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

[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.

[PyurBlue]

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.

Taking life from others is an obvious moral problem, but why does it matter if they need external devices to survive? That can be looked at as something like a very advanced version of a pacemaker. That the people they were based on died also doesn't reflect on their current living status either. It just makes them unique from the originals.