Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[SongOfTheWind]

These people already died. There's no reason for us to save them.

I also find pretty ironic the fact that WoL died at least twice during the MSQ. Once at the end of ARR (after the re-write), so Hydaelyn brought us back, instead of what would be natural. And the second time - the whole history was rewritten, instead of letting the nature take its course.
If anything, I just dislike the hypocrisy that now exists within the narrative.

[CNitsah]

The Endless are memories anchored to a server. I really struggle to understand why everyone is trying so hard to advocate for people who, by your own admission, are dead. They had lives and they should be returned to the lifestream as nature intended. Being randomly chosen to walk around as Sphene's personal zoo animal in a park that is falling apart while your every need is catered to you is not living and turning them off was a mercy.

This one is simple. You might be told it's how you should take it, the entire time you spend with them shows you how humanely they behave. It's a case of slight percieved dissonance between what you're told and how you understand what you're shown. For example, their nature might be different, but if you consider Ultima Thule beings as living entities why should you not consider the endless as such. After all, both are "shadows" of dead people. It's especially weird if you did the Omicrons quests and the allied tribe one.

There is also the fact that the whole extension talk about not being dead when you're physically dead, but when you meet people that actually are "alive" after being dead, you erase them. I know that, the since people don't remember them, they are dead by the Yok Huy ideology, and that discussing with them make it so they're still somehow alive, but even with that, the whole extension is about understanding other cultures and their notion of death, and when you find something really far from yours, you just reject it. Slightly ironic. When you tackles the theme of the beliefs about end of life, and address that you should respect them, just saying "that one is wrong" feels weird.

That's why some people have difficulties with how the endless were dealt. Without changing the outcome, the lack of proper discussion about the endless point of view (again, except for people related to the protagonists), can be disturbing.

[MikkoAkure]

You are mixing the question of sustainability with the question of are they alive/real if they don’t have a soul. You can’t explain one with the other. And on the topic of laws of nature - do dragons defy it? They live pretty much till bored and they don’t need a partner to lay an egg and give new life.

Considering they are stored in a server as memories when not in use and then manifested when called in using someone else's soul, I think it's inferred that they don't have souls of their own. They don't exist in Living Memory into perpetuity when they get downloaded into the cloud because one Endless says that only 1 in 10 exist at the same time and he's gone back and forth between the terminals and Living Memory 3 times. Getting "slain" by fiends also just means getting resent to the terminals rather than a cessation of existence. Even Ancients, dragons, and Omicrons can be slain. Then there's also the matter of the Endless at Deadwalk who got separated from their aether supply and turned into monsters. Not sure if that's soul aether they needed to continue to exist or sucking up mundane aether like Zero did from an apple.

Dragons are an alien lifeform from a completely separate star. They also don't live until they're bored. The Greatwyrms may have infinitely long lives but that does not extend to their brood and a large chunk of a whole zone is devoted to the dragon graveyard and the lore book itself says they can die of old age. They sense when their time is coming, show up at the graveyard, and die of old age or of their wounds. But just as you yourself stated, they as a race have the capability to birth new generations which is something the Endless are incapable of.

This one is simple. You might be told it's how you should take it, the entire time you spend with them shows you how humanely they behave. It's a case of slight dissonance between what you're told and how you interpret what you're shown. Their nature might be different, but if you consider Ultima Thule beings as living entities why should you not consider the endless as such. After all, they're both shadows of dead people.

Like I had said in that quote, the Endless are anchored to the terminals. The beings in Ultima Thule can exist independently and don't have a kill-switch and don't get randomly pulled out of existence and then back in again every couple of decades. Cachuia couldn't even leave Living Memory and the most she could do was remotely control a robot.

They may have thoughts and feelings and self-awareness but it's very difficult for me to advocate something as "living" with that sort of "life" that they had. They were for all intents and purposes an advanced version of undead and depended on the lifeforce of living people in order to maintain their form. They didn't physically go out and personally kill people for it like vampires, but they had others do it for them and lived blissfully unaware or at least disconnected from that unfortunate truth to their existence. Do you feel guilty killing the plethora of other undead in the game? Bhoots for example are described as soulless spirits trying to kill others to obtain a new soul to try to live which sounds similar to Endless.

