Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[CVXIV]

regarding the themepark full of children remark
while it's likely there are children that are of the endless, we are told that the endless take form of their happiest moment in life
iirc some of the child NPCs you assist in the side quests turn into adults

[Khryseis_Astra]

So would you say Cahciua was a sentient being to be able to do and think all that?

Is Alexa a “sentient being?” Is Siri? It’s an AI bot, “trained” with the memories of formerly living people. As convincing as they are, they are artificial copies of people who are already gone.

[Carolingian]

Is Alexa a “sentient being?” Is Siri? It’s an AI bot, “trained” with the memories of formerly living people. As convincing as they are, they are artificial copies of people who are already gone.

They're obviously incomparable seeing as Cahciua is even shown passing the Turing Test.

[CNitsah]

Is Alexa a “sentient being?” Is Siri? It’s an AI bot, “trained” with the memories of formerly living people. As convincing as they are, they are artificial copies of people who are already gone.

But that exactly where the problem lies. They have the memories of the dead people their personality and they're shown making new choices. They have individuality, their own capacity of judgement, their own memories and the capacity of creating new ones. Isn't that enough to be considered alive? For some, yes, for others no. It's a philosophical question as old as the humanity : "what is being alive", which lead to divisives questions that go from abortion to sentience of artificial intellingence. It's really deep question. Here the game doesn't answer to what it is, but definitely answer to what is not, without delving enough in the reason why they're not, as if it was obvious. It's not that obvious. For people that feels like the eternals met the conditions to be considered alive, this whole section feels wrong.

The story choose to tackle a deeply philosophical question while not wanting to talk about it at all. Hence the very divisive reception of that part.

[Turtledeluxe]

But that exactly where the problem lies. They have the memories of the dead people their personality, they're shown making new choices. They have individuality, their own capacity of judgement, their own memories and the capacity of creating new ones. Is that enough to be considered alive? For some, yes, for others no. It's a philosophical question as old as the humanity : "what is being alive", which lead to divisives questions that go from abortion to sentience of artificial intellingence. It's really deep question. Here the game doesn't answer to what it is, but definitely answer to what is not, without delving enough in the reason why they're not, as if it was obvious. It's not that obvious. For people that feels like the eternals met the conditions to be considered alive, this whole section feels wrong.

The story choose to tackle a deeply philosophical question while not wanting to talk about it at all. Hence the very divisive reception of that part.

How can you be a copy of a human being and not be able to make new choices? What are you talking about?

Only thing divided imo is people trolling and people who just took the story for what it is.

Sorry if it's dismissive but the "this isn't philosophical enough for me" kinda falls flat when you don't really make any sense to begin with.

And I mean that seriously. At what point are you a copy of the person do you become unable to use your brain??? Why would Sphene even invent that kind of system?

[CNitsah]

How can you be a copy of a human being and not be able to make new choices? What are you talking about?

Only thing divided imo is people trolling and people who just took the story for what it is.

Sorry if it's dismissive but the "this isn't philosophical enough for me" kinda falls flat when you don't really make any sense to begin with.

And I mean that seriously. At what point are you a copy of the person do you become unable to use your brain??? Why would Sphene even invent that kind of system?

I don't know how you got that from my message. I'm not saying this is not philosophical enough for me.
I'm saying that the eternals basically ask the question "what does it mean to be alive" (or more accurately, "what are the limits of being alive"), which is a question that has been there for hundreds, even thousands of years, with no definitive answers. Then FFXIV gave a simple answer. If your personnal belief align with that answer given in DT and you consider that the endless don't meet the requirements to be considered alive, you will not have any problem with it. If you consider they do meet the requirement, you will have problems with the way DT treated them.

I'm not giving a solution, I'm explaining why both vision have their arguments, and why there will never be any consensus on that kind of question.

[Turtledeluxe]

I don't know how you got that from my message. I'm not saying this is not philosophical enough for me.
I'm saying that the eternals basically ask the question "what does it mean to be alive" (or more accurately, "what are the limits of being alive"), which is a question that has been there for hundreds, even thousands of years, with no definitive answers. Then FFXIV gave a simple answer. If your personnal belief align with that answer given in DT and you consider that the endless don't meet the requirements to be considered alive, you will not have any problem with it. If you consider they do meet the requirement, you will have problems with the way DT treated them.

I'm not giving a solution, I'm explaining why both vision have their arguments, and why there will never be any consensus on that kind of question.

