The missing mood in the existential horror of the last zone of the game (spoilers)

[Fawkes]

Did the guy we found the wedding ring for say he "reincarnated 3 times"? I was pretty confused by that since that doesn't seem to be how this version of being dead works. Maybe I misunderstood.

[Loggos]

I think it was his endless form that "reincarnated". It seems like the endless can still be destroyed in the Unlost World, for example by monsters (which is why we needed to fetch the ring for him). But since their memories are stored/constantly updated (I assume) in their respective terminals, they can be materialised again with energy. He said right now he can't risk getting destroyed again (probably used different words) because currently there is not enough energy in the cloud so fewer and fewer endless get recreated. So if he "died" it wouldn't be certain he'd be re-materialised anytime soon, if at all.

[pedromvilar]

yk I feel like some responses w.r.t. ChatGPT and AI and personhood have been a bit...

Ok, so, irl, humanity has always considered animals to be nonpeople, and justified killing them (and sometimes eating them) on the grounds that they don't matter. And over the last several decades we've discovered that chimpanzees have complex social hierarchies, dolphins have language, orcas have fashion trends, octopuses and crows do complex problem-solving and recall events that happened years in the past, cows have best friends they look forward to seeing. Are they people?

What does the word "people" mean? This is far from a settled matter. We're pretty sure rocks aren't people, and we're pretty sure all humans are, but anything in-between is a lot more up in the air. Wild animal welfare movements talk about how to treat mosquitos humanely. It seems incredibly overconfident to claim with perfect certainty that chickens aren't, if not people, at least beings that matter, morally. In real life, out here on Earth, we as a species and as a society still don't know whether we should care about chickens! And they don't talk at all!

As for AI, I don't think ChatGPT is a person. Probably. And I think it doesn't matter in the moral sense. Probably. But is that not a matter of time? Which version of ChatGPT or Claude—which are, I'll remind you, structures built on top of neural networks, i.e. a system inspired by how biological brains work—starts becoming a being? When will they start mattering? How will we know?

Again, I'm not claiming that ChatGPT currently is a person, nor even that it necessarily will ever become one. What I'm saying is that the question "what is a person?" is not settled, irl, and humanity does not understand what "intelligence" means in any detail or with any mechanistic precision, irl, and we don't actually have any good propostals for how we'd figure out whether cephalopods or large language models are people, irl. Claiming that these Endless—who are shaped like people, talk like people, act like people, claim to feel the things people feel, change over time, have memories and look forward to the future—definitely aren't people seems far more confident than we have any justification to be, and erasing them all on a "probably" should elicit a lot more philosophical and existential uncertainty and reluctance than any of the characters show in-game. They should have spent at least one out of those six hours of questing discussing this!

Think about Cahciua. The characters themselves certainly thought she was a person throughout. From everything she did and everything they experienced, they couldn't tell she was anything but. The fact that she claimed she was a "facsimile" and didn't matter shouldn't have immediately flipped a switch in their heads and made them completely discard all of their experiences with her. After all, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, flies like a duck, and cares for its ducklings...

Are you really, really, really certain it's not a duck? Certain enough to kill her?

[Loggos]

After all, if it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, flies like a duck...

(Then it's

Erenville who was named "Mallard" by his mom.)

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

For me it was the kids. Why am I spending time trying to make kids happy knowing I'm about to kill them five minutes later? If I have time to go on boat rides and act in plays I have time to figure out a way to save data given it's not storing the memories themselves that's the issue but instead the creation of human bodies for them. Why not stop making human bodies for them? We know they can exist in robot bodies the way Sphene and Cahciua did. I feel like we should have been looking for a way to break the process rather than deleting the memories of generations of people. We didn't even bother trying to find a non-destructive way for them to continue on because the story assures us they aren't worth the effort.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

This is exactly how I felt about the last zone, and I was having trouble putting my finger on it. I came away from the last fight without feeling that I'd just played through a good story. I came here to see if other players felt the same way because I'm a huge fan of FFXIV. My car's license plate says XIV WOL.

But this story... it really just does not add up, and there's no way that my WoL would ever agree to wipe out psuedo-people without doing some investigation first. It would have made more sense to call in Y'shtola, G'raha and Cid and figure out a way to power this place without hurting the residents. I'm sure one of them could have found a pause button - maybe we could have even restored Spene to her original memory or something. At least that would have made some sense.

It also doesn't add up that a person willing to negotiate enough that she gave some random lizard complete control over her military to avoid conflict won't give us a few weeks to figure out a way to power her servers off anything besides people, which isn't sustainable in the long term whether she kills us or not and we have the cat that can make peace with literally anyone, we spent the first half of the story learning that's her super power, why isn't it working now? Make peace, find another way to run the servers, let the people who want to delete themselves, delete themselves and let the people who don't want to be deleted go on in a way that doesn't require mass murder. They are trying to set up a conflict like Shadowbringers where it's "your people or mine" but they assure us these aren't people and there is no urgency. This is a tech problem, not a battle to the death problem.

[SDaemon]

Now we do the exact same to another group of people and I'm not supposed to be upset about this? Never before in a game have I been so incredibly disgusted by the mandatory action put before me that I just stopped playing. But I got so close here. If we can travel between shards and make fake atomos and open portals to the void there's no fucking shot we couldn't have let the Endless continue to exist. There had to be a way. But we didn't even fucking try.

