Seival wrote...
"If the essence of life is information carried in DNA, then society and civilization are just colossal memory systems and a metropolis like this one, simply a sprawling external memory."
This idea from the GITS: Innocence... it's genius. And recently I imagined - what if the Catalyst would say something like that?...
...Well, actually it said something like that, but differently. A Reaper is not just a harvester made of harvested lives. It is also a storage of colossal memory systems. Contained essence of life... in other words - preserved life. This means the Catalyst preserved life in each Cycle in two ways: made sure the new life will flourish, and the harvested lives were not wasted.
To be harvested by the Reapers is not to be killed.
The essence of Harvested people is still alive, preserved in the Reaper form.
Killing a Reaper is a crime. Crime equal to the genocide. And total disrespect of the ones who came before us.
Let's examine that statement shall we? First, using your logic, the Holocaust never cost a single life because the DNA was stored in smoke and dirt. The deaths arose because the storage systems were inefficient. Do you begin to see the flaws in your argument? You also neglect to examine the case of the Protheans.
The Protheans could not be made into Reaper form and were permanently changed by the Reapers down to their DNA and turned into the Collectors. As Mordin pointed out they had no digestive system, they had no culture or art, and the genetic modifications, to the extent that entire chromosomes were omitted, were nothing more than a final insult to the remnants of a lost race.
DNA is the essence of an organism. It can hold staggering amounts of data, but that data is used to create you. It holds all of the information on proteins and how they should be formed and recognized, it specifies your phenotype, and ultimately it is your unique blueprint and this is why it is your essence. Everything that you are physically, you owe to your DNA. Personality is different.
Let us assume that there is no such thing as a soul for the sake of argument. You assert that there is a "genetic memory." While this has been bandied about in science fiction for decades, there has never been any proof of such a thing aside from the term used to describe the process of homeostasis within the organism. Therefore, that which resides in the mind is destroyed when the mind ceases to function. As such, the mind is similar to computer RAM in that it is volatile. When life (power) recedes, all content (stored data) is lost forever. This is because there is no genetic memory (a hard drive in other words) with which to store it.
Now let us introduce the soul into the argument. If a soul exists, then it would not be directly tied to the organic platform. In other words, it would be independent of the physical body and by definition, this includes the DNA. The physical body is destroyed, the soul is released, and what the Reapers claim as a result of their slaughter is only inert ingredients. If memory exists, it exists only in the released soul in the form of energy. Therefore your argument boils down to belief. However, even your belief is not strong.
Somehow I doubt that you would volunteer to be used to experiment on the concepts you support. In other words, if a scientist wanted to take you and render you down to your base DNA for eternal preservation, you would object. This is because you know that you will cease to exist despite the fact that your DNA, your blueprint, would still exist. As the map is not the territory, the blueprint is not the structure. This fact alone utterly destroys your argument.
If the can contains anything of the civilization it has consumed, it is a library of information only stored in a new being. The essence of the people has been destroyed and no spurious arguments about an imagined genetic memory can change that. We all like to fantasize, membership on the BSN proves that beyond doubt, but I prefer a little reality with my fantasy and so I reject your "Reapers are the good guys" argument because it is based purely on fantasy and belief and even your belief is tepid.
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