#Also keep in mind that I’m an anthropologist/archaeologist… I might be missing a thing or two if a physicist would know

[welcome-to-green-hills]

I forgot you like the science stuff ooooooooh okay and you mentioned mind uploading and I have a THOUGHT.

A HEADCANNON (kinda) because I like ti take pieces of canon and try to fit them all together.

And I'd love your thoughts.

In Sonic Brawl, Rouge says Shadow has Maria's soul. That is super vague, but we do know that Gerald was willing to go to any lengths to save Maria.

... Do you think a backup of her brain was created and 'downloaded' into Shadow?

(I have other thoughts in tandem with this but they're all mildly sad so I just want to ask the fun one💜)

Hello, my dear!❤️✨

I’m terribly sorry for taking so long on your ask. I wanted to make sure that my answer was reasonable, as well as supplied some knowledge to the character’s purpose of creation. Essentially, I wanted to make sure that I was thorough enough to share my thoughts. I’ve even shared this question with a couple of my colleagues at the lab to hear their thoughts too. This will be a pretty lengthy, but well-educated answer.

I absolutely agree, the journal entries from Sonic Battle are vague. I feel that they are purposefully meant to be vague so that the audience could make their own conclusions on what it means. Short answer: possibly, but I lean more towards “no.” Long and complicated answer can be found under the “read more” tab (because why not😅).

We just don’t know the extent of how extreme Gerald’s plans were with discovering immortality. We’ve seen in SA2, Sonic Battles, Sonic Rivals 2 and ShTH 2005 that Gerald has been known to tamper with very questionable forces in order to achieve immortality at the cost of risking everyone and everything around him. It’s desperation, yes. He care more about Maria than anything else. I think it’s just… really up for debate.

We have a couple of ideas that need to be addressed first in order for me to share my thoughts:

1). Brain uploading requirements, zettabytes

2). Psychology/Ethics and Moral Teachings

BRAIN UPLOADING REQUIREMENTS (ZETTABYTES):

The assumption that Gerald was crafty with uploading a consciousness into a computer is a process called “Whole Brain Emulation (WBE).” This is also referred to as a “mind transfer.” This is a process in which, presumably, has the ability to scan the state of our minds and transfer into a database whether it’s postmortem (deceased) or antemortem (living).

As of now, the process of uploading one’s consciousness into an artificial body or database is a pseudoscience. This means that it’s more of a fantasy sci-fi scenario other than supplying factual results. Whole Brain Emulation would have to take into consideration of scanning layers upon layers of one’s mind and convert them into various strands of code. The human brain is made up of neurons; the human mind has about 86 billion neurons (PNAS, 2012).

In order to even begin scanning the mind, we’d need an exorbitant amount of storage space that could store not even a handful of neurons. We’d need to take into consideration of zettabytes. The human mind itself can store about 1.1950 petabytes of data in a lifetime if it was used at its fullest capacity (Houzel, 2009). That’s roughly two zettabytes. That’s like finding the Pacific Ocean with water twice! Thankfully, we live in a world where we have access to zettabytes. Zettabytes are used to store large sums of data in servers for social media sites, like Tumblr and Twitter. Being able to store all of the data into a database seem plausible, but we still run into a couple of problems.

We would not be able to get a 100% accurate reflection of Maria. If anything, we’d only be able to replicate it via artificial intelligence. We would have to take into consideration of Maria’s mannerisms and wide variety of responses to the world around her.

PSYCHOLOGY/ETHICS AND MORAL TEACHINGS:

With all of the technological advancements made in human history, the capability of transferring organic consciousness into a mechanical device is nonexistent. We might be able to replicate states of consciousness, but we would have to teach AI and code human ethics and morals. In this case, we could make an attempt in replicating Maria’s consciousness to a certain extent. We don’t know a whole lot of Maria’s characteristics other than the fact that she mattered tremendously to both Shadow and Gerald.

The problem here would be that we’d lack a ration and irrational response of decision making of the individual. What we think that we might know of a person might be different from them being right then and there as they respond to the phenomenon. If anything, we wouldn’t have Maria’s internal thinking and logic. Everything that would be coded would not be Maria’s true thoughts, it would be an assumed thought of the AI and/or programmer.

