Just finished Destiny. Some Spoilers

[JRoss]

So I just finished the Destiny Trilogy. Funny enough, I read the Typhon series, then A Singular Destiny, then the Destiny stuff.

I've got to say that I enjoyed it immensely. One question: why haven't the Caeliar worked some goodness mojo to the Federation and the others who lost so much in the Borg attack? They've got plenty of resources. Why not share transwarp tech or at least offer services for disaster relief?

Also, Kant Jorel, president Bacco's press secretary. I'm assuming the name is an homage to Superman?

 

[shanejayell]

The Caeliar are VERY VERY isolationist. They do not want to interact with other species, so the just left. *shrug* Or at least that's how I read it.

 

[Christopher]

^Sounds right to me. The Caeliar believe in keeping to themselves and not getting involved with other people's problems. They didn't get rid of the Borg to help the Federation; they rescued the Borg from their own dysfunction because the Borg were, in a sense, fallen Caeliar and needed to be healed. What they did was to help their own kind, as they saw it.

 

[Hartzilla2007]

The Caeliar are VERY VERY isolationist. They do not want to interact with other species, so the just left. *shrug* Or at least that's how I read it.

^Sounds right to me. The Caeliar believe in keeping to themselves and not getting involved with other people's problems. They didn't get rid of the Borg to help the Federation; they rescued the Borg from their own dysfunction because the Borg were, in a sense, fallen Caeliar and needed to be healed. What they did was to help their own kind, as they saw it.

Then whats was all the stuff Hernandez said about the Caeliar going off and from what it sounds like help the poor and defensless or something?

 

[TerraUnam]

We can't say what the new Caeliar Gestalt of Old Caeliar + Borg will do. Inyx for one wants to meet new people but Caeliar society offered no chance to do so until Lost Souls.

One can imagine the tensions that could happen between old and new but we have nothing definite. We're left hanging.

Speaking of hanging, the Enterprise-E visited that Shrouded Galaxy where Kintana, the third Caeliar city was exiled. They entered the same latent subspace tunnel in Mere Mortals. But they just turned around and went home.

What the beings in that galaxy are up to is another thing left hanging.

 

[Sci]

^Sounds right to me. The Caeliar believe in keeping to themselves and not getting involved with other people's problems. They didn't get rid of the Borg to help the Federation; they rescued the Borg from their own dysfunction because the Borg were, in a sense, fallen Caeliar and needed to be healed. What they did was to help their own kind, as they saw it.

Well, that, and they did it to help themselves. They realized that they had become so stagnant, so homogenous, that their society was in danger, and that "assimilating" these liberated former drones would save their society from stagnation.

 

[Destructor]

I just finished Destiny yesterday as well. I thought it was amazing trilogy, the way it folded in on itself at the end, all points meeting up perfectly, was inspired.

My one problem, and this is a problem that occurred in all of the relaunch novels that dealt with the Borg, was the constant assigning of emotions to the collective. The collective was always 'full of fury' or 'bent on Earth's destruction'. Is it me, or did this rub anyone else the wrong way? The collective on televised Trek was always dispassionate, emotionless, rational, slow. Why did not one but four different authors feel the need to portray the Borg as angry? Was this some kind of higher-level editorial conclusion handed down to the authors? To me what always made the Borg scary was not their anger but their total LACK of anger, and emotion in general. I thought trying to portray the Borg's invasion of the Federation as somehow personal was a misreading of the Borg, and while I still enjoyed the trilogy, it did reduce my enjoyment of it slightly.

 

[Christopher]

Anger is a drive that motivates aggression, particularly toward something that is perceived as a threat. If the Borg were to coolly, dispassionately conclude that something was a major threat to them and needed to be aggressed against with extreme prejudice, that reaction could be considered analogous to anger. If they concluded it was necessary to eliminate a threat to their existence, that could be construed as analogous to taking it personally. And it is dramatically useful to interpret it in those terms in a work of fiction.

Besides, the precedent for portraying the Borg in more emotive terms was the introduction of the Borg Queen in First Contact and Voyager. From the start, the Queen recast the Borg's behavior in more emotive terms. She was portrayed in FC as a sexualized, seductive force that tried to lure Picard and Data with the fulfillment of their desire for power or sensation. In VGR she seemed to care about Seven as a protegee, she developed an antagonistic relationship with Janeway, she tried to lure a child in Unimatrix Zero into accepting reassimilation, etc. Like I said, it's dramatically useful to present the Borg in emotive, humanized terms, and that's the role the Queen played.

