it strikes me that, despite the early comparisons between living memory and the philosophy of the yok huy, the philosophy behind living memory is actually a hard inversion of the yok huy's outlook on death. To the yok huy, the dead live on so long as they are remembered by the living-- but this is the one way in which the endless are categorically NOT permitted to live on! they are erased from the memories of the living, robbed of any ability to continue to meaningfully influence the world of the living. they're denied the ability to leave a legacy.
Hermes asked us if we knew the difference between a living being and an arcane entity. The presence of a soul. These were arcane entities formed of the memories of the dead, no different than the brooms in Matoya's cave. Made for a purpose and unable to do anything else.
that's generally the best part of XIV is that if you pay attention to the story many concepts will have a link to things you learned earlier. Now I'm not going to say they are perfect in this, case in point Elidibus in ARR says that the rejoinings was making humans weaker, when now we know was the opposite but generally speaking it's mostly well done
@@dullahandan4067 that wasn't Hermes wiew, that was the ancient knowledge wiewpoint, Hermes in fact was challenging that notion. However would you think chatGPT as being alive? because that's the conundrum and the point Hermes was trying to make
@@neobahumuth6 I do not think Hermes was saying that Arcane entities are chatGPT. I think he was arguing that once something is granted a 'mind' and set loose they should not just kill things on a whim or because they are inconvenient. Particularly because those arcane entities are fully capable of being granted a soul at an unknown time by an unknown force. Souls were a big deal to Ancients which I do not agree with based off what the game has shown me. I see them as organs to help maintain life. If they need to be transplanted or replaced with artificial means that does not devalue the being they were helping to maintain.
I sobbed all the way through living memory. I hit that part of the story 2 weeks from the 15th anniversary of my mother's death, and 3 weeks from the 5 anniversary of my grandmother's. The repeated saying of goodbyes to mother figures was very hard, but at the same time If I magically had the ability to create a living memory of lost loved ones I would hope to be strong enough to say "no". Saying goodbye is difficult, but it is necessary, and I wouldn't want to sentence them to an empty eternity of just reliving old stories for no purpose other than to just exist one more day ad infinitum. The potential ethical issues with shutting down living memory didn't even occur to me while playing, not really at all even until weeks later.
You said it. These exact words crossing my mind as i read the comments section. Like as if this entire system made to sustain the Endless is proof of not letting go, not letting the natural order of life do as it must do. A lesson to us that, even after loss, we still can remember and cherish the time that we had with others through OUR own memories. Memories are personal to each person. Not to be taken away, or recreated and put on display, and surely not to be altered in some way. Let go of that past and remember it. ❤
At first, yes, i felt a sadness of having to shutdown the active terminals. But i realise this sadness was for how everything was constructed, sad that this was Sphenes answer to the perished lives. Then i soon think of Hydaelyn and her words, her sacrifice to the star. All that it stands for. Even in the unsundered paradise of Ancients, the cycle of life and death existed in its own harmony.
Honestly, I consider those in Living Memory to be similar to a person who is considered clinically brain dead yet still hooked up to a machine that is giving some semblance of life to the person. Except the person isn't really alive--it's an illusion created by a machine that's taking care of all the person's functions. Yet shutting off the machine is incredibly heart-wrenching because of the illusion created by the machine. And it feels to many loved ones in that situation like they're murdering the person who is already technically dead. Thankfully, I've never had to go through that experience. Not yet. But I think that's exactly what Living Memory is designed to emulate (I'm actually wondering if the person who wrote the second half of Dawntrail actually had to go through that experience and was using Living Memory as a kind of therapy for themselves).
It was weird to walk around the memories of the deceased, while having G'raha next to us, who gained the memories of his dead, time traveling alter ego. Although the endgame of Living Memory was unsustainable, we have seen memories of the deads kept around, time and time again, the sundered Asians being the prime example. Or even Unukalhai, although he still has his soul, if not his body. We'll probably get to see more philosophical musing on this theme, as the story progress.
The most tragic aspect of Living Memory is that because Alexandrians are no longer allowed to visit like they originally could, they're forgotten. And the fact that the Alexandrians are so afraid of death that the ordinary people never try to access what they think is the cloud is akin in a way to someone on life support who is vegetative. For all intents and purposes that person is gone, but the living can't beat to let them go while simultaneously being unable to face the reality of what they've become. Except in the case of Alexandria it's a complete societal denial that has endured for hundreds of years.
Well XIV does leave you to think of non-normative entities like this as living. Often if it is through their growth and development into sentient beings, such as with the Manderville mammet or the Dynamis beings you work with through Omnicron quests. Learning that life takes all forms is a pretty central theme here and a central critique of past Ancient society. Generally, it would be natural for feel bad for a true AI to die, sentience being important in it's own right. I don't think the debate over what constitutes life is the central point, but the theme the story spells out: not ending another to prolong your own life. That, and the story works hard to show you how futile Sphene's efforts are, even if she wins. The system will never stabilize into something into what Sphene is trying to sell us, even if everyone on the source were to sacrifice themselves. The aether will run dry. It is something many characters realize, even a few in living memory. Sphene would never accept that though because of the programming to preserve, even before her reboot.
I think this is a good point, we're friends with many soulless beings, two of which were implied to have just "gained" a soul, that of Alpha and Omega. Ultimately we have to stop Sphene and turn off Living Memory because they planned to kill us to feed the machine and their plan was wholly unsustainable. Had Sphene listened to our adventures, had she learned of Ultima Thule's existence, had she been able to deign that her course needn't be like this, reject her programming, and that maybe there may have been a way to convert those electrope memory aether into Dynamis beings, maybe none of this could have happened. But it was not meant to be.
@@Deode-d4h I do aggre on that. but i think the reson why she could not act an our knowlege is that she is compared to the other endless an incomplete one desingt to be the sphne all remeber not resembeling the one she really is since the endless programm was crated long after her death so there could not be made a true copy of her just the memorys of other. this makes her in a way just an programmd ai that has to serve it peopel unabel to break free or acting on its own while still being selfaware
Living Memory is a mockery of the past, AI programed simulacrums based on the honored dead's stolen memories. A 'twisted mausoleum' built on, and sustained by, the souls and lives of the living. It was weird to me that people felt sadness in stopping this faux mockery of the dead (to me, it felt like we were removing a desecration to those dead). Certainly some moments were sweet or kind, like answering Otis's question, but its nothing more than reading an emotional passage from a private diary now put on display for all. Turn that diary into a interactive novel all ya want, that diary still isn't 'alive' and I thought it was cruel and selfish to parade it around as such by in Living Memory. I enjoyed this video, and look forward to the "memories is people" debate!
I liken it to a photo or a recording. It’s people stuck in that moment of time forever. Edit it all you want, it won’t change the fact it’s still a moment in time. They can’t grow or change or even have agency. Just exist.
I think memories are people after getting to know a person with dissociative identity disorder who did reintegration work which was massively assisted by ketamine infusion therapy. In childhood she would experience horrific trauma and dissociate and those memories would get compartmentalized away. Certain events happen frequently enough and get pushed into the same place that a separate, dissociated identity arises to manage those kinds of traumatic events. Other kinds of traumas did cause dissociation, but weren't similar enough to others to allow for a distinct identity to gain enough consciousness to take the driver's seat. So while she's almost entirely integrated now, there's a couple "boxes" of traumatic dissociated memories in there that she doesn't think she can access. Like when you have an encrypted file and the only admin with a decryption key got hit by a bus
Personally I believe if an AI is capable of being self-aware and having desires, they're alive. They're certainly not the people they're based on however, so we erased something entirely different. In the end we can't really say whether something is truly self-aware being the observer rather than the one experiencing their individual existence, so the debate will surely go on.
@@redjoker365 I think this is the whole question this section of the msq wanted to posit to us. I agree memory makes us who and what we are, when combined with natural instinct as well. If I had different memories, I would be a different "person," as it were. But while the memory shades were lifelike, they were not alive, and (as Mr. Selch says) it is therefore not murder to kill them. It might be more like effacing an irreplaceable work of art, except that it requires the death of the living to sustain them.
I can't say I really agree with this conclusion. In the first place, the definition of a living being used here isn't even adequate within the confines of the lore of FFXIV. The people of the 13th are considered living for all intents and purposes, yet they do not fit this definition any better than the Endless do. They do not grow, they do not derive energy from chemical reactions, nor nutrition from chemical processes, and they do not procreate as far as we can tell. They equally fail every metric used against the Endless, yet there has never been any denial of the "aliveness" of the voidsent, at at least of Zero and Golbez, as well as their companions. Is the difference because of their origin? But how does that matter compared to what their present conditions are, as is the idea of a corpse is not alive even though it formally was. Perhaps the difference is that the voidsent are capable of meeting at least some of the additional criteria for life if given a chance? The same could be said of the Eternals in theory, that they could also meet more criteria for living if given the chance and enough research is done. Another argument against the Endless is their lack of a soul, but we don't really have any reliable proof of that either. One witness testimony from someone who has a personal motive for the WoL to erase the Endless is far from reliable, especially since she has no capability to provide evidence of the existence or not of a soul. We are entirely relying on Cahciua's testimony for everything, but we have repeatedly seen evidence that an NPC can lie to us or even be wrong, even if they wholeheartedly believed in something. We are simply not provided evidence that the Endless are entirely not sentient beings that are either alive or equivalent to living beings. Even if you can't say that they are alive, can you really say that they are not deserving of the same rights and freedoms of a living being? They seem to be as sentient as normal people, and if you weren't told that they were endless, you wouldn't know it until they vanished. Even if they were entirely artificial beings, that doesn't mean that their worth was somehow less than a traditional living being. Alpha is the prime example of such a being, and that is furthered by the fact that he gained a soul in the end. It's even suggested that Omega manages to gain a soul in the Shadowbringers side story far in the future. Alpha and Omega are both artificial beings, yet they are afforded all the rights of a normal living being, and thus gains souls with enough time. Sure, the Endless were doomed due to the nature of their power source, but that doesn't mean that they deserved to have what little time they had left to be cut short. It's like saying that someone with terminal cancer should be pre-emptively killed today instead of allowed to die tomorrow on their own because they're doomed to die soon anyways. It's one thing if you have their express permission, but the WoL doesn't have that. We only have Cahciua's personal permission, but she can't speak for the rest of the Endless, and we made no attempt to consult them, only mentioning what we were doing to a few. Without the permission of every Endless, or at least of the ones that were active at the time, I strongly believe that what the WoL did was murder on a genocidal level. Even if they would've all died on their own tomorrow, the fact that the WoL's group pulled the trigger makes no difference, especially since nobody made any effort to try to find a different way. Especially since we spent so much time to get to know the Endless to sate Wuklamat's wishes. Time that could've spent trying to find an alternative way for the Endless to live, or a way to defeat Sphene without comitting genocide. Or at least time to confirm Cahciua's conclusion. Really, this kneejerk reaction towards the use of souls is frightening on SE's part. We barely understand anything regarding souls beyond the basic cycle of the lifestream, yet the writers kept trying to jam in the idea that something about it is innately wrong and should be stopped. It's like how people yell and scream about how terrible nuclear power plants are, despite them having a better record than even solar or wind power, not to mention that they typically replace coal power and that despite the nuclear waste fears, we've already figured out better solutions for that than solar or wind waste. Or how so many people are terrified of flying, yet they're completely okay with the idea that you're hundreds of thousands of times more likely to die to a car crash than an air plane. If SE spent the time to explain more about the soul gathering process and why it's flawed, then I'd be more satisfied. Yet somehow the Endless aren't deserving of the status of living beings, yet the soul remains in the Arcadeon are? It's like saying that an AI recreation isn't deserving of being treated decently, yet a corpse is. Everything revolving the Endless and soul manipulation this expansion is getting so incredibly close to severe hypocrisy.
