Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Kirutsuki]

Just to re-iterate, it is clear what Sphene is doing is wrong.
I was just hoping there was more scenes with people who knew about these things trying to solve the issue instead of just accepting the status quo.
Or just blatantly insert their belief of "correct" into it.

Even if we were short on time, why couldn't we even try to entertain the idea it was solvable in some other way? Even if Cahciua or Krile's parents were shaking their heads and saying they tried "everything"?

[Bright-Flower]

It was definitely a heavy choice and not an entirely clean situation. I don't think the story was trying to tell us that these memory-people didn't matter. Even Erenville's mom wants to spend time with her son before inevitably shutting the system off despite her words on the matter. It certainly didn't stop Krile form bonding with the memories of her parents. And the way the music cuts out and everything turns gray, we were definitely meant to feel something here.

That said there also wasn't much of a choice. Living memory was frankly unsustainable and if there was another way to keep it running without such cost, Sphene would have done that. Sphene was harvesting souls because she saw this as a grim neccessity in order to keep living memory going, it would not makes ense for Sphene to go to these lengths if there 'was' an easy third option.

But it's also important to remember this is not the death of a people or a culture. The Alexandrians are alive and wll in Solution 9/Heritage Found. All we did was shut down their Mikoshi. A digital afterlife being powered by living souls. Their culture, their history, their people live on and are doing just fine.

So ultimately I don't have a big problem with how it went down. Sure I suppose they could have thrown in some more text of someone being like 'surely there must be another way' 'no actually there is not' but it wouldn't have really affected how it all played out.

[LilimoLimomo]

The narrative repeatedly emphasizes that the "inhabitants" of Living Memory are computer simulations based on memories. This is not a story that explores philosophical questions like "if AI acts like a human, does it actually have personhood?", because concepts that are intangible and theoretical to us (souls, memories, etc) are scientifically understood quantities in this fictional world. If you accept the premise of the world-building being presented to us, then Living Memory's only life is its plants and animals.

Personhood aside, Living Memory has to be shut down; it can only sustain its existence by infinitely harvesting the lives of others. It's the classic sci-fi catastrophe grey goo.

The only viable solution is so obvious that it would be disingenuous to truly refer to this as any kind of trolley problem; you have a society made entirely of computer simulations on one track, and every life throughout the universe on the other. Which track should you switch the trolley onto? If we truly want to be ethical, there is a single right answer.

[OMGJesuis66]

Honestly, I am on a very personal level, in agreement with how the events in Living Memory unfolded.
Those people were already dead, they relieve memories as stored Data in a Machine, their aspirations only exist based on past memories and they are *unable* to develop beyond what was coded.
Their hopes and dreams were the same hopes and dreams once they were alive, they could not make new ones, Sphene did, and she became an anomaly, which is why she had to erase her own memories to break the strings that held her back from achieving her primary function. It is all code and AI, and as the name stated for the place: It is a Living Memory.

There is no other solution. The ethical solution is to shut everything down, to let those people rest and move on, for they are to rejoin the Aetherial Sea and their souls will become someone new as they live again. That is THE BEST possible outcome for those people, what happened in that place was a massive tragedy akin to nature. Which is why Cachiua states that all things die. But those people there, are not alive. They have been dead for thousands of years. To allow the natural course of life to follow is only kindness to those.

[Kirutsuki]

Honestly, I am on a very personal level, in agreement with how the events in Living Memory unfolded.
Those people were already dead, they relieve memories as stored Data in a Machine, their aspirations only exist based on past memories and they are *unable* to develop beyond what was coded.
Their hopes and dreams were the same hopes and dreams once they were alive, they could not make new ones, Sphene did, and she became an anomaly, which is why she had to erase her own memories to break the strings that held her back from achieving her primary function. It is all code and AI, and as the name stated for the place: It is a Living Memory.

There is no other solution. The ethical solution is to shut everything down, to let those people rest and move on, for they are to rejoin the Aetherial Sea and their souls will become someone new as they live again. That is THE BEST possible outcome for those people, what happened in that place was a massive tragedy akin to nature. Which is why Cachiua states that all things die. But those people there, are not alive. They have been dead for thousands of years. To allow the natural course of life to follow is only kindness to those.

