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[His Name was HYR!!]

KaiserShep wrote...

No matter why anyone picks synthesis, the catalyst's reason for presenting this option is clear: organic life is doomed if left to its own devices. There's really no way around this. It asserts that if left unchecked, it will create an AI that will surpass it, and eradicate it, while ignoring the horrible irony of it all,

Incorrect.

The catalyst is presenting you with the options the Crucible is giving you, he doesn't create them himself.

The Crucible is the reason why his solution (the cycle) "won't work anymore." All three Crucible options are better solutions. Sync is what it is, obviously. Destroy is basically depending on the success of the war over the Reapers being able to hold for all other wars that arise with synthetic enemies. Control is sort of a middle-ground.

and really does not present any reasonable examples to support it, other than itself.  The geth sure aren't a good case, because they were hardly a huge galactic threat, at least not until the reaper vanguard decided to intervene.

Examples:

-- Leviathan DLC confirms that organic races were wiped out by their created life.
-- Geth (almost) wiped out their creators in the Morning War, and actually can if you upgrade them to fully-formed AI (once they've surpassed the quarians).
-- EDI helps you destroy her creators at Cronos Station.

[The Night Mammoth]

HYR 2.0 wrote...

Examples:

-- Leviathan DLC confirms that organic races were wiped out by their created life.

Sentient races, which just makes the Catalyst and the Reapers really pointless. 

-- Geth (almost) wiped out their creators in the Morning War, and actually can if you upgrade them to fully-formed AI (once they've surpassed the quarians).

Can, though they never have in any of my playthroughs, but regardless they still don't want to wipe out all organic life. 

-- EDI helps you destroy her creators at Cronos Station.

So? The created can destroy their creators all they want, that proves nothing. She's not trying to kill all organics, to the point is irrelevant. 

Modifié par The Night Mammoth, 14 mai 2013 - 09:19 .

[KaiserShep]

EDI is not a good example. She's not trying to "destroy her creators" in the same way the geth were waging war with the Quarians. Besides, far as we can tell, none of EDI's creators are on Cronos station anyway. We just get a lot of reaper-augmented troopers and Kai Leng. 

Modifié par KaiserShep, 14 mai 2013 - 09:14 .

[Ieldra]

M25105 wrote...
I would've thought everyone and their grandmother viewed the Reapers as evil and the kid as a monster, but it seems that either I'm seeing things wrong or there are people on this board who are actually sympathetic to thr genocidal flying cuttlefish robots and the space emperor ghost kid from Contact.

Sympathetic? Not necessarily. But there is evidence that the Reapers are mind-controlled by the Catalyst and that they didn't have a choice about supporting the cycle. If so, then they are interesting life forms I would like to see and communicate with in a state where they are freed from their compulsion. In fact, ever since ME1, I have thought "Why the hell must these life forms be enemies? They're much too interesting to just kill". The Synthesis lets me change that. Therefor I appreciate it.

Also, the Catalyst ("the intelligence" is the leviathans' term for it which is why it is used by some people) isn't evil rather than it has utterly non-human priorities. Here's what I posted about its nature in my Synthesis thread:

I.2 The Catalyst and its nature

The most vocal criticisms of Synthesis are based on the assumption that we cannot trust the Catalyst and that its assertions make no sense. This has been mitigated by the Extended Cut, but people still claim it uses circular logic. As a reference, here's what the Catalyst says about itself (EC pre-Leviathan version):