Honestly it's from many different cultures the beliefs of honoring the dead. As long as one remembers or pays tribute to them they will always live on This is something that while many people don't believe in it's tied to multiple parts of history and education systems all around the world honestly. Keep those in memory for all the good or horrible things they have done keeps a part of them living on their legacy if you will. That's what this entire chapter was it was the legacy of a civilization that died It was the memory the hopes the dreams to make sure they still exist Even after they were truly gone. I think the fascinating aspect of this is it's tied into ether and that left an imprint of the memory and even feelings behind. While half of the soul probably left there was a shadow of it fragments of it if you will made whole by their queen. That fragmented part of their personalities was added to that backup data which is why when they were fully deleted they were able to fully go on. We see this when the queen herself tries to overwrite her coding. While she may never fully be the real queen that died a part of the original Queen lived on within that data which is why she was able to overcome the final protocol that she made. And I think that's something scientifically we get that they are copies of the original but when a copy begins to live and truly believe that it's real can you not say that it's not a living or sentient being at this point? Because we see that they are quite aware of their situation they know that they are copies they know that the world they're living in is a replica. But they choose to stay there with their loved ones they even a threats plenty of emotions from memory. So even though they were not thinking in a way that many people would consider living they were sentient enough to fully comprehend what was going on. That awareness may this chapter a lot more touching when it came to progressing towards the end. So yes I do believe they had a life, I do believe they knew exactly what was going on, I do understand the Queen ambition to keep her people alive in that sense because she's the exactly like them, living fragments of what they once were. And I think the developers really did want us to notice that because once you finish the zone changes so drastically and you can see even at night the remainder of the ones that didn't leave. At least that's what I like to believe those giant clusters a fireflies that we see at night in the zone. Some of them still lingering behind, a reminder what once was there. They did a great job with making a place feel empty at the same time eerily feeling like there was something still there in an empty halls and dark corridors😅
My main issue with this topic is this. The main problem with Living Memory is that Sphene needs to kill everyone to harvest their life aether to power the machine running Living Memory. Ultimately, that's what we're there to do, to stop Sphene. The question of whether or not Living Memory people are alive is a moot point. We have met, befriended, and helped MANY arcane and soulless beings, treated their lives as something worth respecting and acknowledging. Alpha was a mere guide construct by Omega to facilitate their trials, we cared for the little guy and it was implied he gained a soul at the end of the raids. Omega in his post 6.0 EW quest went across the star and moon to try and understand Sir's motivations, they also were implied to gain a soul by the end. The Loporrits are arcane beings made by Venat to help facilitate the evacuation of the star in the event the Final Days came. The Ultima Thule denizens now just exist on their own, self sustained by Dynamis, with only their newfound existence to guide them. The only difference Living Memory have to these groups is their inability to self-sustain themselves and they need life aether from others to live. We have treated each and every single of these guys as worthy of living, otherwise what the hell was the point of us travelling, befriending, helping, crafting, and gathering for them? To play pretend for our amusement? The game has already put it's foot down enough times to say "these non-conventional lives deserve life." Us turning off Living Memory SHOULD be bad, because we're killing arcane beings who are self-aware, who still had the capacity to grow and learn. Unless we're fine with also putting each and every single one of the groups I mentioned to the sword if need be. Remember, the main objective in Living Memory was to stop Sphene. Shutting down all of Living Memory was Cahciua's request. We could have rejected her request, sat on our butts, waited til we can enter the Matrix, stop Sphene, and shut down the Meso Terminal. If all of Living Memory falls because of that, then so be it. We would have been party to killing off arcane beings, but at that point it would've been about self defense.
Here's the question though - did we turn off the mechanisms manifesting these memories and illusions, or did we destroy all the stored memories? I don't recall anything confirming that we were completely eradicating all of the stored memory constructs, unless I missed it. As I recall it's the projection of those stored memories into a manifest form that consumes so much stolen life energy, hence why so few of them can be manifest at the same time. So.... shouldn't they still be in storage, potentially able to be made manifest again? If we didn't destroy the stored memories, only turned off the manifestations, did we really destroy them? What if an alternative energy source could be found? Sphene was bound to her path because she was really just a control computer with a personality overlay and was bound by her programmed directives to perpetuate the Endless support system as it existed. She couldn't really oversee efforts to find an alternative, she was locked into stealing life energy. Long story short - what if instead of eradicating the Endless, we've only broken the cycle of life stealing and there could be future options to be explored? Like with the sacrifice of the Scions in Ultima Thule, I had the feeling that what we were doing was not necessarily so final in the bigger picture. Was it explicitly affirmed that we were completely wiping away the Endless? What happened to the memory storage?
I don't remember the exact line, but I am pretty sure Cahciua said (or implied) that shutting down the terminals would destroy the memories inside. Which makes me think it was a volatile method of storage that Sphene was using. One that erases, or can't keep, the data once it loses power
@@Jhaeros13Not possible though. Without souls, memories cannot travel to the Aetherial Sea. Everything is lost because the people of Solution 9 have no actual memories of the Endless. Remember, Origenics replicated the Aetherial Sea by figuring out Memory Extraction, which naturally happens in the Aetherial Sea.
Hopefully the patches go into the person behind the construction of this nightmare, I want to give them a piece of my mind. Actually I hope they’re a trail so I can defeat them again and again and again!
Once I really got into living memory, I realized it was this deeply disturbing mausoleum filled with mockeries of the dead. It reminded me a lot of the Stormblood Dark Knight quest line. I understand how such a thing might be a comfort to the grieving, but all it did was fill me with a weird mix of disgust, sadness, and anger. Even before the NPCs started trying to convince me that we had to shut it down, I realized that there's no way I would want to let such a disrespectful abomination continue to exist. I had a lot of deep feelings about the whole endeavour.
Ghost, specters born from their own memories and others' memories of them. Parasitic ghosts, if unwillingly so, as their existence can only be continued by feeding off the living aether of those yet alive.
@@dullahandan4067 But this isn't quite the same, is it? It's explicitly stated in the game that when you kill a person, their aether returns to the Aetherial Sea. Their essence goes on, goes back into the world, and continues the cycle of life. In the context of FFXIV, this is demonstrated to be a natural process that is true of ALL living things. However, Living Memory breaks this natural process. The soul aether of living beings is extracted and then *consumed* to extend the lives of others and to power Living Memory. It isn't allowed to return to the Aetherial Sea, and is forever removed from the natural cycle of life and death. And the memories, being stored in the cloud, also never return to the Aetherial Sea. The people of Living Memory are forever separated from the rest of existence, denied the freedom of death, and must *consume* the souls of others in order to keep going. And it's further stated explicitly that even if Sphene could consume every single soul across the Source and all of its Reflections, it would still only delay the inevitable, because Living Memory will never stop needing souls. What we do to the people of Living Memory in switching them off is bound to happen eventually. We could do it now, or it could happen after all life in all Reflections has been extinguished. But it would happen regardless.
@@jopabr24while I agree with the general sentiment, a bit correction though. 1. Regulator (the headpiece device) stores extra soul aether, which can be used to resurrect the wearer, but it doesn’t destroy the extra soul themselves. As seen after zoraal ja fight, those souls are released back to the aetherial sea. 2. Living Memory doesn’t run on soul aether (incorporeal aether), but rather from living force (corporeal aether) (also, yeah, it’s confusing af and people are still debating on what exactly this aether is). That being said, it’s still bad for us since the only way to ‘harvest’ them is from supposedly living beings. Aside from that, LM main issue is that it isn’t sustainable at all, rather than destroying souls or anything like that. Sphene mentioned that since the use of regulators, the birth rate of alexandrian keeps declining, which means they can’t use their own people (and who passed away naturally) to power LM.
@@dullahandan4067 …. No they don’t. Even if you’re a cannibal you don’t “kill” souls. And also, this is a weird take. People eating animals/plants and having to kill in order for self defense aren’t the same as a matrix like machine being sustained by countless live of other people. Especially when it is a machine for people who have **died** originally. Normal living people will die eventually and stop taking resources, endless on the other hand can’t do that since that since they’re basically immortal
I think one of the biggest things that makes the whole moral conundrum is that people don't fully grasp the nature of souls in FFXIV universe. Souls are all comprised of 3 elements as stated in Shadowbringers post msq. The soul is composed of The Memory, The Emotions, and The Ego. It is safe to say that Memory and emotions are a by product of the Ego component of the soul, but is still necessary to define the soul as a whole. The process from which souls return to the aetherial see expunges the Memory and Emotions that the soul has expierance in life and that Aether dissolves into the Aethereal Seas, what you are left with is a Blank Soul, devoid of any memeory or Emotion. This is the key distinguishment to the other iterations of moral conundrums in regards to how we evalute living beings in FFXIV universe Starting with the First case is the living beings of the sundered world. We the WoL and all the childern of hydaelyn are living beings born with souls that are but fragments of the original soul from which we derive from. Emet-Selch viewpoint deemed these souls not exactly, not living but more so flawed and imperfect because they were not whole. It was like viewing his ancient breathern in a state of "Death", hence his famous line "I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you. ". He doesn't view it as killing but rather than it as "Fixing" this is the sentiment of all the Ascians that labored to rebuild their broken world. But in retrospect even though the people of Hydaelyn are sundered souls, they're still classified as souls because they still function as such posseing all the qualities of a soul. The second Case is the nature of Ultima Thule. The simulacrums are in its core arcane enities. Arcane entities are always created without souls and in Ultima Thule case these beings were formed from the regret and despair that they're "Living" selves felt when the Meteia absorbed and took upon their emotions which drove the Meteia on their path to the song of the end. Though we were able to cease the end of days, Ultima Thules inhabitants still remain because they are sustained by a different power system. They're existence compltely different from Aether based entities and the nature and behaviors of Dynamis is completely determined by the strength of one's emotions which is too vague of power nature. I think the community in large overestiminate the signifiance of Dynamis as using it as a cop out of dire and conflicting situations when in reality Dynamis is not a solution to every problem. But in digress, The beings of Ultima Thule are more so, akin to Emotion given form rather then living. They don't possess souls in the way that the beings of the sundered world do, but they are a component of souls that has acquired form. A similar case to the manifestation of Gaius's followers in the Atiasphere. Sentinent true, but much to like the creations of the ancients, they're Arcane until they procreate and produce offspring that do have souls. The third case is the beings of the 13th, and this one is very misunderstood. The Voidsent of the 13th reflection were never considered dead, they were considered "Perpetually Alive", because they're world has no Aethereal Sea, they're souls could never be cleansed and so it became a fest pool of soul cannibilism. They consumed each other in order to satiate they're hunger for aether in the same sense that Sineaters do. However in this case they never truly destroyed each others souls but rather become apart of each other. That's why that one Voidsent in Zero's hideout had the memories emotions and partial ego of the friend they've devoured, it's because the soul still exist but was inside them. When voidsent die, they're devoured souls, split off them and go elsewere to reform again. It's why Voidsent don't ever truly die in the 13th reflection because they're souls that are living but are incapable of dying because they can't complete the "Dying" process. Now we have the complicated one which is Living memory. Living Menory falls into a problem from which they aren't souls. The process from which they've preserve memory hints on this fact, The decease pass away, they transfer the decease soul to Everkeeps systems, they filter out the memory, and the rest, the "Soul" itself is used as a battery pack for the living to cheat death, while the memory remains in Living Memory. Now remember, Memory is a coponent/byproduct of a Soul not the "Soul" itself. The reason why it's not a ethicial pratice is because when these souls are used as battery packs, we don't know what happens to these souls once they used up, the hypothesis that the narritive leaves us with is the fact that these souls are burnt up and never have a chance to return to aethereal sea, they lose the chance to become new life. Living memory though true bears self-awareness and sentience falls in the inevitiable problem that it's a system that is unsustainable and even more so it's a system that exists without "Purpose" which subverts the overall message of Endwalker. The beings of living memory are akin to simulacrums, but even more inspite of their sentience and self-awareness, they are more so imitations of the people they were, It really parallels the Yok huy belief on memory and that we live on in the hearts of others, but Living memory tries to go pass that, and keep a memory "Alive" in form which cheats them from truly living on. The whole system from which the alexandrians operate on removes any agency for the chance to "See the end" and therefore they're denied "To begin anew".