Let's face it, the Borg as originally conceived, a completely impersonal force, are not something you can tell many stories about. Stories are fundamentally personal. They're driven by characters, and by what those characters want, need, or fear. Even inanimate objects or forces tend to be personified in fiction. So the more stories that got told about the Borg, the harder it was to keep them depersonalized. That's why they were given a face in their very second appearance through the assimilation of Picard.

 

[Sci]

I just finished Destiny yesterday as well. I thought it was amazing trilogy, the way it folded in on itself at the end, all points meeting up perfectly, was inspired.

My one problem, and this is a problem that occurred in all of the relaunch novels that dealt with the Borg, was the constant assigning of emotions to the collective. The collective was always 'full of fury' or 'bent on Earth's destruction'. Is it me, or did this rub anyone else the wrong way? The collective on televised Trek was always dispassionate, emotionless, rational, slow. Why did not one but four different authors feel the need to portray the Borg as angry? Was this some kind of higher-level editorial conclusion handed down to the authors? To me what always made the Borg scary was not their anger but their total LACK of anger, and emotion in general. I thought trying to portray the Borg's invasion of the Federation as somehow personal was a misreading of the Borg, and while I still enjoyed the trilogy, it did reduce my enjoyment of it slightly.

That ship sailed over 15 years ago with the release of Star Trek: First Contact and the Borg's subsequent portrayal on Star Trek: Voyager. Like it or not, the Borg Collective is not unemotional; it is in fact a deeply emotional, deeply irrational, collective intelligence. It constantly seeks to expand and consume, it refuses to listen to reason, it practically worships the Omega Particle, it has deeply irrational ideas about the existence of "perfection," it suffers from megalomania and narcissism, it has strong emotional urges for companionship, it becomes angry and vindictive, it attempts to emulate familial roles, and it is, quite frankly, deeply sociopathic. Were an individual to display all of the Collective's behavior and emotional drives, he or she -- well, I suppose "she," given the Queen -- would in real life be diagnosed as a psychopath.

And, I dunno about you, but the only thing scarier to me than the idea of a vast civilization of amoral sociopaths is the idea of a vast civilization of malicious psychopaths.

The canon has already firmly established that the initial assessment of the Borg as lacking emotions was erroneous. Star Trek: Destiny just took it to its logical conclusion.

 

[Christopher]

The problem is, the way we define emotions is erroneous. Anything that thinks has emotions, no matter how "logical" it is. Emotions are inbuilt responses to stimuli. They're what motivate an entity to choose how to react to things. Fear motivates us to protect ourselves from danger. Lust motivates us to procreate. Anger motivates us to take action against dangers. Happiness motivates us to continue an action with positive effects. The Vulcans are wrong; emotion has entirely logical reasons to exist. And neurological studies have shown that even the most coldly logical, neutral decision, like choosing the correct answer to a math problem, still engages the emotional centers of the brain. We choose the right answer because it feels better to go with the option we recognize as right. Reason and emotion are not separate processes, but interconnected elements of judgment.

Even an entity like the Borg would still need to make choices -- to pursue things it needed, to defend itself from threats, to favor one action over another. The internal incentives that motivate it to choose an action are thus equivalent to emotions, even if they don't manifest themselves the way human emotions do. (Same with Data. It was always an ethnocentric fiction to say he didn't have emotion just because he didn't express his drives and motivations through laughing or weeping or shouting or other such superficial human displays.) "Emotion" and "motivation" come from the same root word meaning "to move." Any entity capable of decision-making rather than blind instinct needs internal motivations to favor one decision over another, or to choose act at all. So to refer to any thinking entity as emotionless is erroneous. Passionless, perhaps -- there can be differences of intensity -- but not truly emotionless.

 

[JarodRussell]

Emotions are inbuilt responses to stimuli.

That can't be the proper definition, otherwise my computer has emotions, too.

 

[David Mack]

Emotions are inbuilt responses to stimuli.

That can't be the proper definition, otherwise my computer has emotions, too.

Your computer doesn't choose to turn itself on or off, or to launch applications on its own. You or the original software programmer make those choices. Ergo, as your computer is not a deciding entity but a rote machine, it is exempt from Christopher's definition.

 

[captcalhoun]

my cat had emotions. i could tell when she was happy, annoyed and wanted company.

 

[JarodRussell]

Emotions are inbuilt responses to stimuli.

That can't be the proper definition, otherwise my computer has emotions, too.

Your computer doesn't choose to turn itself on or off, or to launch applications on its own. You or the original software programmer make those choices. Ergo, as your computer is not a deciding entity but a rote machine, it is exempt from Christopher's definition.

