End Dawntrail Spoilers: What is the difference between a regulator and giving blood?

[Lersayil]

I feel like discussion on the morality around souls is entirely pointless currently.

Shadowbringers and Endwalker made some effort to explain some stuff about souls and memory, but our current knowledge on the matter (including the wider logistics behind the aetherial sea) is rudimentary at best. We would need a lot more information to start making moral judgments, and I find it wild that the writers are comfortable enough doing so without it.

[Plumerian_Ariadust]

2. While the regulator use soul aether (after it's purified from memory), I don't think they're perma destroyed since Erenville said that he will meet his mom again in the aetherial sea. Meanwhile Endless is powered up by living force (different thing than soul aether and memory aether), which can only be harvested from currently living beings. Why do they not use feral living force? idk. Maybe it will corrupt them the same as people being corrupted by using regulator filled with feral soul.

We don't know if that is the case and i don't remember Erenville being knowledgeable enough to know how the aetherial sea works.

[Jojoya]

Not enough data.

In the end, what is true and correct is totally up to those writing the story. I suspect even the writers haven't thought things through all the way. If they want to create some illogical explanation for things, that's in their power to do since it's complete fiction.

[Sivante]

If a person is given a soul, it can’t return to the life stream to allow a new individual to be born. Unless souls are infinite, there will be a point where souls run out and new babies can’t be born. We can infer souls are not infinite because Sphene plans to harvest every last ounce of life-energy until there is none left, then move on to other shards. If it was sustainable to “harvest life force” in any way, the AI would have thought of making a gigantic fish farm or something.

Query: How can we infer that from Sphene's plan? They established animal life was insufficient in 'Life Aether' in some way so an animal farm wouldn't work. Why, I don't know, as clearly animals have 'souls' as we learn from Arcadion, but they did mention it was insufficient.

Even if souls are finite, the fact that the aether stream crosses shards, and multiple shards are destroyed/wrecked, that would tell us there's plenty of extra souls entering and exiting the aether stream than is normal for a given shard which would suggest that what Sphene planned was entirely valid as a sustainable tactic (if not entirely immorale.)

Mind you I'm not arguing: I don't think we know enough about 'Life Aether' or 'Souls' in this canon to make these determinations and wish to highlight that. What we've seen of 'Life Aether' and 'Souls' makes no sense already, so I'm hesitant to try arguing about the nuance of it. PoTD touches on it, Y'Shtola dying and coming back like she gets stickers for a free sunday touches on it, resurrection as a spell touches on it, but it remains so absurdly vague its hard to put a finger on and most of what I just listed as examples complicate if not directly conflict with what DT touches on it.

We'll have to wait and see, I suppose. I personally suspect the writers are going to intensely regret these story line choices for the implications they create.

[Vhana]

1. Actually though, souls are infinite because the planet can just make a new one instead of recycling from the aetherial sea. For example, Alpha the chocobo. And also hermes/hythlodaeus said that the planet will imbue a creation magic creature with soul so long it "follow the law of nature". That said, the rate of which it create new soul probably is very slow.

Maybe? But we don't know the mechanics of imbuement because it's not actually ever explained.
It's possible that completely new soul aether is spontaneously created by the star when a creature gains a soul, which would potentially be infinite. It's also possible that already existing soul aether is somehow drawn to a construct that becomes compatible with it, which would potentially be finite.

2. While the regulator use soul aether (after it's purified from memory), I don't think they're perma destroyed since Erenville said that he will meet his mom again in the aetherial sea.

They are definitely not permanently destroyed, we see the souls that Zoraal Ja had taken into himself released after his death and as they are not captured again through the regulator system they would return to the aetherial sea.

[W4rm0nger5]

My problem with the regulators is not around the morality of what they've been doing with souls to make them work, it's more the psychological effect both it and the memory manipulations have on the population. The ones with regulators are utterly terrified of running out of souls, to the point where one man abuses the otherwise almost universally loved ruler because she can't help him get any more, and they have no memories of their loved ones to draw strength from since they get erased the second the person dies. There's a side quest in Solution 9 that really rams this home when you help out a guy whose job is to lay out dead people. He asks for help identifying a tag he found on one of the bodies, leading to a bit of a fetch quest where you eventually find out the body belonged to the man's father. He has no idea who the guy is because every memory he has of him has been erased, and without your help, he would never have even known his father had passed or that he had left him a memento of his life.

I'm honestly glad that Solution 9 wasn't connected to the source during the final days because I'm pretty sure every regulator user would have lost hope and turned into a blasphemy the second things got hard, they have nothing to draw on to take strength from the past and cant face their own mortality.

