Is it illogical for Mondatta to be dead?

Obviously, a person would be gone forever when they’re shot in the head like what Widow did to Mondatta, but since he’s a robot, shouldn’t he have easily been creating backups of himself?

Especially since he has bodyguards present with him, he’s clearly a public figure like the pope that has all sorts of protection and safeguards in place. Why wouldn’t he just be creating backups images of his “being” to an external hard drive or something? Even today, we have technology that can create bit-by-bit copies of the original data to another data source. I would imagine it’d be as easy as restoring Mondatta’s previous backup to a new body, and from his perspective, he’ll wake up two days later having no memory of what happened on the day he was assassinated on.

Tbh This seems like a pretty big plot hole, because how does technology of the future advance so far yet they somehow can’t do basic tasks today like backing up data to an external storage device?

In the short story “Stone by Stone” there is this conversation between Satya (aka Symmetra) and Zenyatta:

“I know about Mondatta. He was killed,” Satya recalled.

“Yes,” Zenyatta replied, seemingly untroubled by her blunt statement.

“Before that, I did not realize omnics could die. You are machines; I had
assumed you could replace parts.”

“In theory, yes. But replacement parts have yet to be found for a soul, be it
human…or omnic.”

So in theory, yes they could rebuild Mondatta, but as Zenyatta says, there are no replacements for a soul. And that’s what they believe in, that Omnics have souls too.

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That seems like an extremely weak cop-out from the writers.

Has there ever been an explanation as to why they can’t do a backup and restore operation? I understand that the writers are trying to muddy the waters by mixing religious beliefs into an omnic’s “being”, but I can’t imagine no one has ever tried to do a bit-by-bit backup on a robot in the world of Overwatch to see what would happen.

As someone who works in IT and has an understanding of the technology that’s already out there in the world, I find the writer’s explanation, quite honestly, to be insulting. I know that there’s this broad theme of trying to make the audience understand that robots are people too, and how they’re trying to present their case through these stories. But if legitimate questions are being posed about story elements that have a real world basis, and the only explanation given is “nuh-uh, you can’t do that because I said so”, then they already showed that they’re not interested in enlightening the audience with the truth.

I understand that you yourself are not advocating for any position on the matter; you’re just delivering the narrative’s answer to my question. I’m not sure if you feel too strongly about the claims I’ve raised, but I would like to at least cite a source regarding some of the suped up technology out there that the police use for their digital forensics.

https(colon)//www(dot)sciencedirect(dot)com/topics/computer-science/forensic-clone

Note: replace “(colon)” with a : and replace “(dot)” with a .

It’s okay if you don’t want to read it, but in case of you or anyone else was wondering, this copying technique was what I was referring to. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to question why a bit-by-bit copy of the data representing Mondatta couldn’t be done. I’ve personally done this with new hard drives for my Windows computers, and the cloning process is so seamless, it’s almost like I never swapped the hard drives in the first place.

I think Zenyatta means that they could rebuild him but they fear that they wont be the same in personality and that he will not have any memory of his past. For Echo it was easier since Liao was professional in this and Echoes ability made her being able to copy Liaos personality but Liao is now dead.

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Ah, the “spark” of the Transformers series. :grin:

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From what I understand, it’s the same principle as cloning a human mind or finding a way to preserve the human mind through data. Successfully doing this would essentially make a person’s influence immortal, but is it really the same person? A clone in this scenario would believe themselves to be the original and probably wouldn’t believe you if you told them they’re a clone.

Cyberpunk 2077 covers this, but goes from the assumption that the duplicated mind, or “engram,” is still the person. But it could be argued that it isn’t and they do briefly address this at points.

Similarly, I imagine this is how much the omnics feel. Logically, they could probably find a way to duplicate and essentially revive Mondatta, and maybe someone will. It’s not totally off the table as a plot point in OW2 or a future story. However, many of them might find this just as offensive or immoral as the concept of cloning a human is to certain people.

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As we learned in Stone By Stone, the Shambali believe that omnics have a soul - you can make backups of data, but you can’t back up a soul. Because of this belief, it’s unlikely that Mondatta kept any sort of backup.

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Even Data in Star Trek says that despite B4 having all of his memories, B4 is not Data and would never be Data (I realize the novels have Data “awakening” in B4. But the novels don’t count.) A similar situation came about when the Klingon clerics of Borath created a clone of Kahless.

The Omnics have achieved sentience…somehow. Just having Mondotta’s memories put in to another Omnic wouldn’t bring Mondotta back as each Omnic’s sentience is unique. The other arm of science fiction tells us that simply making a copy of a program instilled within a robot would allow you to make multitudes of the same personality in every robot given that copy. But over time, every copy would become subtly different as each robot gained more experience through it’s lifetime.

An Omnic with Mondotta’s memories might, at first, believe it was Mondotta. But it would learn quickly that it was only carrying Mondotta’s memories and not truly the Omnic leader reborn.

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I think an ideal way to explain what makes an omnic irreparable is to see the pixar movie Wall.E.

if we combine what we learned about omnics from Stone By Stone (Aurora’s sacrifice) and London calling 3 (Lady’s funeral) we can deduce that there was a very rare and unusual algorithm that allowed the Omnics to stop being things that replicate a person but of people sentient to themselves.

it’s a bit like the videogame “Dietroit become human”, that illumination of Aurora was the key to an unexpected protocol, and in a sci-fi context it makes sense enough as a plot.

the moment you go offline, that protocol disappears and you become “junk”. it is a theme that humanity has faced analogously with the search for immortality, as in Frankenstein’s book: how can the cognitive part of the human being be preserved? can one really transcend into a “part 2” of one’s existence?

I find the definitive difference on Echo and Orisa: their personalities are very adaptive to protocols, but they are not at all comparable to the behavior of Zenyatta or Iggy, of the Omnics of the primordial generation. their conscience of the world is formed in a particularly human way, while Echo and Orisa often recall the protocols to be performed by word of mouth, no matter what the experience in the field is.

or at least, I like to notice this difference between the Omnic generations.

a speculation (whether true or imaginative): Aurora’s awakening could have occurred 20 years ago, along with the birth of Zenyatta who is part of the “sentient” generation of Omnics.

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Even if you create perfect backups with memories of Mondatta up to its last moments, you cannot recover his destroyed consciousness or a “soul”, so to speak. Therefore Mondatta is still dead and can never be restores, but you could only create a clone of it, at best. They are not us.
By the way have you played a game called SOMA? 2015’s Psychological horror with puzzles, if you are old enough (+17 years) please play it, as it deals very well with this very theme you brought. I do not think I can share the trailer here, but you should definitely look for it.

and I recommend Talos Principle to you. it’s a bit similar to Portal, but it poses some interesting questions about human existence.

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Oh yes, I own “The Talos Principle on PC” (Steam), indeed it has great philosophies about consciousness, AI, choice, Life and such… pity I never finished it. I should resume playing it someday.

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you’re missing a grand finale. I admit that to be able to catch the stars I had to see the solutions on Youtube, but it’s worth it to complete the tower;)

Along with what others have said here, I remember the events from one of the episodes from Person Of Interest (pretty good TV show actually). The friendly AI they had just been forced to compress and move had just become “hostile” and shutdown the new interfaces they’d after they’d been given time to boot up because from it’s perspective, all their memories over the past few years seemed to have happened all at once, and therefore had no coherent timeline to said AI because all that data had been regiven to it all at once. This happening in a persont would make them question if those memories are real and not say, implanted by soemone.

To say the least, I’d say this happening is a real possibility both IRL and in fantasy, with both biological and electronic backups.