You clearly said "they have the capacity to make new memories, they have individuality". But those are all qualities they had while alive. So please explain how a copy and digital simulation of a dead person, somehow leads to life?

It's not an ethical or deep question. If your grandma died today, and an AI was able to replicate her behavior with a projection of your grandma that was localised to your neighborhood by a projector, is that now your grandma? Does that have rights? Maybe if you are willfully suppressing what you know is true because you want to win internet arguments, but you aren't deep.

The digital projection would never be your grandma no matter how authentic it behaved. You know it and I know it. And that's what the Endless literally are.

[Jojoya]

The story choose to tackle a deeply philosophical question while not wanting to talk about it at all. Hence the very divisive reception of that part.

It's a philosophical that has been getting discussed by the game story all along.

Should the dead be given precedence over the living?

The Endless are not alive. They are dead that have been recreated. To sustain their existence, the living must die.

Do you allow yourself to be killed so an Endless can be activated by a computer to wander around a facade reliving the happiest moments of its life?

It doesn't even make sense to have Living Memory if they aren't sentient.

Living Memory was the Alexandria solution to making sure the dead were not forgotten. The original intent was that the living would go there to visit an accurate recreation of their dead loved ones so that they would not be forgotten. To ensure that accuracy, the memories of the dead were stripped from their souls and fed into the computer as data to be used in making the recreation.

"Remember us. Remember that we once lived."

But the number of dead increased while the number of living decreased. Eventually Living Memory was closed to the living and only randomly selected dead were being recreated to conserve the aether used to power the system. They worked on interdimensional fusion to gain access to more life to strip of aether to power the system.

Again, the entire situation has Ascian written all over it. It would explain why YoshiP said that players should remember what they know about the Ascian when starting Dawntrail.

Question: if the Endless are truly supposed to be alive, why have they not made changes to their environment? Why are they not seeking a solution to their situation? Why are they walking around content with just revisiting their memories, knowing that they will disappear at some point when the computer decides its time to create someone else?

It's because they are not alive. They're programmed to be a certain way and accept that as the entirety of their existence.

What explains Cahciua being the sole Endless trying to create change while the others wander around content with their situation?

We aren't given information about her death. We only know that she is dead. Clearly she would have been part of Oblivion before her death or the rest of the organization wouldn't trust her let alone follow her. Did she manipulate her own death with the goal of gaining access to Living Memory to get more information that could stop Preservation's system? If so, all she had to do was have the strong belief at the time of her death that nothing in her life made her happier than trying to stop what Preservation put in motion. At whatever point the computer chose to recreate her within Living Memory, it would recreate her with that same drive because it was what made her happy.

[Khryseis_Astra]

So the same bot that's deleting it's primary objective is also running a rebellion against itself and orchestrating it's own destruction while also conducting calculations to merge with another shard to preserve the things it's strongarming us to destroy? While also having PTSD flashes about the death of the princess it's actively deleting to preserve the people it's actively destroying? Preservation: Worst.Programmers.Ever.

We should have called Cid.

I was referring to Cahciua specifically from the post I quoted. All the Endless are AI bots. Sphene and Cahciua are different bots, programmed with different memories. The difference from Sphene and the other Endless is that the ones based on deceased Alexandrian citizens are essentially given the command “act as this person would based on these stored memories,” while Sphene, as the bot of their former leader, was given the added directive of “preserve my people no matter what.”

We’re not talking about “copies” of people (as in Emet’s sundering demonstration with Ryne in ShB), or even clones. This is illustrated when Sphene can “jump” from generic robot to robot. We’re talking about data that has been uploaded to a system of robots. These aren’t flesh and blood beings as much as their technology makes them appear so, and the souls they’re using are just a fuel source. Most important thing being, that fuel source requires the murder of beings who actually are alive, and if allowed to follow Sphene’s objective, they will murder any living beings they find and still eventually shut down due to lack of soul fuel if they kill everyone else anyway. There’s no real moral ambiguities here.

[Post]

I don't think it's trolling to take the story for what it is and finding that WANTING.

They were clearly just trying to hearken back to Amarout, Ultima Thule and their respective not quite living denizens but did a crappy job of it because the only reason shown that these people aren't quite alive is that they disappear eventually after a computer is shut down. Everything else about them is told to us directly, in 'trust me, bro' dialogue.

And, given the option to shut them down when previous final zone people were allowed to live on as long as they could without our interference (the actual threat to us dealt with aside), it seems reasonable that many players scrutinize this scenario far closer than previous ones to me.