S: What are you?
C: A construct. An intelligence designed eons ago to solve a problem. I was created to bring balance, to be a catalyst for peace between organics and synthetics.
S: So you're just an AI?
C: Inasmuch as you are just an animal. I embody the collective intelligence of all Reapers.
S: But you were created....
C: Correct.
S: By who?
C: By ones that recognized that conflict would always arise between organics and synthetics. I was first created to oversee the relations between synthetic and organic life....to establish a connection. But our efforts always ended in conflict, so a new solution was required.
S: The Reapers.
C: Precisely.
S: Where did the Reapers come from? Did you create them?
C: My creators game them form. I gave them function. They, in turn, give me purpose. The Reapers are a synthetic representation of my creators.
S: And what happened to your creators?
C: They became the first true Reaper. They did not approve, but it was the only solution.
S: You said that before, but how are the Reapers a solution?
C: Organics create synthetics to improve their own existence. But these improvements have limits. To exceed those limits, they must be allowed to evolve. They must, by definition, surpass their creators. The result is conflict, destruction, chaos. It is inevitable.
C: Reapers harvest all life -- organic and synthetic -- preserving them before they are forever lost to this conflict.

From this, I conclude that the following statements about the nature of the Catalyst are true;

The Catalyst does not use circular logic. It just has non-human priorities.
The Catalyst's priority is the preservation of organic life, and as a consequence, also synthetic life since organic life creates it. It's priority is not specific organic life, not specific individuals or species, but intelligent organic life as such. As long as its continued existence is guaranteed, the Catalyst's purpose is fulfilled.
It sees the minds of organics and the information about their physical makeup as the defining part of organic life, and thus preserves them in the Reapers before they can be utterly destroyed. The thoughts and memories, the information about their material culture, are preserved as we know from the Synthesis epilogue. It makes sense in the non-human kind of way one can expect from an utterly non-human intelligence.

The Catalyst implements the most efficient solution it can find.
The wishes of individuals, the morality of organic cultures, are of no consequence to it. It is, in the purest sense of the word, amoral. That an organic individual would never come up with this kind of solution is irelevant for the Catalyst since is not an organic individual. It can be presumed that any other solution - for instance keeping synthetics in check - would result in a worse cost/benefit balance since the continued non-Reaperized existence of specific organic species does not count as a significant benefit.

The Catalyst created an artificial extinction cycle to simulate the natural ones.
In a universe without synthetics, organic cultures would not last forever. They would come and go. Some would die out, some maybe ascend to become something else, new life would always flourish. Thus, the diversity of organic life that makes it adaptable would be maintained over time. Synthetics threaten that balance, they can be eternal. After they've won once and extinguished organic life, no other intelligent organic life would emerge. The harvesting cycle ensures that new life will always flourish. That old life has to be harvested for that to occur is of no consequence to the Catalyst.

The Catalyst is not insane, but it may be buggy.
The goal of the Catalyst is clear, but apparently it had not been programmed with the necessary restrictions to make its solutions acceptable to organic civilizations. Possibly it also self-evolved out of such restrictions. Whatever the cause, its logic is internally consistent.

Modifié par Ieldra2, 14 mai 2013 - 09:18 .

[His Name was HYR!!]

The Night Mammoth wrote...

HYR 2.0 wrote...

Examples:

-- Leviathan DLC confirms that organic races were wiped out by their created life.

Sentient races, which just makes the Catalyst and the Reapers really pointless.

??

-- Geth (almost) wiped out their creators in the Morning War, and actually can if you upgrade them to fully-formed AI (once they've surpassed the quarians).

Can, though they never have in my playthrough. They still don't want to wipe out all organic life.

They don't need to "want" to.

They don't want to wipe out the quarians when it *does* happen, but they do.

It's not about who's at fault in any given conflict between them -- the organics or the synthetics -- it's about the outcome.

-- EDI helps you destroy her creators at Cronos Station.

So? The created can destroy their creators all they want, that proves nothing. She's not trying to kill all organics, to the point is irrelevant. 

It *is* relevant. The line "The created will always destroy their creators" comes first to clarify the next one: "... synthetics will wipe out all organics." EDI's instance does not need to extend toward all organics to prove this, the instance simply needs to be duplicated again and again by different organics with a different creation that leads to the same outcome.

Modifié par HYR 2.0, 14 mai 2013 - 09:21 .

