::: spoiler He’s an average dude, the games message wouldn’t exactly hit the way it does if both central characters had Catherine’s level of understanding of the situation. If you can’t deal with stupid, that’s fine, but having the two lead characters contrast each other in this way is how the game makes its point. They each represent one possible perspective. Catherine accepts that peoples minds can be reduced to data-files on a computer, copied, whatever. She knows that in tech, there is no “moving” data, only copying and then deleting.

To Simon this is an idea so foreign he can’t even understand it when told point-blank. Hell, he only barely gets it the first time it actually happens to him. He’s like the people who killed themselves after their brain-scans, in his understanding of reality, there can only be one instance of a person, because there is only one soul per person to go around. To him, the real Simon is dead, and he refuses to consider the thought further, because the conclusion he’d come to is that he is a “fake”.

In contrast Catherine is content with being a copy. To her a copy is just as valid and real as the original, but Simon doesn’t feel that way. They are the embodiments of the two sides of the speculative philosophical debate that is central to the game’s plot. Simon isn’t supposed to have intelligent things to say. He is the emotional response to the events of the Pathos facility, while Catherine is the intellectual one. :::