I just watched Measure of a Man, they rule Data has the right to choose. But in Voyager the EMH gets relegated to forced servitude. Why? Doesn’t that violate precedent?
I just watched Measure of a Man, they rule Data has the right to choose. But in Voyager the EMH gets relegated to forced servitude. Why? Doesn’t that violate precedent?
My point is that those are our arguments. My head cannon is that, just like Star Trek engineers know how to build a phaser (and we do not), and understand warp theory, Star Trek scientists also know how to distinguish true artificial intelligence, with an internal dialog and self-awareness from simulated intelligence.
I’m saying that I don’t think it’s a knowable thing, because I don’t think it’s a digital state. Case in point: I feel like I know a bit more than average about the workings of the human mind at a biological level, but you could place me next to the world’s greatest neurologist, a philosopher, a Scientologist (who believes… whatever it is that they believe about the way the mind works), and a non-English speaker, who has been expressly taught how to say the words in the correct order without knowing what they’re saying, and we could all profess our own existence. We would all be saying the same words, but meaning something completely different in our own minds. A similar example could be made using people with mental illness, or neurodivergence, but you start stumbling into really dark moral places really fast doing that.