[KaiserShep]

EDI is still a special case that makes for a fair exception. She's not trying to destroy her creators; she's trying to prevent an otherwise certain death for Shepard. 

Modifié par KaiserShep, 14 mai 2013 - 09:33 .

[The Night Mammoth]

HYR 2.0 wrote...

??

The Leviathans observed synthetics wiping out or attempting to wipe out their organic creators. That's exactly what the Catalyst does. That makes the Reapers pointless. 

They don't need to "want" to. They don't want to wipe out the quarians when it *does* happen, but they did.

They need to want to if the geth are going to be a supporting example. Wiping out one race is irrelevant.

It's not about who's at fault in any given conflict between them -- the organics or the synthetics -- it's about the outcome.

The outcome isn't the attempted or stated aspiration to wipe out all organic life, and it's only one of three potentials.

It *is* relevant. The line "The created will always destroy their creators" comes first to clarify the next one: "... synthetics will wipe out all organics." EDI's instance does not need to extend toward all organics to prove this, the instance simply needs to be duplicated again and again by different organics with a different creation that leads to the same outcome.

How do the two statements connect? How does the first clarify the second? They're completely separate from another, that the created will always destroy their creators, which is in no way proven, does not prove or support that synthetics will wipe out all organics, because absolutely about the first connects in a logical way to the second.

The Catalyst wants to prevent all organic life from being wiped out by synthetics. It observed that sapient species are apparently eventually wiped out by their creations. How does that prove all organic life is at risk? There are examples of the created doing in their creators, but not of the second part of the Catalyst's motive, leading me to be skeptical about it due to the lack of proof or even a logical argument of any sort.

Modifié par The Night Mammoth, 14 mai 2013 - 09:42 .

[KingZayd]

The Night Mammoth wrote...

HYR 2.0 wrote...

??

The Leviathans observed synthetics wiping out or attempting to wipe out their organic creators. That's exactly what the Catalyst does. That makes the Reapers pointless. 

They don't need to "want" to. They don't want to wipe out the quarians when it *does* happen, but they did.

They need to want to if the geth are going to be a supporting example. Wiping out one race is irrelevant.

It's not about who's at fault in any given conflict between them -- the organics or the synthetics -- it's about the outcome.

The outcome isn't the attempted or stated aspiration to wipe out all organic life, and it's only one of three potentials.

It *is* relevant. The line "The created will always destroy their creators" comes first to clarify the next one: "... synthetics will wipe out all organics." EDI's instance does not need to extend toward all organics to prove this, the instance simply needs to be duplicated again and again by different organics with a different creation that leads to the same outcome.

How do the two statements connect? How does the first clarify the second? They're completely separate from another, that the created will always destroy their creators, which is in no way proven, does not prove or support that synthetics will wipe out all organics, because there's absolutely nothing to corroborate them.

The Catalyst wants to prevent all organic life from being wiped out by synthetics. It observed that sapient species are apparently eventually wiped out by their creations. How does that prove all organic life is at risk? There are examples of the created doing in their creators, but not of the second part of the Catalyst's motive, leading me to be skeptical about it due to the lack of proof or even a logical argument of any sort.

What happens if synthetics create organics? Who gets destroyed?

Modifié par KingZayd, 14 mai 2013 - 10:16 .

[Sejborg]

Contact is an awesome movie.

[frostajulie]

The Night Mammoth wrote...

Auld Wulf wrote...

AlexMBrennan wrote...

It's best to ignore Auld Wulff and Seival as they are either trolling or really really indoctrinated.

I can't read that as anything but: I cannot understand X, thus due to my own personal lack of insight, I will label X with Y [random pejorative] term.

Has anyone else looked at this statement, noticed exactly who posted it, and felt their heart stop at the sheer hypocrisy? 

My heart didn't stop but I did LOL!

[Auintus]

KaiserShep wrote...

