Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[Randomer169]

The inhabitants of Living Memory had already lived their lives. Their bodies were gone, their souls had moved on (or been fed into a machine) and all that was left were memories pieced together in a simulated afterlife. I wish we'd had more opportunities to push back against what was going on. They'd made it clear that all of this was at the cost of the living, who by any definition would be enemies justified in fighting back. Why do you think they were harvesting souls in Tuliyollal?

Behold, a puppet show of the dead. Dolls of its inhabitants stripped of their humanity. The trials of life overcome, the passing of time endured, stripped away leaving only their memories. Strings borne of the souls of those deemed unimportant, its gilded streets stained with unseen blood. Mechanical puppeteers parading timeless corpses for the entertainment of another lifeless doll. Yet those around me smile at its sight.

The less articulate side of me would call the entire area an allegory for dead internet theory bringing about NFTs and the environmental impact of propping up a completely artificial economy.

[Naoki34]

I don't see how what we did was wrong, it's a world that refuses to die at the expense of others. These people are nothing more than remnants of a dead person, and every time they're recreated they consume a stored soul. It's like wondering if it's wrong to erase an AI.

As Sphene said, the only possible battery is the Ether, and to safeguard her people at all costs, she'll do anything, even genocide worlds to supply every Eternal but also the population of Alexandria.

It's stupid of human society to have found a “remedy” for accidental death, which consumes a person's soul in order to be resurrected. Every person who dies a natural death becomes a battery for resuscitation. Eternals are people who have died, but their souls are uploaded and sent to the world of Sphene, to feed these copies of souls transformed into Eternals, who don't care much about dying, during quests, many say they've died at least 2 or 3 times since they've been here, knowing that it's a soul that's consumed each time.

I don't see how this type of human society can be considered good, it's downright evil and selfish. The way it works, there are automatically more and more Eternals, when there aren't enough dead to serve as batteries for the ever-increasing number of Eternals. They end up moving on to other worlds to recharge their soul stored.

When a guard outside Solution Nine showed us how she dealt with the monsters around her, she got oneshot. And she comes back to life saying it was nothing at all, even though she's just consumed a soul charge.
It's very likely that any Alexandrian guard is weaker than any other people who fear death and have learned to be careful in battle.

For me, obliterating memories that feed on human souls with every death & resurrection. That's a good thing, because it's never-ending. Sphene will first devour everything (kill other people and store their souls for the survival of her reckless idiot people.) once there's no one left on Aetherys, she'll move on to another world.

So it's wrong to get rid of it? I wonder if you understood what that was all about.

What's more, when they're obliterated, these memories of death aren't even aware of it, except for those who've been waiting for it. at no point do you hear a cry of fright that they've been erased.



Ps: I don't know if this was clear, but basically this is what happens when an Alexandrian dies: 1. Their memories are stored and sent to the world of Sphene through the portal on the top floor. 2. The dead person's soul is sent to the storage batteries to serve as a resurrection charge or energy for the world of Sphene.

[Hallideus]

The Endless are already long dead, and the fuel to sustain these programs, these projections is the energy of souls, they've all but spent their own from their dying world and now look to ours to sustain their own. Its them or us. There wasn't another way, there wasn't, and never was, a hidden option of a feel good everybody's happy swish and flick of a magic wand to make everything ok tee hee, happily ever after.
We did what we had to do in order to thwart that plan.
Was it moral? Was it ethical? do we have to be ok with it? Well there's no universal yes or no to any of those. That's fine.

[Kes13a]

Wuk said it was needed, its Wuk's expansion so... it obviously was needed.

but really, as many people have said, they were the dead, it was artificial and empty "life" so was it really life? we are the living, and killing us to continue the existence of the dead... seems more morally wrong than putting the souls of the dead to final rest

[Fawkes]

It's not even really made clear how any of it works. Souls are presented as a 1-to-1 exchange earlier, presumably it takes a soul to make an Endless. But then we turn off the computer and they all dissipate, as if they are being perpetually sustained by souls over time. Which is it?

And it's probably too nitpicky to point out that some of them don't dissipate for sidequests, since that's probably more for the sake of game design rather than for the lore, but it makes it seem probable that they didn't have to dissipate or maybe they even chose to.

[Syln]

Technically they were just "digitalized memories", a very accurate replication of what they once were, memories, way of thinking and reflecting about thing etc ... very similar to how most peoples fantasize an actual AI is.

Is it morally wrong to shut it down and save actual living peoples ? By today standard moral compass, absolutely not, ask that question in 30 years and the answer will probably be different.

As far as I'm concerned AI Sphene hit a soft spot and i was annoyed by the fact that we deleted her even though it helped partially salvage this poor excuse of a msq.

[NegativeS]

Our actions in Living Memory seem morally wrong.
We don't hold any authority in Sphene's kingdom and don't have the right to wander around switching off parts of her realm as we please. The only reason why we do it is because one of the Endless asked for it, but she doesn't have the right to make the decision for all of them either.

What right we have is to go and stop Sphene, because she's aiming to harm people outside that she has no rule over, and who we have to protect. After we defeat her, if Sphene is still somehow alive, it's her who should enact changes in her realm. If she's not, than a new legitimate local power must do it, e.g. the little Gulool Ja, or better a majority vote where Endless decide their own fate.

