Species no longer exist 31st century?

I'm saying a categorical rejection of such things implies certain epistemological convictions I find lacking.

 

Amazon does have it streaming, for free if you have Prime or for $12.99 for the whole season if you're not a Prime member.
I would love a soundtrack album, the show had some great music.

 

I figure there's no point being too strict on keeping things on the topic of the original post of a thread - quite often secondary points are brought up and discussed, it does make the conversations interesting.

If there's anything you want to say that's relevant to the original topic, LCC, then feel free to post - the conversation will swing back that way, and maybe run in both directions at once - our brains can handle it

 

As others have noted, those episodes make it clear that mental illness is extremely rare.

I would argue that this is a bad comparison, because here you are talking about acts of the state, whereas I was talking about the rights of individuals varying from local subpolity to local subpolity.

So, no, there is no legal chaos in the United States when the State of Ohio executes a convicted criminal but the State of New York does not. But just a few years ago, there was legal chaos in the United States prior to July 2015 when the State of Ohio banned same-sex couples from marrying, but the State of New York did not. I have two close friends in Ohio who had been dating for a decade; they crossed state lines into New York with a sympathetic pastor, got married and obtained a marriage license in New York... and then returned to Ohio, where their marriage was null and void. Now, because the Federal Defense of Marriage Act had been overturned, they had this weird situation where they had to file their taxes twice -- once as a joint filing as a married couple for the federal government, and then again as separate individuals who had no legal ties to one-another and were not family but who just happened to share a street address, in the eyes of the State of Ohio.

God help them if they had had some sort of major medical crisis or other emergency involving power of attorney. Had, for instance, one of them been forced into a coma from a car accident, the law at the time would have prevented his husband from being able to make medical decisions on his behalf -- that authority under Ohio law would have fallen to one of his parents or extended family members, who may themselves have made different decisions than his husband would have made, or who might have even tried to keep his husband away! And that's assuming it had happened in Ohio -- what if the accident had happened in transit in a state where they were married, but the family from a state where their marriage was legally invalid had tried to assert power of attorney over them?

All sorts of legal chaos can entail if your fundamental rights vary from one subpolity to another within a democratic union.

Maybe kind of? I think there is a definition momentum for the European Union to eventually evolve into a sort of "United States of Europe" eventually, but it's nowhere near there now. If they were, the governmental structure of the E.U. would be less opaque and more democratic. They also probably wouldn't be imposing the kind of devastating economic punishments on Greece that they've imposed.

I see no basis for this assumption (why do people always assume Starfleet would cover something up when there's a minor continuity glitch?), nor any basis for the idea that Spock and McCoy would have allowed that to happen. I mean, Spock is the same dude who hijacked the Enterprise so that he could deliver his beloved old captain to the Talosians to relieve his suffering. He would have no qualms about leaking the kal-if-fee.

You bring up an excellent point about questions of criminal culpability. If a Vulcan in the throes of pon farr engages in kal-if-fee while on Earth and kills his opponent, even if United Earth law did not allow for consensual homicide, there is a legitimate question about legal culpability since that Vulcan would by definition not have been within his normal state of mind. And it would have been the result of an involuntary, uncontrollable biological process, to boot.

I cannot imagine that there are restrictions on migration between countries that are part of United Earth. It's right there in the name -- United Earth. There would almost certainly be strict attempts to control the introduction of non-native flora and fauna to fragile biomes, but the idea that there are migration restrictions between countries in United Earth makes about as much sense as the idea that there are migration restrictions between Canadian provinces.

Well, that's the question, isn't it? If consensual homicide is not a universal right within the Federation -- albeit one that would almost certainly need to be regulated within strict conditions to ensure that it is genuinely consensual -- then that opens up all sorts of legal quandaries. I can see a scenario where the United Earth Ministry of Justice puts out an arrest warrant for Spock and the United Earth Attorney-General or United Earth Prime Minister put pressure on the Confederacy of Vulcan to extradite Spock to United Earth to stand trial for murder. And then maybe the Vulcan government refuses to extradite, and other Federation Member States start falling into two camps -- maybe the Tellarites are outraged and so the United Planets of Tellar announce that if Spock sets foot on Tellar, he'll be extradited to United Earth immediately, but the Andorian Empire (remembering their own right to Ushaan) announces that Spock is welcome on Andor and will be protected from anyone seeking to remove him to Earth (all the while the Alpha Centauri Concordium is just like, "Guys, could we just not fight about this?"). And so then you've got the Federation government in a bind, and maybe the Federation Department of Justice is suddenly forced to decide whether or not they will enforce a United Earth arrest warrant on Vulcan soil.

