Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[EchoingPulse]

I'm starting to lose the plot of Silvermoon's arguments. Either they're defending the dead memory ghosts or trying to justify their existance?

[Lady_Silvermoon]

I'm starting to lose the plot of Silvermoon's arguments. Either they're defending the dead memory ghosts or trying to justify their existance?

I'm defending the dead memory ghosts by justifying their right to an afterlife of their choosing. After all, the reason they are exterminated with extreme prejudice is due to philosophical denial of their right to exist. Some might argue it was in self-defense, but the Endless have no ability nor inclination to harm us, it's the program that wishes to harm us.

You're pointing out they're dead to dehumanize them much as the story tries to do, however, we give more self-determination to our own dead (which is why you need either the permission of the person when they were living or the permission of the family to harvest organs) than the characters give those in Living Memory and they can voice their desires, create art, fall in love, construct plans...that's a whole lot of personhood to erase from existence on the grounds one person in the party finds them morally objectionable.

When Krile's parents ask if they are about to be deleted, the first thing Krile says is, "Perhaps there is another way," which meant our characters wiped out countless people based off convictions that aren't even their own.

This thread is about the Questionable Ethics of Living Memory and I've been laying out why someone being dead does not give you the right to do whatever you want with their memory aether. The same way someone being dead in our society doesn't give you the right to whatever you want with their corpse. Consent matters and the Endless are sentient beings capable of consenting and objecting to the things done to them.

[Ayche]

Surely hating on undead is one of the most common stances in fiction. Zombies, ghosts and vampires that prey on the living for sustenance are the most basic narrative vehicles there is, it is very very normal to oppose them. Only twist Dawntrail takes is that they make the undead appear nice and harmless on the surface and the system does the harm.

[Mortex]

Just to clarify, maintaining the Endless doesn\\'t require the destruction of souls. Nothing the Alexandrians are doing is destroying souls. I\\'m pretty sure the characters would have had a far different reaction if that were the case. What the Endless require is for people to die. They are using the corporeal aether to give people bodies. Basically somebody dies and they make ten Endless out of the corporeal aether of that one person. They are effectively, sundered Sundered. Which is dumb. If you want to live forever, creating something MORE fragile is stupid. Had they done what every other species interested in immortality had done and created something hardier, like a machine form or an incorporeal form, then this issue would be entirely avoidable.

And I don\\'t think it\\'s morally wrong to want to be immortal. I think it\\'s wrong to steal other people\\'s corporeal aether in order to do it, but that\\'s not a necessary part of being immortal. Preservation scientists were just bad at their job.

Anyone who wants to argue that it\\'s wrong to want to be immortal due to it being a violation of the natural order, I remind you, nature doesn\\'t have a plan. It just is and we go against what is every time we chop down a tree to build a house. And the Sundered lifespan is not the natural lifespan given to the people of Etheirys by nature, the short lifespan of the Sundered is by design of a person. She altered the entire species in a way she thought best, so why can\\'t those who have been altered attempt to alter themselves in a way they feel works best for them? They should be able to do what they want with their corporeal aether and their souls. The problem comes in when they are trying to do what they want with our aether.

But the Endless aren\\'t trying to steal our aether. Not even Sphene. We\\'re being attacked by a bad line of code. This was a problem better solved with a good programmer than an axe.

And if anyone wants to argue it has to be resolved with an axe cause that\\'s how the game works. Well, the writers knew how the game works, so maybe the shouldn\\'t have made the final antagonists innocent people living in a themepark.

Don’t forget they already had a machine form prototype in the form of robo otis but they did consider a version that has all the memories and can live with minimal help for over 200 years and could be upgraded a bad prototype version. Plus the inconsistency of needing to kill robo Otis off so there wouldn’t be a problem when facing endless Otis (also he dies while saving not even the queen but a drone, so completely pointless death)

[Cenobia]

FFXIV: "Yes, these people are lingering memories given form by Dynamis, but they're sentient, therefore should be considered real people worth helping.
Also FFXIV, somehow: "Yeah just delete all of these perfectly recorded memories that can experience existence again by being given bodies through aether lmao, they're not real anyway, none of them will even complain."

