Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Turtledeluxe]

The souls of the dead aren't even self-aware as far as we know. So they're obviously not alive in all "perceivable ways".

Though it would have been great if the story decided to explore that a bit more. Clearly on the Source most people consider the Soul as the most important part of being alive. When someone dies the Soul goes back to the aetherial sea, gets cleansed/stripped of its memories, and then eventually reincarnates and thus doesn't need memories to "live on". Yet on Alexandria's world they believe Memories are the core part of being alive and that they don't necessarily need the Soul part to live on.

In Shadowbringers a big part of the story was about how maybe people on the Source were wrong (or at least missing some important information) about the way we look at Astral and Umbral compared to people on the First. Could the same be true here?

That question isn't even entertained, we just instantly go to "no, they're wrong so it's fine to destroy it all". It's all so frustratingly shallow.

I guess you didn't play SHB or EW.

It's interesting to me that you're so passionate about an ethical debate but you won't acknowledge we have interacted with several characters who are dead yet perceivably alive.

When we talk about things being alive, that indicates there's biological processes going on perpetuating that organism. As far as recreating a person, you'd need way more than just memories to do that. This is why I think the arguments around XIV are silly in nature. Maybe you all aren't aware of this, but humans can't be recreated from just memories.

What's happening in XIV is all magic and doesn't really apply anything outside a purely theoretical discussion for funsies.

And what we are left with given that, is were the protagonists, who are not real, contextually ethical in the fiction? When the Endless themselves are distinguishing from their state vs the living and several of them giving reasons to turn off the terminals (it's not just Cachiua), the limited time and resources considering the threat of Sphene, it can be argued that they did the best they could with the time, resources, and info they had. And if you're really not satisfied by that, you'd still have to admit the real villain is Cachiua. Not the the protagonists and certainly not players.