A concept for a new playable-race, with lore and feasability considerations

[Kaiser-Ace]

It's OUR soul that's transcending its boundaries (aka our bodies) and interacting with other souls.

The Ascians seem to have perfected the Echo and are capable of preventing physical death by moving their soul to a new body in a symbiotic sense.

Lahabrea even fused with another overlord to form The Ascian Prime.

But as a whole, the full limits and strengths of The Echo seem to only be known by The Emissary, Elidibus, himself. And he's not sharing.

But since Lahabrea was eaten by a primal it's make sense based on that dialog that souls are indeed made of Aether (FF7 style *cough* Lifestreem).

So if Souls are Made of Aether too and Hydaelyn's Aether is in everything on that planet (key word THAT) then not only is a soul needed but one from The Planet Hydaelyn as well. (Or where ever Zodiark is since he can grant it as well)

[Kaiser-Ace]

And on the note if Planet Crystals, who's nessisarilly to say Zodiark and Hydaelyn are the ONLY Planet Crystals, ergo the only worlds?

There Might be Echo users from the planet Mega-Ultra-Chicken who were granted it by their God The Mega-Ultra-Chicken and sent to conquer other worlds with their Crispy Fried Wrath.

[PogueX]

The new race could be something like Darth Vader, General Grevious, or the Adeptus Mechanicus Techmarines, in that the race was once of organic form but have simply replaced their limbs with robotic parts.

It can be a cyborg race like in Phastasy Star, in fact the two MMO's should combine to be "Final Phantasy star 14!"

[LineageRazor]

And the reploids I mentioned are Bio;Mecnical SENTIENT Machines who achived self awareness.
Bio-Mechanical means they could potentially manipulate aether, and Sentience + Self Awareness is the foundation of a soul. So Clockworks can NOT have the Echo, they are programed Machines with no aetheric connection.

You are so fixated on flesh! I don't know much about Mega Man X's story (I pretty much stopped playing after the third game), but regardless of the technobabble they threw at you in that series, or which of dozens of sci-fi definitions of "bio-mechanical" they chose to use, I still see no good argument why a soul couldn't find a home in a fully mechanical, constructed body, so long as that body was sufficiently advanced. Heck, look at the terrible places a lot of souls (presumably) already end up, like babies that wind up stillborn.

Allag has already produced numerous machines that are clearly self-aware. Talk with any node in Azys Lla and it's easy to see that they are aware that they exist. "Sentient" is a terrible word to use, as well, dating from less enlightened times when people assumed that only human beings actually had sensations, and that animals could not feel pain because they were simply fleshy machines programmed to react as though they could feel pain. Even under current definitions, "sentient" basically means anything that has senses, like sight and hearing - Allag machines clearly have those, as well.

You don't have to look far in sci-fi to find examples of life forms that don't have biology as we understand it today. Star Trek, for example, had at least two examples I can think of of intelligent sillicon-based life forms - the Horta from the original series, and those crystal things from the Next Generation (can't remember what they were called; they refered to humans as "ugly bags of mostly water"). If we presume that these life forms had souls, why couldn't a machine constructed of similar materials also have a soul?

I guess the real question is this: What is so special about bone, muscle, blood, and synapse that it represents the only place a soul could take root? To me, this sounds like a very human-centric point of view. "Humans have souls. Humans are made of meat. Therefore, only things that are made of meat can have souls." If you were to present this sort of argument to anyone who knows what logic is, you would be laughed off the floor.

No, science fiction makes it clear that, if the setting decides that it is permissible, even a chunk of drywall could have a soul. The real question is whether there's anything in the world of Final Fantasy XIV that forbids it. We don't know enough about how souls work in Final Fantasy XIV to make any kind of assumption. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that Wedge would insist that Gilly has a soul. He may be right or he may be wrong, but what basis do you have to make that call?

[Enkidoh]

See, now you're just grasping at straws here - the game has made it quite clear that the soul is aetheric 'essence' - a kind of energy that is born from Hydaelyn Herself and returns to Hydaelyn when a lifeform dies, existing in a kind of river of souls retconned with the name of the similar river of life from FFVII known as the 'Lifestream' (itself loosely based on James Lovelock's 'Gaia Hypothesis') - in version 1.0 it was simply called 'the river of aether' or 'the aether'.

Accordingly artificial life which is not born from Hydaelyn therefore does not have a soul. This is why the dead cannot be returned to life as their soul has already returned to the Lifestream - instead a Voidsent almost always sets up shop inside a dead body when someone attempts to resurrect them, such as what happened to the unfortunate Avare, and Lady Amandine, to name a few (specifically, this is the MO of mindflayers and succubi, and possibly ahirman as well).