Oooh, that's an excellent point! It makes the whole affair all the more legally problematic -- if Kirk was not informed it was a fight to the death until after he had already agreed, then he cannot be said to have consented with full knowledge. It would be like tricking somebody into signing a contract without allowing them to read the contract.

Others have covered this, but I would just summarize it as: 1. Picard recognized the vital necessity that the Federation and Starfleet be seen as politically neutral while Picard was carrying out the duties of Arbiter of Succession according to Klingon law, and 2. Picard is not quite as culturally tolerant as he thinks of himself as being.

That one is also an interesting question.

Several times throughout the series, it is stated that the space station is itself not Federation territory -- it is Bajoran territory, which the Bajoran government is allowing the Federation Starfleet to administer as a starbase. So for legal purposes, we should probably think of the physical station itself and the starbase as being separate things -- the former is the physical territory upon which the latter is located.

But! There is a third complicating factor: the Klingon government was clearly using that briefing room for the conduct of internal Klingon governmental deliberations.

So we're left with this legal question: whose system of law applied in that briefing room?

We cannot know the answer to this question unless we know whether or not the Klingon government's use of those station facilities were subject to any sorta of extraterritorial agreements (the way, say, embassies or United Nations Headquarters are).

We can probably infer that if Klingon law applied, there are no problems at all; that if Bajoran law applied, Worf would probably be guilty of murder; and that if Federation law applied -- well, assuming the Federation treats consensual homicide as legal, then probably no real problems... except!

Except!

Does the Federation Starfleet Uniform Code of Justice (aka Starfleet military law) allow for consensual homicide, too? Does it allow it only within strict perimeters? Does it allow it when the other person in the ritual is a foreign head of state or government?

Lots of questions. Though in practice, I think it's clear the Federation was willing to look the other way and call it an internal Klingon matter so long as it meant Gowron was no longer in a position to stymie the war effort against the Dominion.

Excellent point. See above re: Federation law vs. Starfleet military law.

Very true.

Nothing in science is ever 100% certain, because new evidence could always come to light that forces us to revise our theories. But you have to have evidence, and that evidence has to stand up to scrutiny.

Sure, if future expeditions to the North Pole uncover evidence that there is an old man with a long white beard who dresses in red, employs vast numbers of toy-making elves, and travels on a flying sled pulled by flying reindeer, I will concede that Santa Claus exists. But until I see such evidence, I'm gonna say with reasonable confidence that there is no such thing as Santa Claus (except, of course, in our hearts).

 

The point is that the modern cult belief in UFO aliens is psychologically and sociologically identical to traditional beliefs in fairies, supernatural entities, and occult phenomena. The same neurological imbalances, hallucinations, and incentives for paranormal belief that used to lead to myths about fairies and demons are still part of the human psyche, but they're occurring in the context of the Space Age, and so they have now taken on a technological and space-oriented component. Supernatural entities were always considered "otherworldly," so the existence of actual other worlds in outer space is perceived culturally as overlapping with the older kind of "otherworldly." As I said before, the descriptions of aliens in claims of actual UFO contacts over the past 70 years have tended to reflect whatever images of alien life were dominant in popular media at that time, because movies and TV and comic books are the modern equivalent of myth and legend. The aliens that ordinary people see in fiction create their mental image of what it means to be alien/otherworldly, and so when they hallucinate, dream, or simply lie about encountering out-of-this-world beings, what they imagine reflects the images they've been fed by the culture.

