Trill personhood
- Thread starter Captrek
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It's an interesting subject... in general, the symbionts and hosts both seem capable of independent existence. Most Trill are never joined, and the slugs can exist independently in the pools. So symbiosis seems to be a mutually beneficial act, but not a necessary one.
The evolution story continues…
When people discover what they can do with the symbionts, they are highly coveted. They “become commodities to be purchased or prizes to be fought over.” This is damaging to Trill society and to the symbiont population, so the Symbiosis Commission is created to protect the remaining symbionts and join them to the best potential hosts by selecting high achievers with good character, good health, and other desirable traits.
Then the Commission somehow and somewhy suppresses the facts that justify its existence. I find that story problematic.
Who can and can’t be joined is a subject that would be widely studied by Trill scientists and by historians of the pre-Commission era. The truth would be known. The idea that the facts accepted by the scientific community are just the diktats of a powerful cabal with a secret agenda is a story too many people tell on Earth with very damaging consequences. Star Trek should know better than to fuel that kind of storytelling.
Besides, other episodes seem to establish that the truth is well known in universe. Being rejected by the Commission doesn’t mean Verad wouldn’t survive the joining, it means he was seen as a lesser applicant. People working hard and studying their butts off so they can be selected to join seems to have nothing to do with proving biological compatibility. Dax isn’t evaluating whether Arjin would survive the joining, she’s making sure he’s prepared to be a good host and if he wants to pass he’ll stop calling her “ma’am.” The symbionts are “prizes to be fought over” — peacefully, through the selection process, where “fighting” means proving your worth.
This nonsense isn’t even necessary for the story. “That simple error in judgment” could be enough of an embarrassment for the Commission to drive the story if some of the people involved (or their symbionts) are still around. Then it’s just a political cover-up instead of a 70-year scientific hoax, and we don’t get the uncomfortable scene of our hero telling the villain, “Agree to my terms or I promise you, I will take revenge on your whole damn planet and it will be your problem, not mine.” (Well, uncomfortable for me, anyway. I may be unusual.)
When people discover what they can do with the symbionts, they are highly coveted. They “become commodities to be purchased or prizes to be fought over.” This is damaging to Trill society and to the symbiont population, so the Symbiosis Commission is created to protect the remaining symbionts and join them to the best potential hosts by selecting high achievers with good character, good health, and other desirable traits.
Then the Commission somehow and somewhy suppresses the facts that justify its existence. I find that story problematic.
Who can and can’t be joined is a subject that would be widely studied by Trill scientists and by historians of the pre-Commission era. The truth would be known. The idea that the facts accepted by the scientific community are just the diktats of a powerful cabal with a secret agenda is a story too many people tell on Earth with very damaging consequences. Star Trek should know better than to fuel that kind of storytelling.
Besides, other episodes seem to establish that the truth is well known in universe. Being rejected by the Commission doesn’t mean Verad wouldn’t survive the joining, it means he was seen as a lesser applicant. People working hard and studying their butts off so they can be selected to join seems to have nothing to do with proving biological compatibility. Dax isn’t evaluating whether Arjin would survive the joining, she’s making sure he’s prepared to be a good host and if he wants to pass he’ll stop calling her “ma’am.” The symbionts are “prizes to be fought over” — peacefully, through the selection process, where “fighting” means proving your worth.
This nonsense isn’t even necessary for the story. “That simple error in judgment” could be enough of an embarrassment for the Commission to drive the story if some of the people involved (or their symbionts) are still around. Then it’s just a political cover-up instead of a 70-year scientific hoax, and we don’t get the uncomfortable scene of our hero telling the villain, “Agree to my terms or I promise you, I will take revenge on your whole damn planet and it will be your problem, not mine.” (Well, uncomfortable for me, anyway. I may be unusual.)
Makes you wonder, really — what was that first primordial Trill thinking?
“Hey, what if I just… jam that thang in my gut? lol.”
Gotta love evolution.
Reminds me of the question of how escargot was discovered. Someone had to be really hungry to eat one of those things.
Can you tolerate some ideas from GPT?
If we start from your premise (co-evolution with social, intelligent marine mammals), the symbiont’s “brain” doesn’t replace the host’s; it extends it in areas where short-lived individuals and fluid social structures leave gaps.
Here’s what those specializations might look like.
1. Long-term memory persistence
Marine mammals live 30–80 years, but migratory and oceanic cycles can last centuries.
The symbiont brain becomes a temporal bridge, encoding:
So its neural architecture favors slow plasticity and error correction — it forgets almost nothing, but updates carefully.
- stable maps of ocean currents, feeding grounds, and acoustic routes;
- long-term cause-effect links (which reefs recover fastest after storms, where predators move after El Niño events);
- social genealogies: “this pod’s matriarchal line three generations back was allied with that one.”
2. Meta-coordination / leadership cognition
If the host species already forms pods with leaders, the symbiont could evolve circuits for:
These would make joined individuals natural mediators or navigators — traits that still manifest in joined Trill diplomats.
- social pattern prediction: modeling other pods’ behavior, synchronizing migrations;
- conflict resolution heuristics: pattern recognition for signaling peace or alliance;
- decision dampening: inhibiting impulsive reactions in crises (the calm “pod voice”).
3. Cognitive parallelism
While the host brain handles perception and motor control, the symbiont brain can:
Essentially, the symbiont is the pod’s data-analytics cluster.
- run background simulations — “what if” scenarios during rest periods;
- track statistical regularities over long spans (currents, prey availability);
- integrate multi-individual data (acoustic gossip from many whales) into one model.
