Il Divo wrote...
The Razman wrote...
Aliens invading is not a logical thing to happen given what we know. Machines rising up and destroying organic life, given that we've spent three games seeing the effects of synthetics raging war on organics (the Geth) and exploring the consequences of machines having intelligence with EDI ... is not an illogical thing to happen. In fact, we've seen it happening with the Geth, as I've said.
Then you failed to understand anything that happened over the course of those three games. We have not seen any effect of synthetics waging war on organics. To claim such is to drastically overstate the scale of the threat being presented. We all have our fringe groups. Terrorism exists in the world. I doubt most people would appreciate being subsumed into the actions of the minority, which is exactly what the heretics represented.
As it stands, Mass Effect does not explore one single difference between synthetics and organics which makes such actions inevitable. Certainly not anymore than any other group. Mass Effect 3 actually poses the opposite conclusions with both the humanization of EDI and the Geth, regardless of our actions, more substantial as evidence than anything you or the Catalyst have presented.
Il Divo has a point here. Even if there are hints in the game that machines might possibly pose a danger to organic life, or rather organic life to itself because it has the ability to create machines, there is simply no proof.
In fact, as Il Divo points out, Mass Effect 1 and 2 have decidedly provided proof against such a claim.The rogue AI on the Citadel is merely acting out of self-preservation because it is afraid for its bare existence because of the Citadel's anti-AI laws (and we're headed down a very outdated ideological path if we start legally discriminating life for its very nature). The geth heretics were attacking organics because of Sovereign. And as explored in great detail in Mass Effect 3, the geth/quarian war happened because the quarians wanted to prevent the geth from reaching autonomy, something that was not only racist and organic supremacist but also utterly unnessary as we can see when you save both species in ME3.
Further, ME3 provides proof that living machines are capable of making their own decisions based on their experiences (geth/EDI). Thus they stand in direct opposition to the Reapers who are mere tools of an ancient AI. Even if we ignore the heinous genocide the Reapers commit, all they do is ultimately pointless. The logic that explains the Reaper cycle is faulty because the Reapers ultimately fail as an archive of species.
Let me elaborate on that last point a bit. What the Reapers want to prevent, according to Catalyst logic, is that organics create machine life so powerful that it wipes out all sentient life forever (in simple terms). They do that by wiping out advanced civilizations of sentient life instead, archiving them in Reaper form, to make room for a new generation of species which will be wiped out in the next cycle.
The first failure is that the archive is pathetic. The Reapers follow programming, not the essence of the species they consist of. It's very improbable that a species that has experienced the horrors of a Reaper invasion and Reaperization would go along with it. Further, organic life is also largely dominated by intersubjectivity and culture, none of which is retained in a Reaper. Also, the Reapers must somehow be kept in a state of harmony. They have no free will and have nothing in common with sentient machines from the galaxy.
The second failure of the Reaper logic is the assumption that it's actually possible to wipe out all organic life forever. It's not. The Mass Effect universe clearly renders the Fermi paradox moot. If there is enough life in only our galaxy to have spacefaring civilizations every odd 50,000 years, then chances are pretty good that organic life is developing all across the observable universe, and possibly beyond that. It's no evidence, but it's what the Reaper cycle implies. Considering the fact that the Catalyst is based in the Milky Way galaxy, and that we have no other evidence, it is clear that the Reapers are only a local phenomenon. They have only a limited operational radius because they can only cover so much distance until they have to return to the galaxy. So even if they're reaping other galaxies as well, they can never affect the entire universe based on evidence that we have.
We would have to assume that we can get swept away by infinitely powerful sentient machines any time according to Catalyst logic. The Reapers cannot prevent what they're trying to prevent everywhere. Therefore, it would have been a much more sensible approach to enlist the help of all organic species, in spite of their occasional differences, to find a way to protect them and all other organic life by creating a civilization that is powerful in its own right.
The Catalyst logic collapses both on a functional as well as on a dimensional scale. It's short-sighted and outright stupid.
Modifié par beyondsolo, 11 mai 2012 - 01:38 .
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