I mostly feel bad about Krile and Erenville's situations. Krile never got to meet her real parents, just facsimiles of them. And Erenville was SO close to seeing his mom again, but he may as well have lost her as soon as the dome went up, and now he only got to say goodbye to her shade. It's definitely some rough stuff.
We don't have confirmation of where living memory is? The void portal on the roof? I thought that made it clear that living memory itself is still on the world they came from.
Correct, we do not have any confirmation of what world Living Memory is in the game at this point. Also, the world where they came to the source from is not necessarily the world where they originated. At this point we can only speculate.
@@LoreLinesXIV That is something I hadn't considered. I really appreciate your videos and the amount of compacted thoughtfulness. I often have to stop and rewind, to reflect.
I mean this really gets at the core of a lot of personal philosophy. For example, there’s every chance we are part of a simulation (meaning we are likely not alive) and the leading neurological research into consciousness suggests that our consciousness and free will are both illusions created by a cascade of underlying biochemical processes (meaning we aren’t really alive or even technically independently exist). On the other hand you have animists (a popular philosophy in Japan) who believe absolutely everything in existence (even inanimate objects) is alive and conscious. Neither of these views is 100% accepted by everyone and so we don’t know in the realest sense whether everything is alive or dead, real or not. However, it doesn’t matter. Even if programmed or illusory, our consciousness certainly feels real to us and so we act as though we are living. This subjective experience is all that truly matters because it is all we have to go on. Applied to the game, it doesn’t really matter if the endless are alive or not in a real sense (much like us they may ultimately not be) but their subjective experience indicates they are alive - at least as alive as we are or in a manner comparable to our living. We also consume resources all the same and are currently overpopulating our world (though mercifully births are falling globally). Hell we are abusing our planet so badly the rich and powerful have already begun looking at other planets (other worlds) for colonization meant to ensure enough resources for our/their survival. And I don’t think finding life anywhere in the cosmos would stop us. If we found what we accept as sentient life anywhere, our current society would gladly snuff it or enslave it for our benefit (we already have done that in our own history and in some ways continue to do this to this day). So we could very well be the endless from a consciousness stand point - bound by a common conscious experience that is ultimately not “real”- and we certainly find ourselves with very similar issues regarding the sacrifices needed for our survival. So the metaphor the narrative weaves hits home if you are able to think deeply enough to understand you are looking at a mirror. From an in-world perspective I am already bracing for the revelation that the aetherial sea is a creation of the ancients and their predecessors which will turn the arguments against Alexandria’s use of souls on its head and hopefully help people better understand the mirror metaphor.
Wasn't the Aetherial Sea already it's own natural system even in the presundered world? Wasn't that the point of the Seat of Emet Selch was to monitor, watch, and if need be protect the Aetherial Sea, that which they called the Underworld?
@@Deode-d4h Correct. The Ancients did not create the Aetherial Sea, they discovered its existence. It was already well-known to them by the time of the Sundering that the natural order of living things was to return to the Aetherial Sea, such that the aether of living things could continue the cycle of life.
Yes, the cycle of Alexandria/Living Memory was abhorrent and unsustainable, and the whole system was unsettling from the start. And yet, I still hesitated to pulled the plug when the time came. 😅 They got me. Luckily the follow-up quests reinforced what we were doing.
I was of the opposite experience. I was honestly annoyed that the game kept trying to make me feel bad for shutting that abomination down. Hell, Alexandria still runs on consuming souls, and I find that so abhorrent that I turned off my subscription for the first time in three years. I need the general world state of an mmo to be somewhere that sounds fun to exist in for me to want to spend my time there, and playing nice with soul cannibals doesn't do it for me.
@@Keira_Blackstone Lucky for you, regulators don’t exactly “consume souls”. It use the aether to basically resuscitate the wearer, but the soul itself are fine and will be released back to aetherial sea after the wearer passed away
Living Memory is ironic because while the people there are recreated they don't live, they exist. They can't live because they have no reason to live besides the pleasure of just being there. If it were used to allow the living to say good bye that would be something, but it is just a records room with a holodeck built in.
Its sad about the Endless situation but their existence is a twisted one made by those who refused to accept death and honor the dead. The endless cannot survive on their own accept by taking away the life of others. Its horrifying if you think about it and if you think about it I doubt the Endless would want to live by taking god knows how many lives. They also take the memories of those of the living not even allowing them to remember their loved ones. No choice on it just take the memories away from them. The whole system is messed up in my opinion.
I'd be ready to believe the Endless were just cheap simulacrums of life if it weren't for Mama Erenville, who: 1. Escaped the simulation 2. Lead an organization with clear, change-based goals "Having no souls" is a kind of meaningless argument to me in a universe where souls are literally just a battery that people can wear on their heads. Don't get me wrong, they needed to be shut down. But it was a mass murder.
I felt nothing turning off the lights. Consuming the souls of the living to sustain them is abhorrent and an insult to the living and those who have left the star
now the real question, by removing the memory from the soul... Are those people unable to be reborn, are they completely dead from the cycle of death and rebirth?
Kinda no? IIRC even the natural process of soul rebirth wipes the memory of the incoming soul before placing it into a newly born vessel (even G'Raha commented that they had recreated the natural process). At best the shard where Alexandria is from has an aetherial sea intact which is presumably how new children could be born before it merged with the Source; at worst they were literally recycling all the old souls via the soul cells and their aetherial sea was too unstable to allow rebirth much like the Void. In now being merged with the Source, my assumption is that if they removed their regulators and discontinued the operation of Origenics then the souls of any Alexandrians that died thereafter would flow the Source's aetherial sea. Arguably the memories are still preserved in the data banks of Living Memory but we now consider them lost because we have no intention to restart the system. Personally my follow up question is would the Alexandrian shards eventually find their way to the original rejoined soul? Would it have to wait until the rejoined soul returned to the aetherial sea for rebirth or would it do so while that soul is in a living vessel? If it's the latter then that might explain why Krile's soul seems no different from other Source natives.
It's really sad how hard this place tries to make the point that letting go and moving is something everyone should learn and endings are part of life... only for the playerbase to refuse and use NG+ to cheat the system to keep this amusement graveyard going, all to avoid letting go and moving on. Life is not about clinging to make believe comforts, that's just a dead end. It feels nobody learned anything from the ten year long MSQ.
The debate among people about whether the people of Living Memory were actually alive I think just shows us how different people's personal views of "what is alive" are. ... it also reveals to me that a lot of people would totally think an advanced ChatGPT bot was a living thing if it was presented to them in this format.
The Living Memory is most akin to walking into an apartment of someone that has passed away. You are free to look at their things, examine bits and pieces of their past life, imagine what was as you watch their home videos - but ultimately, that person is no longer there. Only memories remain. If you lack sentimentality, you can just take all that stuff and throw it in the trash if it's of no use to you. But you can also give it respect, mindfully learning about this person, appreciating what they left behind, before ultimately moving these things elsewhere as this apartment will now house others. That's what the whole scenario was to me - a respectful send-off to the people's legacy here as we evacuate the apartment for renovation.
It's still a philosophical conundrum I think. They're not the people they were created after, but they're essentially at least seemingly self-aware AI. It's a question we ourselved have pondered for a long time now, and of course there are people on both sides of the argument.
I never considered the Endless to be alive. An extremely sophisticated digital ecosystem, maybe. To put it into computer terms: The physical bodies can be thought of as hardware, the soul is the operating system, their memories would be data obv. Additionally, Living Memory can be thought of as Cloud Storage or at least an extremely sophisticated data center. The whole thing is a system of cloud syncing and OS restore with the importing of a specific person's data. The regulators merged this data to a person's OS. The point is it was all artificial and honestly putting an end to it was the best decision to make. I didn't feel wrong about it at all. I love technology, but there are boundaries that are just outright unethical.
The fact that people can be so absolute on this is frightening. Isn’t that the same stance Emet-Selch took? “I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you.”
I mean i though the same thing from emet, for me the ascians are a mockery of existance, brutally tempered by darkness to the point they re not beings anymore
So letting Sphene kill everyone on the source to keep the Endless going is okay? Because that's the only other option. The difference here is that the WoL and the shards of the Source ARE alive. The Endless are not, they're scraps of data fueled by the deaths of others.
That is sorta the conundrum 14 dropped on our heads. It's made much more palatable by the fact it's a survival situation because Sphene was planning to kill everyone and harvest their soul. As someone who played through all the Endwalker Allied Tribes quests, this is odd, because we're friends with Loporrits and Ultima Thule denizens. Loporrits are basically just arcane beings made by Venat and Ultima Thule people are arcane via Dynamis and throughout those quests we treated as if their newfound existence has meaning, has purpose, has a right to life. Let's not forget Alpha and Omega, one a construct made by Omega the other a soulless warmongering machine, yet both were implied to have gained a soul and we treat them as if they too have a right to exist by the end of their respective stories. We're friends with a lot of arcane and soulless beings. The only difference with Living Memory people is the unfortunate caveat they need life energy to sustain themselves and they can't exist on their own without the machine. For people to be this absolute is crazy, unless they're also willing to put everyone I just listed to the sword just because.
@@Deode-d4h I think a lot of it is willful. They HAVE to paint them as something unworthy of life otherwise they did a bad things. And they could NEVER do a bad thing.
@@dullahandan4067 The craziest thing is this. Turning off Living Memory WASN'T THE MAIN OBJECTIVE, it was a request by Cahcuia. We could've rejected her request, waited til the process Sphene was doing to finish so we can enter the Matrix and end her, taken the relic from her, and we would have been done. Whether or not Living Memory survives the fall of the Meso Terminal is another question onto itself, but ultimately our objective there was Sphene and Sphene alone. I'm fine with the game pulling that as a philosophical issue down the line, something like "Was there another way?" or "Did we just Emet Selch them?"
At no point did it make me feel like it was wrong. You were shutting down a well written computer program. The whole section was insane. We should have razed the place to the ground as well as the 99 dungeon. The fact that Alexandria is still using the earpieces should be a crime against life and put to an end by force if need be.
Not really. The Living in Solution 9 have a closed loop. They recycle all souls and imprint memories onto them. They are not stealing souls from anyone (except when Zoraal Ja attacked Tural.) The only issue they had was Living Memory, stealing souls from their closed loop, making it unsustainable. That was the crime, and one we put to an end. I can envision us shutting down the dome around Everkeep in patch quests, making their lives not need the regulators anymore, since they won't be in such a dangerous area. It's implied that even walking around outside Everkeep is dangerous due to the amount of lightning strikes. Yeah, it's different than Eorzeans are used to, but it's not really our place to walk in, demand they quit their practices and feel righteous about it, without fixing what's truly wrong. The dome needs to leave, so they can be safe. Then I'd be all for removing regulators.