As for Maggie the magitek armour, I'm liable to take her apparent self awareness with a grain of salt - given the fact it seemed that her self awareness was inadvertently triggered by the player and was not something that just 'came naturally' (maybe the Echo/Blessing of Light influenced it's programming, or something).

Either way, I definitely stop short at saying she has a true 'soul', as she is still just a machine, albeit a machine with a clockwork computer that has given her some rudimentary intelligence and self awareness. But I'm rambling again...

[Kaiser-Ace]

You are so fixated on flesh! I don't know much about Mega Man X's story (I pretty much stopped playing after the third game), but regardless of the technobabble they threw at you in that series, or which of dozens of sci-fi definitions of "bio-mechanical" they chose to use, I still see no good argument why a soul couldn't find a home in a fully mechanical, constructed body, so long as that body was sufficiently advanced. Heck, look at the terrible places a lot of souls (presumably) already end up, like babies that wind up stillborn.

Allag has already produced numerous machines that are clearly self-aware. Talk with any node in Azys Lla and it's easy to see that they are aware that they exist. "Sentient" is a terrible word to use, as well, dating from less enlightened times when people assumed that only human beings actually had sensations, and that animals could not feel pain because they were simply fleshy machines programmed to react as though they could feel pain. Even under current definitions, "sentient" basically means anything that has senses, like sight and hearing - Allag machines clearly have those, as well.

You don't have to look far in sci-fi to find examples of life forms that don't have biology as we understand it today. Star Trek, for example, had at least two examples I can think of of intelligent sillicon-based life forms - the Horta from the original series, and those crystal things from the Next Generation (can't remember what they were called; they refered to humans as "ugly bags of mostly water"). If we presume that these life forms had souls, why couldn't a machine constructed of similar materials also have a soul?

I guess the real question is this: What is so special about bone, muscle, blood, and synapse that it represents the only place a soul could take root? To me, this sounds like a very human-centric point of view. "Humans have souls. Humans are made of meat. Therefore, only things that are made of meat can have souls." If you were to present this sort of argument to anyone who knows what logic is, you would be laughed off the floor.

No, science fiction makes it clear that, if the setting decides that it is permissible, even a chunk of drywall could have a soul. The real question is whether there's anything in the world of Final Fantasy XIV that forbids it. We don't know enough about how souls work in Final Fantasy XIV to make any kind of assumption. I'll bet you dollars to donuts that Wedge would insist that Gilly has a soul. He may be right or he may be wrong, but what basis do you have to make that call?

I'm fixated on the Biological Aspect (And there are plant creatures in Eorzea so "Flesh" doesn't always equal biological) because I have a fundamental understanding of what "Aether" is in the classical sense. Long story short, Aether is the Divine Life Energy of Biological/Organic Beings. Golems don't have Aether, nor do Clockworks, nor Homunculi, nor any other man made construct regardless of life or sentience.

I keep mentioning the reploids because they broke the mold. By the time of Megaman Zero the differences between man and machine had almost become semantics as the reploids became more Biological and Humans became more Mechanical thus breaking the typical Sci-Fi mold when added to the fact that The Reploids were thinking and feeling in their own right, completely self aware with their own souls in at least the poetic sense. But they still would have limited Aether at best and likely no way to channel it.

Aether is Life Energy so Machines that are not truly alive in the Biological since CAN NOT possess Aether. You'd be more likely to get a race of Plant People than Droids.

[Glasya]

You'd be more likely to get a race of Plant People than Droids.

An Alraune or Dryad race would also be acceptable.

[Risvertasashi]

So, here's a question to those arguing about souls/echo:

Suppose an Eorzean were critically, catastrophically injured... and required a full body prosthetic. Perhaps the Goldsmiths guild comes up with something, or maybe Cid & his Ironworks engineers do it (possibly with some reverse-engineered Allagan tech?), but one way or another someone pulls it off.

Do they still have a soul? Can they have the Echo, particularly if they had it before?

Please answer before revealing:

Ultimately though, the Lore team will write whatever they want. If they were to add a synthetic race that's playable, they could always say that they had some sort of Human/Hyur/other organic basis before conversion, or had somehow been touched by the light of the crystal, or any number of other things.

I do agree we're unlikely to ever see it, but simply because most players wouldn't care or wouldn't want it... not because of lore. My 2 gil anyways.

[Kaiser-Ace]

So, here's a question to those arguing about souls/echo:

Suppose an Eorzean were critically, catastrophically injured... and required a full body prosthetic. Perhaps the Goldsmiths guild comes up with something, or maybe Cid & his Ironworks engineers do it (possibly with some reverse-engineered Allagan tech?), but one way or another someone pulls it off.

