Omicrons and The Endless (Do Endless Dream of Electric Sheep?)

[SieyaM]

This I feel is a key point. The soul and memories are supposed to go to the aetherial sea together. But Alexandria separates the soul and memories. Did this keep them from returning to the aetherial sea possibly?

It's possible to interpret what Cahcuia said that way. She said their existence was unnatural. Plus since this is the IX expansion, it's entirely possible this process was similiar to the Iifa Tree, which was preventing the souls of Gaians from returning to the crystal.

If I am remembering right the goal of the Terrans was to harvest souls from Gaia and use them to revive or fill the soulless people that are left on Terra. This would seem similar to the endless which as I understand it need souls harvested from living people to then be combined with their memories to then exist in the Living Memory. So I guess technically they do have souls, but it is the soul they took from someone else who is now dead, and with the way things have been going probably killed to obtain that soul.

[Turtledeluxe]

Because we were trying to find a peaceful solution first? The first thing we did upon arriving was confront her and ask her to stop until we could figure out a solution that would benefit all parties. She said "piss off, kupo" and started purging the memories that made her even remotely reasonable before initiating the countdown to her plan, leaving us little time for anything else. Because remember, the entire reason this topic keeps coming up is because some players are upset that we "killed" the Endless without bothering to find a solution, completely ignoring the fact that we did try, were immediately rebuffed, and then put on a strict timer where the only solution really available to us was to alt+F4 the Endless.

Us defeating her had everything to do with the fate of Living Memory and the Endless. There was no way to stop her without "killing" the Endless at the same time. Sphene was sustained by the Meso Terminal. The Meso Terminal in turn ran everything else in the Living Memory. The Endless were going to "die" no matter what we did. Hell, even if we rolled over and let Sphene have her way, the Endless were on borrowed time anyway. The whole point of contention is the system was unsustainable and the twisted reasoning of her programming wouldn't allow her to see it or care. Even when Wuk Lamat managed to Talk no Jutsu her personality back, Sphene doubled down on her position.

She didn't notice at first, because as the story points out, she was busy with the calculations required to put her plan into action.

And they did mention why we chose the route of shutting down the Terminals first. First and foremost, the idea was hedging the bet that if Endless no longer existed, Sphene would abandon her goal. Unfortunately she didn't. Second, there was a fear that immediately attacking her directly would possibly force her to accelerate her timetable, giving us even less time to stop her.



Whatever. You folks are welcome to die on the hill that the Endless are alive and that we "genocided" them without making an effort to save them. That's you asserting your headcanon over what the game explicitly tells us about the situation, but you're free to reject that reality and substitute it with your own.

The characters in the game distinguish the difference between alive and dead. Cahciua is an Endless and establishes it quite directly. Sphene admits in dialogue that her perception of the Endless as living is simply based on being remembered. I wasn't aware that in the game or reality, we qualified being remembered as being alive.

She doesn't even refer to it as killing. She refers to it as erasure. They're literally data.


And just being able to still do new things doesn't change the fact that they are a data based instance of the original human soul.

[SDaemon]

If I am remembering right the goal of the Terrans was to harvest souls from Gaia and use them to revive or fill the soulless people that are left on Terra. This would seem similar to the endless which as I understand it need souls harvested from living people to then be combined with their memories to then exist in the Living Memory. So I guess technically they do have souls, but it is the soul they took from someone else who is now dead, and with the way things have been going probably killed to obtain that soul.

In FFIX Terra originally wanted to fuse their planet with Gaia in order to survive as they had done numerous times in the past in order to preserve Terra when it got to the point of collapse. They got hasty, messed it up when trying to merge with Gaia and Terra was dimensionally shifted inside of Gaia. In a way Garland starts harvesting the souls on Gaia but only so that they get divided out of the life cycle of souls and turning into the Mist that the Iifa Tree's roots send out while having Terra's souls cycling into the planet instead to be reborn. The Endless are also a reference to the Genomes, soulless vessels that Garland created for the Terran people once the fusion was pulled off successfully.

