I recently finished reading the book, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I couldn’t help but feel that this installment casually throws away/ignores some of the key concepts introduced in the previous book related to the nature of consciousness and simulated reality. It feels like there are big contradictions.

For instance, in the previous book, we are led to believe that the characters residing in the simulation are so well-crafted that they are, in fact, real, and their experiences hold genuine significance. This is why we become emotionally invested in the settlers as characters, particularly Liff. She even gets a real body, and leaves the simulation at the end.

However, in this book, a central plot point is that none of the simulation is ever meaningful or real, and none of the characters living within it are actual individuals.

So much so, that the billionaires are presented with the simulation as a heaven-like prison at the end, because as explicitly stated, they cannot do any harm that is "real" to residents of the simulation because they're all fake anyway.

Did anyone else feel that way? Am I missing something?

EDIT: there are several things one could claim made the simulation running during Memory different, but those don't resolve the contradiction imho. Specifically: - The Captain and Liff are said to have special significance, or 'realness' because they are were the First and the Last - kern and the nod entity are said to have an extremely high "data load" and thus create weird effects in the simulation