It's just bad writing, period. Hiroi did not play the game he's "writing"(ruining) for, and it shows.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Surely hating on undead is one of the most common stances in fiction. Zombies, ghosts and vampires that prey on the living for sustenance are the most basic narrative vehicles there is, it is very very normal to oppose them. Only twist Dawntrail takes is that they make the undead appear nice and harmless on the surface and the system does the harm.

Up until the attack on Tuliyollal, the Endless ran off the life force of those who died of natural causes who had opted into their system by wearing a regulator. Their leaders killed 51 people. In return we wiped out their entire Endless population. If they are vampires, they are vampires in a universe where Tru Blood exists and we didn't stake them because they were actively attempting to drink our blood, we staked them because vampires are gross. We even knew wiping them out wouldn't stop Sphene from attempting to drain the Source because she still had the Meso Terminal. We seriously did it because they are "twisted and unnatural."

Don’t forget they already had a machine form prototype in the form of robo otis but they did consider a version that has all the memories and can live with minimal help for over 200 years and could be upgraded a bad prototype version. Plus the inconsistency of needing to kill robo Otis off so there wouldn’t be a problem when facing endless Otis (also he dies while saving not even the queen but a drone, so completely pointless death)

I mentioned that here in my dissertation on why Alexandrians are the dumbest advanced society ever created that they had already come up with a sustainable way of achieving their goals and abandoned it for a stupid way that would eventually destroy the universe.

FFXIV: "Yes, these people are lingering memories given form by Dynamis, but they're sentient, therefore should be considered real people worth helping.
Also FFXIV, somehow: "Yeah just delete all of these perfectly recorded memories that can experience existence again by being given bodies through aether lmao, they're not real anyway, none of them will even complain."

It's just bad writing, period. Hiroi did not play the game he's "writing"(ruining) for, and it shows.

And I love being lectured on the importance of accepting death when I'm standing next to the guy who rewrote time because he couldn't accept the WoL's death... And I'd just like to remind everyone after the Exarch (who has lived for CENTURIES) died, we stuck his memories and soul in a crystal and jammed them into his younger self (hopefully with his younger self having consented to it and we didn't just shove them in there while he was sleep). But when it's not Grandpa SimpCat we're "violating the natural cycle."

[Ayche]

Up until the attack on Tuliyollal, the Endless ran off the life force of those who died of natural causes who had opted into their system by wearing a regulator. Their leaders killed 51 people. In return we wiped out their entire Endless population. If they are vampires, they are vampires in a universe where Tru Blood exists and we didn't stake them because they were actively attempting to drink our blood, we staked them because vampires are gross. We even knew wiping them out wouldn't stop Sphene from attempting to drain the Source because she still had the Meso Terminal. We seriously did it because they are "twisted and unnatural."

I think you have lost the plot. Like you can be unsatisfied with the delivery of the story, but the moral of the story is rock solid. They ARE twisted and unnatural, the dead do not come before the living. The point of vampires is that they are ... vampires. They are undead that live at the expense of the true living, they die without the blood of the innocent. Trying to solve vampires with fake blood, animal blood or blood donations is missing the point of vampires, they are a story device. It is wrong to live at the expense of others. This is like one of the most common plot points there are.

[Papayatar]

Don’t forget they already had a machine form prototype in the form of robo otis but they did consider a version that has all the memories and can live with minimal help for over 200 years and could be upgraded a bad prototype version. Plus the inconsistency of needing to kill robo Otis off so there wouldn’t be a problem when facing endless Otis (also he dies while saving not even the queen but a drone, so completely pointless death)

I’m going to guess the reason for rejecting the robo bodies has to do specifically with giving Sphene a physical form, since robo-Otis is a pro type made after the real Sphene a dead. And also rejecting robo bodies because something to do with her crown since the crown was hinted at being something special.

