Questionable ethics - Living Memory

[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.