Now, most likely we just shut down a couple of advanced chatbots, and our actions objectively are most likely not evil, but Sphene explicitly stated multiple times that she views Endless as her full-fledged citizens, and we know this viewpoint of her. So to her perception, what we are doing is willingly commiting a mass-scale genocide of her people. If I were her, I would be very mad at us to say the least. But she doesn't even mention our actions, which is weird in itself, but that's another point.

We are told that stopping Sphene necessitates shutting off the Meso Terminal (because she is the Meso Terminal), which would have destroyed the rest of Living Memory anyway because its operations relied on her. The Endless were going to be deleted no matter what if we didn't want the rest of Hydaelyn to be destroyed.

Also, the Endless know that they are basically the dreams of the dead, none of them seem particularly upset about the fact that they are going to be deleted. The ones in the MSQ, but also the ones in sidequests as well. One of them in particular really showcases how they are happy to have the chance to restart in a new life.

Note 1: if Endless are your precious citizens, dear Sphene, why the heck didn't you try to protect them? Put at least some guards around monoliths, you know? Especially considering that you saw and knew that we, hostile forces, have arrived into Living Memory.

We are told that the process of deleting her former memories and initiating the interdimensional merge took up all of her attention, which prevented her from fighting back against us.

Why we do even have to erase them instead of just shutting the system down? We know that only 1/10 of Endless are online, so that means they can be kept archived offline for no or much less energy. We could just put them all offline temporarily, without erasing the data itself, and take any amount of time to search for the solution of their problem. If we could fetch huge amounts of aether from 1st to 13th, we have all chances to reconfigure Sphene's system somehow. Maybe feed it the souls of voisent, lol, since they all want to die anyway. Perfect combo.

1. Killing Sphene would have killed the rest of the Endless anyway.

2. We didn't really have time to figure out a way to preserve the aether of an entire civilization, kind of on the clock to prevent the destruction of our world... though I'll admit this doesn't hold much water what with all the sightseeing we did.

Note 2: when the fight with Robo-Sphene starts and she talks again about protecting her precious Endless, why couldn't anyone tell her - sorry, lady, we just erased all of them, so you don't have the reason to fight anymore?

Sphene at that point wasn't really Sphene anymore, as her memories had been deleted. All that remained was the overarching directive to protect the Endless and collect aether.

[Scarletelf]

I see your point and looking at it outside of them being a simulacrum of life. We interact with these citIzens and they’re fleshed out, we empathize with them, we feel for them. I think in the end if it wasn’t a necessity we just wouldn’t be able to stop her. But it does help that every endless you meet is cool with it. They knew this special time, this eternity wouldn’t last, and they’re grateful they were given an opportunity to get their happy ending. Everyone you interact with is okay with the terminals stopping, in fact it is only sphene who isn’t okay, and whether it’s her programming or her heart that bleeds for her people. She is the only one who is wanting her people to stay in this eternity. It’s bittersweet and tragic for sure, but all of the msq/side quests are telling you that they’re content with it ending. They are self-aware and know that they are only memories, but even so they cherished this opportunity to be given a temporary chance.

[Kiarin]

I see many people responding with an an argument "they are only projections of already dead people, so shutting them off is not morally evil".

I agree to that and don't argue. As I wrote, most likely Endless are just glorified chatbots, so shutting them off is objectively not more evil than deleting a game from your PC. Most likely, as we cannot be 100% about their nature, since many things about aether and souls are vague in ff14.

However that misses the main point of my argument: evil or not, we simply don't have neither authority nor legitimacy nor right to do as we please in Sphene's kingdom. Even if existence of Endless is in the end harmful, as long as Sphene doesn't use outside souls for her system, we have no right to intervene. What we have is the right to stop her from threatening souls outside, by force if needed. Erasing Endless within their bubble, however, is an internal affair, a decision that must be done by local legitimate authority, not by us, a hostile outside force.
And if we say that we allowed ourselves do to as we please in Sphene's realm because of situation in extremis, that makes us somewhat of a war criminals, since we were targeting civilians which has no direct effect on stopping Sphene here and now.

[Valkyrie_Lenneth]

I see many people responding with an an argument "they are only projections of already dead people, so shutting them off is not morally evil".

I agree to that and don't argue. As I wrote, most likely Endless are just glorified chatbots, so shutting them off is objectively not more evil than deleting a game from your PC. Most likely, as we cannot be 100% about their nature, since many things about aether and souls are vague in ff14.

However that misses the main point of my argument: evil or not, we simply don't have neither authority nor legitimacy nor right to do as we please in Sphene's kingdom. Even if existence of Endless is in the end harmful, as long as Sphene doesn't use outside souls for her system, we have no right to intervene. What we have is the right to stop her from threatening souls outside, by force if needed. Erasing Endless within their bubble, however, is an internal affair, a decision that must be done by local legitimate authority, not by us, a hostile outside force.
And if we say that we allowed ourselves do to as we please in Sphene's realm because of situation in extremis, that makes us somewhat of a war criminals, since we were targeting civilians which has no direct effect on stopping Sphene here and now.

Sphene was in the process of attempting to dimensionally fuse the shards (where the endless memory was with the source), she then would kill people on the source for their souls to power living memory.

She was actively attempting to kill everyone on the source to preserve the living memories (digital data and projections) of her soulless dead citizens.

Her entire purpose, as modified by the organization (probably ironically named Preservation) who preserved her memories, is to preserve the endless.

That's why we couldn't convince her otherwise. She was programmed to do so.