Problematic notion about Zone 5 & 6 story bits.

[Alenore]

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.

They know they're pretty much projections from the terminal. For them, the temrinal being shut down means they'll just be reincarnated at another time, sinc ethey've been through multiple cycles of beinc recreated.
I suppose they think we're just shutting down the terminal, and not erasing data. I kinda want to know other translations on the matter, do they also use "erase"?

[DreadCrow]

There's a few things you're forgetting/ignoring...

1.) The nature of life in the universe.

For something in the world of Final Fantasy XIV to be alive, it has to have three things; a body, a mind, and a soul. This isn't an opinion; it's a scientific fact. This is why ashkin (undead) aren't alive; zombies and skeletons have bodies but no souls, while ghosts are souls with no bodies. Since Endless lack true bodies and souls, Endless are not alive. Hell, we're told as much. By the Endless.

2.) Emet Selch was a racist.

While you are right, that Emet Selch thought we really weren't alive, it was because he thought we were inferior. His whole talk about how we're "insects" mirrored similar views that people have used to justify genocide in real life. Since even if our souls were less dense than his, we still had souls. We were still alive based on all definitions of life, in universe.


3.) The Endless are essentially ghosts with questionable sentience, let alone sapience.

As mentioned above, with ashkin, the Endless are ONLY memory. No body, non soul. Basically, digital ghosts. When you shut down the terminals, you're flat out told that some will remain behind if they have "unfinished business". And while some of those that remain do seem to realize other people have disappeared, they seem unaware that the world around them has changed to a shade of grey.

4.) Our actions are defined, in game, as a tragedy, but really the ONLY choice.

We're not doing what we're doing out of malice. We're doing what we're doing because it's the only thing we can do, in order to shave our world and other worlds, because the Endless are unsustainable. If we didn't do something, everyone in the Source would die, as a sacrifice to keep around the memory of the dead. And eventually, it would spread into other sources... And eventually, in time, still fail, since their isn't enough energy in the universe to keep the machine running indefinitely. So in time, a countless number of lives will be lost and everything still ends the same.

4.) Emet Selch was a racist.

While you are right, that Emet Selch thought we really weren't alive, it was because he thought we were inferior. His whole talk about how we're "insects" mirrored similar views that people have used to justify genocide in real life. Since even if our souls were less dense than his, we still had souls. We were still alive based on all definitions of life, in universe.

[PorxiesRCute]

1.) The nature of life in the universe.

For something in the world of Final Fantasy XIV to be alive, it has to have three things; a body, a mind, and a soul. This isn't an opinion; it's a scientific fact. This is why ashkin (undead) aren't alive; zombies and skeletons have bodies but no souls, while ghosts are souls with no bodies. Since Endless lack true bodies and souls, Endless are not alive. Hell, we're told as much. By the Endless.

By one Endless. That's the thing. More of the Endless should have been aware of our plan and should have been telling us to go for it.

3.) The Endless are essentially ghosts with questionable sentience, let alone sapience.

As mentioned above, with ashkin, the Endless are ONLY memory. No body, non soul. Basically, digital ghosts. When you shut down the terminals, you're flat out told that some will remain behind if they have "unfinished business". And while some of those that remain do seem to realize other people have disappeared, they seem unaware that the world around them has changed to a shade of grey.

And what about Cahciua and Krile's parents? They're every bit as sentient as any main character.

The background NPCs are less developed because they're background NPCs.

4.) Our actions are defined, in game, as a tragedy, but really the ONLY choice.

We're not doing what we're doing out of malice. We're doing what we're doing because it's the only thing we can do, in order to shave our world and other worlds, because the Endless are unsustainable. If we didn't do something, everyone in the Source would die, as a sacrifice to keep around the memory of the dead. And eventually, it would spread into other sources... And eventually, in time, still fail, since their isn't enough energy in the universe to keep the machine running indefinitely. So in time, a countless number of lives will be lost and everything still ends the same.

