Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[AlysCamoa]

And that definition doesn't apply to the Endless, who are by all accounts just projected recordings of people who are long dead. They're just simulacrums, nothing more than cheap copies that Sphene's goal is to maintain at the expense of actual living people. I'm really not grasping how you think "life" or "sentience" apply to the Endless. If I taught ChatGPT things about me today and then I died tomorrow, would you consider it to be alive just because it regurgitate the things I taught it? It can pretend to be me all day long, but that doesn't make it me and that doesn't make it "alive" by any stretch.

If you just said from the start that you don’t know how the game handles the idea of things being ‘alive’, that would have saved a lot of time I think. But since I’m bored: your funny little hypothetical that I’m sure you thought up yourself doesn’t work, because despite what you and your fellow cutscene skippers/speed readers/general baitposters like to believe, there’s no copying going on. A far better hypothetical is that your neurons get pulled out of your tissue, and preserved in storage. Sometimes your neurons get removed from storage and put on new tissue, but at no point in time do they cease being yours. The body changes, the memories do not. Are you, you?

In terms of the setting, that’s not something they’ve ever addressed. Even in Ultima Thule, the memories are best-effort recreations by the Omnicrons. They’re not the memories lifted directly off of the soul, as they are in Everkeep. In Ultima Thule, these memories are not ensouled. They are embodied, but at no point are they ever said to be ensouled; indeed, a soul as we (the Scions) know it would be impossible, as there is no aether in Ultima Thule. Yet the Omnicron questline treats this new life, as life.

During the usual lifestream process, your memories get peeled off before the soul is reused. Only the most potent memories are engraved onto the soul to be potentially recalled. So if everything that made you you is dissolved between incarnations—what worth does a soul have in determining if you’re dealing with a person? The soul is nothing more than a glorified job stone.

[Dorito_Burrito]

Hey Reddit, AITA if I drain the life force of other worlds just to keep my computer simulation full of Oblivion NPCs running in perpetuity?

[Magikazam]

I think the citizens of Ultima Thule are a bit different as they are creations of dynamis and don't require living aether to exist. They're also not threatening to make all life in the universe extinct.




Except we did. We tried several times, and Sphene was having none of it because her primary objective is to keep the Endless going no matter the cost.

I guess I used the bad term, rather then peacefull, It would be better to say an ''alternate'' solution to just, consuming all life. As in you know, it an universe where we can travel to the edge of universe in a spaceship and travel people souls into other shards. There most likely an alternate way to keep them alive. (Even to, like you said, Sphene kinda make it hard with how much she reject peaceful option and create a scenario where time is an issue)

As for the citizens of ultimat Thule, I guess dynamis could affect it. But Omnicron are not shades like the other and are just, living AI. Also don't everyone consume living aether? Pretty sure post endwalker MSQ said that food contain it and that you can, in fact, just absorb the Aether out of your food instead of just eating it normally.

[Xylira]

The Endless are just echoes of the dead, copies of memories being played out by an elaborate AI system powered by blanked souls. There are the occasional glimmer of some manner of autonomy or sentience, but they're just illusions. I felt the story made it quite clear that despite appearances it was all just a hollow and artificial existence, and the Endless are little more than AI ghosts. It's why Sphene was so hell bent on protecting 'her people', so much as to justify genocide, as it was just the system's directives playing out through the lens of an approximation of the dead queen's personality recreated from her memories.

[OMGJesuis66]

It is interesting to me that everyone who speaks up against the actions taken in Living Memory, cannot really process that the Endless are not living beings. They wish to blame it upon writing, they wish to compare it with Emet-Selch's actions, and it's such a screaming false symmetry that is stunning.
If anything, Emet and Sphene's actions were almost equivalent, albeit different solutions to simply recover/preserve the dead.

There is no life in Living Memory, at all. There's nothing for us to hold onto the prospect of saving genuinely, all there's there cannot be saved because there is NOTHING there.
It is the equivalent of a Ghost, the best thing you can do to pay respects is to shut down the lights, close the door, and preserve those who passed in your heart as you move on with grief.

The living remains, the dead are set to have their rightful rest. Even for basic literacy, this is not hard to comprehend and it stuns me how people twist the topic of such a beautiful zone that much. For me, and in my personal opinion only, a vastly better zone than Tempest and Ultima Thule.

[Magikazam]

It is interesting to me that everyone who speaks up against the actions taken in Living Memory, cannot really process that the Endless are not living beings.

The issue there being that we've seen similar being in ultima thule that are considered ''living beings''. I wouldn't consider it weird if it wasen't for the fact that AI and the inhabitant of UT are considered ''living'' in lore.

[Volgia]

I found it to be disturbing, because they're simulacrum of an approximation of a person, but they also need an actual soul to function. If they were just a simulation you'd only need data and electrope, but it's an echo of a person living off a real being's energy.

[TheMightyMollusk]

The issue there being that we've seen similar being in ultima thule that are considered ''living beings''. I wouldn't consider it weird if it wasen't for the fact that AI and the inhabitant of UT are considered ''living'' in lore.

The people in Ultima Thule are entirely physical beings, who are shown able to grow and change with outside stimuli, even just during the MSQ spent there. The people in Living Memory are projections of stored memories from a computer, which also edits their memories to keep them "happy", or can freely switch them off to conserve power. They're about as alive as a boss's summoned adds.

[Bunyon]

The people in Ultima Thule are entirely physical beings, who are shown able to grow and change with outside stimuli, even just during the MSQ spent there. The people in Living Memory are projections of stored memories from a computer, which also edits their memories to keep them "happy", or can freely switch them off to conserve power. They're about as alive as a boss's summoned adds.

For an expansion where memory is such a big theme, it's absolutely INSANE to me how little people even consider the topic. "Projections of stored memories"? They're not video clips playing over and over, they're sentient, they can feel, they can listen, think create new memories.

"BRO THEY'RE JUST MEMORIES"
Do you even consider what your memories are? They're one of the biggest parts of what make you YOU. They're all your experiences, they're everyone you know, they're everything you've learned. The last zone made be go absolutely insane at how quickly sentient beings perfectly simulated from the memories original people are not even worthy of being considered to be in any way shape or form preserved. IMMEDIATELY you are told that bunny mom wants to die so it's ok.

I revisited the MSQ of the last area to try and figure out if I was missing something, but as far as I can tell this is what I gathered:
- The only way to get to Sphene is by entering the terminal during the last moments, when defenses are down.
- Shutting down the endless is only being done because Sphene would maybe lose motivation
- Bunny mom even says they don't have to shut them down now, but she REALLY REALLY WANTS TO DIE HOLY SHIT ERENVILLE CAN'T YOU BE HAPPY FOR HER THAT SHE WANTS TO DIE, WHAT A WHINER

And, please correct me if I'm wrong, Sphene never even for one line acknowledges at any point that you shut down the endless, meaning that you could've very well just have saved that for patch content and actually explored these themes and characters in depth (even if the conclusion was the same, and we had to shut it down).

It felt RUSHED, cool interesting themes were completely under-explored, and it left a really sour taste for this expansion for me.

[Magikazam]

The people in Ultima Thule are entirely physical beings

Ea are stated to be non-corporeal beings.

The people in Living Memory are projections of stored memories from a computer

And the Omnicron are a 100% robotic lifeform that has a computer serving as a brain.

They're about as alive as a boss's summoned adds.

Again, you can't have it both way, If Endless aren't alive, Omnicron aren't alive. Both are computer. Again, I agree by real world logic that the Endless aren't alive, but it not my fault if Computer are living being in lore.