@@dullahandan4067 No one is saying that just because the inhabitants of Living Memory are not alive in the traditional sense, that we had to kill them. The problem is quite clearly that the continued existence of Living Memory required and was predicated on the extermination of all other life across the Source and its Reflections. This was made very clear in the story. If the Endless could have continued to exist in some form that did not require them to genocide all of reality, I'd have been happy to let them continue existing.
@@jopabr24 Fully agree on that. Two opposing forces with incompatible values face off. One must completely wipe out the other or they will die. Just wish the game would not try so hard to say 'these aren't people it is okay to kill them'
@@jopabr24 Which is why it annoyed me that we never just got Sphene to sit down and hear our stories of Ultima Thule. Imagine a different future where she learned of Dynamis, where she could potentially fulfill her goal without slaughter by using Dynamis to create Ultima Alexandria where she converts the memory Aether of her people into Dynamis beings instead. Maybe she could've rejected her programming and take the gamble, maybe not, we'll never know. I'm not saying it's possible at that point in the story, but it could theoretically be possible, especially if the one Meteion we know is still alive as the starbird at the 6.0 credits scene. It's just a possibility that could never be now because Sphene forced our hand.
@@Deode-d4h It is my feeling that the developers were also exploring something of the nature of AI. If you think about it, that's all Sphene really is. That's all *any* of the inhabitants of Living Memory are. They really, truly are just like the AI chatbots that people have theorized could emulate deceased loved ones, right? Take the sum total of a person's written words throughout their entire life, and feed that into an LLM, and suddenly you have a Grandma Chatbot you can talk to after she passes. But one of the fundamental flaws of any AI is that it can only do what we teach it to do. LLM's can't create anything new. Not really. They're only capable of regurgitating (sometimes badly) whatever's been fed into them. And that basically describes Sphene. I don't think she is at all capable of ingesting and processing new data, or new ideas, because her programming won't allow her to. She was only ever capable of her single-minded mission to consume all other worlds, because that is specifically what Preservation created her to do. So, I don't disagree that it would have been nice if we could have taught her a different way, a better way, to save her people. But I think that, within the confines of the narrative, it had been established that she simply could not be swayed from her course, because her programming would never have allowed it. And she demonstrated that in the final fight against her, I think. It seemed as though Lamat'yi was getting through to her, but then Sphene doubled-down on the idea that her way was the only way.
The Endless strike me as being arcane entities. I suspect the vast majority of them are merely simulacra of the living beings that inspired them. While AEs can develop souls under the right conditions (Alpha is a prominent one, and I suspect some of the Loporrits qualify, too), I'm not sure the artifice of LM provides those conditions. Turning off the history represented in LM did make me a bit sad, but I was also a bit glad in that it felt as though I was at long last ending the suffering (known to them or not) of the Endless.
At least the Nobodys can grow hearts to become a new person but when they die that heart is stuck in the recompleted person so the recompleted hvae two hearts by chance if their Nobody formed their heart, Also gamerant but a nazi hat on the WoL's head for shutting down the endless
are they alive? no, the memories keep on living and earning experiences and knowledge? yes. They are basically undead. they are sentient and may be considered "living" but not alive. but yeah... they are on borrowed time.
I felt no sympathy shutting down the simulation. From a character standpoint, I viewed it all as an attack on life itself due to what was needed to maintain it. Sphene wasn't evil, she was merely following her programming. A machine that needed to take life to maintain its directives. Honestly I hope to see solution 9 fall into ruin due to the fact it's people live flippant lives only because they use the souls taken from others to live carelessly and dangerously. Why be safe when there is no drawback to death...
Under than argument, then we as humans must be wiped out as well Currently we are not living in a sustainable way in Earth, we need to eat plants and/or animals to survive, lives, but our way of life out space environment capacity to sustain life. We're omnivores, we need to achieve balance again with nature
@@anthonyzucabar I agree, and I think this is one of the important questions the story posits to us. While Living Memory could never really be made sustainable, our own life on this planet could be, if we let go of greed. It's something we should think and talk about more imo!
@@anthonyzucabar I don't think that's the logical conclusion of OP's argument. Humanity *could* live sustainably on Earth, and could do so quite comfortably. We have by no means outpaced our planet's ability to create the resources we need to survive. But a relatively small handful of people would have to make less money, or have less power, in order for it to be possible. The situation of real-life humans on actual Earth is not, I don't think, comparable to that of the simulated people of Living Memory.
@@boulderbkb1536 I mean, kinda? It's an odd situation. The people of Living Memory aren't really opposed to their destruction because they know their time was over long ago and they know what it means to keep them running, AKA the whole life energy stealing bit. The devs gives us an easy-ish out by making it about us fulfilling Cahciua's request so we don't really feel too bad about it because we can technically place all the blame on Cahcuia. In my book it's murder via self defense. I do think by what the game has presented us from Alpha, Omega, the Loporrits, and Ultima Thule people, we are meant to treat the lives of non-conventional living beings as worthy of life. So even if Living Memory is just full of AI recreations of dead people from their memories, by the game's in world lore, we have to treat them just like any other arcane/soulless being, so they are deserving of life. So yeah, we are party to killing off a bunch of memory constructs of dead people, but it was more than likely in self defense.
@@Deode-d4h the self defense outlook is valid. But after the whole ascien(I know spelled wrong) Arc feel like we’re in the same position just with no real push back
@@boulderbkb1536 When you say push back and same position, do you mean we're the Ascians and the Endless is us in ShB but not resisting, or do you mean we are still in the same position but no one in the Scions is objecting to us turning off the Endless/questioning if that's a good idea at all?
Living Memory didn't hit me like it did so many others. I immediately recognized it as a Matrix-like simulacrum so shutting it down didn't really bother me at all. It was nice that Krile got some closure/info from her "parents", Erinville got... something... from his "mother", but to me it felt like talking to AI's meant to sound like real people.
Omg, yes! I had this exact experience. I had a number of my FC-mates warn me that Living Memory would be a really depressing ride, and I should be prepared for it. They knew how hard the ending and epilogue content of ShB hit me, as well as some of the stuff in EW, so they anticipated that Living Memory would be difficult for my emotional ass. They were mistaken. Living Memory immediately struck me as a horrifying clockwork mausoleum, its inhabitants little more than automatons acting on a series of instructions. I mean, the inhabitants are literally just computerized summaries of real people's thoughts, feelings, and experiences, condensed into what are essentially very good chatbots. In fact, I was struck by the thought that this is like how some AI developers have speculated that you could take the social media presence of a deceased loved one -- all of their writings, every video and picture of them -- and feed all that data into an LLM, and then use that LLM to create an AI chatbot with whom you could have conversations long after their death. Which is pretty fucked up, imo. Living Memory was basically that, but at scale. So, I felt no remorse shutting them down.
@@jopabr24 Heh-heh -- I know what you mean. I was a basket case all through ShB and EW. I still tear up watching streamers play through parts of it. I kept bracing myself for big sad all through the ending and other than Krile's initial reunion scene with her parents (which was rough since I have kids myself), it was just "walk around and flip the off switch."
See the funny thing is it hit me the hardest *because* of this being a sham Utopia, a matrix-like simulation. Because it represents to me the pure manifestation of the inability to let go of a loss, to keep someone’s memory alive by repeating or emulating their best lives. But is it really living? In this made-up paradise where people aren’t allowed to do anything else but to chase that high of their previous life? Not being allowed to grow or expand beyond? That’s not a paradise, that’s a gilded cage. So really we are flipping the switch off to a whole bunch of terminally ill patients kept artificially alive in an induced dream slumber so their selves can finally enter the Lifestream to be reborn. At the least it will cut off the entire system from feeding on countless souls of other dead who surely won’t enter this fake heaven. Personally, as someone in the spectrum who can suppress emotions during loss but struggle to reconcile in the aftermath, this map resonated strongly with me.
The game kinda explicitly says, they have souls. Its just not THEIR soul. Its the whole thing introduced with the regulators, replacing a vessels soul with a refurbished soul and imprinting the prior's memories. I interpreted Living Memory as being FLOODED with soul aether, that the machinery then uses to form a construct and imprint memories onto. So, its not quite accurate to say they don't have a soul - its just that its not self-stainable without the aether supply and the machinery. You could argue that the Scions were in the exact same situation on the First, their souls had been removed from their body and if they had stayed much longer - they would have unraveled into pure aether. The Living Memory and Sphene had to be stopped for sure, but the philosophical conflict that is reinforced by the game world's established mechanics does make it a hell of a dilemma. Even to the point of us being a bit of a hypocrite with our actions and decisions - like normal people are.
The constructs in Living Memory did not have souls; they were projected simulacra from a computer that used soul aether as power, but there was no soul projected into them.
They’re lacking that spark of life that these people had in their original lives: their original soul. They’re not “alive” in the sense that they live. They’re stuck in one moment of time essentially forever. That’s not living, not at all. But it’s hard to let them go for some because they’re people.
They are an intelligence that can learn and adapt. The soul portion not being there is like saying someone isn't human if they have an artificial heart. The WoL went FULL Emet Selch. Which is fine. I like playing villains. Let me kill even more.
@neobahumuth6 not talking about alive or dead or some alternate state. Talking about an intelligent being that existed and was then erased from existence by our actions. But yes yes moral relativism and all that. We don't see them as alive and so can't be guilty of murder by 'killing' them.
@@dullahandan4067 I mean arcane entities have intelligence and they aren't alive, that's what the context of the universe XIV is in. The difference between living or not is having a soul, arcane entities and memory simulacra don't have a soul even though are given intelligence
@neobahumuth6 correct. And you like many others take the view that arcane entities have no right to exist and can be killed at will for any reason. Which is odd cause animals have souls and we can kill them for food or many many other reasons without guilt either. So having or not having a soul does not seem to matter to a things right to exist.
it strikes me that, despite the early comparisons between living memory and the philosophy of the yok huy, the philosophy behind living memory is actually a hard inversion of the yok huy's outlook on death. To the yok huy, the dead live on so long as they are remembered by the living-- but this is the one way in which the endless are categorically NOT permitted to live on! they are erased from the memories of the living, robbed of any ability to continue to meaningfully influence the world of the living. they're denied the ability to leave a legacy.
🤯 Well put! Unable to leave a legacy...
Yes! Being removed from the memory of the actual living makes it a sick farce.
"Memories are nice, but that's all they are."- Rikku, FFX
Hermes asked us if we knew the difference between a living being and an arcane entity. The presence of a soul. These were arcane entities formed of the memories of the dead, no different than the brooms in Matoya's cave. Made for a purpose and unable to do anything else.
This is a good, in-lore point and a good reference.
that's generally the best part of XIV is that if you pay attention to the story many concepts will have a link to things you learned earlier. Now I'm not going to say they are perfect in this, case in point Elidibus in ARR says that the rejoinings was making humans weaker, when now we know was the opposite but generally speaking it's mostly well done
Why do you think Hermes was correct in this viewpoint?
@@dullahandan4067 that wasn't Hermes wiew, that was the ancient knowledge wiewpoint, Hermes in fact was challenging that notion. However would you think chatGPT as being alive? because that's the conundrum and the point Hermes was trying to make
@@neobahumuth6 I do not think Hermes was saying that Arcane entities are chatGPT. I think he was arguing that once something is granted a 'mind' and set loose they should not just kill things on a whim or because they are inconvenient. Particularly because those arcane entities are fully capable of being granted a soul at an unknown time by an unknown force. Souls were a big deal to Ancients which I do not agree with based off what the game has shown me. I see them as organs to help maintain life. If they need to be transplanted or replaced with artificial means that does not devalue the being they were helping to maintain.