Our actions are defined in game as a tragedy because the pretty landscape is going away and because the memories of the Endless are being erased, but it's okay because we'll remember them, which is exactly the same thing as digital recreations of them walking around and being aware of their surroundings.

I agree it was a tragedy and it was unsustainable, but the devs wrote a story where our only option was to mass-delete a society of people who appear to be completely self-aware. That's messed up.

[MikkoAkure]

By one Endless. That's the thing. More of the Endless should have been aware of our plan and should have been telling us to go for it.

They seemed apathetic to the whole thing. We weren't being sneaky, we shut them off one terminal at a time and no one lifted a finger. One NPC you can talk to even says he's aware of Sphene's plan and doesn't care whether she succeeds or fails. Constancy himself says that he doesn't agree that his existence should continue at the cost of others' souls.

I agree it was a tragedy and it was unsustainable, but the devs wrote a story where our only option was to mass-delete a society of people who appear to be completely self-aware. That's messed up.

The existence they had was more of a dream than actually being alive. They had every whim catered to them and even "serendipitous" encounters were rigged by the terminals. They were taken in and out of consciousness at random because only 1/10th of the population could exist at the same time. The place they "lived" in was run down for some time and just behind the facades the place was filled with fiends.

The whole thing was made by a people who were so upset about losing their young princess that they turned her into a program, who in turn was so protective over her people that she boxed their dead up into a computer and erased their memories from the living because she couldn't let go and her and her people became codependent on each other. And then to keep those memories of dead people dreaming along in a dilapidated Disneyland, she needs to harvest the souls of the living from other civilizations and whole worlds.

Now that's what's messed up.

[Kirutsuki]

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.

Yea I agree with this and would like to add to it that the flaw was Sphene herself and her love for her people.
Since she wanted to preserve her people even after death no matter what or who they were, it means that she couldn't let go of them after they have become Endless.
Which resulted in the Living Memory's capacity to fill up.

But see, that is never directly stated to be that's the case, you have to do a bit of mental gymnastics to get there,
which is to say that the writing is falling short on this area in that regard.

They do mention at points that the Sphene we see is not exactly the same as the real Queen Sphene of Alexandria, because she was made from the memory
and because of that her need for preservation of souls became absolute. So the Living Memory really only failed BECAUSE of the version of Sphene that was there.
Even if she did still harbor some emotions that she stripped entirely at the end it wasn't enough for her to be able to let go of her own people.

The thing is Living Memory doesn't need to keep growing to perpetuity. If there was a version of Sphene that understood that SOME people want to actually die, and some can
find happiness there when they fail in life it wouldn't necessarily just keep on growing. Sure after billions of years it would probably be filled with the most selfish people you could imagine who only think about staying there as long as possible.
But properly managing that from the get go of who get the regulators and who don't would even fix that small issue.

The only problem is the source of the power, but with less people inhabiting Living Memory there is no real reason to invade other reflections, since the Electrope can manage quite a bit on it's own I wager.

[Alenore]

1.) The nature of life in the universe.

For something in the world of Final Fantasy XIV to be alive, it has to have three things; a body, a mind, and a soul. This isn't an opinion; it's a scientific fact. This is why ashkin (undead) aren't alive; zombies and skeletons have bodies but no souls, while ghosts are souls with no bodies. Since Endless lack true bodies and souls, Endless are not alive. Hell, we're told as much. By the Endless.

Were Zenos, the Sahaguin that switched body, and every Ascians we defeated but not directly destroyed dead?
Were the Scions dead when their souls were ripped out of their bodies and sent to the First? They were souls without body, at that time, and had to manifest an avatar.

Are Loporrits alive? Because they don't have souls, like the good arcane entities they are classified as.
Is somebody who lost his memories and in a vegetative state alive, despite having only body and soul?