But we act as the judge, jury and executioner, without any question or proper understanding that that is the case. We just trust Cahciua on her word that this is the only solution.
What I mean by this is that I understand with your point of the Endless being just lines of code and I agree, but we never confront an Endless to make the distinction clear.
Erenville was the closest of the bunch that I related to because he wasn't treating Cahciua as just lines of code.

Let me ask you this, if a solution is found later. Someone just comes in and asks "why didn't you do this or that?" and it would have kept all in Living Memory alive and not force Sphene to invade other Reflections.
Do you think you could stand on the side that this was an ethical solution, when you stopped someone from meeting their son or a loved one in the afterlife?
Why was Krile & her parents or Cahciua allowed to have their dreams fulfilled? Isn't that quite selfish?

I would never say that it was only a kindness to those memories, unless I specifically saw that they were actually suffering from this existence. They knew what they were and they seemed all really happy.

[Zero-ELEC]

If you interact with the Endless that give sidequests after the terminals are off, they generally just accept without much issue that they were turned off and in one case even say that keeping them "alive" at the cost of the lives of others would be unconscionable.

Let me ask you this, if a solution is found later. Someone just comes in and asks "why didn't you do this or that?" and it would have kept all in Living Memory alive and not force Sphene to invade other Reflections.

If we're talking about hypotheticals like these, then they can simply be turned back on. We know that various Endless have been turned off before; particular people were turned on and off multiple times over the years as the aether reserves that sustained them dwindled. If their existence was genuinely threatened by being turned off then they were already on the verge of nonexistence.

[Kirutsuki]

The narrative repeatedly emphasizes that the "inhabitants" of Living Memory are computer simulations based on memories. This is not a story that explores philosophical questions like "if AI acts like a human, does it actually have personhood?", because concepts that are intangible and theoretical to us (souls, memories, etc) are scientifically understood quantities in this fictional world. If you accept the premise of the world-building being presented to us, then Living Memory's only life is its plants and animals.

Personhood aside, Living Memory has to be shut down; it can only sustain its existence by infinitely harvesting the lives of others. It's the classic sci-fi catastrophe grey goo.

The only viable solution is so obvious that it would be disingenuous to truly refer to this as any kind of trolley problem; you have a society made entirely of computer simulations on one track, and every life throughout the universe on the other. Which track should you switch the trolley onto? If we truly want to be ethical, there is a single right answer.

Yes, this is something I constantly had to do, to separate "myself" from the story being tld because it went heavily against my philosophical thoughts about life. to just try and stay within the confines of the world 14 has built.
That said I never thought that characters from ARR to Endwalker would hold such strong beliefs of what you can and can't do with a soul. Even when they themselves have been transported beyond reflections within crystals and while it is not the same, it is still a perversion of the natural state of things within 14's world building. Yet G'raha does it forcefully and accidentally pulls half of the scions to another reflection. But Alisaie isn't even remotely bothered by this in Shadowbringers.

But she is bothered by this memory shenanigans now. She even learns about the Yok Hyu's version of the similar belief on this expansion, that people are remembered by others and it's somehow a better belief than the one Alexandriands cooked up, why?
I could argue that the Aetherial Sea is just a different version of Living Memory, they just operate differently with different sets of beliefs.

but yes, Living Memory has to be shut down, but not because it hosts the memories of the endless, but because what Sphene and Sphene alone is doing to sustain those memories. Don't get those two mixed up.
Had Sphene not presented her ultimatum and started the interdimensional fusion, we would have 100% tried other solutions to keep these memories "alive". Even if Cahciua had come to us with the same proposal.

I don't see the crew doing the same thing would they have had more time. I honestly don't.

[Kirutsuki]

If you interact with the Endless that give sidequests after the terminals are off, they generally just accept without much issue that they were turned off and in one case even say that keeping them "alive" at the cost of the lives of others would be unconscionable.

