, Strask. It is.
Strasky: Well okay then, stay safe."(2104-01-16, Omicron Audio Player)

"Dahl: Things are out of hand. The staff looks like they are about to explode. Every other person walks around with nosebleeds and the rest keep wiping stains of blood from their eyes to keep them from overflowing. It’s to do with the WAU trying to free Ross somehow., for sure. At this point I wouldn’t be surprised if the body just got up and left. Raleigh Herber, our dispatcher, has been snooping around asking questions she shouldn’t. She says she’s going down the abyss to find Alpha. I can’t bring myself to stop her. Aaaargh!"

And thus Everyone's heads explode.

But notice the pattern here? From the very beginning of recovering Ross's corpse, the WAU was manipulating systems to revive him. Lansky incidentally made this way harder for the WAU by sealing him in the shielded glass box. And because of that barrier, the WAU had to pump an insane, lethal amount of electromagnetic energy through the Station.

I honestly bet that if they had just left his body out in the open, the WAU wouldn't have needed to overload the systems so badly, and the majority of the staff probably would have survived. So this isn't a case of "Self Preservation" or the WAU "Shrieking" back in fear. I think it was just a machine, algorithm trying it's best to fully revive Ross in line with its "preserve humanity" directive, and the staff unfortunately became collateral damage when the power surge blew their blackboxes.

Really great video. And it did lead to a lot of deep thoughts (not conversations, watched this at like 2am lol).
But I felt like the tone about the whole "continuity" part was a bit, judgy... people have their reasons for... "continuing".
I had a friend that "continued", and I didn't understand it at the time, and wouldn't until my own experiences with depression. It's honestly not for us to judge whether people choose to "continue" or not.

Idk, just stuck out to me. I'm not gonna rage quit the video or anything stupid like that I'm gonna watch the rest right now, just saying, people who do that must really go through it in order to think THAT is the only relief from it.

Overall a good video, but I really think you are a bit too certain of your own views (despite me largely agreeing with them). SOMA doesn't really make any arguments for or against specific philosophical positions, it simply presents emotionally impactful situations that have the potential to challenge yours*.

To me, that is one of the things that makes SOMA special. If I want to learn about a specific philosophical viewpoint, there are much better ways to do that than playing a video game. What games are uniquely good at is forcing me into situations where my positions on these topics suddenly have emotional weight, making me feel a kind of uncertainty that purely intellectual challenges rarely can. As Catherine implies, we lack objective definitions that would allow us to reach definitive answers to these questions. When discussing these topics in abstract, we can just agree on definitions and move on, but once it feels like there are real emotional stakes involved, this foundation can start to feel a lot more shaky.

*For example, one of your take-aways seems to be that souls don't exist, but there is nothing in SOMA that substantiates that claim. To someone who believes only real humans can have souls, it might be emotionally confusing to become emotionally attached to soulless robots, but the idea that a robot might act as though it had a soul is really nothing new. Similarly, the game might show the negative consequences people's suicides had on the remaining staff, but it never disproves the idea of continuity. It can't because the hypothesis is fundamentally based on how you define yourself as an individual.

Has anyone mentioned you sound very similar to nexpo? Because you do and if you haven't heard of him before I highly recommend his channel

I dont know why you keep saying as if Catherine is weird or antisocial or manipulative. She is a scientist and I was actually super annoyed at Simon being such a stupid person

I don't understand why some of these people would believe the continuity hypothesis.  How could these scientists and engineers be this stupid.  It's a copy not a move.  You would think that people who know the difference between a file copy and paste and a cut and paste would understand the difference.  Maybe this is just a delusional cope.

The only part I disagree with is keeping the WAU alive.

It's going to make a hell on earth and consider it a success of dozens of copies of minds all broken wandering around, in a pale imitation of life. Screw that.

I remember soma.  It was a game.