309 réponses à ce sujet

[WindOverTuchanka]

Double post, somehow...

Modifié par WindOverTuchanka, 29 mars 2012 - 10:44 .

[minormiracle]

Flextt wrote...
Bottom line: Once AIs / synthetics would cease their war or would have been stopped initially by proto-reapers, given suitable conditions, life would immediately start forming again. Of course it would take millions of years again, but if the Reapers have anything, it is time. (That is, considering they scrapped the Dark Energy ending entirely)

Wouldn't that make the Reaper mission pointless? If AI rebellions do destroy all life, but organic life returns anyway, then why bother stopping AI rebellions at all? Each "cycle" would be self repeating without Reaper inteference, even if they turn out to be orders of magnitude longer.

[Rhiens VI]

If the Starchild created a solution to a problem, and that solution was the Reapers, how come the Reapers haven't rebelled against the Starchild yet?

It is rather obvious from the subsequent exchange, that by "created" and "creators" he means synthetics and organics.

Reapers are not synthetics, and Starchild is apparently not an organic. Reapers are a fusion of synthetic and organic life, Starchild is... well, something.

The conflict is not applicable to him and Reapers.

The obvious counterargument is that the Starchild didn't create the Reapers.

No, the most obvious counter-argument is above.


I thoroughly dislike the endings as the next guy, but please, give it some more thought before you jump on the bandwagon and proclaim you found another "plot hole" where it isn't.

[minormiracle]

Rhiens VI wrote...

If the Starchild created a solution to a problem, and that solution was the Reapers, how come the Reapers haven't rebelled against the Starchild yet?

It is rather obvious from the subsequent exchange, that by "created" and "creators" he means synthetics and organics.

Reapers are not synthetics, and Starchild is apparently not an organic. Reapers are a fusion of synthetic and organic life, Starchild is... well, something.

The conflict is not applicable to him and Reapers.

The obvious counterargument is that the Starchild didn't create the Reapers.

No, the most obvious counter-argument is above.


I thoroughly dislike the endings as the next guy, but please, give it some more thought before you jump on the bandwagon and proclaim you found another "plot hole" where it isn't.

Yep. I made a chart for just those kinds of arguments. It's on the front page.

[res27772]

Cool OP.

One thing I've noticed is Starkid says the Crucible changed him and provided 'new options', but Control is TIMs solution, Destruction is Anderson's solution and Synthesis was Sarin's solution (unless I misunderstood him) - so where are the "new" option(s) the Crucible provided? There should at the very least be a fourth option, if I'm right about those others.

[Flextt]

minormiracle wrote...

Flextt wrote...
Bottom line: Once AIs / synthetics would cease their war or would have been stopped initially by proto-reapers, given suitable conditions, life would immediately start forming again. Of course it would take millions of years again, but if the Reapers have anything, it is time. (That is, considering they scrapped the Dark Energy ending entirely)

Wouldn't that make the Reaper mission pointless? If AI rebellions do destroy all life, but organic life returns anyway, then why bother stopping AI rebellions at all? Each "cycle" would be self repeating without Reaper inteference, even if they turn out to be orders of magnitude longer.

If that is true, it boils down to the question, why the Reaper would want to prevent Synthetic supremacy. They seem to be a hybrid of organics and synthetics. Yet, what is the inherent problem of Synthetic supremacy? I think it boils down to the scrapped Dark Energy storyline. If you get to the bottom of it, you cannot come up with an idea of why the Reapers would ultimately want organic species to flourish.

edit: or it comes down to self preservation to have enough races for a new reaper. And that would devalue Reapers in their malignance and unknowability entirely.

Modifié par Flextt, 29 mars 2012 - 10:54 .

[Lightfox]

Pride Demon wrote...

So, in essence, the catalyst acts like he does because he's the ME equivalent of HAL9000?

I don't think they're equivalent, but I'm not a specialist of the Space Odyssey universe, so my knowledge about HAL9000 is limited.

But maybe my sentence is not clear. If Starchild created the Reapers, they became the threat they're supposed to prevent, and he's trapped. He should destroy them, but they are his only solution, so he can't afford to get rid of them.

Modifié par Lightfox, 29 mars 2012 - 11:14 .

[weltraumhamster89]

Flextt wrote...