[Valence]

(For that matter, how do they have enough spare souls for everyone? If at the start they all had one extra soul each half of the population would need to have died... Let alone having more than one soul each which is implied by the fact that they can buy them. Did we skip the part of their history where they harvested the souls of all their neighbours? And they have such a shortage yet accepted the people who got stuck in the dome into their population instead of just harvesting them, that means they would have been using even more.

They gather the souls of their dead while they let newborn get provided a soul naturally from the aetherial sea. It means that the more of their people die, the more souls they do have in storage unless those souls get somehow released by people dying like Zoraal Ja. Still, some of their citizens are too poor socially to have any souls as backup, while some do have more/many. Obviously it would also have to balance out with how fast their population can grow, for instance a baby boom would literally bring a shortage of souls, and same an aging population with abruptly increasing lifetimes as well. But otherwise yeah, ideally no soul is leaving their cycle while new ones are constantly getting in from newborns.

Also, if the Endless are just electronic versions of a souls memory, why do they need souls to power them? They're not alive, all they should need is electricity/power, not souls (if they need souls, that means they are alive in some way). Seems to make far more sense to me that they would need all the souls to keep their living population supplied as that seems like the most unsustainable part.

The endless are stored data but they aren't like AIs or active while in the databanks. They need to be projected into the physical reality like seen in the last area, and I assumed that this is what requires souls for sustaining them. It's also actually hinted constantly by the fact that after dying it generally takes them dozens of years "in the current days" due to the lack of harvested souls from conquests, before they can be afforded a new body/existence in there.

[Lord_Umbra]

Well Choice for one the souls didn't choose & for two let me put this way I kidnap you but promise let you go in 100 years once I'm done with you are but also I give no choice in the matter you don't get reject it I'm just doing it cause it's beneficial to me.

These souls could be stuck in these 1-up devices for anywhere from a minute to thousand years so wont enter lifestream & be reborn as XIV has reincarnation as it's canon.

[kaynide]

Query: How can we infer that from Sphene's plan? They established animal life was insufficient in 'Life Aether' in some way so an animal farm wouldn't work. Why, I don't know, as clearly animals have 'souls' as we learn from Arcadion, but they did mention it was insufficient.

I'm 100% guessing/assuming here, but my understanding of what Origenics does is something like.. I dunno.. Fission?

As in, rather than separating a molecule into elements and harvesting the released energy, the machine separates a dead life into "Memories" and "Soul", but harvests the life-energy (Dynamis? I dunno) as a power source for maintaining Living Memory. And something about the life of a person is more...valuable..than animals. I'm not sure it's actually the soul itself or the memories themselves that are important for the energy system.

....which is also to say the entire setup is incredibly nonsensical considering what we know can be used as a power source for magic devices and whatnot (dragon eyes, crystals, etc), especially given that they have electrope which supposedly can convert aether A into aether B.

The only thing that makes this work is that their system is specifically powered by Dynamis, which as far as we know is only held by people split from the sundering (and of course Thule).

Even if souls are finite, the fact that the aether stream crosses shards, and multiple shards are destroyed/wrecked, that would tell us there's plenty of extra souls entering and exiting the aether stream than is normal for a given shard which would suggest that what Sphene planned was entirely valid as a sustainable tactic (if not entirely immorale.)

My understanding is the souls of the rejoined fuse with their source counterpart, rather than float in the stream...but the writers might decide whatever.

Again, the only way any of this makes sense is if they were harvesting Dynamis, as that's the ONLY resource I can imagine that is specific to people, and people only.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

You are correct. Given what we've been told thus far, what the Alexandrians are doing with souls is sacrilegious, but not harmful. But people saw their favorite characters frowning and scowling and so they want to make them stop even though we were lectured for 40 hours about respecting other cultures. Obviously, killing people and stealing their souls is wrong, but there is nothing wrong with the voluntary system they have going in Everkeep, though I suspect they will add some way that it's dangerous so we can make them stop given all those frowns seem to extend to the writers' view of what's good and right.

As for how they'd have a stock of souls, most people die of disease and old age. Accidental deaths are actually the least likely way to die, so they'd have centuries of people who lived incredibly save lives inside Everkeep who never burned a soul. Sure you'd have fighters and hunters that burned through a bunch of them, but how often do you think the average merchant or accountant in Everkeep dies from an accident? They don't even have stairs for anyone to fall down.

Also, the lower birthrate doubtfully has anything to do with their soul usage as they seem to be the last living civilization on their shard, and the used souls go back into the aetherial sea at the death of the user, that's why the regulator is necessary to stamp their personality on top after they use a soul cell, cause that other person is still in them until death. The lower birthrate is likely due to the memory wipes. One of the number one reasons people have kids in modern times is to pass on their legacy. Legacy was a theme of this expansion, but the people of Alexandria can't do that because when they die their kids forget about them. So I'm sure many people wondered what the point of having kids would be if the kids wouldn't even be able to remember you after you died.