[Somnolence]

Why would they need souls if they don't have souls?

Plot hole IMO. Either soul aether is needed for Endless and therefore they do use souls and therefore are alive or they are soulless simulations and ordinary aether can work so there was no reason to turn them off as finding alternative power sources was possible.

[TaleraRistain]

The Endless are memories anchored to a server. I really struggle to understand why everyone is trying so hard to advocate for people who, by your own admission, are dead. They had lives and they should be returned to the lifestream as nature intended.

This I feel is a key point. The soul and memories are supposed to go to the aetherial sea together. But Alexandria separates the soul and memories. Did this keep them from returning to the aetherial sea possibly?

It's possible to interpret what Cahcuia said that way. She said their existence was unnatural. Plus since this is the IX expansion, it's entirely possible this process was similiar to the Iifa Tree, which was preventing the souls of Gaians from returning to the crystal.

[CNitsah]

They may have thoughts and feelings and self-awareness but it's very difficult for me to advocate something as "living" with that sort of "life" that they had.

I think that's actually the core of the problem here. The definition of life what life is has been a philosophical question with no definite answer for centuries even millenia. Mythologies tackled the the theme of artificial life, science fiction tackled it from early on (Frankenstein, for example). The meaning of what it is to be alive is something that lies within everyone beliefs and there are as much answer than there are people.

For some, having reached consciousness and the ability to self-determine is enough to be considered alive. For those people, the endless are alive, and the way the story dealt with it feels wrong. To other, being copies deny them that status, and people won't have a problem with the outcome. But in the end, nobody can tell the other they are wrong. The problem here is that SE, willingly or not, touched to the philophical question of what it means to be alive, and went "This is the (our) answer". They gave one simple solution to a very complex question, without going deep enough in the subject to make people that might not agree accept it in the story. Thus it does not sit well with people that don't agree with that view. FFIX treated that subject with far more care and depth: it avoided giving one definitive answer, and also avoided to say "that's not life". To me, the way they dealt with that subject is kinda clumsy.

[MikkoAkure]

I think that's actually the core of the problem here. The definition of life what life is has been a philosophical question with no definite answer for centuries even millenia. Mythologies tackled the the theme of artificial life, science fiction tackled it from early on (Frankenstein, for example). The meaning of what it is to be alive is something that lies within everyone beliefs and there are as much answer than there are people.

For me, the problem is that everything needs to be taken together in context. Despite having awareness, they cannot exist independently from the devices that manifest them outside their server and they are people who have already had a life and then were converted to this state after death where they depend on the souls of sapient people in order to persist.

It's not even a matter of "understanding other cultures' beliefs" because we know for a fact that they've broken the cycle of life and death in order to do this since we were already taught scientifically how it works regardless of what other cultures believe. We also have word from one of the original Alexandrian Endless who has nothing to do with the protagonists who says that he did not want that.

I, for one, would not wish to remain Endless at the cost of such terrible sacrifice to worlds beyond.

[VoidsentStatus]

The concept of a soul was never consistent or explained in ff14, so this explanation doesn’t clear up things at all, really. Unless you can explain what a ‘soul’ is in the lore and what a difference it makes?

A soul is defined by Otis in cutscenes as well as Origenics in the console logs you can interact with. A soul can be defined in 2 ways. Most people's definition of a "soul" and the way Otis uses it is actually a combination of memory aether and soul aether. There is no such thing as a "soul" by itself. It's one of the reasons I get irritated when I see people only saying "soul" or only using "memories" when, in a technical sense, soul aether is nothing but a battery to a body like electronics, and memory aether (thanks to otis's description as well as our own observations) is more than just memories. Memories alone are just a movie, a showing of events. Memory aether is capable of not only retaining that standard definition, but also the personality of an individual, feelings/emotion, language capabilities, and an ability to update all of these elements with things that happen in the future. Memory aether is not an AI as most people call it, it is drastically more complicated and is not merely "predicting" what this person would be, but performing "exactly" as this person would. It is every detail of your identifiability other than your physical body, separated into an infinite form. In a traditional IRL sense, your memory aether is closer to a "soul" than ff14 soul's aether considering we talk about our soul going into some form of an afterlife/reincarnation. That sense of soul is your identifiability which would be memory aether. People say that Endless don't have a "soul" when in reality, the memory aether is actually half of the definition they've been referring to and is the identity related half of it.