If that is true, it boils down to the question, why the Reaper would want to prevent Synthetic supremacy. They seem to be a hybrid of organics and synthetics. Yet, what is the inherent problem of Synthetic supremacy? I think it boils down to the scrapped Dark Energy storyline. If you get to the bottom of it, you cannot come up with an idea of why the Reapers would ultimately want organic species to flourish.

edit: or it comes down to self preservation to have enough races for a new reaper. And that would devalue Reapers in their malignance and unknowability entirely.

Still why not just destroy the synthetics then who thus threaten their "food" to build new reapers? Or, if spacebrat is that powerful, keep the organics at a very dumb level of existence (let's say stoneage) by taking away all their technical achievements and then go "harvesting" every now and then to build new reapers. Also, Reapers seem to live an endlessly long time, if they wouldn't attack the organics (who they let themselves develop so much that they can actually hurt the reapers) every 50k years, they wouldn't really need that many organics to build new reapers.

*head explodes* It all makes no sense. They should have just let them unexplained.

[Flextt]

Or they could just migrate to a new galaxy given their seemingly infinite power and life. And do some stuff there.

[Peete]

OP is genius!

[Pride Demon]

Lightfox wrote...

Pride Demon wrote...

So, in essence, the catalyst acts like he does because he's the ME equivalent of HAL9000?

Well, I'm not a specialist of the Space Odyssey universe, so my knowledge about HAL9000 is limited.

But maybe my sentence is not clear. If Starchild created the Reapers, they became the threat they're supposed to prevent, and he's trapped. He should destroy them, but they are his only solution, so he can't afford to get rid of them.

That's exactly what I meant...
In the film it's not completely clear why HAL goes bonkers, but it was later explained in other mediums, that it going crazy was due to the fact that its directives forced it to never willfully withold info from humans; however when the mission begun HAL was entrusted with the REAL reason for the mission and programmed not to reveal it till the crew had reached Jupiter...
From the wiki:

Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL's crisis was caused by a programming
contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of
information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders, directly
from Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics,
required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", reducing HAL to paranoia.
Therefore, HAL made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him
to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and
in full, and his orders to keep the monolith a secret. In essence: if
the crew were dead, he would no longer have to keep the information
secret."

And it would explain the crazy logic, it's probably the only way he can get to fulfill a contradiction in its programming...

I merely found the idea funny, I wasn't antagonizing your post... In fact, I pretty much agree with your post, and with OP...

[azerSheppard]

Interesting OP, would have made a more interesting ending if sheperd arrived at the catalyst only to realise he no longer controls the Reapers, because they rebelled against him. And you could choose between destroying them, giving them to catalyst or control them yourself.

[luzburg]

i like it

[Estelindis]

Good catch, minormiracle. That's some fearsome logical skill you have, flow charts and everything!

[Xarathox]

Stupid browser not letting me quote properly!

Anywho, @ WindOverTuchanka: If reapers are okay with losing a few of their kind by careless tactics, that kind of defeats the purpose of "preserving the old life in new form" as the starbrat puts it.

The entire harvesting system it uses is absolutely **** in both theory and execution. By picking the least optimal path for its solution, it's effectively not preserving anything.

[minormiracle]

WindOverTuchanka Wrote...
Well, just another counterpoint: sentient creations always rebel against the creators.
What if the Reapers are not actually sentient?

That's an interesting take I've never considered before. Reminds me a lot of Daniel Suarez's Daemon series, and considering the Reaper's singular focus it does make a weird kind of sense.
I suppose if this is true and the Starchild and Reapers are not sentient, then it takes the moral struggle out of the Control ending. After all, if Reapers are nothing more than hyper advanced bundles of logic gates, then TIM's intentions (if not actions) were right. There's nothing morally questionable with taking control of what never had free will to begin with. Admittedly that's a pretty weak rebuttal, but it's getting late and that's all I can think up right now.

WindOverTuchanka Wrote...

minormiracle Wrote...
 If the destruction of all organic life without Reaper intervention is merely a possibility, why does the Starchild say "always?"

It may be a very, very high probability, so high, in fact, that it could be considered certainty. Say, over 95% of all synthetic instances turned on organics and emerging victorious would be good enough to prompt the Starchild for action. The Prothean VI indirectly hints at it on Thessia, it's The Pattern™. Would it matter if the Starchild said 'in 9500 cases out of 10000' instead of 'always'? Nah, I'll still hate it's guts.

