Data from Star Trek doesn’t quite give me the lurching despair I was thinking of when I wrote the original post, but he does make me do a mental double-take whenever a physical embodiment of human understanding of cognition sits there wondering about esoteric aspects of human behaviour that were mysterious to sci-fi screenwriters in the early 1990s.
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 from Star Trek doesn’t quite give me the lurching despair I was thinking of when I wrote the original post, but he does make me do a mental double-take whenever a physical embodiment of human understanding of cognition sits there wondering about esoteric aspects of human behaviour that were mysterious to sci-fi screenwriters in the early 1990s.
To be fair, he didn’t actually have access to Soong’s design notes.
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.