What happens if you Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V on the Doctor’s data files? Do you duplicate a sentient being?
In “Virtuoso”, Tom & Harry try to reproduce the Doctor but they’re basically trying to make him from scratch, so I don’t think their failure is relevant.
At the end of “Author, Author” we see many repurposed EMH Mk1s working as miners:
…and they seem to be self-aware, so I guess we have to assume that it’s technically feasible.
But then what happens if you Ctrl+Z?
Basically, yeah, if you include all of their memories and experiences. The EMHs in the dilithium mines were EMH copies but weren’t The Doctor. I’ve also wondered if they were sentient or just good facsimiles. Part of The Doctor’s story arc was growing beyond his original EMH programming (plus B’Elanna expanding his matrix in some pretty hacky ways). So that leads me to believe that they weren’t sentient, though they had the potential to become so.
Anyway…
That said, the Doctor from “Living Witness” was, if I recall, the Backup EMH and had all of the The Doctor’s memories and was fully sentient as a result.
Essentially it would be the Will / Thomas Riker transporter accident equivalent for holographic beings.
But then what happens if you Ctrl+Z?
VOY S5E11: Latent Image
they gave the convoluted explanation that emh doctor was more advanced than the ones in the mines and its hard to replicate his hologram programming.
Violence is what happens.
And given the immense file size, the ship’s computer will probably draw all power from life support.
multiple epsiodes where he was the only one so it made snse. antimatter/fusion in thier subsystems produces alot more energy then you can use anyway.
Love how barclay turns right back to the Doctor in utter shock. Makes it look like the Doc was gentler than with paris xD
Short answer, “yes” with an “if.” Long answer, “no” with a “but.”
This just makes me think of the transporter issue.
As far as I can work it out, either transporters are death machines and Star Trek is a secret dystopia, or consciousness has a universal root so it doesn’t actually matter. Like, either the observer changes and just has the same configuration of thoughts and memories, or the observer is the same regardless and the only difference between individuals is their thoughts and memories.
It doesn’t seem like the people in Star Trek know this with any certainty, though, one way or the other.
transporters are death machines and Star Trek is a secret dystopia
If you are killed quickly enough, it stops meaning anything subjectively…
Enterprise tries to go there are few times, and show how people just become desensitized and completely stop caring about it. But they never get fully into the point. (Do they get fully into any point?)
They did though, they didn’t dwell on it but the transporter inventor had some line about the idea of it being a different person who comes out the other side being nonsense.
I don’t have the episode on hand right now to get the exact quote.
I could definitely see people just taking it for granted that it’s fine due to the difficulty of pinning down one particular source of consciousness versus another. It isn’t obvious and everyone who goes through the transporter claims to feel fine, so unless they’re thinking a lot about their own consciousness why question it? Endless killing by convenience and ignorance.
Or, you know, not. Hard to say, though.
Well, no. Subjectively either the observer is continuous or it isn’t. Either you walk in one end and walk out the other continuing to perceive your body and the world around you, or you’re replaced by a different perceiving entity with the same memories.
Certainly the speed at which your body is deconstructed might have an effect on the pain and horror of it all, but in terms of your consciousness remaining afterward it kind of either does or doesn’t. If some other consciousness is looking through your eyes because you own has been extinguished, it’s not going to do you much good if it just happened fast enough that it doesn’t have to grapple with the memory of disintegration.
As far as I can work it out, either transporters are death machines and Star Trek is a secret dystopia
- Badmirals and crooked captains
- Section 31
- The Janeway
I don’t remember the details, but they definitely mentioned that you can’t just copy the doctor. The real reason is, of course, so that there’s some actual tension when the doctor gets sent off the ship and to avoid having to deal with the ethical and philosophical issues that arise from that (it’s also probably just the writer of an episode shooting from the hip as usual), but if I’m allowed to switch over to my thick-framed glasses and come up with a plausible in-universe reason:
Perhaps in order to properly reproduce human-like intelligence, you need to take advantage of quantum phenomena, so the state of the doctor’s program is in a quantum state. And since it’s not possible to perfectly copy a quantum state without destroying the original (Nebula), even with a Heisenberg compensator that works very well, any movement of the state of the doctor from one device to another would have to be a “transfer” and not a “copy”.
However, even if the state of the program is in a quantum state, the program itself may not be. In present day attempts at quantum computing, the program itself is still written in plain old text. If that’s the case, it would be possible to create copies of the doctor in their initial state, without any memories or experiences, which explains the miners and the EMH on the Enterprise-E.
As for undo, it may be possible to undo removing something from the state of the program if the data doesn’t actually get destroyed but the program is just blocked from accessing it. Similar to how if you delete a file from a drive, it doesn’t actually the destroy the file, it just removes the entry from the file system, and if you’re fast enough you can often still restore the file.
Ctrl-Z restores the previous state, which I think they’ve shown before.
Well, right, so if you Ctrl+Z after Ctrl+V it undoes the paste command, so in this context you just murdered a sentient being.
I specifically told the computer to make no mistakes.
Sapient being. I don’t know if he’s also sentient, but what he is is sapient.
It’s one of the “just bugs me” aspects of Trek in general, but they generally don’t make a distinction between sentience and sapience and use them interchangeably.
I know, it’s a general issue in (not-hard) science-fiction and I’ll point it out whenever I can. Like the misuse of “(just a) theory” instead of “hypothesis”, especially by characters who should know better.
Fighting the good fight for all us sinners
I#ll compare the Doc with a game. It should be possible to duplicate the project folder and recieve two identical copies. If you build the game, from either, you will recieve two identical builds. Over their life, they will accumulate individual experiences and become different people. Depending on how this data is retained within the EMH, it may be possible. But the doctor is liekly more complex than a puny game project file. I am not saying AI is sentient, but if you promted an LLM with the identical promt on two seperate new accounts, are you going to recieve the identical output? I honestly expect that the LLM’s answers will be somewhat different from each other.
There’s stuff about holograms being special and not easily copyable at least for the advanced memory state.