I sobbed all the way through living memory. I hit that part of the story 2 weeks from the 15th anniversary of my mother's death, and 3 weeks from the 5 anniversary of my grandmother's. The repeated saying of goodbyes to mother figures was very hard, but at the same time If I magically had the ability to create a living memory of lost loved ones I would hope to be strong enough to say "no". Saying goodbye is difficult, but it is necessary, and I wouldn't want to sentence them to an empty eternity of just reliving old stories for no purpose other than to just exist one more day ad infinitum. The potential ethical issues with shutting down living memory didn't even occur to me while playing, not really at all even until weeks later.
Real or not, it does show us as players to learn to let go and walk forward from loss.
You said it. These exact words crossing my mind as i read the comments section. Like as if this entire system made to sustain the Endless is proof of not letting go, not letting the natural order of life do as it must do. A lesson to us that, even after loss, we still can remember and cherish the time that we had with others through OUR own memories. Memories are personal to each person. Not to be taken away, or recreated and put on display, and surely not to be altered in some way. Let go of that past and remember it. ❤
At first, yes, i felt a sadness of having to shutdown the active terminals. But i realise this sadness was for how everything was constructed, sad that this was Sphenes answer to the perished lives. Then i soon think of Hydaelyn and her words, her sacrifice to the star. All that it stands for. Even in the unsundered paradise of Ancients, the cycle of life and death existed in its own harmony.
Honestly, I consider those in Living Memory to be similar to a person who is considered clinically brain dead yet still hooked up to a machine that is giving some semblance of life to the person. Except the person isn't really alive--it's an illusion created by a machine that's taking care of all the person's functions. Yet shutting off the machine is incredibly heart-wrenching because of the illusion created by the machine. And it feels to many loved ones in that situation like they're murdering the person who is already technically dead. Thankfully, I've never had to go through that experience. Not yet. But I think that's exactly what Living Memory is designed to emulate (I'm actually wondering if the person who wrote the second half of Dawntrail actually had to go through that experience and was using Living Memory as a kind of therapy for themselves).
It was weird to walk around the memories of the deceased, while having G'raha next to us, who gained the memories of his dead, time traveling alter ego. Although the endgame of Living Memory was unsustainable, we have seen memories of the deads kept around, time and time again, the sundered Asians being the prime example. Or even Unukalhai, although he still has his soul, if not his body. We'll probably get to see more philosophical musing on this theme, as the story progress.
The most tragic aspect of Living Memory is that because Alexandrians are no longer allowed to visit like they originally could, they're forgotten. And the fact that the Alexandrians are so afraid of death that the ordinary people never try to access what they think is the cloud is akin in a way to someone on life support who is vegetative. For all intents and purposes that person is gone, but the living can't beat to let them go while simultaneously being unable to face the reality of what they've become. Except in the case of Alexandria it's a complete societal denial that has endured for hundreds of years.
Well XIV does leave you to think of non-normative entities like this as living. Often if it is through their growth and development into sentient beings, such as with the Manderville mammet or the Dynamis beings you work with through Omnicron quests. Learning that life takes all forms is a pretty central theme here and a central critique of past Ancient society. Generally, it would be natural for feel bad for a true AI to die, sentience being important in it's own right. I don't think the debate over what constitutes life is the central point, but the theme the story spells out: not ending another to prolong your own life. That, and the story works hard to show you how futile Sphene's efforts are, even if she wins. The system will never stabilize into something into what Sphene is trying to sell us, even if everyone on the source were to sacrifice themselves. The aether will run dry. It is something many characters realize, even a few in living memory. Sphene would never accept that though because of the programming to preserve, even before her reboot.
I think this is a good point, we're friends with many soulless beings, two of which were implied to have just "gained" a soul, that of Alpha and Omega. Ultimately we have to stop Sphene and turn off Living Memory because they planned to kill us to feed the machine and their plan was wholly unsustainable. Had Sphene listened to our adventures, had she learned of Ultima Thule's existence, had she been able to deign that her course needn't be like this, reject her programming, and that maybe there may have been a way to convert those electrope memory aether into Dynamis beings, maybe none of this could have happened. But it was not meant to be.
@@Deode-d4h I do aggre on that. but i think the reson why she could not act an our knowlege is that she is compared to the other endless an incomplete one desingt to be the sphne all remeber not resembeling the one she really is since the endless programm was crated long after her death so there could not be made a true copy of her just the memorys of other.
this makes her in a way just an programmd ai that has to serve it peopel unabel to break free or acting on its own while still being selfaware
Start a New Game+ and bam, the power is back on!
Living Memory is a mockery of the past, AI programed simulacrums based on the honored dead's stolen memories. A 'twisted mausoleum' built on, and sustained by, the souls and lives of the living. It was weird to me that people felt sadness in stopping this faux mockery of the dead (to me, it felt like we were removing a desecration to those dead). Certainly some moments were sweet or kind, like answering Otis's question, but its nothing more than reading an emotional passage from a private diary now put on display for all. Turn that diary into a interactive novel all ya want, that diary still isn't 'alive' and I thought it was cruel and selfish to parade it around as such by in Living Memory. I enjoyed this video, and look forward to the "memories is people" debate!
I liken it to a photo or a recording. It’s people stuck in that moment of time forever. Edit it all you want, it won’t change the fact it’s still a moment in time. They can’t grow or change or even have agency. Just exist.
I think memories are people after getting to know a person with dissociative identity disorder who did reintegration work which was massively assisted by ketamine infusion therapy. In childhood she would experience horrific trauma and dissociate and those memories would get compartmentalized away. Certain events happen frequently enough and get pushed into the same place that a separate, dissociated identity arises to manage those kinds of traumatic events. Other kinds of traumas did cause dissociation, but weren't similar enough to others to allow for a distinct identity to gain enough consciousness to take the driver's seat. So while she's almost entirely integrated now, there's a couple "boxes" of traumatic dissociated memories in there that she doesn't think she can access. Like when you have an encrypted file and the only admin with a decryption key got hit by a bus
Personally I believe if an AI is capable of being self-aware and having desires, they're alive. They're certainly not the people they're based on however, so we erased something entirely different. In the end we can't really say whether something is truly self-aware being the observer rather than the one experiencing their individual existence, so the debate will surely go on.
@@loofy530 thing is, this isn't about self-awareness. the memory constructs are certainly self-aware. but they are not alive
@@redjoker365 I think this is the whole question this section of the msq wanted to posit to us. I agree memory makes us who and what we are, when combined with natural instinct as well. If I had different memories, I would be a different "person," as it were. But while the memory shades were lifelike, they were not alive, and (as Mr. Selch says) it is therefore not murder to kill them. It might be more like effacing an irreplaceable work of art, except that it requires the death of the living to sustain them.
I can't say I really agree with this conclusion. In the first place, the definition of a living being used here isn't even adequate within the confines of the lore of FFXIV. The people of the 13th are considered living for all intents and purposes, yet they do not fit this definition any better than the Endless do. They do not grow, they do not derive energy from chemical reactions, nor nutrition from chemical processes, and they do not procreate as far as we can tell. They equally fail every metric used against the Endless, yet there has never been any denial of the "aliveness" of the voidsent, at at least of Zero and Golbez, as well as their companions. Is the difference because of their origin? But how does that matter compared to what their present conditions are, as is the idea of a corpse is not alive even though it formally was. Perhaps the difference is that the voidsent are capable of meeting at least some of the additional criteria for life if given a chance? The same could be said of the Eternals in theory, that they could also meet more criteria for living if given the chance and enough research is done.
Another argument against the Endless is their lack of a soul, but we don't really have any reliable proof of that either. One witness testimony from someone who has a personal motive for the WoL to erase the Endless is far from reliable, especially since she has no capability to provide evidence of the existence or not of a soul. We are entirely relying on Cahciua's testimony for everything, but we have repeatedly seen evidence that an NPC can lie to us or even be wrong, even if they wholeheartedly believed in something. We are simply not provided evidence that the Endless are entirely not sentient beings that are either alive or equivalent to living beings.
Even if you can't say that they are alive, can you really say that they are not deserving of the same rights and freedoms of a living being? They seem to be as sentient as normal people, and if you weren't told that they were endless, you wouldn't know it until they vanished. Even if they were entirely artificial beings, that doesn't mean that their worth was somehow less than a traditional living being. Alpha is the prime example of such a being, and that is furthered by the fact that he gained a soul in the end. It's even suggested that Omega manages to gain a soul in the Shadowbringers side story far in the future. Alpha and Omega are both artificial beings, yet they are afforded all the rights of a normal living being, and thus gains souls with enough time.
Sure, the Endless were doomed due to the nature of their power source, but that doesn't mean that they deserved to have what little time they had left to be cut short. It's like saying that someone with terminal cancer should be pre-emptively killed today instead of allowed to die tomorrow on their own because they're doomed to die soon anyways. It's one thing if you have their express permission, but the WoL doesn't have that. We only have Cahciua's personal permission, but she can't speak for the rest of the Endless, and we made no attempt to consult them, only mentioning what we were doing to a few. Without the permission of every Endless, or at least of the ones that were active at the time, I strongly believe that what the WoL did was murder on a genocidal level. Even if they would've all died on their own tomorrow, the fact that the WoL's group pulled the trigger makes no difference, especially since nobody made any effort to try to find a different way. Especially since we spent so much time to get to know the Endless to sate Wuklamat's wishes. Time that could've spent trying to find an alternative way for the Endless to live, or a way to defeat Sphene without comitting genocide. Or at least time to confirm Cahciua's conclusion.
Really, this kneejerk reaction towards the use of souls is frightening on SE's part. We barely understand anything regarding souls beyond the basic cycle of the lifestream, yet the writers kept trying to jam in the idea that something about it is innately wrong and should be stopped. It's like how people yell and scream about how terrible nuclear power plants are, despite them having a better record than even solar or wind power, not to mention that they typically replace coal power and that despite the nuclear waste fears, we've already figured out better solutions for that than solar or wind waste. Or how so many people are terrified of flying, yet they're completely okay with the idea that you're hundreds of thousands of times more likely to die to a car crash than an air plane. If SE spent the time to explain more about the soul gathering process and why it's flawed, then I'd be more satisfied. Yet somehow the Endless aren't deserving of the status of living beings, yet the soul remains in the Arcadeon are? It's like saying that an AI recreation isn't deserving of being treated decently, yet a corpse is.
Everything revolving the Endless and soul manipulation this expansion is getting so incredibly close to severe hypocrisy.
Honestly it's from many different cultures the beliefs of honoring the dead. As long as one remembers or pays tribute to them they will always live on This is something that while many people don't believe in it's tied to multiple parts of history and education systems all around the world honestly. Keep those in memory for all the good or horrible things they have done keeps a part of them living on their legacy if you will. That's what this entire chapter was it was the legacy of a civilization that died It was the memory the hopes the dreams to make sure they still exist Even after they were truly gone.
