[Spoilers] Copy, but why not transfer/cut?

[Mina]

I really love this game, finished it, and what a ride it was. The story is intriguing, pretty sad, though it really sounds like what humanity would do if all other options ran out.

Anyway, one thing kept nagging me about the whole conscious copying. It causes duplicates, so... Why not just 'control-x' a person/scan? Maybe I missed a log or something somewhere which explains this, but if not, I wonder why they could only seem to copy a mind. Maybe it was done to create the responses in the game and never really explained, this would be a bit of a bummer though, to be honest.

[Syystole]

Catherine said she didn't have the technology to actually transfer someones conscious

[EckyThump]

Like any data, you never really 'transfer' it. Even with cutting and pasting, you're always actually making a copy, just the computer then flags the original as being invisible to the system so the space it occupies can be overwritten. It is still 'there' though. To truly transfer it, you'd have to physically cut the portion of hard drive out and move it elsewhere, ie transplant it.

The seats were created to take a copy of a living person's brain. Obviously they never considered needing to 'wipe' a person's brain post-scan, yes some crew were disturbed by the fact it meant two of them now existed; a living body and the consciousness on the Ark. That's why some, like Sarang, committed suicide, so there would only be one Sarang.
They never designed the chairs with the intention to scan and copy consciousnesses to and from artificial people with artificial brains. just like a scan from a living subject, it's going to leave the old consciousness behind in the body that was scanned, with no way to remove it/flag it as invisible to the OS, like a computer cut/paste.

[Mina]

Ah, yes, I forgot that a computer doesn't truly cut data but just copies it and 'deletes' the original... Makes sense. I guess they could've prevented the panic if they also programmed their devices to delete source files (except when scanning an organic, original mind), although this could've been forgotten, yes.

And yeah, I only meant cases like where Simon copies himself to another body, not when making a scan of the source mind. Well, this all does explain it pretty well. I guess missed the part about Catherine mentioning it or forgot it.

[Clord]

Windows has this function known as "cut" etc.

If you cut a file and move it to another folder in same hardware, it happens "instantly" as there is no need to actually destroy the file, all it does reconfigures it on hard drive to show up elsewhere.

Now if you use same command but want to cut the file on different hard drive, then Windows copies the file first onto another hard drive and after that destroys the original.

[Mina]

Aye, that too, though I guess in SOMA's case, it's always like copying to 'a different drive'.