[Renall]

Actually, you can't verify the event happened, even if you're standing in the shattered crater on an island you know for a fact to be Rokkenjima.

Can you prove a person who left no trace of his or her existence ever actually existed? Photographs can be faked. Memories can be mistaken. People can lie.

So do you choose to doubt or choose to believe? I wonder if, philosophically, it actually makes any particular difference. Whether it is more rational to believe or doubt information is going to be based solely on whether most information is true or false. Most people would argue that the overwhelming majority of information is true and therefore shouldn't be doubted, while cynics or believers in an illusory reality would believe most, if not all information is false.

Of course we run up against another wrinkle, which is that most information may be true but most information that comes from people is false. In other words, you can believe Rokkenjima existed by visiting the place, but you can't necessarily believe everyone the message bottle says was present on the island that day actually was because people are deceptive by nature. Unless of course you believe they aren't.

Ultimately, however, the question is impossible to resolve, because you have to start trusting something somewhere in order to form a foundation for trusting anything, and if you choose to doubt everything as false your position, while technically consistent, is meaningless.

So the question becomes, what degree of truth, based on trustworthy information, is satisfactory? With respect to Prime, we have no idea, because almost no information is available and practically all of it comes from corruptible sources. The best physical evidence seen is what Ange is able to gather in ep4. And as I've said in the past, I don't even know if I buy the validity of Maria's diary either.

Originally Posted by haguruma

And that is what EP8 keeps on telling us, doesn't it?
Isn't it better to accept the best possible event of what happened in the past over the worst? I'm not saying that I agree on all levels of what the implications of such a worldview would be. But the basic idea of "we shouldn't always think the worst" is not that bad.
It's the same as with the Kinzô catbox. You can condemn him for the sins he's done or you can use the implications made and create a Kinzô who was conflicting but loving.

This is interesting, and I've been tinkering with it (to little effect, unfortunately, as I lack a lot of time to write), but maybe not?

Let's look at it this way: In the absence of knowledge of the Truth, is it better to assume the best or the worst? This kind of goes back to what I was previously talking about (sort of) regarding doubting versus believing. Although it's a bit different in that it's more of a moral question than an ontological one.

The people on Rokkenjima are dead (we presume; if nothing else they want to be seen that way by everyone). Therefore nothing we can say or do actually changes the external facts. Nobody can be arrested and dead people can't be offended by our characterization of them. This is true even of the people affected directly; Nanjo's son, for example, is no better off assuming the best or assuming the worst about his father's behavior simply because he can't know and therefore could always doubt in one direction or the other that his conclusion is acceptable and correct. Nagging doubt and slim hope may as well be the same to the extent they imbalance us from the comfort of certainty.

That presence of uncertainty means any fact can be willfully interpreted by any individual, whether positively or negatively. One can believe Kinzo was a doting grandfather or a reclusive unpleasant rapist. It doesn't change (1) what Kinzo actually was, (2) what we actually can say we know about what Kinzo actually was.

Common decency might tell us to assume the best because we'd want other people to think of us pleasantly in the same situation. But it's possible, based on facts we cannot know, that at least one of these people was a murderer! Common decency shouldn't extend so far as to view a criminal in the most positive light possible, to the extent it erases and denies their crime. It's possible there was no crime, but if there was, whitewashing it is wrong.

Really, the only morally defensible position if faced with the inability to learn any definitive information is to shrug and say "I don't know." Assuming the best about the individuals who died could be as much of a disservice to them as assuming the worst. If we can know the Truth, we should strive to find it. If we cannot, it's probably arrogant and erroneous to presume the answer was either the absolute best possible or the absolute worst possible. That's simply implausible.

Originally Posted by LyricalAura

Did Kasumi ever personally see Ange before she got to Rokkenjima? In the Yukari ending, maybe Amakusa just led her on a wild goose chase while pretending to be with Ange and then wiped out her entire group once they'd been lured to the island.

She was clearly killed by the Smoke Monster. Rokkenjima was a secret Dharma Institute facility and Kinzo had to keep resetting the clock every day or the laboratories underneath the island would explode. He passed this task to Yasu, but something prevented her from making her daily reset on Oct. 5 1986.