Well, hm, I have no control over my "programming" either. I can't "tell" my heart to stop beating for example. All the "applications" run on the human brain are there from the start, and you can't launch them by yourself. All a human can do is to "learn", which essentially means feeding a pre-existing database with new information. But you have no influence whatsoever on the processes behind it. Someone programmed you, let's call him Dr. Evo Lution. But you are bound to that programming just like a computer.

 

[Christopher]

What Dave said. What a computer has would be analogous to instincts. Not choices, but predetermined actions.

Then again, it's not an entirely false analogy. The mistake made by the people who write about Data and other AIs and say "machines can't feel emotions!" is that emotions are far more like programming than conscious thought is. Emotions aren't something we learn, or something we choose to feel. They're innate, automatic responses. They're much simpler things than thoughts, existing on a far more elementary level. Animals have emotions but most of them don't think. We romanticize and mysticize emotions, but in their purest form, emotions are very simple preprogrammed responses. It's only when they interact with conscious thought and decision that they become complicated, because thought and decision are complicated. Emotion is the simplest, most basic part of the equation. A cat or a rabbit or an alligator will react to its emotions very simply and predictably. If it's hungry, it'll go after food. If it's scared, it'll run or hide. If it's aroused, it'll try to mate with something. Very simple and reflexive. Emotions are complicated for humans because they're often in conflict with our thought processes -- our values or beliefs or responsibilities tell us that we can't just take the food in front of us without following the proper social rules, can't run and hide without betraying our duty, can't have sex with that hot person because it would be socially taboo, etc. It's our intelligence and judgment, our ability to construct complex social rules and abstract ideas, that brings the complexity and mystique to our emotional lives. The emotions themselves are just the simple raw ingredients. They're primitive in the technical sense of the word, the most elementary and uncomplicated components of the system.

So most SF gets it backward. It would be far, far easier to instill an AI with emotion than it would be to instill it with conscious thought. Just as it's easier for evolution to produce animals with emotion than animals with sentience. The Borg don't care, they don't love, they don't weep, but they do have drives and reactions, and it's valid to call those emotions. Maybe they're equivalent to reptilian emotions -- reptiles have aggression and fear and desire, but the more social emotions like love for offspring and mates are more a product of the limbic system of birds and mammals -- but they're still emotions.

So I couldn't buy the Borg feeling love or sorrow or compassion, but yeah, I can buy them reacting to a civilization that's seriously hurt them in a way that maps onto what we call anger. Because that's what anger is for -- it's a defensive reaction against something that you perceive as an attack or a threat.

 

[Sisko4Life]

Personally, I would love to see this as a movie trilogy. It would be by far the best Trek in my opinion. The images were just too powerful and on screen would make it quite special. Seeing dozens of cubes head toward Vulcan and steamrolling Fed / Klingon fleets. Seeing the looks on Federation faces in the brink of annihilation.. oh my

 

[BrotherBenny]

Personally, I would love to see this as a movie trilogy. It would be by far the best Trek in my opinion. The images were just too powerful and on screen would make it quite special. Seeing dozens of cubes head toward Vulcan and steamrolling Fed / Klingon fleets. Seeing the looks on Federation faces in the brink of annihilation.. oh my

In the words of Data: "Oh Shit!"

 

[Relayer1]

Personally, I would love to see this as a movie trilogy. It would be by far the best Trek in my opinion. The images were just too powerful and on screen would make it quite special. Seeing dozens of cubes head toward Vulcan and steamrolling Fed / Klingon fleets. Seeing the looks on Federation faces in the brink of annihilation.. oh my

In the words of Data: "Oh Shit!"

I'm grateful to it as it brought me back to Treklit having lost interest, but although it was not awful, I didn't really like it.

Didn't like the Caeliar, the time travel, the too pat resolution of the Borg threat..

 

[Deranged Nasat]

my cat had emotions. i could tell when she was happy, annoyed and wanted company.

Is there anything more emotional than a cat?

My grandmother's cat hated me as a small boy, if "hate" isn't the wrong word (does "hate" imply a degree of reason or justification to the antagonism?) I could practically sense it radiating off of her (off of the cat, that is).

 

[Christopher]

I think that hate is a blend of fear and aggression. It's the perception of something as a threat or a wrongness and a powerful urge to make it go away.

As for the extent to which cats are ruled by their emotions, I think it depends on the cat. My cat Tasha was a creature of pure impulse and appetite; any urge that came to her was acted on immediately and to an extreme degree. But her brother Shadow was more deliberate. He watched and waited and chose his moment to act. He was a thinker, inasmuch as a cat can be a thinker. (He once figured out that the way to open the kitchen door was to turn the knob on the deadbolt and then the doorknob itself -- cats are good at learning to open doors through observing how humans do it -- but he luckily didn't have the leverage or dexterity to succeed at the attempt.)