I see the "the odds are good enough" approach as contradictory to my impression that the Reapers intended to do what they did indefinitely. Run the cycles long enough and the same argument starts becoming valid in reverse. As long as not all probabilities are accounted for with the passing of each cycle, the likelihood of an event disastrously contrary to Reaper goals occurring due to neglect or unintended consequences approaches one.

WindOverTuchanka Wrote...
And it's not an arbitrary schedule, it's an implied Universal Law - organics are diverse, but not diverse enough to develop faster or slower than the writer-induced 50 000 years. 

Writers deserve a certain amount of leeway for telling a good story, but this I don't buy. We already know from the details of past cycles that 50,000 years is not an optimal time to invade if the Reapers wanted to avoid taking unnecessary risks. The fact that they're encountering so many defeats in this cycle just further illustrates the point.
I don't know. If the endings were handled better I might have been more willing to suspend disbelief, but absent of that, everything about the Starchild has turned into fridge logic fodder.

[Ziggeh]

minormiracle wrote...
If Reapers are a race of unchecked synthetics then they never destroyed all organic life and the Starchild is wrong. If the Reapers are synthetics held in check then the Starchild has been using them extremely inefficiently for their designated goal of stopping AIs and he's still wrong. Neither outcome explains the Starchild's reasoning.

 
Again, one instance of synthetics not annhilihating all life does not contradict the possibility, and therefor eventual inevitablility of it happening. 

And only expending energy for a few hundred years every 50 thousand is really rather efficient indeed, and as I say, we don't really know what their goal is without knowing exactly what it is they value about organic life. Without that key variable we can't properly evaluate the logic.

minormiracle wrote... 
If the Reapers did lead to the death of all organic life, how come there's still organic life around? 

 
That would be the same question as "why is there organic life?". Given it arises on mulitple planets in mulitple cycles it's really not a stretch to imagine the whole process could begin again. In fact, I would say that unless his thinking suggests that synthetics will continue to keep the galaxy sterile the fact that organic life apparently springs up so easily gaurantees it's continual presence, thus is a flaw in his logic.

minormiracle wrote...  
Again, the Starchild's reasoning makes no sense. When he starts throwing around the words "all" and "always," one counterexample is all that's needed to invalidate his claims.
 

  
Only if you assume it's literal, and you're right that it's demonstrably false if it's literal, which surely should indicate that it's not?  It only fails if you limit your interpretation, which you can't blame on his logic.

minormiracle wrote... 
When you can't make out the intention of a character even when he flat out tells you what they are, that's usually a pretty good sign of bad writing.

Well, that would depend on the context. Mystical character being vague is sort of a sci fi/fantasy mainstay, but given this is supposed to be the reasoning for the main thrust of the series, then I'd definitely agree. Very bad.

Still doesn't make his logic flawed, just the explanation incomplete.

[Lightfox]

Pride Demon wrote...

That's exactly what I meant...
In the film it's not completely clear why HAL goes bonkers, but it was later explained in other mediums, that it going crazy was due to the fact that its directives forced it to never willfully withold info from humans; however when the mission begun HAL was entrusted with the REAL reason for the mission and programmed not to reveal it till the crew had reached Jupiter...
From the wiki:

Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders, directly from Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security. This contradiction created a "Hofstadter-Moebius loop", reducing HAL to paranoia. Therefore, HAL made the decision to kill the crew, thereby allowing him to obey both his hardwired instructions to report data truthfully and in full, and his orders to keep the monolith a secret. In essence: if the crew were dead, he would no longer have to keep the information secret."

And it would explain the crazy logic, it's probably the only way he can get to fulfill a contradiction in its programming...

Thanks for the insight ! I only know the movie, so I understand why I didn't see the connection.

Well, at least HAL found a solution to preserve its goal while putting an end to its loop. And this loop was created by the action of two separate groups : people who created it, and people who gave it an order.

In the Catalyst case, whatever it decides, it will fail to achieve its goal. And it seems Starchild is the only responsible for this...  Aside from the writers, of course.

Pride Demon wrote...
I merely found the idea funny, I wasn't antagonizing your post... In fact, I pretty much agree with your post, and with OP...

Don't worry, I didn't take your post that way.
It's just that english is not my native language, so I thought I didn't express myself properly. Sorry if I seemed cold.

But I agree, the idea of the Catalyst being the equivalent of HAL is funny.

