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

[SDaemon]

If I am remembering right the goal of the Terrans was to harvest souls from Gaia and use them to revive or fill the soulless people that are left on Terra. This would seem similar to the endless which as I understand it need souls harvested from living people to then be combined with their memories to then exist in the Living Memory. So I guess technically they do have souls, but it is the soul they took from someone else who is now dead, and with the way things have been going probably killed to obtain that soul.

In FFIX Terra originally wanted to fuse their planet with Gaia in order to survive as they had done numerous times in the past in order to preserve Terra when it got to the point of collapse. They got hasty, messed it up when trying to merge with Gaia and Terra was dimensionally shifted inside of Gaia. In a way Garland starts harvesting the souls on Gaia but only so that they get divided out of the life cycle of souls and turning into the Mist that the Iifa Tree's roots send out while having Terra's souls cycling into the planet instead to be reborn. The Endless are also a reference to the Genomes, soulless vessels that Garland created for the Terran people once the fusion was pulled off successfully.

Endless are soulless memory constructs that require the souls of others to continue operating. Genomes are soulless vessels intended to be filled with Terra's souls.

[CuteBucket]

Either these were people and wiping them out should have been treated with way more gravity or they were nothing and all the time effort we put towards appeasing them made no sense. Both can't be true at the same time.

This. This is my main take away about Living memory, and something I put in another thread about this topic (I can't keep track of them all). My point in making the whole "Are they alive or not?" checklist was that it doesn't really matter, because the heart of the issue is that the writers couldn't decide if the Endless were real people or not. If you believe the Endless are real people, then the way they are treated by the narrative is terrible and doesn't engage at all with the moral quandaries of the subject. If you believe the Endless are not real people, then all of our faffing around in Living Memory to try and appease AI ghosts is a pointless waste of time that doesn't serve the narrative at all. By either interpretation, the writing and narrative failed. That is the real problem at the heart of Living Memory, not whether the Endless are alive, dead, real, fake, people, or not people. No matter how you interpret it, it still sucks and is still bad writing at its core.

[LuciferMournstar]

This. This is my main take away about Living memory, and something I put in another thread about this topic (I can't keep track of them all). My point in making the whole "Are they alive or not?" checklist was that it doesn't really matter, because the heart of the issue is that the writers couldn't decide if the Endless were real people or not. If you believe the Endless are real people, then the way they are treated by the narrative is terrible and doesn't engage at all with the moral quandaries of the subject. If you believe the Endless are not real people, then all of our faffing around in Living Memory to try and appease AI ghosts is a pointless waste of time that doesn't serve the narrative at all. By either interpretation, the writing and narrative failed. That is the real problem at the heart of Living Memory, not whether the Endless are alive, dead, real, fake, people, or not people. No matter how you interpret it, it still sucks and is still bad writing at its core.

Yeah, just a giant plot hole because if Cahciua had just told us about Living Memory, how it works, ect. We could have went up to Sphene, (before she went full Computer Program and would actually converse with us), and proposed other possible solutions to the problem. Though NOPE, she just kept her mouth shut about where she was and what was going on. The writers for SOME REASON decided "Let's have Cahciua deny critical, need to know information that could enable us to possibly help cause... reasons."

All I can really think of at this point was Cahciua was a bitch. She was selfish cause she, "didn't want to be tied to one place", so she wanted Living Memory shut down. That way she "could be free" and decided "The rest of those in Living Memory, yeah, I couldn't care less if they fade with me. I want out." Or as so many of EMPHATICALLY pointed out, she didn't consider them actually alive or worth saving. "Feel bad for them sure, but it's not worth even trying." Like she's the only voice in Living Memory that matters.

[Vyrerus]

I'm sorry Timmy, you need 15 tickets to live

That's not what The Endless are. They are the memory aether of actual people stored in Living Memory, sustained and then given form by soul aether. Sphene also mourned Wuk Lamat's milk maid. Krile's parents expressed real love.

And not all of The Endless did interact with us, as you describe. Quite a lot of them merely thought of us as other Endless. They were just conscious of the fact that they had lived once and lost their original body.

