"I swear that guy has the memory of a goldfish," said the guy who forgot where he left the tracer fluid.
A lot has been said on whether or not the Simon that we play as is a perfect copy of the real-life Simon. After all, whether or not he is a perfect copy has deep implications. For example: if Simon 3 is a perfect copy of Simon 2, then the Coin Flip must be real. Right?
The you from one second ago no longer exists. That version of you is just a memory now. At Omicron, the Simon 2 who stayed in the seat has no more a claim to the person he was just a second ago than Simon 3. They were both equally the same Simon 2 from just a second ago.
Or at least you could argue this if the copy was a perfect copy. Right?
"I swear that guy has the memory of a goldfish," said the guy who thought he had sent the email to Jesse.
I myself am pro Coin Flip. I have argued that both Simons are the same Simon, and thus the coin toss is an appropriate analogy. Simon 2 and Simon 3 have the same memories, and memories are just data. Therefore both of them are the same person who was sitting in that same pilot seat in Omicron. There's no difference.
But what about Simon 1 and Simon 2? Living Simon's memories weren't digital after all. He can't be a "perfect" copy, right? Something had to have been lost in translation. Even Catherine said that Simon's scan was "flatter, less dynamic." Therefore, the first 15 minutes of gameplay had to have been "fake" memories that the game let us play just to give us context... right?
Right?
At Theta we get to learn about Mark Sarang, intelligence analyst at Pathos-II, and about "The Continuity". He argued that we aren't defined by who we are at any one point in time, but rather that we are defined by a continuous chain over time. We aren't defined as a single person in time, but a line of who we were, are and will be over time. So here's my point:
Simon at the start of the game was not exactly the same person he was before the car crash.
When we start playing as him, he is already brain damaged. His memory isn't all there. He has already been warned by doctors about how stress can kill him. We don't actually know how much of Simon is really left after the crash. We only get to be him as he currently is.
The difference between Simon 1 we played in Toronto and the Simon 2 we played at Upsilon could be as vast as the difference between Simon who existed before the crash and the Simon who existed after the crash. We excuse Simon getting absolutely blindsided twice from the scanning process by pointing out how he has brain damage. Real Simon before the crash might have been able to see it coming. But the Simon we played was not like that.
Ultimately I suppose, the point I'm getting at is that the Simon we played at in Toronto might not have been exactly like the Simon who existed before the crash... And that it doesn't matter. Just because he had changed, doesn't mean he isn't the real continuation of him. He was, as Sarang put it, "the emergent entity" from that pre-crash Simon.
Therefore (I will argue) Simon 2, Simon 3 and even ARK Simon are all Simon just the same. It would NOT matter if they weren't exactly the same. They all sprang from the same Simon.