While watching the series I always get the feeling that the Doctor acts to much like a real human being, with feelings etc. You can basically not distinguish him from a human being. I find this rather disappointing to the character. When comparing with Data on TNG who is the artificial lifeform there, I found that the portrayal of the latter was more believable and realistic. Therefore I find the skills of the actor performing Data superior than that of the playing the Doctor. What do you think? Was the Doctor performed as being "too human"?
The difference between Data and the EMH is that Data was programmed without emotions, whilst the EMH was
how can you say that? Data was designed to be a life form. The doctor was designed to be a beast of burden tool. What idiot designs a hammer that can feel pain and beg for mercy?
the doctor was programmed with a hell of a lot of personality subroutines, which would make him seem human. plus he was desinged decades after data.
The Doctor is designed to mimic a human being exactly, its never really proven uncategorically that the Doctor is fully sentient like Data.
It was never proven that Data was sentient. You can say that the Doctor felt compelled to leave the ship and become an opera star, and Kathryn let him because he is a real person, but I believe that that scenario was plugged into the Doctors memories because it was less painful to deal was a little rejection than cope with the reaization that he is a slave. Although if he can feel shame and oppression, doesn't that make him a person? Unless he's just programmed to play out a series of scenarios to entertain the crew. And if anything out of the Doctors mouth is a preset story, why would he only use each "story" once? 150 crew. The Doctor is there to make sure they all don't go space crazy.
They're not space stories, he's adaptable, but it's still basically all mimicing. I don't really know if a hologram like the EMH could genuinely feel and be sentient.
It can't, without being a massive human rights violation. We see how holograms work in Worst Case Scenario. When you reset the program, it starts over trying to preform the same functions while observant of the terrain and reacting to obstructions sensibly... We also see Zimmerman asking for Bashir to unload his own personal life history to fuel up the LMH with a massive stock of pageantry to keep deep space missions titillated. The real test of this is how he behaved if after Swarm when they reset/bound his program... but then Janeway and ransom could have, but they didn't, traded stories about how their respective EMH's sentience emerged.
Maybe The Doctor was the only human on-board 'voyager', and the entire crew / ship / story was an elaborate holodeck program because The Doctor was actually crazy and needed to be isolated away from real humans... M
Why complain that one hologram seems too human when the holodecks are full of holograms that are a helluva lot more human seeming than Data ever was. The real question to ask is why data couldn't write his own personality subroutines and implant himself with a holoprogram's human qualities.
In the pilot he was teaching himself to sneeze. Although that thing where he was upgraded to dream was just whacky.
Data and the EMH's thinking are both based on programming, right? The Doctor started becoming much more human when they started expanding his subroutines. In the Caretaker pilot, he seems much less human.
Picard gave three criterions of sentience: 1. ability to learn and adapt, 2. a being's awareness of the situation around it/him/her and a comprehension of it, and finally 3. A personality of sorts no matter how rudimentary. Doctor definitely covers 1, 2 and 3. You could all argue it's just good programming, but you could make the same point towards Data.
Well the TNG episode when dealing with the questionwas Data a lifeform and not property mentioned three criteria (well Maddox did at least) 1.>Intelligence 2.>Self-Awarness 3.>Consiousness
That's bunk. I did a paper on Descartes, and the only true proof of being real I could discern is "paranoia". They say that you can't prove that anything is real because someone could be fucking with you, but to suspect that an evil genius, a demon or god is fucking with you is the proof of a highly cultivated and pronounced imagination that can bring substance to unintelligible bunk like the air we breath and the people we think are our friends ain't sleeping with our wives and husbands laughing their asses off.
Data was made sentient. He grew, learned from scratch and chose his own path. The EMH was prgrammed to be a doctor and mimic human characteristics from the get-go. They enabled his ability to learn and adapt without limit. From the earliest of character notes in "A Vision of the Future: The Making of Star Trek Voyager", the Doc was supposed to be based on whatever it was that made Next Gen's Moriaty ("Elementry, Dear Data", "Ship in a Bottle") sentient, which Starfleet had since learned to duplicate. The consequences of an engineered, sentient labour class was only briefly touched upon inthe series, at the end of "Author, Author" when we see the poor MK-1 EMH's being used as miners.