Cyberpunk 2077 builds its entire progression system on a lie neuroscience has spent thirty years disproving: that consciousness is portable, that the self is substrate-independent, that you can replace your spine with titanium or your arms with chrome and remain essentially you.

The ripperdoc encounter proves this is the game's philosophical bedrock—a cyberneticist opens your character's chassis like a vending machine and swaps organs, and the game asks you to feel nothing about it except the stat upgrade.

Not loss, not violation, not the disorientation of suddenly having a nervous system that doesn't recognize its own limbs—just better damage resistance. The mechanical message is clear: body parts are modular, consciousness is untethered, the continuity of self survives any substitution.

You don't rebuild your character's story through choices or relationships—you rebuild them through augmentation, which means the game defines growth as replacement, not integration. Every limb you install distances you further from the biological substrate that neuroscience shows actually generates your sense of self: your proprioception, your emotional response to touch, the way your cerebellum constructs continuity through embodied feedback. The game never shows you someone struggling with phantom limbs or the neurological vertigo of a replacement organ, because that would contradict the core mechanic, which requires that someone never changes at all, only upgrades.

V remains V, the self is permanent, and the body is disposable—everything else is just scaffolding around that false assumption.