In 1986, William Shatner appeared on SNL.
"Before I answer anymore questions, there's something I wanted to say. I, uh, having received all your letters
over the years and I've spoken to many of you. And some of you have traveled hundreds of miles to be here.
I'd just like to say, get a life, will you? People?
I mean for crying out loud, it's just a TV show!"
Even though it was a comedy sketch, it reflected his true feelings at the time.
In later years he would come to better understand the fans and the franchise.
He later wrote in his book, also called 'Get a Life', quote, "That now-infamous sketch,
was for me, at that time, equal parts comedy and catharsis….
I bought into the Trekkie stereotypes.
In a nutshell, I was a dope."
Hey you fancy nerds!
I'm Jay and today we're going back to the final frontier with a broad overview of
some of the most interesting things Star Trek can teach us.
Is it more than just a TV Show? Let's find out. Engage!
Let's begin with a not so simple question.
Does Star Trek have an ideology?
What I mean by that is, does it present thoughts, notions, and concepts that are meant to form
the basis of economic and political theories?
And if so, does it aim to spread or advocate for those theories?
Well, I've stated before that Gene Roddenberry had an agenda.
He stated as much.
"Because it speaks to some basic needs that there is a tomorrow. It's not all gonna be over with a big flash and a bomb. "
"That the human race is improving."
He was a humanist who believed in cosmopolitanism and believed that dogmatism could be a dangerous
thing when taken to the extreme.
Before we get started, let's briefly explore a few of these ideas and try to put Star Trek
into context by exploring the mindset of it's creator.
Let's start with Cosmopolitanism.
At its core, this is the idea that all human beings are (or should be) citizens in a single
community.
There are many differing versions of cosmopolitanism and each envisions the community in different
ways.
Star Trek shows us a future where people from all cultures, civilizations, and even planets
can agree on a shared set of values and unite together.
It manifests this early on in the form of a bridge crew that appears to have been
assembled without any regard to race, sex or nationality and it's worth noting that
this isn't presented as a plot point.
There's no episode where the captain has to argue the merits of hiring a woman or defend
the race of a crew member.
It's simply never questioned.
Everyone in the Federation is a member of the community and anyone with shared values
can join.
Next on the list, we have humanism.
Now, we touched on this topic in our discussion of ethics and the prime directive.
In short, Humanism came about in the Renaissance era and had a major influence on the founding
of the United States.
As a system of thought, Humanism attaches importance to humanity as opposed to supernatural
or divine beings and emphasizes a rational evidenced based approach to solving humanity's
problems.
So last but not least, we come to dogmatism, defined as a set of principles presented as
incontrovertibly true where little to no recourse exists to present evidence to the contrary.
Now, unlike cosmopolitanism and humanism, Star Trek isn't advocating for dogma.
Instead, Star Trek draws a line...
"The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!"
It says that extreme dogma can be dangerous and
gives us numerous examples of theistic, political, and militaristic dogmatism, both
within and outside the Federation.
Star Trek makes the case that anyone can fall victim to extremism so nothing should ever above
scrutiny.
So long as one's arguments are based in evidence, we should hear them out.
In the somewhat lackluster second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation, we find an
outstanding episode entitled "The Measure of a Man".
In just over 45 minutes the audience is asked to question exactly what it means to be sentient
and through that lens we explore not just the human condition but also philosophy and
civil rights.
In his 2016 video "The Trouble with Transporters" CGP Grey discusses how the transporter works
and the frightening repercussions that come as a direct result of using this method of
travel.
In short, although it's often described as taking your body apart and moving it to
a new destination for reassembly, this can't be how the transporter works because of cases
where a person was copied or merged with another person.
What this means is that the transporter actually breaks you down and then builds another you
at the destination.
That kinda sounds like being killed and replaced by a copy though… doesn't it?
There's not enough matter in your body to make two of you, the transporter is turning
energy to matter and matter to energy.
Is the you that arrived at the planet the same you that beamed down?
It seems so, the person who arrives on the planet is exactly like you right down to the
atoms and quarks but nevertheless there sits poor Riker, arguing with the other Riker about
which one is the real deal.
Sadly, the real Riker seems long dead, he was disassembled by the transporter, his matter
was turned into energy the first time he ever used it, long before this freak accident.
The two Rikers created in this rare transporter malfunction are both copies of a copy, many
times over.
So neither Riker is the original and their paths diverged the moment they were beamed
into existence.
Maybe, they were exactly the same for a moment, but after being created these Rikers clearly
became two individuals.
That bring us to King Theseus, alleged founder of Athens and the subject of a million nerd
arguments.
The story goes like this, the citizens of Athens dedicated a ship to Theseus and over
the course of hundreds of years, as the ship was repaired, pieces of the ship were replaced.
If you remove one rotten plank and replace it, then most people would agree that it's
still the same ship, but what happens after you've replaced every single piece with an
identical replacement.
Is it still the ship of Theseus?
You are the ship and the very nature of your existence is change.
Your body, including your brain, loses and gains quarks, atoms, molecules and cells.
If you are made of entirely different matter than you were seven years ago, are you a different
person?