So the story not extrapolating on it, instead gives us a “wait for the sequel” post credits hint and then the flip flop nature of the story saying we should and shouldn’t care about the Endless makes things awkward because we don’t know enough other than they’re fueled by souls so gotta shutdown the PC despide and moral dilemas being ignored.

So my half-thought of theory is the robo bodies weren’t viable due to memories 100% being retained. Even though LM Otis had his PTSD moment he was still an early version of an Endless so he probably didn’t get the full memory wipe treatment. Sure his moment was directly related to Sphene but I think that was probably also a flaw they worked out with future Endless.

It’s possible that whatever they needed a Sphene copy and her special crown required some level of memory manipulation even if they were just making super advanced AI vers of their dead queen. And for whatever reason making the Endless the way they are and tying her directives to the might be related. But I could be giving the writing too much credit through speculation.

[MikkoAkure]

Correct. Souls are not corporeal aether. That's why I clarified that the Endless, cannot and do not run off souls. They run off life force, which is corporeal aether. From the souls entry in our codex:


People conflate and confuse what people with the regulators are doing and what's happening in Living Memory. But the people of Living Memory are not memory aether grafted onto souls as that would be ghosts and they could have just been that in the first place, be much sturdier for it and not needed any resources to maintain it. All you'd have to do is keep them from going to the aetherial sea and they would have continued on forever. Even a city of ghosts would have been a less stupid plan. But the memory aether is removed from the soul and sent to Living Memory, while the soul is packaged into a soul cell and sent to the lower levels for distribution to living citizens. So if what she needed was souls, extracting memories from them and sending them to the other place makes no sense. She's making their physical bodies out of the stuff physical bodies are made out of. If she was making them physical bodies out of souls, well souls are eternal. She could have just left them on their original souls and none of this would have been necessary.

Then isn't that even worse? Without souls, they're less than ghosts, they're just aetherial residue or to use Montichaigne's analogy, just floating ink that used to be written to a page and now has to be constantly maintained through sucking out life aether. This makes the Endless no different than the shades of Amaurot or even familiars like a carbuncle. They're just recreations that only resemble life. I had thought the users referring to them as chat bots were going a bit too far but it seems that's exactly what they are. They're simulacra devoid of the actual pieces that make something alive and without a supply of life force they become monsters.

I saw someone say that this whole thing is much clearer in Japanese. I wonder if there's some sort of translation difference here with what's going on and if the English community are the only ones who keep on saying the Endless were "genocided".

[jameseoakes]

Then isn't that even worse? Without souls, they're less than ghosts, they're just aetherial residue or to use Montichaigne's analogy, just floating ink that used to be written to a page and now has to be constantly maintained through sucking out life aether. This makes the Endless no different than the shades of Amaurot or even familiars like a carbuncle. They're just recreations that only resemble life. I had thought the users referring to them as chat bots were going a bit too far but it seems that's exactly what they are. They're simulacra devoid of the actual pieces that make something alive and without a supply of life force they become monsters.

I saw someone say that this whole thing is much clearer in Japanese. I wonder if there's some sort of translation difference here with what's going on and if the English community are the only ones who keep on saying the Endless were "genocided".

The endless are far more 'alive' than the shades of Amaurot which the game makes the ponit of explaining outside Hyth that they only follow a fairly narrow understanding and get confused when trying to engage them on topics outside what they're there to do but then the Amaurot in Shadowbringers is meant to feel fake. The endless feel alive and seem to have will and motivation.

If the game wanted them to feel fake it did a bad job of making them feel that way. why did I help someone find the engagement ring they had for the love of there life only less than an hour later condemon them to oblivion. The game doesn't seem to know what it wants this to be and it feels evil to out of hand do what we are doing.