It's more akin to if you had your body horrifically mangled, but they were able to save your brain by hooking it up to a computer, and then you were able to control a robot body or make a hologram speak or something.

Despite everything, it's still you.

Denying that people are people, even if they get damaged or disabled is actually the far more dangerous line of thinking, and that's where your head is at, Turtle. That's the path to excusing large scale atrocities.

If an entity has every requisite of humanity in it, what right have you to deny its humanity?

I recommend you watch the movie Bicentennial Man.

[Somnolence]

"They are the memory aether" is a fancy way of saying they're just fascimilies created from memories by other people's souls being used as the fuel. The game clearly demonstrates that there's a human with an original soul and that is distinct from an Endless.

Also Sphene does not mourn Namikka. I'm not sure where you got that from. She mourns Otis though. Namikka is calmly explained to be euthanized.

Humans also can't shape-shift, can't live forever, and have physical forms. Your suggestion regarding uploading consciousness doesn't really make sense because consciousness is more than simply the parts of your brain pertaining to memory. If someone fed my memories to a Meso Terminal and created a new instance of me that can shape shift and be immortal, I'd also hope it was deleted unless I wilfully participated.

Otis: This incarnation of me...what was he like?

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Emet-Selch can shape-shift, live forever and exist without physical form(but he uses clone body in Source and possess random one on the First since naked soul has weaknesses) and he is certainly alive.

[TaleraRistain]

If I am remembering right the goal of the Terrans was to harvest souls from Gaia and use them to revive or fill the soulless people that are left on Terra. This would seem similar to the endless which as I understand it need souls harvested from living people to then be combined with their memories to then exist in the Living Memory. So I guess technically they do have souls, but it is the soul they took from someone else who is now dead, and with the way things have been going probably killed to obtain that soul.

They weren't harvesting their souls. Terra and Gaia and any other world in the IX universe has at its heart a crystal that all souls return to when they die to be reborn. One of those typical FF tropes. Terra's crystal is dying. They tried to fuse with Gaia to steal Gaia's crystal but ended up shifting Terra inside Gaia. Garland used the Iifa Tree to prevent the souls of the Gaians from returning to their crystal so they could be replaced by the Terran souls that were in safekeeping. The genomes on Terra were constructs to hold the Terran souls since they don't currently have bodies.

So it's not exactly the same, but if soul and memory are both required to return to the aetherial sea in the XIV universe, then it is possible the Endless were being denied their right to be reborn and live new lives, instead being held to the lives they had already lived through.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

The Endless are instances of a person. This is why Sphene mourns Otis when he dies. You can argue that a digital projection that walks, talks and acts like a person is really them. But it's not them. And Endless themselves acknowledge this and interact with the living in this exact way.

Excuse me? Sphene did what again? I'm sure you meant that the program that controls her extrapolated from her memories that the loss of her childhood protector would have made the original Sphene sad and instructed her hologram to appear to be mourning. Because programs don't mourn. Spit that cake out sir. You cannot have it and eat it too.

Also Sphene does not mourn Namikka. I'm not sure where you got that from. She mourns Otis though. Namikka is calmly explained to be euthanized.

How odd. It's almost like one was a childhood friend now lost forever and the other was a citizen among many that she knew would be saved to the cloud. It's like the program is practicing discernment, caring more about some people and situations than others. Almost like she was a feeling, thinking person. Wow...those programmers sure made her impression of personhood quite convincing. But I mean they scripted Cahcuia so well she helped destroy the entire system while being a part of it. It was like she had autonomy. That's some impressive programming right there. Maybe I just haven't played enough video games to recognize when someone is behaving like an autonomous self-aware person verses an algorithm.

If someone fed my memories to a Meso Terminal and created a new instance of me that can shape shift and be immortal, I'd also hope it was deleted unless I wilfully participated.

