Quote Originally Posted by Dikatis View Post
I feel like you missed the part that they're facsimiles of the originals who lack souls or even much of their physical substance.
I'm not sure why I'm meant to care that they lack souls? What are souls for? Why do they matter? Why does being a "facsimile" and not having a "soul" make someone less important? Why does not having substance matter? If you want to argue that they aren't sapient that's a different story, and I think you'd have your work cut out for you there because the story goes to great pains to show us that they have every single feature a sapient being does, but being a facsimile or not having a soul seem completely irrelevant facts that should not affect whether an action is moral or not.

Quote Originally Posted by Dikatis View Post
at the same time they know they exist thanks to the untold deaths of others
They might, in the future, if nothing changes, exist thanks to the untold deaths of others, but right now it's been fifty of them tops. And it seems wild to me to imagine that this is a completely unsolvable problem, that we can't just shut the computers down but keep the memories there and then try to fix the problem later with better resources. It seems wild to me that we can't do the same thing Otis did and get them to live in a robot body without consuming tons of energy. It seems wild to me to just accept that this problem cannot be solved just because Queen Sphene and Cahciua says so.