I think the fascinating aspect of this is it's tied into ether and that left an imprint of the memory and even feelings behind. While half of the soul probably left there was a shadow of it fragments of it if you will made whole by their queen. That fragmented part of their personalities was added to that backup data which is why when they were fully deleted they were able to fully go on. We see this when the queen herself tries to overwrite her coding. While she may never fully be the real queen that died a part of the original Queen lived on within that data which is why she was able to overcome the final protocol that she made. And I think that's something scientifically we get that they are copies of the original but when a copy begins to live and truly believe that it's real can you not say that it's not a living or sentient being at this point? Because we see that they are quite aware of their situation they know that they are copies they know that the world they're living in is a replica. But they choose to stay there with their loved ones they even a threats plenty of emotions from memory. So even though they were not thinking in a way that many people would consider living they were sentient enough to fully comprehend what was going on. That awareness may this chapter a lot more touching when it came to progressing towards the end.
So yes I do believe they had a life, I do believe they knew exactly what was going on, I do understand the Queen ambition to keep her people alive in that sense because she's the exactly like them, living fragments of what they once were. And I think the developers really did want us to notice that because once you finish the zone changes so drastically and you can see even at night the remainder of the ones that didn't leave. At least that's what I like to believe those giant clusters a fireflies that we see at night in the zone. Some of them still lingering behind, a reminder what once was there. They did a great job with making a place feel empty at the same time eerily feeling like there was something still there in an empty halls and dark corridors😅
My main issue with this topic is this. The main problem with Living Memory is that Sphene needs to kill everyone to harvest their life aether to power the machine running Living Memory. Ultimately, that's what we're there to do, to stop Sphene.
The question of whether or not Living Memory people are alive is a moot point. We have met, befriended, and helped MANY arcane and soulless beings, treated their lives as something worth respecting and acknowledging. Alpha was a mere guide construct by Omega to facilitate their trials, we cared for the little guy and it was implied he gained a soul at the end of the raids. Omega in his post 6.0 EW quest went across the star and moon to try and understand Sir's motivations, they also were implied to gain a soul by the end. The Loporrits are arcane beings made by Venat to help facilitate the evacuation of the star in the event the Final Days came. The Ultima Thule denizens now just exist on their own, self sustained by Dynamis, with only their newfound existence to guide them. The only difference Living Memory have to these groups is their inability to self-sustain themselves and they need life aether from others to live. We have treated each and every single of these guys as worthy of living, otherwise what the hell was the point of us travelling, befriending, helping, crafting, and gathering for them? To play pretend for our amusement?
The game has already put it's foot down enough times to say "these non-conventional lives deserve life." Us turning off Living Memory SHOULD be bad, because we're killing arcane beings who are self-aware, who still had the capacity to grow and learn. Unless we're fine with also putting each and every single one of the groups I mentioned to the sword if need be. Remember, the main objective in Living Memory was to stop Sphene. Shutting down all of Living Memory was Cahciua's request. We could have rejected her request, sat on our butts, waited til we can enter the Matrix, stop Sphene, and shut down the Meso Terminal. If all of Living Memory falls because of that, then so be it. We would have been party to killing off arcane beings, but at that point it would've been about self defense.
Here's the question though - did we turn off the mechanisms manifesting these memories and illusions, or did we destroy all the stored memories? I don't recall anything confirming that we were completely eradicating all of the stored memory constructs, unless I missed it. As I recall it's the projection of those stored memories into a manifest form that consumes so much stolen life energy, hence why so few of them can be manifest at the same time. So.... shouldn't they still be in storage, potentially able to be made manifest again? If we didn't destroy the stored memories, only turned off the manifestations, did we really destroy them? What if an alternative energy source could be found? Sphene was bound to her path because she was really just a control computer with a personality overlay and was bound by her programmed directives to perpetuate the Endless support system as it existed. She couldn't really oversee efforts to find an alternative, she was locked into stealing life energy.
Long story short - what if instead of eradicating the Endless, we've only broken the cycle of life stealing and there could be future options to be explored? Like with the sacrifice of the Scions in Ultima Thule, I had the feeling that what we were doing was not necessarily so final in the bigger picture. Was it explicitly affirmed that we were completely wiping away the Endless? What happened to the memory storage?
I don't remember the exact line, but I am pretty sure Cahciua said (or implied) that shutting down the terminals would destroy the memories inside. Which makes me think it was a volatile method of storage that Sphene was using. One that erases, or can't keep, the data once it loses power
There is a very short and quick answer to this. Everything has an end. Nothing should last forever.
They are already dead. _Let it go._
@@cnkclark seems like they memories would be set free of the system, not destroying but going to the aetherial sea, although without a soul.
@@Jhaeros13Not possible though. Without souls, memories cannot travel to the Aetherial Sea.
Everything is lost because the people of Solution 9 have no actual memories of the Endless.
Remember, Origenics replicated the Aetherial Sea by figuring out Memory Extraction, which naturally happens in the Aetherial Sea.
Hopefully the patches go into the person behind the construction of this nightmare, I want to give them a piece of my mind. Actually I hope they’re a trail so I can defeat them again and again and again!
Once I really got into living memory, I realized it was this deeply disturbing mausoleum filled with mockeries of the dead. It reminded me a lot of the Stormblood Dark Knight quest line. I understand how such a thing might be a comfort to the grieving, but all it did was fill me with a weird mix of disgust, sadness, and anger. Even before the NPCs started trying to convince me that we had to shut it down, I realized that there's no way I would want to let such a disrespectful abomination continue to exist. I had a lot of deep feelings about the whole endeavour.
Ghost, specters born from their own memories and others' memories of them. Parasitic ghosts, if unwillingly so, as their existence can only be continued by feeding off the living aether of those yet alive.
All things survive by killing other things. Whether it be souls, meat, vegetables, etc.
@@dullahandan4067 But this isn't quite the same, is it? It's explicitly stated in the game that when you kill a person, their aether returns to the Aetherial Sea. Their essence goes on, goes back into the world, and continues the cycle of life. In the context of FFXIV, this is demonstrated to be a natural process that is true of ALL living things. However, Living Memory breaks this natural process. The soul aether of living beings is extracted and then *consumed* to extend the lives of others and to power Living Memory. It isn't allowed to return to the Aetherial Sea, and is forever removed from the natural cycle of life and death. And the memories, being stored in the cloud, also never return to the Aetherial Sea. The people of Living Memory are forever separated from the rest of existence, denied the freedom of death, and must *consume* the souls of others in order to keep going. And it's further stated explicitly that even if Sphene could consume every single soul across the Source and all of its Reflections, it would still only delay the inevitable, because Living Memory will never stop needing souls. What we do to the people of Living Memory in switching them off is bound to happen eventually. We could do it now, or it could happen after all life in all Reflections has been extinguished. But it would happen regardless.
@@jopabr24while I agree with the general sentiment, a bit correction though.
1. Regulator (the headpiece device) stores extra soul aether, which can be used to resurrect the wearer, but it doesn’t destroy the extra soul themselves. As seen after zoraal ja fight, those souls are released back to the aetherial sea.
2. Living Memory doesn’t run on soul aether (incorporeal aether), but rather from living force (corporeal aether) (also, yeah, it’s confusing af and people are still debating on what exactly this aether is). That being said, it’s still bad for us since the only way to ‘harvest’ them is from supposedly living beings. Aside from that, LM main issue is that it isn’t sustainable at all, rather than destroying souls or anything like that. Sphene mentioned that since the use of regulators, the birth rate of alexandrian keeps declining, which means they can’t use their own people (and who passed away naturally) to power LM.
@@dullahandan4067 …. No they don’t. Even if you’re a cannibal you don’t “kill” souls. And also, this is a weird take. People eating animals/plants and having to kill in order for self defense aren’t the same as a matrix like machine being sustained by countless live of other people. Especially when it is a machine for people who have **died** originally. Normal living people will die eventually and stop taking resources, endless on the other hand can’t do that since that since they’re basically immortal
I think one of the biggest things that makes the whole moral conundrum is that people don't fully grasp the nature of souls in FFXIV universe. Souls are all comprised of 3 elements as stated in Shadowbringers post msq. The soul is composed of The Memory, The Emotions, and The Ego. It is safe to say that Memory and emotions are a by product of the Ego component of the soul, but is still necessary to define the soul as a whole. The process from which souls return to the aetherial see expunges the Memory and Emotions that the soul has expierance in life and that Aether dissolves into the Aethereal Seas, what you are left with is a Blank Soul, devoid of any memeory or Emotion. This is the key distinguishment to the other iterations of moral conundrums in regards to how we evalute living beings in FFXIV universe
Starting with the First case is the living beings of the sundered world. We the WoL and all the childern of hydaelyn are living beings born with souls that are but fragments of the original soul from which we derive from. Emet-Selch viewpoint deemed these souls not exactly, not living but more so flawed and imperfect because they were not whole. It was like viewing his ancient breathern in a state of "Death", hence his famous line "I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you. ". He doesn't view it as killing but rather than it as "Fixing" this is the sentiment of all the Ascians that labored to rebuild their broken world. But in retrospect even though the people of Hydaelyn are sundered souls, they're still classified as souls because they still function as such posseing all the qualities of a soul.
The second Case is the nature of Ultima Thule. The simulacrums are in its core arcane enities. Arcane entities are always created without souls and in Ultima Thule case these beings were formed from the regret and despair that they're "Living" selves felt when the Meteia absorbed and took upon their emotions which drove the Meteia on their path to the song of the end. Though we were able to cease the end of days, Ultima Thules inhabitants still remain because they are sustained by a different power system. They're existence compltely different from Aether based entities and the nature and behaviors of Dynamis is completely determined by the strength of one's emotions which is too vague of power nature. I think the community in large overestiminate the signifiance of Dynamis as using it as a cop out of dire and conflicting situations when in reality Dynamis is not a solution to every problem. But in digress, The beings of Ultima Thule are more so, akin to Emotion given form rather then living. They don't possess souls in the way that the beings of the sundered world do, but they are a component of souls that has acquired form. A similar case to the manifestation of Gaius's followers in the Atiasphere. Sentinent true, but much to like the creations of the ancients, they're Arcane until they procreate and produce offspring that do have souls.
The third case is the beings of the 13th, and this one is very misunderstood. The Voidsent of the 13th reflection were never considered dead, they were considered "Perpetually Alive", because they're world has no Aethereal Sea, they're souls could never be cleansed and so it became a fest pool of soul cannibilism. They consumed each other in order to satiate they're hunger for aether in the same sense that Sineaters do. However in this case they never truly destroyed each others souls but rather become apart of each other. That's why that one Voidsent in Zero's hideout had the memories emotions and partial ego of the friend they've devoured, it's because the soul still exist but was inside them. When voidsent die, they're devoured souls, split off them and go elsewere to reform again. It's why Voidsent don't ever truly die in the 13th reflection because they're souls that are living but are incapable of dying because they can't complete the "Dying" process.
Now we have the complicated one which is Living memory. Living Menory falls into a problem from which they aren't souls. The process from which they've preserve memory hints on this fact, The decease pass away, they transfer the decease soul to Everkeeps systems, they filter out the memory, and the rest, the "Soul" itself is used as a battery pack for the living to cheat death, while the memory remains in Living Memory. Now remember, Memory is a coponent/byproduct of a Soul not the "Soul" itself. The reason why it's not a ethicial pratice is because when these souls are used as battery packs, we don't know what happens to these souls once they used up, the hypothesis that the narritive leaves us with is the fact that these souls are burnt up and never have a chance to return to aethereal sea, they lose the chance to become new life. Living memory though true bears self-awareness and sentience falls in the inevitiable problem that it's a system that is unsustainable and even more so it's a system that exists without "Purpose" which subverts the overall message of Endwalker. The beings of living memory are akin to simulacrums, but even more inspite of their sentience and self-awareness, they are more so imitations of the people they were, It really parallels the Yok huy belief on memory and that we live on in the hearts of others, but Living memory tries to go pass that, and keep a memory "Alive" in form which cheats them from truly living on. The whole system from which the alexandrians operate on removes any agency for the chance to "See the end" and therefore they're denied "To begin anew".
