Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Lady_Silvermoon]

The Sundered at least are still alive.

The Endless are a bunch of collected dead people. They had lives, they died, and instead of being reincarnated they're removed from the natural cycle and uploaded to a cloud server that randomly decides when to manifest them into a dilapidated purgatory until the end of time (or the terminals) by stitching their memories onto someone else's soul.

Again, if the Endless were collected while they were actually alive and the state of being Endless was a natural continued state of life and done to evade some sort of calamity, I'd feel a little different about the whole thing. Or if like the Sundering, it had been done widespread against an entire people but they still managed to continue actual mundane living after that. But it's not any of that. Their memory aether is collected postmortem. These people are ghosts. They're not a "new version of life", they HAD lives.

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

[MikkoAkure]

I also do not believe we have the right to wipe out the spirits in the aetherial sea, do you? I agree they are not alive, but I don't think being dead erases personhood and then gives me the right to do with the dead whatever I want. Alive or dead, they were sentient beings whose existence we were ending. I don't really have a "you had your chance" policy when it comes to wiping out societies.

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before. The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

The people we fight in the Aitascope if that's what you're referring to are already fragmented souls who have partially merged with the Aetherial Sea itself. The deceased antagonists there are only able to maintain any sort of sense of self because they're angry and want to kill us. Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

[Themarvin]

Living Memory is AI that has gone bad, it depicts the real world and how it could become...

[Lady_Silvermoon]

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them.

Deleting them all is one possible solution to stopping an AI from wiping out all life in the universe to obey it's poorly programmed directive...or...we could have tried reprogramming it. *shrugs* But that would have probably cut into our ice cream eating and boat riding time. Sure, wiping out every Garlean would have solved a lot of problems for us too, but for some reason we never brought up any Final Solutions when it came to them. Wonder why?

The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

It's beyond that. We're told they are unnatural and we should feel no guilt in wiping them out. But the characters do feel guilt. They feel guilt and shame when Krile's parents ask are we about to erase them. The characters know they are doing something wrong, you can see it on their faces regardless of what Cahcuia tells them to view it in order to get it done. Krile even suggests "finding another way" when faced with the possibility of her parents begging her for their lives. Good thing like everyone else's mommy they were perfectly cool with being deleted, they even WANTED to be deleted. *whew* Might have had to face the gravity of what was being done.

Did they peacefully pass on? Memories are washed away in the aetherial sea. It's the soul that's eternal. From my best understanding, we sent those people to oblivion. The guy who waited centuries to be with the love of his life? Welp, hope he made the best of those five minutes before we erased the both of them from existence because their existence was worth less than those the program might hurt in an attempt to preserve them.

Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

Everyone on Etheirys (barring accident or murder) is supposed to die when they want to, but a single individual decided we'd be tougher if we died sooner, more often and more horrifically. The Sundered life is not a natural state. It was a state decided not by a god, but a retired politician. Soo...maybe we shouldn't use that as the metric for when it's good and right to wipe people from existence. Maybe we shouldn't wipe people from existence unless absolutely necessary to save ourselves and that wasn't absolutely necessary. That was Plan A.

[AnotherPerson]

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before. The fact that they're dead and already lived just makes it "easier" to let us end this farce and allow them to peacefully pass on.

The people we fight in the Aitascope if that's what you're referring to are already fragmented souls who have partially merged with the Aetherial Sea itself. The deceased antagonists there are only able to maintain any sort of sense of self because they're angry and want to kill us. Defeating angry fragments of souls in the Lifestream if anything only speeds up the natural process of fully returning to it and ALL people who return to the Aetherial Sea are supposed to have their personhoods erased. That's literally the entire point.

We don't have a right. We have a compelling reason to get rid of things that stand in our way, but not a right.
Civilian causality in war is never a "right".