The "Grays" in particular are an invention of popular culture. As I said, the image originated in a pop-science work (I think it was one of Time-Life Books' hardcover nonfiction publications, and it's possible my family may actually have had it when I was a kid, though I don't know for sure) and was meant to be a conjecture about what humans might evolve into in a million years. It got a lot of press and media coverage at the time, so the image got into people's heads as a representation of a superior, futuristic life form. Naturally starfaring aliens are presumed to be superior and futuristic, since they can do something (travel the stars) that we're nowhere near capable of. So it wasn't long before this image ended up appearing in claims of close encounters with aliens. And that image was prominent in UFO accounts at the time film and TV began telling stories popularizing UFO lore, so it fed back into the media as an image of flying-saucer aliens, which in turn reinforced it in UFO beliefs, and so on in a feedback loop.

 

Your example, though, comes from a point in time when that particular right (marriage to a partner of the same sex) was still in the process of being established. It seems like other examples are more the norm for U.S. society and U.S. legal systems.

When I was growing up, my parents knew an unmarried couple who were first cousins. At that time in California, first cousins were not allowed to marry (not sure if that's still the case). IIRC, they could have chosen to move to one of several other states where such marriages were legal, live there long enough to establish residency, get married and move back to California, and California would recognize their marriage, but they chose not to do this. Some things may have changed, but I think the basic principle is still that all marriages are legal from one state to the next. I think something similar would apply from one planet to the next in the Federation, although the principle would be a bit more complicated for something like ritual killing.

I've always made the assumption that there's some sort of minimum requirements for how planets that want to enter the Federation gain admittance. Part of that would be meeting certain expectations of basic rights of members of their society. Of course, "The Cloud Minders" from TOS seems to contradict this, since there somehow the planet got admitted without anyone noticing that they were practicing a form of slavery! "Attached" from TNG does seem to suggest that there's at least some kind of vetting process for prospective members, though.

I think there may just be a little bit more of a live-and-let-live attitude in Federation societies. Maybe the general rule is just "well, that's the way they do it, we do it differently. Be glad you live on planet X and not planet Y." It's also worth considering just how big the Federation is. It's pretty hard to stay informed of the day to day events around the world today. Multiply that by 100 to 150 worlds, and who's going to be staying up on the ins and outs of every member of the Federation? How much attention will the average Federation citizen be paying to one incident on Vulcan, even if it does involve a Starfleet captain?

 

Whether or not it was because the right was being established, the fact that it was a right acknowledged in some states but denied in others did create legal chaos.

It is currently legal in California according to Wikipedia.

Well, you're thinking of the Full Faith and Credit Caluse, the part of the United States Constitution that states, "Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State." In other words, it obliges states to recognize that if you get married in New Jersey, you're married in Montana.

But while I think you raise a valid question in terms of comparing the right of same-sex couples to marry having varied from state to state prior to Obergefell v. Hodges, I think the comparison breaks down precisely because of the Full Faith and Credit Clause. (I am restricting myself here to the question of whether or not the inconsistent laws about first cousin marriage lead to legal chaos from state to state. I am absolutely not touching the substance of whether or not first cousin marriage ought to be legal, because God do I just not feel like dealing with that can of worms.)

Looking at Wikipedia's rather short article on cousin marriage cases in the United States, it would appear that the general rule is that if someone obtains residency in a state where cousin marriage is legal, then other states have to recognize that marriage, even if cousin marriage is illegal in that sate.

The thing is, though, prior to Obergefell v. Hodges, states were explicitly violating the Full Faith and Credit Clause by refusing to acknowledge as valid any same sex-marriage, even if performed in another state by legal residents of that state at the time of the marriage. So if my friends had literally moved to New York, become New Yorkers, gotten married, and then moved back to Ohio, the State of Ohio would still have refused to acknowledge as legally valid their marriage; under Ohio law, they would still have been but strangers sharing an address.

So, while people may make an argument about why or why not first cousin marriages ought to be legal, the simple fact is that there is a legal process for reconciling the issue in spite of conflicting state laws -- the Full Faith and Credit Clause creates that process. Your marriage can still become valid in a state that bans it if you follow that process.

So, no, I don't think it's quite comparable to the state-by-state patchwork on same-sex marriage, or to consensual homicide being legal in some Federation Member States but not others.

