Souplex said:
Hurr Durr Derp said:
Souplex said:
With self-awareness comes a soul.
Does it? That's a pretty shaky foundation to give a robot rights. Especially since individual Geth are barely sapient, and they only gain in intelligence and understanding when there's a lot of them together (like in Legion's case; many geth, one body). You can't treat them like you'd treat humans because their 'individual' forms as seen by humans are meaningless. Legion himself claims that treating Geth like any other race would be racist, since the Geth
aren't like any other race.In fact, that just made me think of an awesome way to combat the Geth: Discrupt their communications. If they can no longer communicate with each other, they'll revert to their basic routines and will be relatively easy to take out.
And as I said before, if my computer kicked me out of my house for whatever reason, I sure as hell wouldn't let it get away with that.
Individual brain cells are barely sapient, but network them together and you get a brain.
Individual brain cells aren't
barely sapient, they're not sapient at all. Even if you'd treat the Geth collective as one huge organism, the comparison to a Human brain is just wrong. A collection of computers working in tandem to create a supercomputer doesn't make the individual computers worthless, but remove a brain cell from the brain and it won't survive.
Individual Geth are relatively simple, but still more or less self-sufficient entities. They don't have any higher mental functions until you put a lot of them together. So to put it crudely, you've got a collection of toasters that become smart when you put enough of them in the same room. Do those toasters have a 'soul'? Probably not, since the Geth didn't become self-aware until they started interfacing with each other on a large scale. If that's the case, how many do you need to recognize them as a mentally capable entity? Say if it's a hundred, then what does that mean for a room with 99 toasters? What about 50? What if you have a room with 100 toasters, and one leaves? etc. You just can't judge the Geth on the same basis you'd judge a Human or a Quarian or any living being, because they're fundamentally different.
Either way, giving an artificial construction rights as a sentient, living species on the grounds that it has a 'soul' is not a position that can be defended, in my opinion. They have a certain intelligence, certainly. But intelligence doesn't imply a soul. How can you use the 'soul' as an argument anyway, if there isn't even any proof that there is such a thing as a soul, let along any solid idea of what exactly makes anything have a soul. And even if you did conclude that the Geth have a soul, that doesn't mean much. Many animals have emotions, dreams, and are (to a certain degree) aware of their own existence, so it'd be logical that they too have a soul. Does that mean they should be treated the same way as humans? Does that mean your dog should be allowed to take over your house and murder you if you don't leave? I don't think so.
Looking at the facts, the Quarians built the Geth, so they own them. It's not slavery since they were just simple robots at the time. When they found out their machines might potentially be dangerous, they wisely decided to shut them down (the same way a car can get recalled if it turns out to be unsafe). The Geth treated this completely rational behavior as an act of aggression. This makes sense from their perspective, but not from the Quarians' perspective. It'd be like your computer murdering you because you tried to turn it off.
I'm not saying the Geth are wrong, because their actions are perfectly understandable from their perspective. I'm just saying the perspective is heavily skewed by assuming they're the same as any of the other sentient species in Mass Effect, which simply isn't true. I had thought that point to be made sufficiently clear on Legion's loyalty mission.