I mostly feel bad about Krile and Erenville's situations. Krile never got to meet her real parents, just facsimiles of them. And Erenville was SO close to seeing his mom again, but he may as well have lost her as soon as the dome went up, and now he only got to say goodbye to her shade. It's definitely some rough stuff.
We don't have confirmation of where living memory is? The void portal on the roof? I thought that made it clear that living memory itself is still on the world they came from.
Correct, we do not have any confirmation of what world Living Memory is in the game at this point. Also, the world where they came to the source from is not necessarily the world where they originated. At this point we can only speculate.
@@LoreLinesXIV That is something I hadn't considered. I really appreciate your videos and the amount of compacted thoughtfulness. I often have to stop and rewind, to reflect.
@@LoreLinesXIVI believe Yoshi-P recently confirmed it is the 9th Reflection.
I mean this really gets at the core of a lot of personal philosophy. For example, there’s every chance we are part of a simulation (meaning we are likely not alive) and the leading neurological research into consciousness suggests that our consciousness and free will are both illusions created by a cascade of underlying biochemical processes (meaning we aren’t really alive or even technically independently exist).
On the other hand you have animists (a popular philosophy in Japan) who believe absolutely everything in existence (even inanimate objects) is alive and conscious.
Neither of these views is 100% accepted by everyone and so we don’t know in the realest sense whether everything is alive or dead, real or not. However, it doesn’t matter. Even if programmed or illusory, our consciousness certainly feels real to us and so we act as though we are living. This subjective experience is all that truly matters because it is all we have to go on. Applied to the game, it doesn’t really matter if the endless are alive or not in a real sense (much like us they may ultimately not be) but their subjective experience indicates they are alive - at least as alive as we are or in a manner comparable to our living.
We also consume resources all the same and are currently overpopulating our world (though mercifully births are falling globally). Hell we are abusing our planet so badly the rich and powerful have already begun looking at other planets (other worlds) for colonization meant to ensure enough resources for our/their survival. And I don’t think finding life anywhere in the cosmos would stop us. If we found what we accept as sentient life anywhere, our current society would gladly snuff it or enslave it for our benefit (we already have done that in our own history and in some ways continue to do this to this day).
So we could very well be the endless from a consciousness stand point - bound by a common conscious experience that is ultimately not “real”- and we certainly find ourselves with very similar issues regarding the sacrifices needed for our survival. So the metaphor the narrative weaves hits home if you are able to think deeply enough to understand you are looking at a mirror.
From an in-world perspective I am already bracing for the revelation that the aetherial sea is a creation of the ancients and their predecessors which will turn the arguments against Alexandria’s use of souls on its head and hopefully help people better understand the mirror metaphor.
Wasn't the Aetherial Sea already it's own natural system even in the presundered world? Wasn't that the point of the Seat of Emet Selch was to monitor, watch, and if need be protect the Aetherial Sea, that which they called the Underworld?
@@Deode-d4h Correct. The Ancients did not create the Aetherial Sea, they discovered its existence. It was already well-known to them by the time of the Sundering that the natural order of living things was to return to the Aetherial Sea, such that the aether of living things could continue the cycle of life.
I take the view that they are a kind of life form, albeit a carcinogenic one which was inherently unsustainable and had to be stopped
They cause cancer?? Is my WoL going to be okay?!
Do you mean parasitic?
I cannot reproduce, but I'm pretty sure I'm still alive.
Yes, the cycle of Alexandria/Living Memory was abhorrent and unsustainable, and the whole system was unsettling from the start. And yet, I still hesitated to pulled the plug when the time came. 😅
They got me. Luckily the follow-up quests reinforced what we were doing.
I was of the opposite experience. I was honestly annoyed that the game kept trying to make me feel bad for shutting that abomination down. Hell, Alexandria still runs on consuming souls, and I find that so abhorrent that I turned off my subscription for the first time in three years. I need the general world state of an mmo to be somewhere that sounds fun to exist in for me to want to spend my time there, and playing nice with soul cannibals doesn't do it for me.
@@Keira_Blackstone Lucky for you, regulators don’t exactly “consume souls”. It use the aether to basically resuscitate the wearer, but the soul itself are fine and will be released back to aetherial sea after the wearer passed away
Living Memory is ironic because while the people there are recreated they don't live, they exist. They can't live because they have no reason to live besides the pleasure of just being there. If it were used to allow the living to say good bye that would be something, but it is just a records room with a holodeck built in.
Its sad about the Endless situation but their existence is a twisted one made by those who refused to accept death and honor the dead. The endless cannot survive on their own accept by taking away the life of others. Its horrifying if you think about it and if you think about it I doubt the Endless would want to live by taking god knows how many lives. They also take the memories of those of the living not even allowing them to remember their loved ones. No choice on it just take the memories away from them. The whole system is messed up in my opinion.
Tfw the Golden City is actually a Potemkin Village.
I'd be ready to believe the Endless were just cheap simulacrums of life if it weren't for Mama Erenville, who:
1. Escaped the simulation
2. Lead an organization with clear, change-based goals
"Having no souls" is a kind of meaningless argument to me in a universe where souls are literally just a battery that people can wear on their heads.
Don't get me wrong, they needed to be shut down. But it was a mass murder.
I felt nothing turning off the lights. Consuming the souls of the living to sustain them is abhorrent and an insult to the living and those who have left the star
now the real question, by removing the memory from the soul... Are those people unable to be reborn, are they completely dead from the cycle of death and rebirth?
Kinda no? IIRC even the natural process of soul rebirth wipes the memory of the incoming soul before placing it into a newly born vessel (even G'Raha commented that they had recreated the natural process). At best the shard where Alexandria is from has an aetherial sea intact which is presumably how new children could be born before it merged with the Source; at worst they were literally recycling all the old souls via the soul cells and their aetherial sea was too unstable to allow rebirth much like the Void. In now being merged with the Source, my assumption is that if they removed their regulators and discontinued the operation of Origenics then the souls of any Alexandrians that died thereafter would flow the Source's aetherial sea. Arguably the memories are still preserved in the data banks of Living Memory but we now consider them lost because we have no intention to restart the system.
Personally my follow up question is would the Alexandrian shards eventually find their way to the original rejoined soul? Would it have to wait until the rejoined soul returned to the aetherial sea for rebirth or would it do so while that soul is in a living vessel? If it's the latter then that might explain why Krile's soul seems no different from other Source natives.
But in reality, mules cannot reproduce as well as othee hybrids, and they are pretty much alive. Great video and comparison tho.
It's really sad how hard this place tries to make the point that letting go and moving is something everyone should learn and endings are part of life... only for the playerbase to refuse and use NG+ to cheat the system to keep this amusement graveyard going, all to avoid letting go and moving on. Life is not about clinging to make believe comforts, that's just a dead end. It feels nobody learned anything from the ten year long MSQ.
The debate among people about whether the people of Living Memory were actually alive I think just shows us how different people's personal views of "what is alive" are.
... it also reveals to me that a lot of people would totally think an advanced ChatGPT bot was a living thing if it was presented to them in this format.
The Living Memory is most akin to walking into an apartment of someone that has passed away. You are free to look at their things, examine bits and pieces of their past life, imagine what was as you watch their home videos - but ultimately, that person is no longer there. Only memories remain.
If you lack sentimentality, you can just take all that stuff and throw it in the trash if it's of no use to you. But you can also give it respect, mindfully learning about this person, appreciating what they left behind, before ultimately moving these things elsewhere as this apartment will now house others. That's what the whole scenario was to me - a respectful send-off to the people's legacy here as we evacuate the apartment for renovation.
It's still a philosophical conundrum I think. They're not the people they were created after, but they're essentially at least seemingly self-aware AI. It's a question we ourselved have pondered for a long time now, and of course there are people on both sides of the argument.
HOOK MENTIONED
I never considered the Endless to be alive. An extremely sophisticated digital ecosystem, maybe. To put it into computer terms: The physical bodies can be thought of as hardware, the soul is the operating system, their memories would be data obv. Additionally, Living Memory can be thought of as Cloud Storage or at least an extremely sophisticated data center. The whole thing is a system of cloud syncing and OS restore with the importing of a specific person's data. The regulators merged this data to a person's OS. The point is it was all artificial and honestly putting an end to it was the best decision to make. I didn't feel wrong about it at all. I love technology, but there are boundaries that are just outright unethical.
how is the human brain not just a hard drive?
Has anyone explained what the Tattoo on Sphenes back means?
@@LoreLinesXIV "Many souls" probably referring to all of the "fuel" used to keep her going as an endless... at least, that's how I read it.
I disagree, the endless are able to change, a form of growth.
The fact that people can be so absolute on this is frightening. Isn’t that the same stance Emet-Selch took? “I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you.”
I mean i though the same thing from emet, for me the ascians are a mockery of existance, brutally tempered by darkness to the point they re not beings anymore
So letting Sphene kill everyone on the source to keep the Endless going is okay? Because that's the only other option. The difference here is that the WoL and the shards of the Source ARE alive. The Endless are not, they're scraps of data fueled by the deaths of others.
That is sorta the conundrum 14 dropped on our heads. It's made much more palatable by the fact it's a survival situation because Sphene was planning to kill everyone and harvest their soul.
As someone who played through all the Endwalker Allied Tribes quests, this is odd, because we're friends with Loporrits and Ultima Thule denizens. Loporrits are basically just arcane beings made by Venat and Ultima Thule people are arcane via Dynamis and throughout those quests we treated as if their newfound existence has meaning, has purpose, has a right to life. Let's not forget Alpha and Omega, one a construct made by Omega the other a soulless warmongering machine, yet both were implied to have gained a soul and we treat them as if they too have a right to exist by the end of their respective stories. We're friends with a lot of arcane and soulless beings. The only difference with Living Memory people is the unfortunate caveat they need life energy to sustain themselves and they can't exist on their own without the machine.
For people to be this absolute is crazy, unless they're also willing to put everyone I just listed to the sword just because.
@@Deode-d4h I think a lot of it is willful. They HAVE to paint them as something unworthy of life otherwise they did a bad things. And they could NEVER do a bad thing.
@@dullahandan4067 The craziest thing is this. Turning off Living Memory WASN'T THE MAIN OBJECTIVE, it was a request by Cahcuia. We could've rejected her request, waited til the process Sphene was doing to finish so we can enter the Matrix and end her, taken the relic from her, and we would have been done. Whether or not Living Memory survives the fall of the Meso Terminal is another question onto itself, but ultimately our objective there was Sphene and Sphene alone.
I'm fine with the game pulling that as a philosophical issue down the line, something like "Was there another way?" or "Did we just Emet Selch them?"
By your criteria, fire is alive.
At no point did it make me feel like it was wrong. You were shutting down a well written computer program. The whole section was insane. We should have razed the place to the ground as well as the 99 dungeon. The fact that Alexandria is still using the earpieces should be a crime against life and put to an end by force if need be.
