Quote Originally Posted by AlysCamoa View Post
Except Sphene isn't an Endless. She's an amalgamation artificially made by Preservation. This was stated quite explicitly. She is not the memories extracted from a soul and stored for later use.
Anyway, if your litmus test for 'change' is 'acting like a completely different person', then by that metric Wuk Lamat never changes. Should I then consider Wuk Lamat to not be alive, given that Ultima Thule has established a soul is not necessary for life?
Sphene is an Endless. They extracted her memories and soul to be able to make such an amalgamation.
That is explicitly spoken and even has NPC dialogue in her own erased memories talking about how they were capable of preserving her Soul.
Your second rhetoric is not a point of conversation, it would lead us to a very silly tangent about Wuk Lamat that I have no interest in jumping on. But to properly explain what I meant, is that newfound memories for those beings do not have an impact on themselves. They are data, they get new data, store it, and respond accordingly to present and past data, much like an AI.
They aren't doing actual introspection or personal growth as a living being, they are just adapting to their surroundings.