Good point. If only the Alexandrians had a way to opt-out of being uploaded into the system. Some action you could take to indicate you didn't want your memories to go to Living Memory like, I don't know, maybe not wearing the device that sends your memories to Living Memory! You have to die with a regulator on to end up in Living Memory. Cahcuia eludes that she did it on purpose to figure out a way to destroy Living Memory because she was morally against it and perhaps Krile's parents died unexpectedly being rebel leaders, but the vast majority of people in Living Memory would have worn regulators their entire life knowing they'd be uploaded to the cloud after death. So while I agree the Endless who want to erase themselves should have the ability to do so because I believe in personal autonomy. I also believe that to delete people who didn't want to be deleted is a violation of personal autonomy. We are ignoring their rights because we're deciding they are not people, but how is that any different than what Emet-Selch did? We didn't fit his definition of people and so he was at liberty to do whatever he wanted with us even though we were also feeling, thinking, self-aware beings.

[ValynS]

I was slightly amused at the game taking such strong visual and thematic plot cues from classic scifi/cyberpunk works, but not bothering to also carry over the philosophical questions they raise, giving it a quick shrug and concluding that proactively committing the g-word is totally ok if it saves other people.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

My point there wasn't that mourning makes Sphene human. It's that she mourned Otis because he's dead.

I think you need to watch the scene again. Sphene explains why Namikka passing is of no concern, and why Otis passing is. We will never meet the real Otis again.

I find this a fascinating interpretation of events. If a soul is what makes Otis the "real" Otis and the reason she mourns him, then why does she not mourn the "real" Namikka given she also has a soul? Considering she mentions that Otis does not have a regulator, it seems to me what she is mourning is the centuries of memories and experiences that are forever lost. THAT Otis is gone forever, while Namikka, in her eyes, has been saved. She did not experience the end. Unlike Otis, her memories will live on in Living Memory (well at least for a day or so until we shut it down.)

Emet Selch's primary motivation wasnt "youre not people let me be cruel". When he makes that comment he says it with an intense sarcastic flair btw-- not because it is sarcastic but because it helps him rationalize doing what he knows is problematic to the main cast. I feel like what you're suggesting here is kind of an oversimplification of Emet.

That said, we aren't deciding they aren't people. The game defines them as not people. The Endless themselves address the living as distinct from them. The game shows us they are made up of data and calls them fascimilies. Players are the ones telling the writers what the Endless are ITT.

I didn't say his motivation was that we weren't people, I pointed out his justification was that we weren't people. The same way our justification was that they weren't people.

Also, the game doesn't tell us they aren't people. Cahciua tells us they aren't people, while Sphene insists that they are. And Sphene's right. By every metric we use to measure personhood, the Endless qualify. Souls are not the metric of personhood, they are the metric of life. And the pants my character is wearing came from something that used to have a soul, so clearly we don't use that as the metric of determining what does and doesn't have rights. No one would advocate for wiping out every Garlean so that Varis would have no one to fight to protect, so why is that an acceptable strategy with the Endless?

They are dehumanized so that we can wipe them out without feeling guilt. But the characters do feel both guilt and shame. So much so Krile suggests finding another way when it's time to delete her parents and we have to strongarm Erenville into deleting his mom. If these aren't people, then the pain these characters are feeling as they wipe them out is nonsensical, however, if they are people, then the behavior in between wiping them out is nonsensical.

[Galvuu]

I'm not sure what your point is. That a fantasy race exists for humanity origin story in XIV so the Endless are alive?

Puppies are also alive in XIV. Also to be clear, Ancients are not real and not comparative to humans outside storytelling purposes. They're humanoid.

My statement you quoted was more of a commentary on the theoritocal that I'd be OK with what happens to Endless happening to me. I wouldn't be OK with it because it results in something not me and not human that seems like me.

Their point is that what you pushed forward as a qualitative measure of the nature of the Endless is inconsistent and insufficient- hence, he applied it to a character in the same universe that we all consider to be alive to show the discrepancy.

This thread is rife with excellent discussion. It really bothers me how the game just... glosses over all of it. No nuance, no discussion, even when our party has so many of the greatest minds in the realm in it.
So much missed potential...