Over that amount of time, even your collection of memories, opinions and personality traits
have changed.
If you're a different person than you were at age seven, at what point did you stop being
that you and become this you?
Is the real you, your consciousness or soul, for lack of a better word, entirely contained
in the biological structure of your brain?
Or is there some part of you that can't be copied?
This question is known as The Duplicates Paradox.
Let's say your brain was frozen, later on it's scanned down the quark and used to
make a new brain.
Would that new brain contain your consciousness?
What if they made two copies?
Can two identical copies of you both be you?
Do they stop being you once they each form their own separate new memories that you didn't
have?
If so, are they sentient?
Well, if we're looking to judge who is or is not a sentient being then we should circle
back to "The Measure of a Man".
In the episode were given three criteria: intelligence, self-awareness and consciousness.
Let's begin with intelligence.
Can you acquire knowledge and skills and then apply them?
Congratulations, you are intelligent.
How intelligent, well that's not relevant to the discussion but I'm sure you're
great. I'm sure you're great...
Next, self-awareness: are you aware of your motives, feelings and desires?
Congratulations again!
You're self-aware.
Just one more hurdle to jump, consciousness.
Are you awake and aware of your surroundings?
Well, look at all you fancy sentient nerds!
Good for you.
Now, here's the problem.
You can easily judge these things in yourself, but can you tell the difference between a
robot that's built to emulate sentience and one that's actually sentient?
What about people 2000 years from now dealing with much more advanced technology?
To quote CGP Grey directly, "Did we not contain conscious brains ourselves, how would we know that other brains are conscious?
Truth be told, you can really only know that *you* are conscious... -- and it seems polite to give other people the benefit of the doubt.
But were a computer to claim that it was conscious, how would you know?
Back in 1965, Gordon Moore predicted, from careful observation, that computing would
exponentially and dramatically increase in power with a corresponding dip in cost.
This was called Moore's Law and it predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated
circuit doubles every two years and while we've recently slowed to about two and a
half years, according to Intel, this is still a breakneck pace when compared to other Industries.
Computer systems are now able to perform tasks that once required human intelligence.
Software bots can emulate visual perception to sort images, recognize and transcribe speech,
make decisions based on input, learn new behaviors and more.
This is artificial intelligence or AI and we briefly touched on it earlier in this video.
What we have today is known as weak or narrow AI.
This type of artificial intelligence already impacts your daily life.
You use it every time you ask Alexa to make a fart noise, tell Cortana to shut up and
uninstall itself or ask Siri to ask Google to translate something into another language.
Narrow AI is only concerned with doing one task (and doing it well).
It has no genuine intelligence, self-awareness or consciousness.
Any type of AI you interact with today, falls into this category.
An artificial general intelligence would be an AI that can successfully perform any given
intellectual task that a human being can perform.
It is essentially a simulation of one human person. * singing * That's a human person!
As Kyle Sullivan points out in Trekspertise's episode on Artificial Intelligence, Data was
designed to be a simulation of one human and, as a result, his development seems to be capped
at the general AI level.
He's sometimes more advanced than human beings, but only when it comes to things like
physical strength or computational power and these are traits that we see in other sentient
beings in the Star Trek multiverse.
He also comes up short in areas like emotional development or, oddly enough, the ability
to whistle.
However, he makes progress on these fronts and grows over the course of the Trek timeline,
showing that he does have the capacity to fully emulate one human being.
Unlike narrow AI, Data does indeed have genuine intelligence and seems to be perfectly self-aware.
As a result, consciousness is the determining factor of Data's status as a sentient being.
Again, we can really only know, for sure, that's we're conscious but Star Trek makes
the case that Data deserves the same benefit of the doubt that we give to other human beings,
and as a result, the same freedoms.
Most of these things hold true for The Doctor as well, the hologramatric life form featured
in Star Trek Voyager.
The Doctor, as a hologram, is closer to today's software based AI than Data.
Still, he is roughly equivalent to one human person * singing * That's a human person!
seems just as intelligent, self-aware and conscious as Data.
The difference, however, is that The Doctor can rewrite his own code while Data only seems
to be able to add to his software in the form of subroutines.
This gives The Doctor the theoretical ability to become what's called an artificial superintelligence…
but that is a topic for next time.
So Star Trek is indeed "just a TV show".
That doesn't mean that it has nothing worthwhile to add to the ongoing discourse within our
society.
While we all flurry about tending to family, work, school and other matters of importance,
the need to settle down and unwind is ever-present.
If we can be entertained while simultaneously pondering many of the great philosophical
and ethical questions of our time, then I say that's a step in the right direction.
Next time, we'll finish up our two part video on The Life and Death of Superman by
exploring the philosophy and symbolism behind the character so ring the bell and you'll
be notified.
In the meantime, I'll be back on Comicstorian this week with another list of evil doppelgangers!
Last week I did 5 Evil Supermen!
Again, link in the description below.
And keep in mind, guys, comics, Star Trek, Star Wars, Harry Potter or whatever you love: these things aren't
just totally normal, they're valuable.
They shape how we see the world and they shape our lives.
If we dig a little deeper, we just might find something profound.
I've been Jay and I'll see you guys next time!
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