Modifié par Lightfox, 29 mars 2012 - 12:20 .

[KarlPilks]

Starchild logic > bioware fans

[minormiracle]

Ziggeh wrote...

minormiracle wrote...
If Reapers are a race of unchecked synthetics then they never destroyed all organic life and the Starchild is wrong. If the Reapers are synthetics held in check then the Starchild has been using them extremely inefficiently for their designated goal of stopping AIs and he's still wrong. Neither outcome explains the Starchild's reasoning.

 
Again, one instance of synthetics not annhilihating all life does not contradict the possibility, and therefor eventual inevitablility of it happening. 

And only expending energy for a few hundred years every 50 thousand is really rather efficient indeed, and as I say, we don't really know what their goal is without knowing exactly what it is they value about organic life. Without that key variable we can't properly evaluate the logic.

Regardless of what they say, the Starchild and Reapers must act in absolute terms considering their timescales of operation. If the mere possibility of AI irrevocably destroying all organic life justifies their actions, then the mere possibility that access to Reaper tech will initiate/accelerate the apocalyptic birth of such an AI justifies their inaction.

Ziggeh wrote...

minormiracle wrote... 
If the Reapers did lead to the death of all organic life, how come there's still organic life around? 

 
That would be the same question as "why is there organic life?". Given it arises on mulitple planets in mulitple cycles it's really not a stretch to imagine the whole process could begin again. In fact, I would say that unless his thinking suggests that synthetics will continue to keep the galaxy sterile the fact that organic life apparently springs up so easily gaurantees it's continual presence, thus is a flaw in his logic.

Then the followup question would be why bother to preserve organic life in the first place if it will return even in the face of total AI victory? The Reapers are redundant since their cycle already occurs naturally.

Ziggeh wrote...

minormiracle wrote...  
Again, the Starchild's reasoning makes no sense. When he starts throwing around the words "all" and "always," one counterexample is all that's needed to invalidate his claims.
 

  
Only if you assume it's literal, and you're right that it's demonstrably false if it's literal, which surely should indicate that it's not?  It only fails if you limit your interpretation, which you can't blame on his logic.

If the Starchild is not speaking in literal terms then there's no reason for Shepard to react as if they were literal statements, but Shepard does. If you go down this route then we're back to "Shepard is indoctrinated" or "Shepard has suddenly become an idiot who's given up the fight."

Ziggeh wrote...

minormiracle wrote... 
When you can't make out the intention of a character even when he flat out tells you what they are, that's usually a pretty good sign of bad writing.

Well, that would depend on the context. Mystical character being vague is sort of a sci fi/fantasy mainstay, but given this is supposed to be the reasoning for the main thrust of the series, then I'd definitely agree. Very bad.

Still doesn't make his logic flawed, just the explanation incomplete.

Any flawed logic can be argued as potentially logical with additional context. If the Starchild cannot offer a coherent and consistent explanation for its motivations but Shepard goes along with it anyway, then it might as well be indoctrination and space magic.

[Kalas82]

Space-God is a contradiction himself, but yea the TE pretty much got it right...nothing space-god represents, says, or does makes any sense...cause he himself is not a working plot-device, just some randomly slapped in feature someone thought might fit in with the ME-canon...wrong again Bob.

[Pottumuusi]

Even if you accept the first premise of "the created will always rebel against the creators", it would still be more logical to just have the reapers dormant in the galaxy and wake them up when a AI-organic war breaks out and crack down on that ****.

[FyreSyder]

The Angry One wrote...

What were they thinking?

Not much.

[Ziggeh]

minormiracle wrote...
Regardless of what they say, the Starchild and Reapers must act in absolute terms considering their timescales of operation. If the mere possibility of AI irrevocably destroying all organic life justifies their actions, then the mere possibility that access to Reaper tech will initiate/accelerate the apocalyptic birth of such an AI justifies their inaction.

 
But doesn't negate it. Again, depends on their core assumption.

minormiracle wrote...  
If the Starchild is not speaking in literal terms then there's no reason for Shepard to react as if they were literal statements, but Shepard does. 

 
In what way does he confirm the assertion that all AIs will attempt to destroy all life? That would be the key element you're questioning no?

[Cazlee]

I don't know if someone pointed this out already, but he doesn't explicitly say he created the reapers. He says that he controls them.