I'm not sure how this is. In the first Mass Effect, the reapers are quite simply ancient god-like machines that demand we go extinct. In ME2, we find out that they "reproduce" by melting swaths of unwitting victims. In 3, they start their genocidal attack on all life in the galaxy. In both cases of somehow joining or subjugating the reapers, the characters making these cases become corrupted abominations of their former selves in the end.

Easy. I couldn't give two steaming piles of space cow feces whether the Reapers live or die. So long as they are no longer harvesting us, I'm good. I would choose Destroy(over Refuse) if I had no other option, but I do. Control and Synthesis pacify the Reapers, but spare the Geth, who I am rather fond of. I refuse to condone the idea that an enemy needs to die so badly that you would rather sacrifice your own allies than suffer their continued existance, in whatever form.

I don't see it as quite that simple. All of these options leave me with a lot of unanswered questions, so the thing that makes the biggest difference is: which ones leave me with more? I certainly did not want EDI and the geth to die, and I probably would continue to fight like hell to keep them alive, but in order to save them, I must defy some fairly strong personal beliefs. I do not believe in controlling the reapers at all. I strongly believe that my humanity is inextricably bound to my mortality, and that my mind and sense of morality and how it relates to my logical side would become severely diluted over time, or worse, instantaneously. My willingness to do "good" would probably become skewed by the prospect of immortality, because my former perspective may be lost. There's no way to know for sure, but I do know that this isn't something I'd be willing to die for to find out, not with the stakes this high. This is something I had to apply to my Shepard's character. Synthesis presents the same dilemma. There's a litany of questions about the nature of this big change, with none of the guarantee that it will make a lick of difference. All the while, the reapers continue to exist, with the dark cloud of uncertainty that this newfound "utopia" may collapse. Losing EDI and the geth is regrettable, and if Shepard losing sleep over them also means the galaxy is finally left to evolve without further interference from the reapers, then so be it. Sure, the narrative of the EC attempts to negate these concerns, but I don't believe in these resolutions either. Besides, I refuse to believe that the galaxy can't exist with relative peace on its own terms without further intervention of the reapers. 

Of course not. I wouldn't expect you to. That is just one way of evaluating the situation. There are other reasons as well, but the first time I played through(pre-EC), that was how I saw it.
Synthesis also applies quite accurately to one of my personal character flaws: Doing what I think is best for others regardless of what they may want. I was playing my Shepard as what I would do in a given situation and thus, Synthesis. Besides, I see Destroy as both rejecting the Reaper's beliefs and reinforcing them. The few synthetics that had come to see organics as allies and equals would be wiped out. Eventually, new synthetics would come about and history would tell them that organics not only would sacrifice them, but had done so in the past. Such a history does not garner trust. That's my interpretation, anyway. And we all know how flawless I am.

[FlyingSquirrel]

Pressedcat wrote...
Also, if I'm following his logic correctly, Auld Wolf's argument is that each Reaper is the essence of a harvested species, enslaved in order to enact the will of the Intelligence. By this logic, the Reapers were just more victims. To destroy them would be to punish them for actions over which they had no control, and obliterate the last remnants of otherwise extinct species from past cycles.

I will admit that this (whether Auld Wulf agrees or not) is more or less my thinking regarding the Reapers. Between Leviathan and the Catalyst's explanations, my sense is that the Reapers are self-aware with some limited freedom of their own, but that they are "programmed" to be unable to reject the Catalyst's logic or decide that continuing the cycles is wrong. And as I've explained elsewhere, I find it unlikely, based on the evidence in the game and the way in which the Catalyst talks to Shepard, that the Catalyst is lying about anything at the end.

[Cainhurst Crow]

To play a bit of devils advocate, you have to choose to do an evil action in order to be evil. If you were never given a choice in the matter, and from the moment you were created, you were forced into the role of an evil being, than you wouldn't be evil, but a victim of whoever or whatever forced you into the role of a villian in the first place.

