I had a big awesome post typed up last night, and then my internet crapped out on me and wouldn't come back, so I lost it. I'm going to be trying to hit all my big points from that reply, and hopefully it all still makes sense to me after a good night's sleep.
For the record, I'm not snipping out chunks of your post to be dismissive of them, but rather to save some space, and to only reply to certain high points that really caught my eye. I'm not out to come off as arguing, here, just discussing and sharing my own opinions.
I see what you guys are saying, but the nature of the Cyberpunk genre is to question "What makes us human", "How do we define Humanity" and "What are the ramifications of losing ones humanity"?
An important thing to remember is that Shadowrun isn't a Cyberpunk game. Or not only a Cyberpunk game, at least. It's also got magic, which throws two monkeywrenches into this opening statement/question of yours.
First and foremost, magic
thematically changes the nature of a "what is human" question. Who has lost more humanity? The dedicated Lone Star patrol officer who's gotten some microchips put into his eyes so he can see in the dark and do his job better, or the guy who goblinized into a nine foot tall monster with horns and chalky dermal plating? Who's farther away from being human, the everyday cubicle jockey office worker with a little plug behind his ear that lets him interface with the corporate internet more efficiently, or the kid who'll live for three hundred years and never look a day over twenty, and can break the laws of physics with his will and imagination? Magic changes the game, by setting wildly different bars for "human" in the first place. Humanity isn't just a sliding scale -- like in CP: 2020 or other dedicated games where cyberware is the only Nth factor -- that changes based on how much chrome you've got, "humanity" has become a three dimensional idea, factoring in the HMVV infected, Pixies, Sasquatch, Dragons, and who knows what else.
In addition to those thematic changes, though, magic also brings
balance, or rules, changes to the game. In CP:2020, where everyone's a human and all that changes that humanity is a varying Empathy attribute (bought or rolled like other attributes, and then lowered by cybernetics or raised by counseling), you've got a simple enough picture. Empathy high means more human, Empathy low means going cyberpsycho. Because cyberware is the only way to boost a character's abilities, cyberware affecting the Empathy score is the only check and balance that's needed. In Shadowrun, though, you've got magic. A physical Adept can be every bit as inhumanly fast as a Street Samurai, but only the Street Sam takes an Essence hit for being that fast, or social penalties for being that fast. See the issue? Game balance is -- nominally -- restored by the fact that being an Adept has its own downsides, costs its own points, etc...which is what leads to the comments you've received on this thread, where folks have expressed concern at further "nerfing" mundanes.
Because the rules already handle Essence loss -- with difficulty modifiers for friendly spellcasters, with social test modifiers, with Qualities that players can
choose to take, in a balanced fashion, to represent other Essence loss issues -- it feels like your introduction of some sort of Sliding Scale o' Essence Loss is further penalizing characters in a way that feels needlessly harsh.
Assuming 6 is a spiritually centered being...
Which is a big, and in my opinion misplaced, assumption. Essence is -- at heart -- purely a game balance conceit. It's been called the purity of someone's soul, the balance of their karma, the nature of their living aura, and yadda yadda yadda. But consider this: right now, in the world today, pretty much everyone has a 6 Essence.
How spiritually centered do you think the everyday schmuck on the street is? How spiritually centered are the folks on Jersey Shore or in C Block of your nearest federal prison? How spiritually centered are the guys slinging dope down on the corner, the corporate sharks screwing up everyone's retirement, or the politicians who'll say anything to win a vote?
"Spiritually centered" gives folks a little too much credit, I think. An Essence of 6 doesn't make you zen balanced or morally straight, that's for sure.
Does an essence at level 3 mean that...Does an essence level of 1 mean that...Do they...Do they...How does...
And this gets to the nuts and bolts of the matter, to me.
Does an essence of
6 mean anything? Does it mean we both react the same way to a dirty joke? To a picture of a pretty girl? Do we both have the same idea of what "dirty" is, or "pretty" is? Do we like the same movies, feel the same emotional tug at a Hallmark commercial, do we both stand up for the national anthem and do we both mean it when we sing along? Does everyone in the world today -- all of us with the same boring, vanilla, Essence of 6 -- react the same to relationship troubles, feel the same way when we hear a song on the radio, have the same reaction to a newspaper headline, or handle it the same when we stub our toe, wake up on the wrong side of the bed, get laid, or smoke a cigarette?
There's nothing automatic about emotional responses to anything, for anyone, ever. Essence 6, Essence 3, or Essence 0.06 (more on that later), nothing is guaranteed to work a certain way with any two people...in game, or out of it.
The questions you ask are all valid. They're all important. I'm not dismissing them, or brushing them aside, or sweeping them under the rug. But they're not all
general. They'll vary based on the personality of the character involved, the background of that character, the social skills and Charisma score of that character, or even the mood that character's in on a given day -- do you
always react the same to a coffee shop employee and a pretty girl (Ork and Elf or not), or does it change sometimes based on whether, say, your girlfriend is standing there, whether you're running late that day, or whether you just suffered a bad break up?
That's all where role playing comes in, and role playing is always about individual characters, not hard and fast rules.
I mentioned 0.06 Essence earlier because it's what my longest running, most popular, Shadowrun character had. For a 250+ karma career, he was hovering right at the razor's edge of just outright dying from too many implants. But he wasn't emotionally detached. Connor was emotionally unstable, instead. He changed faces based on who was around him (his long running partner, his little girl, his girlfriend, strangers), but he never appeared outright inhuman about it. He was, at heart, a high functioning sociopath. He had terribly little value for human life (the ones that didn't matter to him, personally), he killed more men before breakfast than some Street Sammies do their whole career, he butted heads with Deus and Tir Princes and Red Samurai without batting an eyelash...but he did so all with no chrome showing but cyberspur ports and smartlink induction pads (and dermal plating, which was admittedly easy to see because he took his shirt off alot for my now-wife's then-character). He had a 7 Charisma score, he had 5-6 in all the social stats, and he acted like it. His Essence loss didn't make him obviously inhuman or cold, it made him...mercurial.
Conversely, I had another character with a superficially quite similar background. Both were from the Tir, both were in the Peace Force, both had a similar blend of stealth and shooting skills. This other character, though? He lost less than one of Essence, ever. He got an arm taken off to a Troll street-gang ambush, he had a cyberlimb installed to replace it, and he had an Essence of 5.2 (because it was an Alpha grade arm). He
did turn emotionally cold, uncaring, brooding, and almost PTSD-like because of it, though. Why? He had a Charisma of 3 (as an Elf, mind you!), he had shitty social skills, and he just reacted differently to his different circumstances. Jace took his little 0.8 bit of chrome harder than Connor took his 5.94, because they were two different characters, who'd gotten implants in two wildly different circumstances (one voluntarily to keep up with the Adepts around him, one an Adept who'd been blown the hell up), and of wildly different types (one didn't have much obvious chrome at all, one was stuck with a big ugly cyberarm that he hated) and so they reacted in wildly different ways. Two different characters, two different circumstances, two very different amounts of Essence lost.
You ask valid questions -- you do! -- but they're questions best answered by one character at a time, at one game at a time. The last thing we need are more hard and fast rules about how a character
must act, based on what enhancements they've received.