Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[ElHeggunte]

Basic literacy is dead. You can't really "genocide" something that isn't alive in the first place. If you were to create a prospering population in SimCity and then delete it, would that be genocide? That's basically what you guys are arguing. The main hiccup of course being that in this example, the computer running your simulated city is being powered by a regular blood sacrifice from your neighbors, and you keep having to kill them to keep the game going. If your remaining neighbors knocked down your door and forcefully shut down your computer, that would be self-defense, not something cruel they did just because they have some vague and baseless "agenda" against you.

The Endless had to go because Sphene was quite keen on wiping out the rest of Source and all of the Shards (which would be genocide) just to keep sustaining what was basically a glorified simulation.

[AlysCamoa]

What you are pointing out are writing flaws. The rest of it is you contradicting yourself in your first few sentences. You say

"We have an agenda to destroy the Endless...
Given to us by Cachiua...(not our agenda then)...
...to target the Endless to deprive Sphene of a reason to fight (i.e. this is the motive, we are not destroying the Endless because we have an issue with their identity or something against the Endless)

There's something going on where players like you just can't get beyond the "targeting them because" part. But the because matters. Because the ethics of it are literally decided by the intent behind it. Are we turning off the Meso Terminals because we hate them or because of their identity? No? Then it's not cruelty. Turning them off to stop a villain or to save other souls are both sufficient reasons that disqualify the act as anything cruel.

And yes, the aspect of the intention regarding demotivating Spene is ineffective. But that doesn't make it cruel. It means the writers just forgot about it because they literally did.

"It's not cruel because the writers forgot you were doing something cruel" is truly one of the takes of all time. But no, I agree. It is not something that would keep general do-gooders like the Scions awake at night, knowing they intentionally targeted the hapless civilian population of their enemy in order to conduct a terror campaign against their opponent's morale. For sure. They'd laugh it up while Smile plays in the background. Maybe have some peace tacos while listening to Wuk talk about peace and happiness and peace? There's a 7.x scene idea for you, Hiroi.

Basic literacy is dead. You can't really "genocide" something that isn't alive in the first place. If you were to create a prospering population in SimCity and then delete it, would that be genocide? That's basically what you guys are arguing. The main hiccup of course being that in this example, the computer running your simulated city is being powered by a regular blood sacrifice from your neighbors, and you keep having to kill them to keep the game going. If your remaining neighbors knocked down your door and forcefully shut down your computer, that would be self-defense, not something cruel they did just because they have some vague and baseless "agenda" against you.

The Endless had to go because Sphene was quite keen on wiping out the rest of Source and all of the Shards (which would be genocide) just to keep sustaining what was basically a glorified simulation.

Basic literacy, the gamer says, while failing to recognize that the very literary work being discussed has had its in-universe definitions of things like 'sentience' and 'life' redefined several times as new forms of each are discovered.

[ElHeggunte]

Basic literacy, the gamer says, while failing to recognize that the very literary work being discussed has had its in-universe definitions of things like 'sentience' and 'life' redefined several times as new forms of each are discovered.

And that definition doesn't apply to the Endless, who are by all accounts just projected recordings of people who are long dead. They're just simulacrums, nothing more than cheap copies that Sphene's goal is to maintain at the expense of actual living people. I'm really not grasping how you think "life" or "sentience" apply to the Endless. If I taught ChatGPT things about me today and then I died tomorrow, would you consider it to be alive just because it regurgitate the things I taught it? It can pretend to be me all day long, but that doesn't make it me and that doesn't make it "alive" by any stretch.

[AlysCamoa]

And that definition doesn't apply to the Endless, who are by all accounts just projected recordings of people who are long dead. They're just simulacrums, nothing more than cheap copies that Sphene's goal is to maintain at the expense of actual living people. I'm really not grasping how you think "life" or "sentience" apply to the Endless. If I taught ChatGPT things about me today and then I died tomorrow, would you consider it to be alive just because it regurgitate the things I taught it? It can pretend to be me all day long, but that doesn't make it me and that doesn't make it "alive" by any stretch.

If you just said from the start that you don’t know how the game handles the idea of things being ‘alive’, that would have saved a lot of time I think. But since I’m bored: your funny little hypothetical that I’m sure you thought up yourself doesn’t work, because despite what you and your fellow cutscene skippers/speed readers/general baitposters like to believe, there’s no copying going on. A far better hypothetical is that your neurons get pulled out of your tissue, and preserved in storage. Sometimes your neurons get removed from storage and put on new tissue, but at no point in time do they cease being yours. The body changes, the memories do not. Are you, you?

In terms of the setting, that’s not something they’ve ever addressed. Even in Ultima Thule, the memories are best-effort recreations by the Omnicrons. They’re not the memories lifted directly off of the soul, as they are in Everkeep. In Ultima Thule, these memories are not ensouled. They are embodied, but at no point are they ever said to be ensouled; indeed, a soul as we (the Scions) know it would be impossible, as there is no aether in Ultima Thule. Yet the Omnicron questline treats this new life, as life.

During the usual lifestream process, your memories get peeled off before the soul is reused. Only the most potent memories are engraved onto the soul to be potentially recalled. So if everything that made you you is dissolved between incarnations—what worth does a soul have in determining if you’re dealing with a person? The soul is nothing more than a glorified job stone.