The reapers can be seen as having no choice in how they act. Their actions are dictated by their programed mandate, which is why despite coming from a variety of species with multiple outlooks and who were all forcibly made into reapers, there has never been a single reaper rebel against the others. In a way, you could say that they are indoctrinated creatures forced to indoctrinate others.

Quite tragic actually. Pick destroy and end their suffering. Accept their enslaved and use them for good. Free them from their shackles and let them have freedom. Or do nothing and let the next cycle destroy them.

[KingZayd]

There never was an innocent Reaper to begin with. They were created this way. Sure, maybe we could end up with nice Reapers afterwards, but if we did they'd be NEW. Why should we risk the galaxy so that we might (if we're lucky) create new nice AIs?

Harbinger was never a nice guy, so we shouldn't feel bad for killing him. It's not as simple as mind-control, where a nice guy could have been forced to do these horrible things. The nice guy never existed.

Modifié par KingZayd, 14 mai 2013 - 10:52 .

[TheRealJayDee]

Auld Wulf wrote...

My problem with this is that it's not their fault that they're horrible, to me it just reminds me of demagogic hatreds in general, where it's more fuelled by a desire to be part of a bigger whole of circlejerkish hatred rather than actually having a good reason for hating them. Yes -- they might be ugly, bizarre, unearthly things, and that much might be entirely true, but the demagogic hatred levvied upon them is unfair.

The point is not that they look horrible, the point is that they do horrible things, and have done so their entire existence. They're not innocent, individual beings forced into commiting crimes, they are sentient weapons of mass destruction, specificially created for the execution of the Starchild's genocidal "solution".

HYR 2.0 wrote...

Bill Casey wrote...

Synthesis asserts there's something fundamentally wrong with synthetics and organics that needs to be changed. It treats sapient beings as your personal science experiment...

It's pure hate disguised as love...

It is also the only option that is more unethical than the cycle...
Somehow, they managed to make Shepard worse than the reapers...
It's the sickest ****ing thing I've ever seen...

Nobody picks Sync because they thing anything is "wrong" with life, so quit labeling those of us who don't share your fundamentalism. 'Only thing wrong in the world are extremists who -- thankfully -- have no hand in the decision.

At least, I can speak for my own play.

Your posts are hate, disguised as moral-righteousness.

Well, say what you will, but the way I see it the whole Synthesis choice is based on the thought that organic life as it is and synthetic life as it is can't ever possibly coexist without the inevitable extinction of all organic life, and therefore both need to be fundementally changed. I don't agree with that line of thinking, and neither does my Shepard (well maaaaybe one of them ^^).

[Asharad Hett]

Auld Wulf wrote...

@OP

Because board pollution instead of posting this in existing threads is big and clever. There are threads which exist which deal with whether one sympathises with the Reapers or not -- instead of posting in there, you had to create your own thread for a post that belongs in that thread, as a cry for attention, to stand out and be speshul. That invalidates any point you could make, and undermines any respect I could have for you.

To sum up: Making a new thread for a post which belongs in an existing thread doesn't make you big and speshul -- no, it just makes you look marginally obnoxious since you're filling up the forum with copycat threads.

If people only posted with your approval, you would get awful lonely.

[xlegionx]

Auld Wulf wrote...

Hadeedak wrote...

And the Reapers are byproducts -- an attempt to archive organic civilizations instead of destroying them entirely. Yeah. They're broken. They're horrible. Whatever.

My problem with this is that it's not their fault that they're horrible, to me it just reminds me of demagogic hatreds in general, where it's more fuelled by a desire to be part of a bigger whole of circlejerkish hatred rather than actually having a good reason for hating them. Yes -- they might be ugly, bizarre, unearthly things, and that much might be entirely true, but the demagogic hatred levvied upon them is unfair.