Do they still have a soul? Can they have the Echo, particularly if they had it before?

Please answer before revealing:

Ultimately though, the Lore team will write whatever they want. If they were to add a synthetic race that's playable, they could always say that they had some sort of Human/Hyur/other organic basis before conversion, or had somehow been touched by the light of the crystal, or any number of other things.

I do agree we're unlikely to ever see it, but simply because most players wouldn't care or wouldn't want it... not because of lore. My 2 gil anyways.

This is an interesting and valid question.

Since Echo Wielders' souls are effectively immortal despite their mortal corporeal body, Which is apparently a normal echo power to an enlightened user since the Ascians taught a Sahagan Echo User how to move his soul to a new vessel as well, then I believe that you could indeed move your soul via echo to a Mechanical Vessel made out of similar Aether Channeling Magitek that the Garlands use and still retain the echo.

How well this would work how ever is open to debate, specifically this one, and completely subject to writer's privilege on how it'd operate.

An Alraune or Dryad race would also be acceptable.

This could actually add a whole new possibility to adding Geomancer to the game in a future expansion. After all, who better to wield earth magic than a Plant Person.

[LineageRazor]

Accordingly artificial life which is not born from Hydaelyn therefore does not have a soul.

It is this vague definition that is at the heart of the issue here. Just what, exactly, does "born from Hydaelyn" mean? Hydaelyn does not personally conceive and birth every living being on the planet. No, Hydaelyn's children do that. Hydaelyn's children create a new child through the reproductive act, and that child recieves a soul from the Lifestream. Why is it so impossible to imagine that a child of Hydaelyn could create a new child using their hands, rather than (parden the crudity) their gonads, and then have a soul flow just as freely into that?

I maintain that there is no conflict in the idea of a souled machine, because we are ALL souled machines, created through the labors of our parents and given a soul by Hydaelyn. If Hydaelyn sees a recepticle as worthy of a soul, she can give it one. To presume that only natural biological processes can produce a worthy recepticle is arrogant, human-centric, and not even IMPLIED by the lore of the game as far as I know. With that said, if any people were advanced enough to create machines advanced enough to be worthy recepticles, it would be the Allagans.

It is dangerous, too, so associate souls so closely with Hydaelyn herself. I'm sure Midgardsormr would be put out if you were to insist that he has no soul, and neither would his seven children. It might be fair to suggest that 'sormr and his brood have a different kind of soul from a different origin - after all, the Ascians most likely got theirs from Zodiark, and there could well be other world-beings out there wherever the dragons came from. (For the dragons born on Hydaelyn, then - do they get their souls from Hydaelyn, or from whereever the dragons originated? Can a dragon have the Echo?)

I have a fundamental understanding of what "Aether" is in the classical sense. Long story short, Aether is the Divine Life Energy of Biological/Organic Beings. Golems don't have Aether, nor do Clockworks, nor Homunculi, nor any other man made construct regardless of life or sentience.

Actually, mentioning the Golem of Prague is kind of a murky area. In some stories, the Golem was self-aware and self-willed, even as he obeyed the commands of Rabbi Lowe to protect the Jews of Prague, and could even fall in love. He was given life by way of God's name, inscribed on paper and placed within him, and could have that life removed by taking it away. God, the source of all souls, gave this artificial being life, and could very well have given him a soul, as well. Cuz, you know, he's God. Pretty resourceful guy.

As for Aether in "the classical sense" - it was my understanding that Aether has nothing at all to do with life, biological or otherwise. Aether was postulated as an "element" to fill up all the empty parts of outer space that served to keep the stars and other celestial bodies apart from the earth - and these interpretations date back as far as Ancient Greece. Hard to get a lot more classical than that! I don't think I've come across any real-world usage of Aether that associates it with life or souls - that's all the stuff of fiction and fantasy.

Aether is convenient as an mystical "fifth element" that fantasy authors can co-opt for any purpose they like, and that purpose is frequently to explain magic. It's no different here; Squeenix adopted the term as a medium for their own storytelling, and this means that they can interpret what it can and cannot do however they like. There's no classical interpretation of Aether even in fiction that limits its power to only biological creatures.

As for Reploids blurring the line between machine and man - they hardly broke the mold. That's pretty much the exact plotline behind the movie "Blade Runner" and the novel that inspired it, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?". I'm sure if I looked hard enough I could find earlier examples, too - the topics of just how close to you have to be to human before you are human, and how far can you stray away from being human before you are no longer human, are very popular topics in sci-fi! That mold is still alive and well; Mega Man used it, and I'm sure it'll be used again more than a time or two in my remaining lifetime!