Data’s awareness of his own construction varies as befits the plot. My point was that TNG often asked a lot of questions about ethics and cognition and personhood and identity. Data himself talks about the mysterious questions of human experience all the bloody time.
In a world where Data exists, significant headway has been made on those questions already.
This is a special case of a general property of the Star Trek universe: it exhibits a very low permeability to new information. Breakthroughs and discoveries occur all over the place that have only local effects. I’ve generally assumed that there’s some as-yet-unrevealed Q-like entity that intervenes regularly to avoid too many changes in the social fabric in a given period of time.
Data’s awareness of his own construction varies as befits the plot. My point was that TNG often asked a lot of questions about ethics and cognition and personhood and identity. Data himself talks about the mysterious questions of human experience all the bloody time.
In a world where Data exists, significant headway has been made on those questions already.
This is a special case of a general property of the Star Trek universe: it exhibits a very low permeability to new information. Breakthroughs and discoveries occur all over the place that have only local effects.
I’ve generally assumed that there’s some as-yet-unrevealed Q-like entity that intervenes regularly to avoid too many changes in the social fabric in a given period of time.
The Federation government being deeply corrupt would also explain a lot.