Plus, you don't own those lives. DRK storyline really does wonders in this regard. You may see yourself as 'morally right to remove the Heavensward'. Then you see the consequences of your actions later on in the storyline, and you live with them. No one truly wins in war. There's only losers and casualties. A real shame there's no more job quests.

[MikkoAkure]

snip

The Garleans are actual living people in an actual functioning society. The Endless are dead people prevented from reincarnating by stealing the souls of others to maintain a boring existence in a broken down Disneyland because their dead queen is too scared to just let people die naturally.

They're still innocent of what they are and what happens to maintain them since they can't control that and that's part of what makes the situation tragic, but Sphene has no right to people's souls and after absconding with the key there was only so much that could have been done. We have a right to defend ourselves and our world and that involved shutting down the terminals. If you believe that we were just going to let it happen because it's too morally dubious then I don't know what to say. If hacking into her terminal and reprogramming her to not be a terrible person was an actual possibility it would have come up. We already tried to talk her down and negotiate which may have led to something, but she refused. But hey, we might get round 2 since her special regulator is still around.

You keep trying to bring Venat back into this, but she didn't make the decision unilaterally. The game itself mentions there were others and then EE3 goes into even more detail about how other Ancients were anti-Convocation and others as well who blamed creation magic for the Final Days and wanted it removed. Her faction was fully aware of the Sundering and what would happen. And she was also right. The Convocation's plan would just delay the inevitable. We could argue all day about what could have happened but there's absolutely no way to know whether any of that would have worked and we know that her plan was the one that actually worked in the end and Emet-Selch admitted it.

The game also goes along with ending the Endless as the correct choice and no other possibilities existed at the time we did it. The writers are the ones who invented the whole plot and the framework it's all taking place in and would know better if there was another way than random people on the forums including myself. In the end, if the game you're playing continuously makes decisions in the story that go against what you believe should happen, then sticking around is probably going to cause you more frustration than satisfaction anyway.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

*snip*

Attempting literally anything before going straight to erase the subhumans from their fragmented and meaningless existence would have been better. I'm not even saying it had to work. But that it was plan A and that it was plan A BECAUSE we deemed them inferior is so Ascian it's not even funny. They should have given the WoL an Emet-Selch costume instead of a bunny costume because we were doing a mighty fine impression of him in Living Memory.

I keep bringing up Venat because an appeal to nature is what's being used to justify the callous actions taken against the Endless. They are unnatural, therefore it's okay for plan A to be wipe them all out. We'll the Sundered are unnatural too, so why can't Emet-Selch's plan A be to wipe us all out? BTW, that's rhetorical because I'm sure you'll draw some arbitrary line between us and the Endless that makes it more okay to kill them, but the Unsundered can draw just as many arbitrary lines between themselves and the Sundered. If it's wrong to kill the Sundered because they are sentient beings, then it's wrong to kill the Endless for the same reason.

As for why I don't just quit, well I'll played this game for the past 10 years, I played through the story for the first time a year ago. I very much enjoyed Shadowbringers, but after that it did get kinda weird and preachy about how some groups of people just HAVE to be wiped out. And yeah, not really enjoying that that very odd moral they keep doubling down on and I do wish they'd stop. And had I known the quality of the DT story, I would have gone back to scene skipping like I had the prior 9 years. But I thought what were the chances we'd end up wiping out another group of innocent people. I'm sure it'll be fineeee...

Definitely egg on my face with that one.

Also, can you provide somewhere it says that anyone on Venat's faction was aware she intended to rip every man, woman and child into 14 pieces and were totally on-board with that? Because I've never seen that anywhere, including EE3. It sounds like she galvanized them on the premise of stopping the third sacrifice, which what's the point if the third sacrifice is gonna get shredded along with everything and everyone else? The Watcher makes it sound like not only was she incredibly vague with her plans, she gutted chunks of his and the Twelves' memories to make sure the Sundered world was shaped by her influence and hers alone.