Emet was endeavoring to erase the people on every Reflection and the Source in order to bring back people long dead. In our situation we're acting in opposition to Sphene who is attempting to eradicate all life on the Source to continue to power her memory archives, an action in itself flawed because there is only a finite number of worlds Sphene can destroy to keep powering her archives. We aren't simply walking into her world on a whim to destroy it. Additionally, whatever optional routes we could have taken were negated by the fact that Sphene refused to considered any other way and was going forward with Dimensional Fusion. When people refuse to discuss things, like Sphene did, resolutions that benefit everyone are not always an option.

[Kaecilius]

Are you really, really, really certain it's not a duck? Certain enough to kill her?

The entire concept of the Endless reminds me of the Star Trek episode Measure of a Man, where they debate whether Data the android deserves rights or is just property.

They establish some parameters to determine whether he has sentience, such as intelligence, self awareness and consciousness. The Endless exhibit these, they are aware of their own status as Endless (and recognize others as living beings), they have enough intelligence to carry out jobs within Living Memory, and even get bored of doing things (such as one of the people you have to convince of going to Otis' show). They can learn new things and operate outside of Living Memory (such as Cahciua). They have an ego, recognize themselves as individuals and can even demonstrate choice: Cahciua chooses to end the system, which is great for her, but it's not a choice we extend to the rest of the Endless.

If they wanted the Endless to just be really nice puppets they shouldn't have shown any of these properties. They should have been glitchy ghosts in the machine, perpetually doomed to repeat the same Groundhog Day routine, forgetting we even exist moments after we meet.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Emet was endeavoring to erase the people on every Reflection and the Source in order to bring back people long dead. In our situation we're acting in opposition to Sphene who is attempting to eradicate all life on the Source to continue to power her memory archives, an action in itself flawed because there is only a finite number of worlds Sphene can destroy to keep powering her archives. We aren't simply walking into her world on a whim to destroy it. Additionally, whatever optional routes we could have taken were negated by the fact that Sphene refused to considered any other way and was going forward with Dimensional Fusion. When people refuse to discuss things, like Sphene did, resolutions that benefit everyone are not always an option.

The issue here is the only person who is refusing the be reasonable is Sphene. Destroy the queen and the person in charge is Gulool Ja. And there is no reason for her to be unreasonable as she's already waited 30 years and it seems as though people can exist on the server indefinitely, it's the act of making them physical that requires soul aether. So we could have figured out something besides making them physical like creating a VR world for them. Even if it eventually came down to her deciding to destroy worlds, we were nowhere near that point, even the writers knew that so they threw in some comment about the program corrupting her decisions. And destroying her in no way required wiping the people. Cahciua simply told us she'd be demoralized if the people she was trying to save were already dead, but Cahciua was wrong. Not only was she not demoralized, she didn't even notice. So if Cahciua was wrong about that, what else was she wrong about? Perhaps the personhood of people she didn't bother spending time with as she immediately worked on a way of interacting with the outside world. And if she only did that because an AI is making her do that, what an odd thing for the AI to make her do. Lead a rebelling intent on destroying it?

The entire concept of the Endless reminds me of the Star Trek episode Measure of a Man, where they debate whether Data the android deserves rights or is just property.

They establish some parameters to determine whether he has sentience, such as intelligence, self awareness and consciousness. The Endless exhibit these, they are aware of their own status as Endless (and recognize others as living beings), they have enough intelligence to carry out jobs within Living Memory, and even get bored of doing things (such as one of the people you have to convince of going to Otis' show). They can learn new things and operate outside of Living Memory (such as Cahciua). They have an ego, recognize themselves as individuals and can even demonstrate choice: Cahciua chooses to end the system, which is great for her, but it's not a choice we extend to the rest of the Endless.

If they wanted the Endless to just be really nice puppets they shouldn't have shown any of these properties. They should have been glitchy ghosts in the machine, perpetually doomed to repeat the same Groundhog Day routine, forgetting we even exist moments after we meet.

Measure of a Man is what formed my view of life outside of the biological and my morals around it. So the idea that anything without a soul (which are still being used as powerups and coins in Everkeep, btw) isn't a person comes under heavy scrutiny for me as the Endless have thoughts, feelings, intelligence, can make plans, are self-aware, they meet every metric of personhood, except a physical body, they are even made out of soul aether, someone else's sure, but everyone in Everkeep is running off some random soul by now given the regulators. And given the lack of personality changes the game is showing us it doesn't matter which soul is in them. Clean them good enough, any soul will do. Given memory removal, the people of Everkeep seem more Stepford-like than their Endless counterparts who have their memories intact.

[Kaecilius]

Measure of a Man is what formed my view of life outside of the biological and my morals around it. So the idea that anything without a soul (which are still being used as powerups and coins in Everkeep, btw) isn't a person comes under heavy scrutiny for me as the Endless have thoughts, feelings, intelligence, can make plans, are self-aware, they meet every metric of personhood, except a physical body, they are even made out of soul aether, someone else's sure, but everyone in Everkeep is running off some random soul by now given the regulators. And given the lack of personality changes the game is showing us it doesn't matter which soul is in them. Clean them good enough, any soul will do. Given memory removal, the people of Everkeep seem more Stepford-like than their Endless counterparts who have their memories intact.

It really just feels like a missing opportunity, right after they tackled themes of loss and what eternal solitude will do to you in Shadowbringers, and then the purpose of life when all seems hopeless in Endwalker.

There was a poignant question about what it means to be alive and they just ran past it with blinders on because it didn't fit their theme of letting go of the past (despite them not being able to let go of Amaurot or milking previous FF games)