Endless are soulless memory constructs that require the souls of others to continue operating. Genomes are soulless vessels intended to be filled with Terra's souls.

[CuteBucket]

Either these were people and wiping them out should have been treated with way more gravity or they were nothing and all the time effort we put towards appeasing them made no sense. Both can't be true at the same time.

This. This is my main take away about Living memory, and something I put in another thread about this topic (I can't keep track of them all). My point in making the whole "Are they alive or not?" checklist was that it doesn't really matter, because the heart of the issue is that the writers couldn't decide if the Endless were real people or not. If you believe the Endless are real people, then the way they are treated by the narrative is terrible and doesn't engage at all with the moral quandaries of the subject. If you believe the Endless are not real people, then all of our faffing around in Living Memory to try and appease AI ghosts is a pointless waste of time that doesn't serve the narrative at all. By either interpretation, the writing and narrative failed. That is the real problem at the heart of Living Memory, not whether the Endless are alive, dead, real, fake, people, or not people. No matter how you interpret it, it still sucks and is still bad writing at its core.

[Turtledeluxe]

The real question, the actual question is 'Were the Endless people?' And by every perceivable metric, yes, they were people, they had dreams, they had ambitions, they had regrets, they could deduce things, they could love, they could experience fear and pain. So yes, we deleted an entire race of people in between boat rides and ice cream and that was tacky.

Sorry but no. In order to qualify as a "race" (what a bizarre choice of word) you need to have a soul and be alive. I'm not sure how many video games you have to play to not understand this basic concept.

The Endless are instances of a person. This is why Sphene mourns Otis when he dies. You can argue that a digital projection that walks, talks and acts like a person is really them. But it's not them. And Endless themselves acknowledge this and interact with the living in this exact way.

This is like saying if I feed all of your text messages since 2020 to an AI and ask them to type up a message that sounds like you, I can just regard them as you because it sounds extremely accurate. The way you are thinking will undoubtedly lead to human rights violations in the future (if this kind of perception becomes common, how terrifying).

And I mean that. Not being able to distinguish a highly novel thing (of any kind) vs a human or an original version of a human and presuming things about them based on your feelings seems incredibly dangerous given where technology is going.

I mean in fact, as we know, this kind of thinking is already resulting in ethics violations in the artistic space.

[LuciferMournstar]

This. This is my main take away about Living memory, and something I put in another thread about this topic (I can't keep track of them all). My point in making the whole "Are they alive or not?" checklist was that it doesn't really matter, because the heart of the issue is that the writers couldn't decide if the Endless were real people or not. If you believe the Endless are real people, then the way they are treated by the narrative is terrible and doesn't engage at all with the moral quandaries of the subject. If you believe the Endless are not real people, then all of our faffing around in Living Memory to try and appease AI ghosts is a pointless waste of time that doesn't serve the narrative at all. By either interpretation, the writing and narrative failed. That is the real problem at the heart of Living Memory, not whether the Endless are alive, dead, real, fake, people, or not people. No matter how you interpret it, it still sucks and is still bad writing at its core.

Yeah, just a giant plot hole because if Cahciua had just told us about Living Memory, how it works, ect. We could have went up to Sphene, (before she went full Computer Program and would actually converse with us), and proposed other possible solutions to the problem. Though NOPE, she just kept her mouth shut about where she was and what was going on. The writers for SOME REASON decided "Let's have Cahciua deny critical, need to know information that could enable us to possibly help cause... reasons."

All I can really think of at this point was Cahciua was a bitch. She was selfish cause she, "didn't want to be tied to one place", so she wanted Living Memory shut down. That way she "could be free" and decided "The rest of those in Living Memory, yeah, I couldn't care less if they fade with me. I want out." Or as so many of EMPHATICALLY pointed out, she didn't consider them actually alive or worth saving. "Feel bad for them sure, but it's not worth even trying." Like she's the only voice in Living Memory that matters.