4. Cross-host translation
Over generations, symbionts learn to map their own memory formats onto very different nervous systems.
That drives evolution toward neural generalization — being able to interface with different hosts via flexible neurotransmitter and electrochemical pathways.
It’s the same trait that later allows them to join humanoids with only surgical mediation.
🕊 5. Emotional averaging
Pod leaders must prevent panic.
The symbiont brain might have evolved a mood-smoothing circuit that senses hormonal signals and releases counter-balancing chemicals.
Joined Trill still show this: unusually even temperament, high emotional intelligence, a kind of serene charisma that others read as wisdom.
6. Memory compression / storytelling instinct
Knowledge is only useful if transmissible.
Symbiont brains could have evolved narrative encoding — turning experience into rhythmic or acoustic patterns easy for pods to repeat.
That predisposition survives culturally as the Trill fascination with oral history, ritual, and songlike speech when recalling past lives.
In summary:
The symbiont brain specializes in slow learning, social forecasting, emotional regulation, and cross-generational data storage — the things individual hosts either can’t do or shouldn’t waste energy on.
When paired with a humanoid, those circuits manifest as the traits we see in joined Trill: calm authority, uncanny memory, empathy, and an almost mathematical sense of timing.
Nice.
Or cooking in general. "Yo, those fruits and veggies are awesome - but that cow I accidentally threw into the fire last night? Who knew?!"
Perhaps they found a cow or something that had been killed by a wildfire and discovered the meat didn't taste too bad.
My thinking is that there must have been a telepathic connection between host and symbiont before anyone ever attempted to get one inside their bodies. There have been several instances on Deep Space Nine where they have shown that there’s a telepathic component to the whole physiology of Trill joining. So my guess is that early forms of “joined” Trill hosts were just spending a lot of time with a symbiont swimming in a pool.
Personally I always wonder about the first humans to ever try blue mold cheese. Were they just like, “Ooh, yeah, that foul-smelling piece of putrid cheese looks so deliciously rancid. I gotta give it a try!”
My thinking is that they saw by observation what the symbionts could do for whales and dolphins and decided to try them in people.My thinking is that there must have been a telepathic connection between host and symbiont before anyone ever attempted to get one inside their bodies. There have been several instances on Deep Space Nine where they have shown that there’s a telepathic component to the whole physiology of Trill joining. So my guess is that early forms of “joined” Trill hosts were just spending a lot of time with a symbiont swimming in a pool.
Interesting thought!My thinking is that there must have been a telepathic connection between host and symbiont before anyone ever attempted to get one inside their bodies. There have been several instances on Deep Space Nine where they have shown that there’s a telepathic component to the whole physiology of Trill joining. So my guess is that early forms of “joined” Trill hosts were just spending a lot of time with a symbiont swimming in a pool.
I’d imagine the first joining was probably accidental, since most evolutionary advances in our history have happened by chance as well. I don’t want to go too far into speculation, but one possibility could be that a Trill host was injured, and the symbiont entered the body that way. A telepathic connection might even be a more plausible explanation. It doesn’t necessarily explain how the symbiont got into the host in the first place, but it’s certainly within the realm of possibility.
That’s a possibility, but I’d think it would have to be a huge, life-threatening would for a symbiont to get in. And in the ocean. Might be an interesting story to write.
Yeah, the more I think about it, the less likely it seems that the first joining was accidental.
You're right: For that to happen by chance, you'd need a serious injury, maybe even a pool of water nearby, and a symbiont that just decides to crawl into a random body. That’s… a stretch.
A ritual seems more plausible. Maybe the humanoid Trill had known about the symbionts for some time—not forever, but long enough to start revering them. And if that’s the case, maybe the first joining wasn’t an accident at all. Maybe it was intentional—part of some early ritual, the kind of thing ancient civilizations might’ve done.
It actually makes me think of those depictions of Aztec or Mayan rituals. Not that they had symbionts, obviously, but there’s a similar vibe—reverence, sacrifice, transformation. That Mel Gibson movie Apocalypto had something along those lines, right?
So yeah... maybe early Trill culture had that kind of dynamic going on. I don’t know. It’s an interesting thing to think about.
Or that spoiled fruit juice that doesn't taste quite right... really isn't bad... especially after the first cup or two.My thinking is that there must have been a telepathic connection between host and symbiont before anyone ever attempted to get one inside their bodies. There have been several instances on Deep Space Nine where they have shown that there’s a telepathic component to the whole physiology of Trill joining. So my guess is that early forms of “joined” Trill hosts were just spending a lot of time with a symbiont swimming in a pool.
Personally I always wonder about the first humans to ever try blue mold cheese. Were they just like, “Ooh, yeah, that foul-smelling piece of putrid cheese looks so deliciously rancid. I gotta give it a try!”
We know that, but the first people who ever tasted wine and beer would have had no idea.
My thinking is that there must have been a telepathic connection between host and symbiont before anyone ever attempted to get one inside their bodies. There have been several instances on Deep Space Nine where they have shown that there’s a telepathic component to the whole physiology of Trill joining. So my guess is that early forms of “joined” Trill hosts were just spending a lot of time with a symbiont swimming in a pool.
~ There's a novel which addresses & confirms these very points within its history of Trill society and culture: The Worlds of DS9: Trill: Unjoined. (Sef is the first symbiont to be joined to a humanoid host, and another was joined to a sick woman to heal her.) I haven't read it in a few years, but I really enjoyed it back then. I'm very slowly going through a DS9 novel re-read, so I should get to it next year.
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