Not really. The Living in Solution 9 have a closed loop. They recycle all souls and imprint memories onto them. They are not stealing souls from anyone (except when Zoraal Ja attacked Tural.) The only issue they had was Living Memory, stealing souls from their closed loop, making it unsustainable. That was the crime, and one we put to an end. I can envision us shutting down the dome around Everkeep in patch quests, making their lives not need the regulators anymore, since they won't be in such a dangerous area. It's implied that even walking around outside Everkeep is dangerous due to the amount of lightning strikes. Yeah, it's different than Eorzeans are used to, but it's not really our place to walk in, demand they quit their practices and feel righteous about it, without fixing what's truly wrong. The dome needs to leave, so they can be safe. Then I'd be all for removing regulators.
I do not consider you to be truly alive. Ergo, I will not be guilty of murder if I kill you. - Emet-Selch
It is messed up how many people are like 'nah this thing is different from what I think counts as a person so I am gonna kill it'
@@dullahandan4067 No one is saying that just because the inhabitants of Living Memory are not alive in the traditional sense, that we had to kill them. The problem is quite clearly that the continued existence of Living Memory required and was predicated on the extermination of all other life across the Source and its Reflections. This was made very clear in the story. If the Endless could have continued to exist in some form that did not require them to genocide all of reality, I'd have been happy to let them continue existing.
@@jopabr24 Fully agree on that. Two opposing forces with incompatible values face off. One must completely wipe out the other or they will die. Just wish the game would not try so hard to say 'these aren't people it is okay to kill them'
@@jopabr24 Which is why it annoyed me that we never just got Sphene to sit down and hear our stories of Ultima Thule. Imagine a different future where she learned of Dynamis, where she could potentially fulfill her goal without slaughter by using Dynamis to create Ultima Alexandria where she converts the memory Aether of her people into Dynamis beings instead. Maybe she could've rejected her programming and take the gamble, maybe not, we'll never know.
I'm not saying it's possible at that point in the story, but it could theoretically be possible, especially if the one Meteion we know is still alive as the starbird at the 6.0 credits scene. It's just a possibility that could never be now because Sphene forced our hand.
@@Deode-d4h It is my feeling that the developers were also exploring something of the nature of AI. If you think about it, that's all Sphene really is. That's all *any* of the inhabitants of Living Memory are. They really, truly are just like the AI chatbots that people have theorized could emulate deceased loved ones, right? Take the sum total of a person's written words throughout their entire life, and feed that into an LLM, and suddenly you have a Grandma Chatbot you can talk to after she passes.
But one of the fundamental flaws of any AI is that it can only do what we teach it to do. LLM's can't create anything new. Not really. They're only capable of regurgitating (sometimes badly) whatever's been fed into them. And that basically describes Sphene. I don't think she is at all capable of ingesting and processing new data, or new ideas, because her programming won't allow her to. She was only ever capable of her single-minded mission to consume all other worlds, because that is specifically what Preservation created her to do.
So, I don't disagree that it would have been nice if we could have taught her a different way, a better way, to save her people. But I think that, within the confines of the narrative, it had been established that she simply could not be swayed from her course, because her programming would never have allowed it. And she demonstrated that in the final fight against her, I think. It seemed as though Lamat'yi was getting through to her, but then Sphene doubled-down on the idea that her way was the only way.
The Endless strike me as being arcane entities. I suspect the vast majority of them are merely simulacra of the living beings that inspired them. While AEs can develop souls under the right conditions (Alpha is a prominent one, and I suspect some of the Loporrits qualify, too), I'm not sure the artifice of LM provides those conditions. Turning off the history represented in LM did make me a bit sad, but I was also a bit glad in that it felt as though I was at long last ending the suffering (known to them or not) of the Endless.
auch
I don't feel bad. I protected the living.
At least the Nobodys can grow hearts to become a new person but when they die that heart is stuck in the recompleted person so the recompleted hvae two hearts by chance if their Nobody formed their heart,
Also gamerant but a nazi hat on the WoL's head for shutting down the endless
are they alive? no, the memories keep on living and earning experiences and knowledge? yes. They are basically undead. they are sentient and may be considered "living" but not alive. but yeah... they are on borrowed time.
I strongly dislike the music you use for these videos. It makes them sound like a sensationalist History Channel pseudoscience piece.
Tsukolos comes out: "ALEXANDRIA WAS BUILT BY ANCIENT ALIENS FROM 30-500 YEARS AGO!!!!!!!!"
I felt no sympathy shutting down the simulation. From a character standpoint, I viewed it all as an attack on life itself due to what was needed to maintain it. Sphene wasn't evil, she was merely following her programming. A machine that needed to take life to maintain its directives. Honestly I hope to see solution 9 fall into ruin due to the fact it's people live flippant lives only because they use the souls taken from others to live carelessly and dangerously. Why be safe when there is no drawback to death...
Under than argument, then we as humans must be wiped out as well
Currently we are not living in a sustainable way in Earth, we need to eat plants and/or animals to survive, lives, but our way of life out space environment capacity to sustain life.
We're omnivores, we need to achieve balance again with nature
Thats the point of the arcadion raids , make people in solution 9 understand that the life they live is feeded by the death and Oblivion of others
@@anthonyzucabar I agree, and I think this is one of the important questions the story posits to us. While Living Memory could never really be made sustainable, our own life on this planet could be, if we let go of greed. It's something we should think and talk about more imo!
@@anthonyzucabar I don't think that's the logical conclusion of OP's argument. Humanity *could* live sustainably on Earth, and could do so quite comfortably. We have by no means outpaced our planet's ability to create the resources we need to survive. But a relatively small handful of people would have to make less money, or have less power, in order for it to be possible.
The situation of real-life humans on actual Earth is not, I don't think, comparable to that of the simulated people of Living Memory.
Idk it still seems like a from of genocide to me
@@boulderbkb1536 I mean, kinda? It's an odd situation. The people of Living Memory aren't really opposed to their destruction because they know their time was over long ago and they know what it means to keep them running, AKA the whole life energy stealing bit. The devs gives us an easy-ish out by making it about us fulfilling Cahciua's request so we don't really feel too bad about it because we can technically place all the blame on Cahcuia. In my book it's murder via self defense.
I do think by what the game has presented us from Alpha, Omega, the Loporrits, and Ultima Thule people, we are meant to treat the lives of non-conventional living beings as worthy of life. So even if Living Memory is just full of AI recreations of dead people from their memories, by the game's in world lore, we have to treat them just like any other arcane/soulless being, so they are deserving of life. So yeah, we are party to killing off a bunch of memory constructs of dead people, but it was more than likely in self defense.
@@Deode-d4h the self defense outlook is valid. But after the whole ascien(I know spelled wrong) Arc feel like we’re in the same position just with no real push back
@@boulderbkb1536 When you say push back and same position, do you mean we're the Ascians and the Endless is us in ShB but not resisting, or do you mean we are still in the same position but no one in the Scions is objecting to us turning off the Endless/questioning if that's a good idea at all?
@@Deode-d4h both seem to align with what I’m saying
Living Memory didn't hit me like it did so many others. I immediately recognized it as a Matrix-like simulacrum so shutting it down didn't really bother me at all. It was nice that Krile got some closure/info from her "parents", Erinville got... something... from his "mother", but to me it felt like talking to AI's meant to sound like real people.
Omg, yes! I had this exact experience. I had a number of my FC-mates warn me that Living Memory would be a really depressing ride, and I should be prepared for it. They knew how hard the ending and epilogue content of ShB hit me, as well as some of the stuff in EW, so they anticipated that Living Memory would be difficult for my emotional ass. They were mistaken. Living Memory immediately struck me as a horrifying clockwork mausoleum, its inhabitants little more than automatons acting on a series of instructions. I mean, the inhabitants are literally just computerized summaries of real people's thoughts, feelings, and experiences, condensed into what are essentially very good chatbots. In fact, I was struck by the thought that this is like how some AI developers have speculated that you could take the social media presence of a deceased loved one -- all of their writings, every video and picture of them -- and feed all that data into an LLM, and then use that LLM to create an AI chatbot with whom you could have conversations long after their death. Which is pretty fucked up, imo. Living Memory was basically that, but at scale. So, I felt no remorse shutting them down.
@@jopabr24 Heh-heh -- I know what you mean. I was a basket case all through ShB and EW. I still tear up watching streamers play through parts of it. I kept bracing myself for big sad all through the ending and other than Krile's initial reunion scene with her parents (which was rough since I have kids myself), it was just "walk around and flip the off switch."
See the funny thing is it hit me the hardest *because* of this being a sham Utopia, a matrix-like simulation. Because it represents to me the pure manifestation of the inability to let go of a loss, to keep someone’s memory alive by repeating or emulating their best lives.
But is it really living? In this made-up paradise where people aren’t allowed to do anything else but to chase that high of their previous life? Not being allowed to grow or expand beyond? That’s not a paradise, that’s a gilded cage.
So really we are flipping the switch off to a whole bunch of terminally ill patients kept artificially alive in an induced dream slumber so their selves can finally enter the Lifestream to be reborn. At the least it will cut off the entire system from feeding on countless souls of other dead who surely won’t enter this fake heaven.
Personally, as someone in the spectrum who can suppress emotions during loss but struggle to reconcile in the aftermath, this map resonated strongly with me.
The game kinda explicitly says, they have souls. Its just not THEIR soul. Its the whole thing introduced with the regulators, replacing a vessels soul with a refurbished soul and imprinting the prior's memories.
I interpreted Living Memory as being FLOODED with soul aether, that the machinery then uses to form a construct and imprint memories onto. So, its not quite accurate to say they don't have a soul - its just that its not self-stainable without the aether supply and the machinery.
You could argue that the Scions were in the exact same situation on the First, their souls had been removed from their body and if they had stayed much longer - they would have unraveled into pure aether.
The Living Memory and Sphene had to be stopped for sure, but the philosophical conflict that is reinforced by the game world's established mechanics does make it a hell of a dilemma. Even to the point of us being a bit of a hypocrite with our actions and decisions - like normal people are.
yeah, i noticed the similarities to what we did in shadowbringer to get the scions back into there bodies, too
the souls are not in Living Memory - those get reprocessed into soul cells. It's specifically the life aether they consume to manifest.
The constructs in Living Memory did not have souls; they were projected simulacra from a computer that used soul aether as power, but there was no soul projected into them.
well they are very akin to the simulacrums made by Athena, they aren't real souls, more akin to aetheric constructs with memories of the departed
They’re lacking that spark of life that these people had in their original lives: their original soul. They’re not “alive” in the sense that they live. They’re stuck in one moment of time essentially forever. That’s not living, not at all. But it’s hard to let them go for some because they’re people.
There is no memory living here.
What is it supposed to mean though? These memories are parasitic... So is it supposed to mean trying to keep memories alive forever will devour life?
They are an intelligence that can learn and adapt. The soul portion not being there is like saying someone isn't human if they have an artificial heart. The WoL went FULL Emet Selch. Which is fine. I like playing villains. Let me kill even more.
cept that soul is what makes you alive in the context of XIV
@neobahumuth6 not talking about alive or dead or some alternate state. Talking about an intelligent being that existed and was then erased from existence by our actions. But yes yes moral relativism and all that. We don't see them as alive and so can't be guilty of murder by 'killing' them.
@@dullahandan4067 I mean arcane entities have intelligence and they aren't alive, that's what the context of the universe XIV is in. The difference between living or not is having a soul, arcane entities and memory simulacra don't have a soul even though are given intelligence
@neobahumuth6 correct. And you like many others take the view that arcane entities have no right to exist and can be killed at will for any reason. Which is odd cause animals have souls and we can kill them for food or many many other reasons without guilt either. So having or not having a soul does not seem to matter to a things right to exist.
@@dullahandan4067ok you have a wierd philosophy and even wierder anger on this topic, I'd rather not spend more time with you then bye