Why do I call it demagogic? It's because it's a recursive circlejerk of hate, it's almost a reverb at this point which no one can really justify. It's the hatred of them that bothers me, because the Reapers have done nothing to deserve it. The Leviathans? Yes, they've done everything to deserve it (and they continue to). The Catalyst? It depends upon how free-willed he is, but I could understand it there. The Reapers, however? They're mind-controlled slaves.

They are deserving of my sympathy because they've been victims since day one. I don't want to hate or destroy them, I want to help them back to becoming something of what they once were -- maybe even restoring the civilisations within, if that's possible. I've pointed this out time and again, but I'll point it out once more -- the Borg, the Cybermen, and so many similar villains are villainous not by their own choice, they're all victims, they were forced to become what they are, and forced to convert.

Star Trek: Voyager acknowledged this with the Borg. It had numerous episodes which dealt with the Collective, and one coup de grâce where many were freed from their Borg slavery. And that was a very interesting episode, since Captain Janeway didn't blame the Borg for those whom they'd assimilated under the Queen's influence. The Reapers share much in common with the Borg, almost being a carbon copy in some respects -- they are a hive of slaves to their resepctive overmind, the Catalyst is their Queen, so to speak.

The Borg can be perceived as hideous and inhuman, but if you had the chance to free a bunch of Borg drones, would you free them or kill them? What I find repugnant is that people actually have hate for the Reapers that goes beyond their character -- and this is what I argue against. If one could perceivably argue passionately for the destruction of creatures they could otherwise free, then I call that demagogic. There's no logic or reason, there, no justification. It's just playing to old prejudices and fear-laden mindsets.

And the people who tend to push these arguments most passionately are demagogues.

So, yes, the Reapers are misunderstood. Yes, the Reapers deserve sympathy. No, it doesn't matter whether one finds them repugnant or not, as that  shouldn't even be a consideration. What your charater does is irrelevant, what you feel about the matter is important, as it says a lot about you. It says whether you buy into the "abomination aesthetic" or not, and whether you believe that's justification to kill, because that just means you're buying into demagogic nonsense.

I find this an interesting philosophical and intellectual discussion, and I'd like to think that it helps us understand how we'd react if we were to ever meet alien life. And my point continues to be that finding something repugnant isn't justification enough for unethical acts on one's own part.

The Reapers are nothing more than victims of a very insidious form of mind and body rape, as I've pointed out before. This is an objective truth. A peoples had their minds and bodies taken away from them to be transferred into a Reaper which the Catalyst could have total control over. I strongly believe that this is something that constitutes rape. Ultimately, what the Reapers are? They don't deserve hatred, they deserve our pity and our understanding -- it's a tragic situation, but one that might be fixable, to a certain extent.

I don't believe though, again, that just because the situation is tragic that we should resolve it with 'kill it with fire.'

The basis for your arguement is that the Reapers themselves are truly organic beings that, left to their own devices, would not commit genocide every 50,000 years. But that isn't the case. If there wasn't a Catalyst, they would likely still harvest advanced organic species, because their directive is probably based on programming, not an active signal the Catalyst emits to control the Reapers, since such a signal likely would have been detected by sentient species long before the Reapers arrived.

The reason the Reapers stop fighting in Control and Synthesis is likely due to a change in their progamming sent by the energy surge from the Crucible. In the case of Control, a new directive from the new Shep-AI/Catalyst to stop fighting organics, in the case of Synthesis that "understanding" somehow changes the Reapers prgramming/directive to believe that organics to not need to "ascend."

The real victims are the countless victims of the Reapers, who were indoctrinated, huskified, and liquified in order for new Reapers to be made. It also sounds that you believe that part of these species, part of at least 740 cycles (the probable number of cycles since the derelict Reaper was shot), still lives on in the Reapers, but they don't. They have already been murdered and liquified, and exist only in the form of cold, solid liquified steel/metal.