Yea I did all the sidequests and they did act as if they knew what was going on to some extent. But neither did they show any particular emotions about people being gone so it was a bit weird.
If it was that Cahciua indeed talked to all the residents, why didn't she clearly say that yea everyone knows they should be shut down. This one dude was so happy he just got his wife back even :'D

Honestly I would probably be happy if there's like a tribe questline here in living memory where we slowly bring like a small section back online and make it clear what's going on.
Could be an interesting thing to do, or maybe too cruel of a thing to do at this point.

[OMGJesuis66]

Let me ask you this, if a solution is found later. Someone just comes in and asks "why didn't you do this or that?" and it would have kept all in Living Memory alive and not force Sphene to invade other Reflections.
Do you think you could stand on the side that this was an ethical solution, when you stopped someone from meeting their son or a loved one in the afterlife?
Why was Krile & her parents or Cahciua allowed to have their dreams fulfilled? Isn't that quite selfish?

I would never say that it was only a kindness to those memories, unless I specifically saw that they were actually suffering from this existence. They knew what they were and they seemed all really happy.

Even if presented with another solution, I would still say that the ethical route was to shut everything down.
That 'happiness' was false. Not saying they were not happy, but due to the fact they are not real, happiness doesn't exist. Again, it's an actual living memory. It's just a person who long passed in a simulacrum, it is not real.
The kindness I mentioned is that while those memories preserve that illusion of happiness, their actual souls would never be able to move on and rest. And for them to live, living people would eventually need to be killed.
It's a Limbo, in all senses. A glorified mausoleum, where souls are unable to move on and yet live in bliss.
Shutting down is bittersweet. It is kindness, but a painful one.

[LilimoLimomo]

That said I never thought that characters from ARR to Endwalker would hold such strong beliefs of what you can and can't do with a soul.

Oh, 100%. It's one of numerous ways that Dawntrail's narrative is flawed. Because since ARR, we've been doing all manner of occult madness with souls, such as injecting thousands of them into our relic weapons. And suddenly someone has a problem with how souls are being treated? Yeah, it sounds hypocritical, it sounds ethnocentric.

To be clear, I don't think Living Memory needs to be shut down because it's bad to use souls or whatever*; it's entirely about them needing to harvest an endless amount of energy from other living creatures to sustain their own existence. Like the ARR Primals, they gotta go.

*though since ARR, I have very much raised an eyebrow that everyone is cool with harvesting souls like that...

Had Sphene not presented her ultimatum and started the interdimensional fusion, we would have 100% tried other solutions to keep these memories "alive".

I don't think we would have; at some point in the story in Living Memory, one or more of the Scions state that from the very beginning, Living Memory was doomed to failure because the system's design is unsustainable. Quite simply, Living Memory is computer storage that needs to be able to infinitely grow (to hold more data, more memories), and the bigger it gets the more resources it will require to keep the lights on. But nothing can infinitely grow; it's not just a fact about nature, it's a fact about reality. Resources are finite, and thus infinite growth is always doomed to failure; infinite growth cannot be sustained. I think it's a bit poetic that in reality, the only natural phenomenon that attempts to infinitely grow is cancer.

The writers were correct to have the Scions point this out...though they were sloppy in having the initial engineers of Living Memory fail to realize this incredibly obvious flaw in their system. Any engineering team worth their salt would have noticed that problem well before the project was finalized, and any population that truly loved their dead wouldn't have generated simulacra of them that would need to choose between their own existence and destroying all life throughout the universe. It's a glaring plot hole.

I could argue that the Aetherial Sea is just a different version of Living Memory, they just operate differently with different sets of beliefs.

At least according to the lore we're given, it's not; the Aetherial Sea breaks down things like souls and memories so that they can form new life, and that life will eventually be broken down itself, and so on and so on. It's the circle of life. But Living Memory just keeps the souls and memories so that they don't return, and thus new life can't be created from them.

And again I have to emphasize, according to the lore we're given, the simulacra in Living Memory are just computer simulations. It's not an afterlife, it's a room full of ChatGPT bots that have each been fed memories related to a specific dead person so that they can impersonate them.