Finished the MSQ - Feels bad, pushed to do evil [Spoilers inside]

[Bunyon]

If the Endless don't have souls then what is a soul? Cahciua seemed like she had emotions and thoughts, and was able to react and interact with everyone around her. Krile's parents were able to recognize Krile and enjoyed being with her and made new memories hanging out with her. Even if they "do not have souls" what does this mean?

And you can say they are being sustained by evil means, but they are not responsible for this. If you were only alive because a truly evil person was keeping you alive, does this justify killing you? The project certainly could not be continued, but whether or not it should have been shut down immediately is not black or white for me and I think it needed to be explored more.

[Shialan]

"you aren't truly dead as long as you are remembered". [...]Then in the climax everyone just immediately agrees to wiping out this entire world made of people's memories because... Erenville's mom wants it?

You didn't understand a single thing then. Endless didn't exist because others remembered them, but because of their own memories. Sphene couldn't let go of the actual people and used their memories to create them as AI.

And that was the whole point of letting go and YOU remembering others. As long as YOU remember them, they are not truly dead.

[Musashidon]

If one day we created a real thinking, feeling machine, you're the kind of person to try and deny it any human rights and delete it or enslave it. Like we didn't have a lot of sci-fi exploring this concept and how cruel that is)

wtf are you going on about. you need to calm down you are putting way to much into this game. the implications that i think a genocidal AI who lives off the death of others is the same as a normal electrical AI who would live off of natural resources without the death of an entire world is insane.

omega was left alive because we stopped their whole plot to conquer the universe, it's the same with all of omega's creations, omega didn't live off the life of every being in the universe. if you want to chuck all AI together that's on you not me.

[genuine_stranger]

The last part so much. Lol

I highly doubt that most people will even recognise the intelligence and feelings of an Inanimate being, or even realize that they interact with one.

[Hewrey]

So I finished the msq, The story was lackluster throughout the xPac but the ending just felt evil to me, the writers try and push their point of view that life should end no matter what, that the endless are not really alive, even though we see that they are, they can hear, feel and think, express emotion, be happy and sad, the WOL just committed a mass murder and we are suppose to feel ok with that?

This has forever tainted my view of the wol, my character is now evil.

From EW where we forgave a genocidal bird girl who killed who knows how many planets to DT where we become the mass murderer yourself what up square enix?

They are collections of the memory aether of an individual manipulated by an overarching intelligence.
Once someone dies their corporeal aether alongside their soul's and memory's return to the cycle of the star to be eventually recreated. (EW lore with Montichaigne's lecture and the overal story.)
The intelligence acts as an artificial substitute to the lifestream that only mimics part of it's innerworking inefficiently.

This innefficiency led to the need to syphon more and more aether from other sources (other people, not signing up for it like with the invasion of tural and an eventual overall drain on the land) and the commodification of the people's soul as fuel to placate a living person's fear of mortality.

Now people are deprived of a chance at reincarnation and FORCED to live in a set artificial theme park forever albeit on a rotation as the intelligence decides which soul-memory gets a turn on the carousel.
These soul-memory manifestations are very much aware of their state, that they are dead and that where they are is their enclosure. One of the reason if not the main reason they appreciate it is because they've been synthesized by the intelligence at a specific point in their memory in which they were the happiest whilst synthesizing the adequate context for them to be content (the lovers, friends, family reunifications are not coincidences it is said, once the intelligence noticed that the memory of person B that knew person A arrived in the data base and the aether is sufficient, then it synthesises them at the specific point in their relationship that they'd better mesh together).
They are puppets in a puppet show content with their lot and that can't act decisively against the puppeteer that created them in the first place if they ever wanted to and they're aware of it; Cahciua needed help from living beings to be free, Constancy appreciated his current disposition but did not want it to be sustained by mass murder.

Also, I think there's a sort of misunderstanding.. The WoL does not KILL them they TURN OFF the terminal POWERING the aether pumped into the place which includes the soul-memory individuals. The things that would be *KILLING* them, them being MEMORIES, is SPHENE when she/it decides to ERASE data.

The thing that bugs me more is the fact I don't know if the whole commodification of people's soul is done away with at the end for Neo-Alexandrians, the hardware -tower- still seems functional and so does the *software* with the robot sentinels and everything.

[genuine_stranger]

Hey, hey

What if this is a gigachad galaxybrain preamble to our WoL being the next holder of the Emet Selch position? Let's wait for the finger snapping and the hand waving.

This is all we can hope for now

I wouldn't even be mad, if they did this. Lol

[AlexisLestrange]

We spent so much time slowly learning about every culture in the first half of the expansion, with one of the most interesting concepts being "you aren't truly dead as long as you are remembered".

Then in the climax everyone just immediately agrees to wiping out this entire world made of people's memories because... Erenville's mom wants it? Can we spend some time discussing this? Can we go out the portal and ask Ysh if there's any alternative to doing this to stopping Sphene? Everyone just completely agrees this is the only way, despite then going around seeing that there are in fact people who are happy in this world. Are they alive? What is living exactly? Those would be interesting concepts to delve into. No? Okay, just wipe out the world, I guess.

