• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Data

Could data download his Brain into a storage device as there is a episode of the next generation were someone dose just that so why couldn’t data do it and any time he is injured just download his brain into Lorre’s body :shrug:
 
You mean after Data killed Lore? Presumably Lore was not in the best shape for uploading after that, and Data would've been uploading himself into a deeply flawed, unstable and villainous brain.
 
Picard S1 addresses this, after a fashion. Without a constant quantum simulated environment, an uploaded Data is simply information and his "essence" would be lost. But even that simulation couldn't be re-downloaded to a new android.
 
If Data had downloaded himself into Lore, it's possible that the design flaw that made Lore go bad would affect Data as well. Just as downloading himself into B4 gave us a very imperfect vessel for Data's memories.

In "The Autobiography of Jean Luc Picard", a work rendered non-canonical by the "Picard" series, that is how they bring Data back. He downloads his memories into B4, and later on Q (to honor his "professor of the humanities") renders his new body able to handle them. Thus, Data is restored.

However, because Brent Spiner was aging, it was increasingly problematic for him to be the essentially ageless Data. Better to let him play Soong's ancestors or descendants, who can be his actual age.
 
Any work of written fiction is potentially canon, until events happen in the actual series that either affirm or debunk it.

cdc.jpg
 
Picard S1 addresses this, after a fashion. Without a constant quantum simulated environment, an uploaded Data is simply information and his "essence" would be lost. But even that simulation couldn't be re-downloaded to a new android.

It was actually addressed in "The Measure of a Man". Where Data had said that they would be downloading the events but non of the flavor of it would transfer over.

Any work of written fiction is potentially canon, until events happen in the actual series that either affirm or debunk it.

Never has been how it has worked where Trek is concerned. Any non-screen material is considered non-canon.
 
However, because Brent Spiner was aging, it was increasingly problematic for him to be the essentially ageless Data. Better to let him play Soong's ancestors or descendants, who can be his actual age.

There is a single reference in TNG to Data being able to physically age, in the season seven episode "Inheritance", in the scene where they discover Data's "mother" is actually an android that just believes herself to be human:

LAFORGE: "Basically she's a Soong-type android, except everything about her is designed to fool you into thinking she's human."
CRUSHER: "She's got tear ducts, sweat glands, even veins and capillaries underneath her skin."
RIKER: "Why does the scanner read her as a human?"
CRUSHER: "Because she has a feedback processor designed to send out a false bio-signal."
LAFORGE: "It's part of her ageing programme. Not only does she age in appearance like Data, her vital signs change too."

Though everyone, including Brent Spiner, seems to forget this ;)

To answer OP's question:

Could data download his Brain into a storage device as there is a episode of the next generation were someone dose just that so why couldn’t data do it and any time he is injured just download his brain into Lorre’s body :shrug:

Theoretically he can – this is what was done with Juliana Tainer, after all, and what Altan Inigo Soong was intending to do with his golem before donating it to Picard – but it seems clear that the host brain has to be designed with this in mind, and doesn't have an existing mind of its own prior to transfer. He can't just freely back himself up into any data storage medium and expect to come back out exactly as he was going in.

We see in season two's "The Schizoid Man" that forcibly writing one's mind over an existing positronic brain produces a type of split personality ultimately leading to psychosis – interestingly Graves!Data behaves quite a lot like Lore – but the same episode shows that transferring a mind into a non-positronic data storage device (in this case the Enterprise's computer) encodes it as simply data, with the "awareness" or "consciousness", that essential spark of individuality, being lost. Data expresses similar concerns that the same thing might happen to him if his core memory is dumped into a starbase mainframe later in the same season in "The Measure of a Man".

A Soong – either Noonian or Altan – could probably make it work regardless, but as Data demonstrates in both "The Offspring" and Star Trek: Nemesis, he himself lacks essential knowledge on how positronic brains work, and is unable to 100% replicate their methods.
 
We see in season two's "The Schizoid Man" that forcibly writing one's mind over an existing positronic brain produces a type of split personality ultimately leading to psychosis – interestingly Graves!Data behaves quite a lot like Lore – but the same episode shows that transferring a mind into a non-positronic data storage device (in this case the Enterprise's computer) encodes it as simply data, with the "awareness" or "consciousness", that essential spark of individuality, being lost. Data expresses similar concerns that the same thing might happen to him if his core memory is dumped into a starbase mainframe later in the same season in "The Measure of a Man".

One does wonder how the non-positronic computer of Voyager can field an AI who actually outperforms Data in terms of emotional ability... if Data downloaded his personality into Voyager's computer, it's theoretically possible that he'd not only be a duplicate of Data, but might even gain the ability to feel emotion, like the EMH did.
 
One does wonder how the non-positronic computer of Voyager can field an AI who actually outperforms Data in terms of emotional ability... if Data downloaded his personality into Voyager's computer, it's theoretically possible that he'd not only be a duplicate of Data, but might even gain the ability to feel emotion, like the EMH did.

My headcanon is that it needs the "life-like" capabilities of bio-neural circuitry to do so, which wasn't available in the 2360s. Also – the EMH's hardware, as suggested by background graphics in the EMH's diagnostic package in "The Swarm", is a big piece of hardware, akin to a dedicated small computer core in its own right, whereas Data's brain fits in his head:

Picture-1310.png


Remember that until Henry Starling forced the issue using 29th century technology the EMH was " fully integrated" into the ship's systems and "cannot be downloaded" ("Eye of the Needle", etc).

Another thing to consider is the fundamental technology of Data's positronic brain seems to be somewhat different from the regular computers of the mid- to late-24th century. While Data can write algorithms, subroutines, and programs for all manner of tasks, his consciousness might be a byproduct of his brain's physical structure, rather than a program running on a small but powerful mobile computer. It would explain why positronic brains are so hard to make, and it also means they mirror how human brains work.

Also consider that the Enterprise-D computer was able to generate Moriarty, though nobody really understood how.
 
Any time any ship's computer creates a sentient hologram, it becomes problematic... after all, if the ship's computer can hold a sentient AI, then it can be a sentient AI itself. And suddenly, setting the ship's autodestruct sequence becomes murder.
 
Not surprised. Going to give watching Discovery another try if I can ever get Paramount Plus on something bigger than a Snartphone...
 
Not surprised. Going to give watching Discovery another try if I can ever get Paramount Plus on something bigger than a Snartphone...

With the right cable you can plug a smartphone into a TV. I don't make a habit of it but it has been a life saver when I've been stuck in hotels.
 
Given the number of people with PS5's, it's ridiculous that there's no Paramount app. They had one for the PS4.
 
Any work of written fiction is potentially canon, until events happen in the actual series that either affirm or debunk it.

Merely in the sense that by an author floating an idea out there, it becomes available as a potential inspiration/resource to writers of canon, given it contains ideas that they might never have considered otherwise.
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top