There is no guarantee that the AI will possess every thought and feeling that Maria might have had when transferring her consciousness. In order to get that, we’d have to do extensive psychological research of Maria’s response to every situation in a controlled environment. This would have to be monitored 24/7. The Maria program would have to relearn everything about herself on top of learning culturally acceptable ethics and morals depending on the environment she was raised in.

If this is the case, then Shadow would have to be habilitated into having the same—or nearly the same—mannerisms that Maria would have had if having her consciousness uploaded into his mind. And if she were still a child, then that would take longer. A child is still in the process of knowing themselves and their identity. Because we would only have a secondary source of Maria’s characteristics, we would lack internal feelings of her growing up.

CLOSING STATEMENT:

It’s safer to assume that everything that Shadow has done in his life are his own thoughts and feelings. Shadow is meant to be perceived as his own person. I’m positive that his actions are influenced by Maria and his interactions with the world around him. Most, if not all, of his actions after learning the truth from SA2 are his own. I do not believe that Maria had her consciousness uploaded into Shadow’s mind, but it is a possibility that Gerald thought about it. The problem here is that we might never know. All that we know is that Gerald would have done nearly anything, even using government funding, to save Maria (Windii, 2018).

Most of my thoughts and feelings are told through the perspective of human interactions. We don’t know enough of Shadow’s physiology in order to make a true comparison. Until we learn more about Gerald and Maria’s characteristics, I think that it’s safe to say that this is more of a hypothetical scenario that needs more information.

I hope this answers your question, my dear!❤️✨

SOURCES:

PNAS, 2012: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1201895109

Houzel, 2009: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2776484/

Ted-ED, 2023: https://youtu.be/2DWnvx1NYUA

Windii, 2018: http://info.sonicretro.org/Sonic_Adventure_2_-_The_Truth_of_50_Years_Ago...

Here’s a great text from the National Institute of Health made that talks about neurogenics: https://www.ninds.nih.gov/health-information/public-education/brain-basics/brain-basics-life-and-death-neuron

[kyidyl]

Kyidyl Explains Bone - Part 1

(These posts will be collected under the tag KyidylBones because I have the sense of humor of a 13 year old boy.  Also, I’m going to start cross-posting them to my science side blog @science-of-anthropology​ in an effort to like give people a place to go if they’re just here for these posts and not for my other random thoughts.  That blog also contains a lot of decent info from the days I was premed and taking premed physical science classes.)

Intro and Ethical Considerations

Ok, all you weird nerds out there (<3), how’s your day going? Good? Are you ready to hear me ramble about one of my favorite things on earth? Well, then gather ‘round ye old tumblr fire.  We’re gonna learn about *people*! Because all the stuff I taught you before was stuff you basically learn in anthropology undergrad and in a field school.  But! I *specialized*.  I have secret powe--*coughs* I mean, a special interest.  See, my favorite topic in the whole world, the one on which I will ADHD infodump for DAYS about if you let me, is the intersection of human evolution and culture.  My ultimate goal is either to work in a museum, or be a scientist that studies this.  That’s why I went out and got a masters.  

A bioarchaeology masters not only taught me how to dig up people, but a whole HOST of other things related to people and digging (Like genetics and using drones to survey an area for digging.). But before we can get into the details, there’s a few things you have to understand.  First: 

On sex, race, ethnicity, and gender

Anthropologists of all kinds are well, WELL aware that these 4 things are extremely fraught and extremely complicated.  Probably more aware than any of the other sciences.  But, when you learn to identify skeletons you learn to do it based on sex and race for a couple reasons: 

1. When identifying a body for the police department, their databases are entirely based on these identifying characteristics.  A lot of forensic anthropologists work with the police to identify remains.  If we can’t pick out demographic qualities then we’d never match them up to people in the missing persons database who are listed along a sex binary and racial categories.  But believe me when I tell you we all do it under duress and in annoyance because we know how complicated these things are for people.  