...

Yikes... where to start with this one. Uh... they're not living people? They don't have souls. The fact that not only did Cahciua ask this of us but Krile's parents were also in notion of agreement gave us the full idea that sustaining this world was not right. Living off the backs of people who were murdered just to entertain someone's dream is very pitiful and deranged. There's no way you're trying to entertain the idea that any of it was moral. Given that what was left of the Providence team was dead and the original Sphene wasn't even fully herself, but only just the memories, she had forcefully created a world to sustain people because she was programmed to do so, in protecting the Endless at all costs. And she continued to do so despite having the appearance and memories of Sphene. She was a slave to those urges.

When we first entered into the area, there was the introduction ceremony, which should have been a huge red flag in the "grace period" to adjust to suddenly living again. It seemed like they operated this procedure without the consent of those still living just because someone wanted to keep them alive. That's the most horrifying thing in all of this.

[Galvuu]

You didn't understand a single thing then. Endless didn't exist because others remembered them, but because of their own memories. Sphene couldn't let go of the actual people and used their memories to create them as AI.

And that was the whole point of letting go and YOU remembering others. As long as YOU remember them, they are not truly dead.

What constitutes something as being "alive" in XIV lore right now? Are the beings in the Ultima Thule alive? Are Omega and Alpha alive? Are primals alive? Memory seems to have been established, in the msq, as a real, physical entity, that we can see (visually, the orange orbs) and interact with (can be manipulated and stored in some capacity, not sure if physically or like energy, but matter and energy usually end up being the same if the world has any semblance of physics). The beings in the Ultima Thule are the result of Meteion's memories and Dynamis powering them up. Are those alive? Omega wasn't designed, as far as we know, with a soul. But, at some point in time, it started to think, and feel, and question its existence and its place in the cosmos. Is Omega alive? If you were to split a being's self by separating "memory" and "soul" and destroyed the memory part- is it alive? You're claiming the reverse is a categorical "no".

I'm not even saying the Endless were truly alive- I really do not know. The game sometimes says and acts like they're not, and sometimes it acts like they are. My sentiments are that it's a "maybe"- not that it mattered, I had to destroy them to save the Source. But I fail to see where the convincing evidence that they were not alive in any capacity is beyond "oh, we were told they were just AI, and AI can't be alive". A person isn't the prison of flesh, it's the electromagnetic pattern that forms their mind, in my view. And that electromagnetic pattern could, hypothetically, be stored in a machine.

wtf are you going on about. you need to calm down you are putting way to much into this game. the implications that i think a genocidal AI who lives off the death of others is the same as a normal electrical AI who would live off of natural resources without the death of an entire world is insane.

You're conflating two things.
One is: "the endless' existence is incompatible with life on the Source and, therefore, they had to be destroyed to preserve the Source". Yes, correct. There's no argument there.
Then there's "the endless were not alive, so destroying them has no moral consequence". This is not evident. Maybe they weren't alive, and were just simulations. Maybe they were alive though. And the game doesn't seem to be showing me that they were lifeless, robotic AI, especially given how they diverge from their original settings on a whim. In fact, the story is better if there is a moral consequence to our choice. Was the WoL justified? Yes, it was for the survival of the Source. But doesn't make it less tragic. Unless, well, you posit that they weren't alive because "AI", which is where this started, isn't it? It doesn't even matter that they're AI, anyway. If a living army of aliens showed up and needed to exterminate life on the Source to sustain their existence, the WoL would still be justified in killing them as an act of self-preservation. That isn't even the point of the discussion.

[Bunyon]

You didn't understand a single thing then. Endless didn't exist because others remembered them, but because of their own memories. Sphene couldn't let go of the actual people and used their memories to create them as AI.

And that was the whole point of letting go and YOU remembering others. As long as YOU remember them, they are not truly dead.

There is no one left to remember all the people you wiped out. You may remember Krile's parents or Cahciua, but everyone else existed in a bubble in a dead reflection, and your group isn't the one that's going to "remember" all of those NPCs. If they were being sustained by their dead memories and you wiped all of those away, then how did you not truly kill them?

Also, what is there to "let go"? Krile's parents, who we never met? Wuk Lamat's nanny/mom who was already presumed dead? Erenville was the only one who had to let go, but his was the most fucked up because he was led around as if his mom wasn't dead and was forced to go along this circus of "lets be goofy before we kill your mom Erenville!" while he can't even hardly muster a single piece of dialog.

[Bunyon]

Uh... they're not living people?

What is living then? They can think, they can interact, they can feel and empathise. They can create new memories. Are they sustained by evil means? Yes. Are they innocent in this? Yes.

What nobody is addressing is that there was no attempt at a solution to help sustain the last remnants of the people of a dying world through non-evil means. Maybe it's impossible, but wasn't it worth at least thinking over instead of deciding in the first 5 mins of entering the zone?