But, the fact that first cousin marriage is legal in some states but not others, but those states where it is illegal may recognize it when it is performed in another state for residents of that state, does to me suggest a possibility: Maybe some Federation Member States ban consensual homicide unless it is being undertaken in accordance with the legal guidelines of a fellow Federation Member States whose homeworld at least one of the parties is descended from. So maybe, for instance, an Ushaan is legal on United Earth if at least one of the parties is a biological Andorian and the relevant laws of the Andorian Empire are being followed. That might be a way to reconcile differing laws about consensual homicide rituals -- and it would also open the door to explaining why Picard and Sisko both chewed Worf out for his consensual homicide rituals (since the Klingon Empire is not a Federation Member State with a consensual homicide ritual that is legally protected under Federation law).

 

That seems like a pretty practical way of dealing with it.

Given the complexities of U.S. law dealing with marriages that you've laid out (and presumably it's equally as complex in some other areas as well), it seems like the Federation must either have some pretty lengthy and comprehensive regulations, or they've come up with some way of just easily acknowledging and accepting different cultural mores and values. Although, as the examples of Picard/Worf and Sisko/Worf show, that would be more easily said than done.

 

Dualism is an explicit reality in the Star Trek universe. Story after story has turned upon the "fact" that human beings and other sentients have essential natures including their thought processes, memories, emotions etc. that can be not just copied but actually transferred from one vessel to another such that the essence - Hell, call it a 'soul' - no longer occupies the original body.

Yep, it's superstition - and it's Star Trek.

 

It's not dualism if it has some physical reality, which considering the fact that it can be detected and analyzed means that it must. Since you can see those ascended energy forms, they're by definition not non-physical; they're emitting light, after all. Scanners detect them. There's technology that can interact with or even affect them.

And you don't need dualism to establish the possibility of transferring the mind from one instantiation of a brain to another. In fact, monism makes it easier because then all you have to do is reproduce or emulate the full physical state to copy or transfer the mind in whole without losing any aspect whatsoever.

 

Nonsense. In episodes like "Return To Tomorrow" they just pop Kirk's essence out of his body and into a globular lamp, then they pop someone else into his body. Later, when Henoch is forced out of Spock's body it's assumed to be vacant.

There's no copying or emulating involved - the premise that people have an essence that is separable and that will survive apart from the physical body is simply treated as a matter of fact.

All you're really saying is that if we could measure and study the soul and prove it exists then it would be a scientific fact and not a superstition. That's kind of a self-evident "Duh!"

The truth, of course, is that nothing we've learned about the Universe through science supports any such notion.

 

No, I'm saying that if you could measure and study the soul and prove it exists, then you've brought the soul into a monist approach rather than proven dualism; you've made it part of the body. Dualism is that the body and mind/soul/what have you are distinct, that one is physical and the other isn't, and that the brain is irrelevant to the mind. I could have my arm severed and separate it from my body, that doesn't mean that "body/arm dualism" is a thing.

Further, I don't see anything in "Return to Tomorrow" that necessarily contradicts what I said. We don't know the technological or physiological mechanism by which the mental transference happens, and a destructive mind uploading process is just as reasonable an interpretation as the idea that there's some non-physical "mind" that was transplanted.

 

What you're doing, on behalf of Trek, is hand-waving - "since in Star Trek they act like Dualism is science, Star Trek is being scientific rather than superstitious in employing Dualism as a plot device."

Ain't so.

 

What? No. "Dualism is true" and "the soul exists" aren't synonymous. Dualism is one philosophical interpretation of how the soul might exist if it does, but it isn't the only one.

Dualism is "the mind/soul exists as a non-physical entity separate from but associated to the body". Monism is "the mind/soul exists as a physical entity separate from but associated to the body". What Star Trek portrays is either the nonexistence of the mind/soul as distinct from the brain or a monistic approach to the existence of the mind/soul. It definitely doesn't portray a dualistic approach to the existence of the mind/soul, because it portrays it as physical.

If you believe in the existence of the soul as something apart from the brain itself, but you also believe that it still exists as a physical thing that could be independently detected in some manner, you aren't being dualistic, you're being monistic. I'm just saying that you're using the word "dualism" wrong.

 

And our previous discussion about the Vulcan kunat kalifee is...

(puts on sunglasses)

...duel-ism.

YEEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!