And saying the Reapers deserve no blame or the hate they get because the harvest was not originally their directive is something of a weak arguement. It is comparable to (but not exactly like) saying the senior n.azi officials that went on trial at Nuremberg deserve no blame for the Holocaust because they were only following orders from Hitler. Ultimately the Reapers still did quadrillions of innocent lives.

And as for this nonsense about demagogic circlejerks of hatred towards the Reapers? I don't hate the Reapers because it's the popular thing on BSN or because some emotion-packed post changed my mind. I came to my own conclusion while playing the game that the Reapers are abhorrent.

[Auld Wulf]

Attacking my post and then ending yours with a demagogic statement about how you feel the Reapers are abhorrent without fully explaining why doesn't make your post valid. Again, I see a lot of this -- appeals to the crowd, to emotion, and so on. But quite simply? Why do you feel the way you do about the Reapers?

If you can't tell me that, your point of view isn't valid, because you don't actually know yourself.

[GreyLycanTrope]

It's like he just looked up demagogue in the dictionary and decided to use it ad nauseum. I'm not nearly drunk enough to put up with this crap right now.

[xlegionx]

I felt that my earlier mention that each of the potentially thousands of Reapers is made from the liquified remains of millions, possibly billions of innocent lives and the fact that these creations went on to kill trillions of organic lives and make more of themselves sufficed as an explanation for why the Reapers are morally abhorrent. I may not have stated it exactly like that, but the idea is there.

And for the record, I did not attack your post. I built a civil counter argument against your points because I disagreed with them. You are the one attacking people, saying their point of view is invalid just because it differs from yours, disguising insults with complex words (well, circle jerk isn't complex, but that seems to be an exception)

[KaiserShep]

So many demagogues here man.

[spirosz]

xlegionx wrote...

I felt that my earlier mention that each of the potentially thousands of Reapers is made from the liquified remains of millions, possibly billions of innocent lives and the fact that these creations went on to kill trillions of organic lives and make more of themselves sufficed as an explanation for why the Reapers are morally abhorrent. I may not have stated it exactly like that, but the idea is there.

And for the record, I did not attack your post. I built a civil counter argument against your points because I disagreed with them. You are the one attacking people, saying their point of view is invalid just because it differs from yours, disguising insults with complex words (well, circle jerk isn't complex, but that seems to be an exception)

^

[His Name was HYR!!]

KaiserShep wrote...

EDI is still a special case that makes for a fair exception. She's not trying to destroy her creators; she's trying to prevent an otherwise certain death for Shepard. 

The Catalyst never said synthetics won't have good reason for destroying those who created them, just that it will happen.

Ergo, EDI is not an exception.

The Night Mammoth wrote...

HYR 2.0 wrote...

??

The Leviathans observed synthetics wiping out or attempting to wipe out their organic creators. That's exactly what the Catalyst does. That makes the Reapers pointless.

It's not exactly what the catalyst does.

The cycle does not wipe out life, it immortalizes all advanced life into a new form.

It's nothing like, say, the geth wiping out the quarians on Rannoch. There is no attempt to clone them all back to life or anything, much less take their genetic material and upload it to a supercomputer. They're dead and gone. In time, they will be entirely forgotten. Not so with the civilizations the catalyst has preserved. They at least live on in some way.

The Reapers are very much the same idea as what one organic race did to preserve themselves over certain-death.

They don't need to "want" to. They don't want to wipe out the quarians when it *does* happen, but they did.

They need to want to if the geth are going to be a supporting example. Wiping out one race is irrelevant.

It's not about who's at fault in any given conflict between them -- the organics or the synthetics -- it's about the outcome.

The outcome isn't the attempted or stated aspiration to wipe out all organic life, and it's only one of three potentials.

It *is* relevant. The line "The created will always destroy their creators" comes first to clarify the next one: "... synthetics will wipe out all organics." EDI's instance does not need to extend toward all organics to prove this, the instance simply needs to be duplicated again and again by different organics with a different creation that leads to the same outcome.