Yok Huy think people don't die because they're always remembered. Are they simply wrong? Multiple Scions think this is a great way to see death.
Even in our world, different cultures have different definition of death, and scientifically or legally speaking, is it when the heart stops beating? The brain stops showing activity?

From an in-game point of view, when do you die? When your soul is in the Aetherial sea? When it's cleansed of its memory?
Was Y'shtola dead when she was sent in the sea for so long she had to be pulled back?

2.) Emet Selch was a racist.

While you are right, that Emet Selch thought we really weren't alive, it was because he thought we were inferior. His whole talk about how we're "insects" mirrored similar views that people have used to justify genocide in real life. Since even if our souls were less dense than his, we still had souls. We were still alive based on all definitions of life, in universe.

He thought they were inferior because they had inferior souls, so I don't really understand your point (or that he's racist, when race has nothing to do with it).
He's literally a superior being to sundered people, and that's not a superlative or a "racial superiority" thing. He's a full 14/14 soul and body, while we're only a part of what Ancients used to be. He's still considering we're inferiors because our "lives" are not real because it's only a shade of what he knows life is.
Despite having memories and experiences, he's considering sundered are not alive because their "souls" don't meet his criteria for what a soul is.

You're trying to judge his conception of what is living or dead based on our own conception of death, or the Eorzean idea of what that means.
Do you think the Ancients and Eorzean had the same definition of death, and gave the same meaning to it?

3.) The Endless are essentially ghosts with questionable sentience, let alone sapience.

As mentioned above, with ashkin, the Endless are ONLY memory. No body, non soul. Basically, digital ghosts. When you shut down the terminals, you're flat out told that some will remain behind if they have "unfinished business". And while some of those that remain do seem to realize other people have disappeared, they seem unaware that the world around them has changed to a shade of grey.

Again, were the Scions dead when they had only memory and souls but no body?
Was Otis alive since he had his soul and memory?
Are the Omicrons alive since they have no body, and I'm not even sure a soul, but a robot?
Are the Ea alive despite having no body?

Is the criteria for still being alive to have at least 2 components between (body, memory, soul) ?

The Endless who remain realize everything has changed, since the guide we help in one of the aetherial current quest literally says a fountain has lost its superb, and the people he was guiding simply disappeared.

4.) Our actions are defined, in game, as a tragedy, but really the ONLY choice.

We're not doing what we're doing out of malice. We're doing what we're doing because it's the only thing we can do, in order to shave our world and other worlds, because the Endless are unsustainable. If we didn't do something, everyone in the Source would die, as a sacrifice to keep around the memory of the dead. And eventually, it would spread into other sources... And eventually, in time, still fail, since their isn't enough energy in the universe to keep the machine running indefinitely. So in time, a countless number of lives will be lost and everything still ends the same.

I've never said we were doing anything out of malice.
Actually, neither did Emet Selch when he wanted to rejoin everything, he felt he had a responsibility toward his people, just like Sphene had one towards her subject, and the Scions do towards the people of Etheirys and other reflections.

But we're with Scions who saw a recreation of life in Ultima Thule, Amaurot, the souls of the departed in the aetherial sea, and who all are scholars on all things aetherial.
We've been told by Cahciua "no can't do", and Sphene thinks she has only one solution.
We found a way to start restoring the First, started stabilizing the Thirteenth, created actual voidgates, solved tempering, G'raha and friends had people figure out working time travel and rift travel then created a summoning spell to summon someone across the rift. We managed to find enough energy to go to the edge of the universe (thanks, Mothercrystal!), we've witnessed the birth of a new star, and we literally know another race of digitalised beings who upload their consciousness in a shared network.

There's also an entire storage facility of free souls in Everkeep, ready to receive memories, and a bunch of puppets able to support these memories. Chances are some of these souls actually belonged to Endless, and they could restore them, Namikka for instance.
Had they considered memories to be important, they would have at least tried to find ways to safekeep them, give them a second chance. Just like they went out of their way to help residents of Ultima Thule.