[Vyrerus]

I'm sorry Timmy, you need 15 tickets to live

That's not what The Endless are. They are the memory aether of actual people stored in Living Memory, sustained and then given form by soul aether. Sphene also mourned Wuk Lamat's milk maid. Krile's parents expressed real love.

And not all of The Endless did interact with us, as you describe. Quite a lot of them merely thought of us as other Endless. They were just conscious of the fact that they had lived once and lost their original body.

It's more akin to if you had your body horrifically mangled, but they were able to save your brain by hooking it up to a computer, and then you were able to control a robot body or make a hologram speak or something.

Despite everything, it's still you.

Denying that people are people, even if they get damaged or disabled is actually the far more dangerous line of thinking, and that's where your head is at, Turtle. That's the path to excusing large scale atrocities.

If an entity has every requisite of humanity in it, what right have you to deny its humanity?

I recommend you watch the movie Bicentennial Man.

[Turtledeluxe]

That's not what The Endless are. They are the memory aether of actual people stored in Living Memory, sustained and then given form by soul aether. Sphene also mourned Wuk Lamat's milk maid. Krile's parents expressed real love.

And not all of The Endless did interact with us, as you describe. Quite a lot of them merely thought of us as other Endless. They were just conscious of the fact that they had lived once and lost their original body.

It's more akin to if you had your body horrifically mangled, but they were able to save your brain by hooking it up to a computer, and then you were able to control a robot body or make a hologram speak or something.

Despite everything, it's still you.

Denying that people are people, even if they get damaged or disabled is actually the far more dangerous line of thinking, and that's where your head is at, Turtle. That's the path to excusing large scale atrocities.

If an entity has every requisite of humanity in it, what right have you to deny its humanity?

I recommend you watch the movie Bicentennial Man.

"They are the memory aether" is a fancy way of saying they're just fascimilies created from memories by other people's souls being used as the fuel. The game clearly demonstrates that there's a human with an original soul and that is distinct from an Endless.

Also Sphene does not mourn Namikka. I'm not sure where you got that from. She mourns Otis though. Namikka is calmly explained to be euthanized.

Humans also can't shape-shift, can't live forever, and have physical forms. Your suggestion regarding uploading consciousness doesn't really make sense because consciousness is more than simply the parts of your brain pertaining to memory. If someone fed my memories to a Meso Terminal and created a new instance of me that can shape shift and be immortal, I'd also hope it was deleted unless I wilfully participated.

Otis: This incarnation of me...what was he like?

[Somnolence]

"They are the memory aether" is a fancy way of saying they're just fascimilies created from memories by other people's souls being used as the fuel. The game clearly demonstrates that there's a human with an original soul and that is distinct from an Endless.

Also Sphene does not mourn Namikka. I'm not sure where you got that from. She mourns Otis though. Namikka is calmly explained to be euthanized.

Humans also can't shape-shift, can't live forever, and have physical forms. Your suggestion regarding uploading consciousness doesn't really make sense because consciousness is more than simply the parts of your brain pertaining to memory. If someone fed my memories to a Meso Terminal and created a new instance of me that can shape shift and be immortal, I'd also hope it was deleted unless I wilfully participated.

Otis: This incarnation of me...what was he like?

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Emet-Selch can shape-shift, live forever and exist without physical form(but he uses clone body in Source and possess random one on the First since naked soul has weaknesses) and he is certainly alive.

[Turtledeluxe]

Not sure what this has to do with anything. Emet-Selch can shape-shift, live forever and exist without physical form(but he uses clone body in Source and possess random one on the First since naked soul has weaknesses) and he is certainly alive.

I'm not sure what your point is. That a fantasy race exists for humanity origin story in XIV so the Endless are alive?

Puppies are also alive in XIV. Also to be clear, Ancients are not real and not comparative to humans outside storytelling purposes. They're humanoid.

My statement you quoted was more of a commentary on the theoritocal that I'd be OK with what happens to Endless happening to me. I wouldn't be OK with it because it results in something not me and not human that seems like me.