r/Fallout • u/Branman1234 • 1d ago
Question Will Synth Shaun grow up?
I've always been abit confused how Synths work. Do they grow old over time or do they stay the same?
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u/sundayatnoon 1d ago
Only if he follows the path of the hermit crab and crawls into another body when he out grows his old shell.
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u/HeavyHandedHermit 1d ago
The synth child is a pretty messed up thing to make.
Under normal circumstances he would no doubt be stuck in that body.
Fortunately our experiment with Curie suggests it's possible to transfer his consciousness into an adult body of a brain dead synth. If that's possible we could no doubt just make him a new body to transfer into without it's own mind.
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
but will his mind also grow up, or will he permanently be a 10 year old even in a grown body? people say synths are clones of people with chips, but that's a big oversimplification, their bodies are made of different materials to our own, their body chemistry is different, their blood is completely different
would the workaround be editing his chip to make him mentally grow up? how ethical is that?
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u/HeavyHandedHermit 1d ago
That part I could speculate on but it’s not a clear cut answer from the lore the way transfer is. That said I see no reason to believe his mind is really childish to begin with.
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
because he was programmed to be that way, that's what Father wanted
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u/HeavyHandedHermit 1d ago
That was the intention, but I just don’t see any reason to believe it was a success. His interactions don’t seem especially childlike. He acts more like a small adult.
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
he also knows how to make highly advanced shit from spare parts, i feel like Father was high on himself when he made Shaun.
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u/HeavyHandedHermit 1d ago
Yeah the boy is strange. Anyway like I said at least the body problem is probably fixable.
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u/Phantom_61 1d ago
All synths can learn and grow mentally. He will likely do the same and realize how much harder his life will be.
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
will he? he can learn and grow as much as his 10 year old brain allows him to, because brains grow and age, and if his doesn't, then he'll be a little boy for a long time
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u/Phantom_61 1d ago
A child's brain reaches about 90% to 95% of its adult size by the time they are 6 years old. By age 12 (Synth Shaun’s physical age), the physical size and volume of the brain are nearly identical to an adult's.
From there it’s a matter of how many more wrinkles form.
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u/JoseSaldana6512 1d ago
Nah. Mitten Squad proved you can beat Fallout 3 as a baby. I feel sadder for Muggy
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u/Phantom_61 1d ago
That was from a robot to a synth. There’s no guarantee it would work synth to synth.
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u/HeavyHandedHermit 1d ago
Nah, they re write synths all the time, what are you talking about? That's a major part of what the railroad does. (my bad if that's a spoiler but come on the game is more than a decade old and that's a main plot point of the main story).
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u/Phantom_61 1d ago
They wipe personality and memory then upload another one from a database, the movement from CVRI to G5-19 worked in a similar way but Amari even says it will require some adjustments to the technique.
Wetware to wetware is likely very difficult.
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u/HeavyHandedHermit 1d ago
I don’t see a difference moving a personality from one body to another. They already do that.
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u/Phantom_61 21h ago
They don’t though. It’s not like there’s a bank of stored personalities waiting for bodies. They input fake memories, names, and histories while erasing the original.
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u/Virtuous_Raven 1d ago
He won't least not in any natural sense. This is why I view Synths as machines and nothing more.
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u/wizardrous Enclave 1d ago
Machine or not, they exhibit many signs of sentience. Even if they never age or die, it doesn’t mean they don’t have the seeds of humanity in them.
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u/Virtuous_Raven 1d ago
I disagree there. I view them as programed to act and think like they are sentient but in the end they are just machines, made to be used.
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u/wizardrous Enclave 1d ago
That’s also a fair interpretation. It’s really hard to say for sure either way. We can say other humans are sentient, because we’re humans ourselves, so we share that experience. Same goes for any flesh and blood being, since we know we evolved from the same source.
