SPOILERS FOR TADC ENDING!!

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The only thing that made sense for the circus that they were copies of themselves and couldn’t escape. Some of them had been in there for years and none of them remember being hooked up to any life support or anything that would keep them alive during that time. It’s the same concept of that black mirror episode where they make a copy of her to control her appliances it’s actually horrifying. If you’re interested in this you can look up embodied-cognition. There’s a lot of cognitive scientists who think you can’t have human like consciousness independent of a body, that the experience is too intertwined to be separated.

I didn’t rewatch everything before jumping into the finale so I might have forgotten but is there a solid reason why they couldn’t just put kinger’s head in a bucket and do their plan sooner?

The descriptions of the humans they’re copied from at the end had me tearing up ngl.

I was most excited about this series because of the connection to IHNMBIMS but I think it begins and ends with setup. Caine is supposed to be AM’s counterpart or I guess the evil inside him is? But as far as the function in the plot goes, even with the horror and torture that Caine inflicts at the end this doesn’t even begin to match what AM did. He kept them alive for over 100 years, changing them physically and torturing them in every possible way but not allowing them to die. The series ends with the narrator sacrificing himself to continue to be tortured forever so that the others can take themselves out. Tortured until he you know doesn’t have a mouth but must scream. Caine’s nature is to entertain, he is in the digital world and seems relatively content with his position compared to AM. AM’s existence itself is torture, he has no mouth but must scream. The nature of an AM, as a consciousness with no body and no senses, causes him to hate us. This is not a personality flaw, or a freak coding mistake, or a question of nature or nurture like when humans go wrong. This hatred and evil is an inevitable, almost natural conclusion to how AM exists. Caine does not hate the circus members. The thought of being left alone in the circus, and the constant need for validation that he is performing his function from the members resembles the disposition of a normal socialized human. Maybe in the tadc universe, cognition can be successfully separated from the body if you also code IN a virtual body (artificial nerves, senses, a virtual world to interact with). Whereas this is not possible in the IHNMBIMS universe?? The nature of the ai and the meaning of it is very different. TADC doesn’t seem to be much of an exploration on the nature of consciousness and artificial intelligence, but more themes of change and guilt and only being able to help those who want to be helped. Just to be clear, the fact that it is so different isn’t inherently a bad thing, but I kept holding out for it to somehow come around as a fan of the book 😓.

If u read all that 😘😘here’s a kiss on the forehead. 🛌 now goodnight.