P.S. - I should also mention that Gra'ha compared the process of Origenics to the natural lifestream that exists in the game. Where memory aether is scrubbed from soul aether. We do not know what hapens to memory aether other than inferring it just fades away into oblivion/scattered into unrecognisability (the death of you as a person), but your soul aether gets used for life in the future by whoever. They've essentially copied Ascians in pausing that cycle of going to the lifestream and being scrubbed into oblivion there, and instead being separated and stored after. The main reason I think a lot of people take the AI route is because of memory alteration that's spoken of, but lose of selective memories isn't really considered death in an IRL sense until it reaches the point you remember absolutely nothing including family memories or your name even. That's when people get into the philosophy "is this the same person even" even though their physical body and what we consider a soul is exactly the same. Another thing to note is the Origenics process description of a beam of pure light is similar to when we first "destroyed" an Ascian with Moenbryda. I believe we trapped the Ascian's aether inside of the auracite and repeated the Origenics process of scrubbing its memory aether away from its soul aether, thus defeating it. One hobby I've been doing is going back and trying to add more detail/clarity into older events, older monster concepts now that we understand that any living creature is corporeal aether (body physical material) + memory aether + soul aether (dictates the form of corporeal aether as well, we learn this from animal soul aether use causing changes to the body if used too much)

[SongOfTheWind]

Considering they are stored in a server as memories when not in use and then manifested when called in using someone else's soul, I think it's inferred that they don't have souls of their own. They don't exist in Living Memory into perpetuity when they get downloaded into the cloud because one Endless says that only 1 in 10 exist at the same time and he's gone back and forth between the terminals and Living Memory 3 times. Getting "slain" by fiends also just means getting resent to the terminals rather than a cessation of existence. Even Ancients, dragons, and Omicrons can be slain. Then there's also the matter of the Endless at Deadwalk who got separated from their aether supply and turned into monsters. Not sure if that's soul aether they needed to continue to exist or sucking up mundane aether like Zero did from an apple.

Dragons are an alien lifeform from a completely separate star. They also don't live until they're bored. The Greatwyrms may have infinitely long lives but that does not extend to their brood and a large chunk of a whole zone is devoted to the dragon graveyard and the lore book itself says they can die of old age. They sense when their time is coming, show up at the graveyard, and die of old age or of their wounds. But just as you yourself stated, they as a race have the capability to birth new generations which is something the Endless are incapable of.

Well, that’s the problem with cherry picking arguments like that, it goes both ways.
They can’t give birth? Well, can Omicrons? Is procreation now a definition of life, not soul then?
They can’t leave the Living Memory area? Scions were dying in the First. People on life support can’t be without it. We can’t survive in space as is, and so on.

The reality in my opinion is simply that it was an artificially created problem with shoehorned solution which contradicted to the already established stories. But if you are sincerely convinced by the writing as you seem - then you are lucked out.

[Tsumdere]

Basically it all boils down to the writing is bad. The longer you think about Living Memory the more holes you can poke in their flimsy story. They don't explain what they mean and they disregard previous examples of dubiously alive beings that we treated with respect such as the citizens of Ultima Thule, Omega, Alpha, and Meteion.

It doesn't matter if we had to shut down the Endless in the end. The writers simply, clearly failed to convey their moral of Living Memory and WHY we took Cahcuia at face value instead of remembering our previous experiences. It's as if the writers were unfamiliar with their own lore and how it can muddle the waters without proper explanation. Perhaps Living Memory could have been about thinking through the problem (and failing) and not eating popcorn and ice cream with things that the game told us were fake and not alive.

They want us to not feel guilt about turning them off because they are not real, but then go out of their way to give them every single quality of a living being. For what? Which is it?

I wish that I could shut my brain off, never think about it past surface level and go on the writers' lazy writing train.