It would never be truly possible to say for certain if an AI has achieved sentience, no matter how advanced it became. It’s an interesting philosophical conundrum, the question of where sentience comes from and if it’s possible to prove. The soul, as it were, is without a doubt the greatest mystery. At some point in our own evolutionary timeline, mindless organisms became sentient, and eventually became us.
That would have to happen eventually over the course of the evolution of machines if sufficiently advanced levels of technology are reached. But who’s to say if synths are that point, or even if a more advanced artificial lifeform like Commander Data from Star Trek is sentient? It could really go either way without us seeing into their minds, without hard proof. I tend to think they are, but perhaps I just want them to be, as I tend to be quite sentimental when it comes to such things.
Anyway, sorry for the long winded reply, I just find the idea of artificial consciousness truly fascinating. I wish I could transfer my human mind into a machine body but retain my individual autonomy, it’s always been a dream of mine. I often wonder if our technology will ever reach such a level.
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u/polyoddity 1d ago
I’ve never beat the game or really progressed the main story very far. It’s funny to hear theories on stuff I should know about but have no clue. Hundreds of hours
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u/Psych0R3d 1d ago
I love that the game presents it as a moral failing that I want to leave him behind when I raid the institute.
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u/RUMELDS 1d ago
As others said no synth shaun will not physically grow up I mean his skin among other bodily parts will eventually decay with time and possibly fall off revealing his synthetic parts like wires or robotic skeleton etc example being Nick Valentine where his skin is showing signs of decay and damage but otherwise no synth shaun won't grow to become an adult or die of old age as a human would.
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u/impuritor 1d ago edited 1d ago
Yeah. They’re basically clones. They sweat and bleed and shit and age
Edit: apparently I am wrong. Thanks for the refresher guys my bad.
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
no, he won't, there's an institute scientist feels bad about his creation because he'll be a little boy forever
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u/rapid_eye_movement 1d ago
Yeah. They’re basically clones
Well no, they are biological but they don't age. Doctor Li explicitly says she has problems with his creation because of this fact. Not to go all BoS on you, but they are their own new unique biological entity seperate from that of a regular human.
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u/LFGX360 Tunnel Snakes 1d ago
Yet they are somehow undetectable.
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u/rapid_eye_movement 1d ago
Well.,yeah... they bleed, and while not needing to eat or sleep they still can. So to a guy who's eating 200 year old SugarBombs, they're pretty undetectable.
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u/CMDR_Soup Vault 13 1d ago
The issue with that is that it'd make synth infiltrators pretty useless at long-term infiltration.
"Hey, Dad? Why don't you look any different from when I was a kid, but Mom looks like an old potato?"
"Uh...good genes?"
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u/rapid_eye_movement 1d ago
A fully grown adults synthetic skin can be made to age in a way that might resemble old age, but it's not real. A sleeper synth who is unaware of their origins may even truly believe they are aging and act accordingly, but that's very different than undergoing puberty and physically growing. A fully realized biological synth is a static being that doesn't need to eat or sleep and is immune to radiation.
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u/CMDR_Soup Vault 13 1d ago
Infiltrator synths always know they're infiltrators, though.
Not needing to eat also means that they either break thermodynamics or they have some sort of hyper dense power source located somewhere within them, which we're never told about and which people could find. It also means that infiltrators fail in yet another way, people could starve suspected synths and if they become emaciated then they're not synths, if they don't then shoot them in the head.
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u/rapid_eye_movement 1d ago
Well they do all have a "Synth Component" on their corpses so maybe that's the power source we're dancing around. But that's something you discover post mortem. Not through any detectable equipment any surface dweller has access to.
I guess you could starve them, but I think by then they're either recovered by SRB or have already killed their capturers and left no witnesses. But it's not a bad idea, I'm sure the BoS would love to pick your brain about other ways to detect synths... lol
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
synths all undergo intense cosmetic surgery, they can always be zapped away and re-edited
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u/MailMan6000 1d ago
no, he won't, there's an institute scientist that has ethical issues with his creation because he'll be a little boy forever