2. When dealing with populations that are gone and can’t tell us what they identified as, we arrange them by sex and race to make some sort of sense of the demographics of an area.  This is how we know, for example, that people from Africa intermingled early and often with people from Europe.  Being able to ID these markers on a skeleton is faster and cheaper than DNA tests and often the only method available, especially in prehistoric populations. 

So I will be discussing features on bones in these terms, but understand that it’s not my way of excluding trans people.  We, as of yet, just have no good way of *identifying* trans people in the archaeological record. 

And second:

Ethics

Ethics is a huge and thorny topic so I’m going to only make a couple notes here.  I bounced this series around in my head for awhile and the reason I didn’t do it sooner is that despite having human remains in my possession for legitimate scientific reasons, it’s extremely unethical for me to post pictures of them on the open internet.  The same goes for the tons of pictures I have of human remains from my masters studies.  To that ends, the images I’ll be using will fall into one of four categories: images from my textbooks, images on the public web that are available for educational use, and images of Bone Clones, and my own image of damage patterns on animal bones.  This is also a warning that, yes, there will be images of human remains here.  I’ve decided, though, that when a post starts to contain human remains, I’ll insert a cut.  So you will not be surprised by human remains randomly in your timeline.  

Now, here are some ethical things I need you guys to understand and adhere to: 

- These people had names in life, and you do not get to give them new ones.  Naming a skeleton is verbotten in archaeology circles, and often will extend to Bone Clones because they are casts of real bones. The correct terminology here is either “the/this individual” or “the remains”. If specificity is needed they’re either given an identification number or referred to by their demographic information.  If you have the name of the individual bc there was a gravestone or records, then it’s ok to use it.  Often we don’t though for privacy reasons.  

- These were people.  They had tastes, beliefs, people who loved them, etc. - all of which were different than mine or yours.  Please keep that in mind when commenting.  

- There is no ethical way for a lay person to obtain human remains, aside from direct donation by a relative or friend.  No, I don’t care what they website says in their statement about ethical sourcing.  They did NOT obtain the remains ethically.  The people who sold the remains almost always do so under duress, usually economic.  And if they weren’t given, they were stolen.  There is No.  Ethical.  Way.  To.  Purchase.  Human.  Bone.

- Modern bone collections obtained by institutions for education usually are obtained ethically.  Often via donation by a living donor before their death for the purpose of scientific education.  In other instances they are obtained from legally-dug excavations, from donation by family members (IE, no money exchanged and consent given.), or with some other kind of permission.  However, there are many existing bone collections that pre-date this practice and are NOT obtained ethically.  In the US these are undergoing identification (we’ll get to this in another post) and repatriation, but this is just one of the many thorny issues that physical anthropologists and archaeologists have to be aware of.  

- What other societies do with their human remains is going to seem strange and sometimes disgusting or objectionable to you.  Not always, but definitely sometimes.  This is their choice and in this house we respect the emic (within the social group) view on death rituals.  

I think that’s everything...if I remember more I’ll sprinkle them in as I go along.  Ethical violations are a Big Deal among archaeologists and other social scientists who handle human remains.  It’s one of the few things we don’t joke about (because as we all know, archaeologists are forces of chaos.).  The history of completely unethical treatment in the field makes us very sensitive to how human remains are handled and where they came from.  Questions are 100% fine - you all are still learning and I’m not gonna get mad at you for not knowing yet.  I’ll gently let you know if it’s inappropriate.  

So here’s the stuff I’m planning on getting to: 

Human vs. Animal

Sex identification.  

Racial identification.  

Age identification. 

Teeth! 

Damage to the skeleton (this might be two posts.).  

Other random stuff that might come up while I’m doing the other things.  

So....let’s begin....mwahahahahahahahaha. And for making it to the bottom of this post you get a bonus picture of me AND the dog:

His name is Gage, and my name is Kristina - you’re welcome to use it.  I know probably “Kyidyl” isn’t easy to say in your heads.  :) It’s pronounced kai-dul if you were every wondering tho.  Now you can put a face to the internet voice. :)