Dawntrail's Final Zones destroy everything the story has built.

[Singularity]

With existing FFXIV lore, soul is primary component of conscious beings, not memory.

Is it? Yet there are many conscious beings without one - any creation of the ancients according to Emet-Selch could not possess a soul. This would therefore include Meteion, the Twelve (and the Watcher), and the Loporrits, yet all of these appear to be fully sapient beings.

[Lady_Silvermoon]

Is it? Yet there are many conscious beings without one - any creation of the ancients according to Emet-Selch could not possess a soul. This would therefore include Meteion, the Twelve (and the Watcher), and the Loporrits, yet all of these appear to be fully sapient beings.

Creations of the Ancients can get souls, it's that the Ancients themselves couldn't give them souls. Based on the rules of nature the Loporrits shouldn't have souls, but we were told on Twitter they do and that's probably because Hydaelyn, having become a god, gaining the power to bestow souls and so she gave her familiars souls. Also, the Watcher and the Twelve were made from slivers of the souls of the people who sacrificed themselves to make Hydaelyn. She needed most of their memory and soul aether to make herself powerful enough to stand a chance against Zodiark, but she saved a bit of them and fashioned that bit into the Watcher and the Twelve.

But yes, being sentient and having a soul are not the same in the FF14 universe given Alpha didn't have a soul and he was sentient the entire time. He was given a soul as a reward for helping us at the end of the raid series.

And even if we declared having a soul being the one and only consideration for personhood which I disagree with, the Endless are memory aether grafted onto soul aether, so...even people who only care about souls should give more pause before being ready to wipe out the Endless. There could be an argument about them not being grafted onto their own soul, however, most the residents of Everkeep are very likely living off a soul that isn't their own given they burn through them like Pringles.

[Zackneifein]

In our real world, I don't believe in souls. In our world, I could see how such a debate of "are they alive or not" could happen, since in both case, I think that we are, in a simplified way, an electric signal in a brain or in a computer.

But we are in FFXIV universe, a place where souls exist, where reincarnation exist, where a true "circle of life" exist. And it change everything.

In such universe, having a soul or not is what make being truely alive or not, not just having showing emotion or being "biologically" alive. It doesn't mean that we should just erase any AI or being without a soul (like Meteion I think) just because we don't care about them or that we should despised them, but in the case we are talking about, they are a doom that will consume all life and then disappear.

Sphene is a cosmic dread, maybe not on the same scale as Meteion, but with the same finality, and for that, she and the living memory have to disappear. We are specifically told that they need living ether (not just simple ether), and that it's the only way for them. It cannot be accepted.

At the end, we aren't committing a genocide, we are reluctantly giving peace to memories who where locked in a fake paradise. All we can even hope that all the living ether that haven't been consumed could return to the circle of life.

[Somnolence]

Is it? Yet there are many conscious beings without one - any creation of the ancients according to Emet-Selch could not possess a soul. This would therefore include Meteion, the Twelve (and the Watcher), and the Loporrits, yet all of these appear to be fully sapient beings.

Well the game constantly reminds us that we have chunk of Azem's soul, and as a result we are very similar to him/her in what we want and what we do without having any memories at all.

[Bright-Flower]

We didn't shut down Living Memory because 'Cahciua asked us to' but because it was necessary to stop Sphene from invading other worlds, be it ours or other shards, and stealing their souls to keep the system going.

Also, though Cahciua tells us not to worry about it, I don't think the game itself is telling us we shouldn't care. Sure SHE says that. But if they truly didn't matter at all, we wouldn't have such touching scenes between her and Erenville, or Krile and her parents, and all the side quests about helping the memories let go which are very reminiscent of ghosts lingering after death because of unfulfilled desires and attachments. Cahciua is telling us not to care while the game is telling us this is necessary but still sad.

[Gortys]

That's the most poorly programmed AI in history if it can create characters bent on it's own destruction.

Good AI will one day be able to recognize nuances and other human emotions. Bad AI is just a computer program. So Cahciua is good AI if she can recognize that their situation is not ideal. Sphene to me is bad AI since she cannot accept other ways to save her people and thinks it is all up to her.

[Equalitas]

The endless and regulators spend the soul and it does not go back to the life stream.

Something that messing with the birth rebirth life-stream and using it like oil should be deleted from existence. If this wasn't portrayed as memories of living beings none would be liking this machine. If it was portrayed as a void eating soul-aether, none would let this to continue. This is worse then voidsent.

When i knew this place was all wrong was when i saw the male and female Lala by the clock tower going around looking for eachother but keep missing by a corner of the tower in a loop. Those two souls just had incomplete memories and as the soul aether was limited at the time and could not let them. We would need to give up a part of another let them continue have more memories.

[Kathryn]

The final area made me feel abit uncomftable I love Erenvilles mother she was fantastic but when it came to switching off her area i really didnt want to do it, I was on the verge of crying x.x damn emotions.

[CuteBucket]

I keep seeing people say the Lopporits have souls, but as magical constructs created by Hydaelyn, I don't think they have any reason to have souls, and I don't recall anything in the game ever saying that they have souls. If I'm wrong and there is a source or line I missed for this however, I would like to know. Not "I speculate they have souls because..." -- actual, in-game conformation.

[DiaDeem]

Endless are not exactly the person they once were. The Sphene we meet is a physical representation of the raw desire to help her people, not the complete human being that she once was. That person is just gone.

Ever played Soma? Gonna spoil the ending:

So, the world is ending and you have to upload the main character's consciousness to the Ark (a virtual world in a ship launched into space) and he succeeds... except what survives is not really him. He copy pastes his mind to the Ark but he dies, and all that survives is his copy, not the person that did the actual upload. Is he truly alive after that? His original self didn't seem to think so, but his copy thought he did, so... who knows.

Anyway, the issue with the Endless is that they specifically require life Aether to exist. This is a problem without a solution that required a choice to be made. Sometimes there's no right choice, only a choice. One is to let Sphene eat every living reflection to keep them existing until all life is gone everywhere else. The other one was to deactivate the memories. Like I said: There's no really a good choice here, but one had to be made, and ending all life in every reflection for the sake of the memories just didn't seem right to me. That doesn't mean I was happy at all to shut down the towers, but a choice had to be made.

The only other solution that I would have tried (if there was an option for it) is to not deactivate the towers but simply let them run out of power eventually by themselves, though I'm not sure if we could have stopped the main terminal (and Sphene) with that method. If possible, that's what I personally would have liked to do.

I believe this whole topic requires a lot of nuance to discuss. It made me think of future AI entities that may become self aware, euthanasia, sacrifice, that one dumb metaphor of the train you have to derail into a city or just a few people (or whatever it was, you know what I'm talking about), etc.

I just hope people remember that all of these concepts are rather complex and that there's hardly one simple definitive answer to all of it.