Holodeck interactions? How realistic would they really be?

Like Issac Newton in Data's card game, being irritated at being made to play a card game.

 

I wonder if "the willing suspension of belief" comes into play? Because excepting that you're a fool, you are intellectually aware that you're in a holodeck/suite.

What happens between a person and their seedless watermelon in the privacy of the bedroom is no ones business.

That would depend on whether the historical figure was a "jerk" or a kind gentle person in historical times.

 

Some of them might be kind to you, but they'd be kind in the cordial manner, not in the manner of opening up and making you their apprentice. Also they'd have period accurate prejudices.

 

That's a good point. So people from the deep south would be racist as all hell if recreated in that historical setting.

 

So a Black from the Antebellum south would automatically be "racist as hell?" Of course not, a random white from the same time period, again not a given. Some of the population yes, but certainly not all.

 

I meant historical white people from the south, those that had notorious reputations, that is. If they were to be accurate the computer would have to include their prejudices..

 

Northerners from before the civil war were pretty racist in general too, just fewer of them were in favor of slavery.

When you read about it in school, it seems like everybody in the north was a modern progressive who believed completely in equality and everybody in the south was slave-loving racist. This just isn't accurate. Even most of the Abolitionists who believed in equal rights didn't really believe the races were equal, and most of the people in the south were were strongly supporting slavery were the rich plantation owners whose fortunes depended on it.

But case and point, when you replicate a historical figure, you want a version of the historical figure who has modern values and thinks you're really cool. Not the realistic version of the historical figure.

 

Neither of those would be a requirement on my part, maybe yours? I would wanted them to be able to converse in a language I'm knowledgeable in, so that at least would be "unrealistic."

Aristotle and Moses never spoke Spanish or English.

I would also want them to be willing to interact with me, which wouldn't be a given.

Would Elvis even be in the mood to sing to me?

 

I was speaking in the statistical sense, not the universal sense. If I say 'Vulcans are logical' obviously I don't mean the ones who appeared on DS9. Janeway recreated Leonardo Davinci in exactly that way. I'd say 98% of people would prefer that to a realistic recreation, but there is a large overlap between the other 2% and the segment of the population that would post on TrekBBS.

I'm not sure I'd want either, TBH. It might be fun to recreate historical figures to interact with each other and watch how it goes down, but not to interact with me.

I think a lot of people who are into sports would do it to watch dream matchups, like Sisko did that one time. They might put Michael Jordan against Lebron James in their primes, or things like that.

 

I mentioned Aristotle, while there are drawings we don't (and the computer wouldn't) actually know what he looks like, certain wouldn't know the sound of his real voice, or the way he moved. What would be in front of you is a interpretation based on store information.

If you woke in the 24th century and ask the holodeck to speak to your grandfather, the computer would likely be unable to do it, unless you grandfather was a person of note. There wouldn't be enough information.

Holodeck characters (with exceptions) are just the ship's computer. When you talk, or dance, or have sex with a hologram, you're really doing these things with the ship's computer.

If you have a holodeck party with twenty holograms present, all twenty are puppets of the one computer, they're not separate entities.

 

Except for Moriarty....

For some reason the computer created a living sentient persona when it made him.

 

I could imagine crewman lining up, waiting for their turn in the holodeck. The area around the holodeck would be the equivalent of a red light district.

I wonder if the holodeck was self cleaning and self sanitizing like some public restrooms. Otherwise the floor of the holodeck would be icky.

The holodeck must have been one incredible machine, if it was able to create a sentient being. It might have been too good for its own good.

Did Picard install a fail safe program into the holodeck after the Moriarty incident? Some program that would prevent a holodeck created entity from destroying or causing havoc to the ship.

 

No. They never address the safety issues after this in either TNG or any other series.

 

Obviously Picard didn't. Otherwise Barclay wouldn't have been able to go nuts and build that neural interface chair and take over the ship.

 

I don't remember that episode.