How do the two statements connect? How does the first clarify the second? They're completely separate from another, that the created will always destroy their creators, which is in no way proven, does not prove or support that synthetics will wipe out all organics, because absolutely about the first connects in a logical way to the second.

The Catalyst wants to prevent all organic life from being wiped out by synthetics. It observed that sapient species are apparently eventually wiped out by their creations. How does that prove all organic life is at risk? There are examples of the created doing in their creators, but not of the second part of the Catalyst's motive, leading me to be skeptical about it due to the lack of proof or even a logical argument of any sort.

It's pretty clear that the only organics the catalyst concerns himself with are the advanced (sapient & sentient) life forms -- not literally all fauna and flora in the galaxy. Indeed, the "all organic life" was very poor word-choice, but I'm all but certain that it refers only to advanced life, like: humans, salarians, turians... NOT: trees, varren, space-cows...

If space-cows evolve to achieve sapience, they would switch categories (not sure if it even works like that, but Mass Effect seems to think so).

Now, I realize that lots of folks take issue when I go off-script to explain the story, saying it's just headcanon without official in-game explanation. I maintain that -- so long as my explanations do not: directly contradict anything in the game, make sense of what happens well enough, and no better explanations exist -- they are not only valid, but likely the correct interpretation.

In that, I'm more than 99% sure that the organic life implicated is not literally all plants and animals, just ones sapient enough to be creators and thus come into conflict with the created. In which case, EDI and the upgraded-geth both serve as examples of how it would happen. If you continually duplicate the outcome of the conflict with their creators over a long period of time, there won't be any of these creator-organics left.

Modifié par HYR 2.0, 15 mai 2013 - 04:47 .

[His Name was HYR!!]

TheRealJayDee wrote...

Well, say what you will, but the way I see it the whole Synthesis choice is based on the thought that organic life as it is and synthetic life as it is can't ever possibly coexist without the inevitable extinction of all organic life, and therefore both need to be fundementally changed. I don't agree with that line of thinking, and neither does my Shepard (well maaaaybe one of them ^^).

Again, it's the glass as half-full vs. half-empty. We see it differently, that's okay.

The issue I have ITT simply comes against the notion that choosing Sync makes you a glass-half-empty person, among other allegations commonly made by our resident Pluck-ideologue (he's a nut; we ought to rename him "Nut Casey").


I reserve pessimism and optimism on a case-by-case scenario. That is, I'm not optimisitic or pessimisitic without good reason to be in the first place, depending on what I'm dealing with. In this case? I tend to see it both ways.

On the downside, we *do* have flaws. I don't care what you choose, this is simply a reality that can't be denied. However, for all our flaws, I believe we are good enough to handle the great power/responsibility that comes with Sync.

The latter is more why I choose Sync at all. If it were only about the issue of conflict, I'd choose differently (beside the point).

Modifié par HYR 2.0, 15 mai 2013 - 04:53 .

[SpamBot2000]

Quickly scrolling through this page, a comment caught my eye. Ieldra was saying that "there is evidence that the Reapers are mind-controlled by the Catalyst" and that they don't have the choice in whether to support the Cycle.

But is that really what the last minutes of ME3 suggest? Why would we assume that there are Reapers independent of the Catalyst entity? It IS the Reapers. They are not it's "slaves", they are a part of it. It personally Reaped the Galaxy some 50,000 times, and there are no "preserved" species to "liberate". The very thought that the liquidation of all those species was their "preservation" is offensive. Those species most likely consisted of discrete individuals, and even if (and that's a big-ass freaking if) there's some "collective consciousness" in the killbot, that was not the nature of the civilization. Frankenstein's monster is not an accurate reflection of the character of the people whose body parts it was stitched out of. And equating the Reapers with that status is still a reach.

Modifié par SpamBot2000, 15 mai 2013 - 08:02 .