But they didn't, and my whole point is it's because Scions don't see "just memories" as actually alive, and think the cycle of life and death is important. But Sphene and Alexandrian people don't think the same, and Scionsare somewhat imposing their beliefs on Alexandrian.

Edit : In fact, we're using the exact same argument as Emet Selch here. "Endless are not alive because they have no souls, and the cost to saving our world is their existence", against "Sundered people are not alive because their souls are incomplete, and they have to disappear if our civilization and star must come back from the tragedy that happened".

[Iscah]

Yea I had more to say to that point, but I kind of realized that it would deviate from the point too much.
But what you gotta understand is that Cahciua is from the source, so ofcourse she thinks it's natural for the dead to go the the lifestream.
But that isn't necessarily what the Alexandrians believe, we barely know what the Alexandrians think of the system in the first place.

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

Again, you're blurring concepts. It is unarguably natural for a soul to go to the aetherial sea upon the death of the body, in the same way that it's natural for gravity to make a dropped object fall or for heat to evaporate water. There is no cultural belief that can change these things from being how the world works.

I think it's significant that this specific argument is the one put to someone who works with the natural world and understands that natural flow of life and death in everything.

By contrast, the Alexandrian think it's culturally normal to artificially interfere with the natural behaviour of souls. That does not in any way make it natural for them, and their artificial soul-management system is not equatable to the natural process that the system is designed to keep souls out of.

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.

Isn't that the exact point of the trolley problem, though? Right now it is on a track that, if you do not interfere, will kill a large number of people. You can choose to do nothing or you can choose to save those people by choosing to instead kill/destroy an objectively "less bad" target on the other track.

Theoretically it's an easy choice, but it still involves you acting to cause what would in isolation be regarded as a tragedy.

[LilimoLimomo]

Isn't that the exact point of the trolley problem, though? Right now it is on a track that, if you do not interfere, will kill a large number of people. You can choose to do nothing or you can choose to save those people by choosing to instead kill/destroy an objectively "less bad" target on the other track.

Theoretically it's an easy choice, but it still involves you acting to cause what would in isolation be regarded as a tragedy.

That's fair, I was being a wee bit hyperbolic, wasn't I? ^^

[Alenore]

Again, you're blurring concepts. It is unarguably natural for a soul to go to the aetherial sea upon the death of the body, in the same way that it's natural for gravity to make a dropped object fall or for heat to evaporate water. There is no cultural belief that can change these things from being how the world works.

I think it's significant that this specific argument is the one put to someone who works with the natural world and understands that natural flow of life and death in everything.

By contrast, the Alexandrian think it's culturally normal to artificially interfere with the natural behaviour of souls. That does not in any way make it natural for them, and their artificial soul-management system is not equatable to the natural process that the system is designed to keep souls out of.

I'm not sure we should mix Living Memory itself and Alexandria use of souls. In theory, nothing would stop Alexandria from preserving memories, and send the souls their merry ways to the lifestream.

[Kirutsuki]

I'm not sure we should mix Living Memory itself and Alexandria use of souls. In theory, nothing would stop Alexandria from preserving memories, and send the souls their merry ways to the lifestream.

what do you mean mix? (The entire process is that the Alexandrians use the regulators and the weapons to extract the entirety of the soul, put it in a blender, extract the memory and have that memory eventually go to the cloud for storage and eventually into Living memory while the soul is stored separately for usage with the regulators. And when a person with a regulator dies of old age, it's soul is processed the same way.)

But yea someone did mention that if the memory is kept in Living memory, that the soul would stay in a limbo until they can reconnect again. But I'm unsure if that's true.
It makes sense, but it isn't really stated directly to be the case.

And someone else mentioned that because they are just memories they don't go to the aetherial sea if they are erased as an endless, because it's just lines of code, so the soul has already gone it's merry way.

This is what I mean that the story should really try to explain what the actual is going on here.