[Hyperia]

I have a feeling that this topic is good enough to merit its own ethics class: Ethics 407 - AI Entities

[Carolingian]

We have a right to delete the Endless because that was part of stopping Sphene who planned to kill everyone on the Source and eventually all the Reflections in order to power them. If she had her way, eventually the only people left would be Endless and then they'd slowly run out of souls to use and we'd be back to where we were before.

No, this is simply evil. We were at war with Sphene, not with the Endless. Attacking civilian targets is always a war crime. It's really not something anyone has a right to. Yet it's the main strategy that the Scions settle on immediately. As soon as they enter Living Memory they don't even try to target Sphene, they instead target the innocent civilians. And only after they've killed those do they go for Sphene herself. It's honestly pretty crazy.

I have a feeling that this topic is good enough to merit its own ethics class: Ethics 407 - AI Entities

The philosophical and ethical debates and questions around AI Entities are genuinely interesting. It's why they're such a popular topic in science-fiction. It's what makes it so frustrating and disappointing that DT doesn't seem at all interested in exploring that topic beyond the most shallow and surface-level "they don't have souls so it's fine to erase them" without any real further discussion.

[MikkoAkure]

We had just enough time to interact with the Endless and remember them since no one else has the capability. Generations of Alexandrian dead, gone forever because Sphene erased them from the minds of the living. If you think that in just 1 afternoon we could have solved the problem that Sphene couldn't solve for hundreds of years with her own technology, then you're delusional. We didn't have anything special that could bring something new to the table. If Cahciua, an actual hacker and part of a rebellion who had been present in Living Memory for years couldn't hack the terminals to prevent Sphene's plan, then no one in our group could.

It was presented to us that there was no other way, that we had to shut off the terminals to stop Sphene, and that the Endless would be caught in the crossfire. If the writers wanted to entertain any other possibility, they would've let us know. It's their world and their logic. The same people who came up with the problem also invented the solution. Cahciua had been there for years and knew more than anyone else how to stop Sphene and that involved shutting down the terminals. With time of the essence, we had no reason to doubt her.

Also, can you provide somewhere it says that anyone on Venat's faction was aware she intended to rip every man, woman and child into 14 pieces and were totally on-board with that? Because I've never seen that anywhere, including EE3. It sounds like she galvanized them on the premise of stopping the third sacrifice, which what's the point if the third sacrifice is gonna get shredded along with everything and everyone else? The Watcher makes it sound like not only was she incredibly vague with her plans, she gutted chunks of his and the Twelves' memories to make sure the Sundered world was shaped by her influence and hers alone.

Venat convinced her followers that Hydaelyn and Her sundering were the only path forward.

Also it wasn't just about the third sacrifice though that was obviously a large sticking point. A few pages before the above quote it mentions that Ancients believed that mankind could not continue as it always had and blamed creation magic. Others lost faith in the Convocation.


Continuing to play something you don't like and arguing about why you don't like it and only staying because you've already spent 10 years on it is just sunk-cost fallacy. If this has been the direction of the game for multiple expansions now, I don't know how you would expect it to suddenly change for you.

No, this is simply evil. We were at war with Sphene, not with the Endless. Attacking civilian targets is always a war crime. It's really not something anyone has a right to. Yet it's the main strategy that the Scions settle on immediately. As soon as they enter Living Memory they don't even try to target Sphene, they instead target the innocent civilians. And only after they've killed those do they go for Sphene herself. It's honestly pretty crazy.

We didn't attack anyone, we turned off a computer. And again, it was Cahciua who knew what to do and made the suggestions and she was someone experienced in the technology, had reasons to oppose Sphene, had been there for years, and had no other solution for this.

It's tragic, but it was what had to be done to stop Sphene from killing everyone. And in the end, the Endless can't be "killed" because they were already dead. Like I've said over and over, it would be one thing if these were people who entered the cloud alive but they already had lives and died before they were made Endless. Living Memory is an afterlife.