A Hologram in an Android Body

[Mojochi]

So I suspect he would find the senses of a Soong android to be quite alien.

It's hard to see how it wouldn't be. It's an entirely new set of parameters to experience. Even if they were equivalent, they'd still be arrived at differently, & therefore perceived differently enough to be noticeable.

Which brings us to Moriarty. He's a special problem, because he's a hologram programmed to think he's human.
What I mean is: when I eat a sandwich on the holodeck, the computer replictes a sandwich for me to eat. But when Moriarty eats a sandwich, the sandwich is an illusion and disappears as he eats it, but he thinks he's tasting it and feels full when he's done.
The computer doesn't do a chemical analysis of the sandwich and then tell his brain how tasty it would be, it just tells him "it tastes good".
Moriarty may be consciously aware that he is a hologram, but he perceives his own body as being flesh and blood.
I guess my feeling is that we don't know enough about how Moriarty perceives his environment to know if we can satisfactorily mimic it for him.

This is why a Soong android seems like a good fit for him, because clearly some of them do perceive themselves as flesh & blood. Is The Doctor so different? I'm not as up on him & his Voyager stories to know the ins & outs, but doesn't he in some way also interpret his physical existence as a real thing in some way, even though he is aware of his actual physical state? If not, then I guess it all comes down to the individual programming... which is mind boggling in its scope, to think how many varying degrees to which holographic AI might interpret their own tangible reality

But if you were to build something roughly human sized that was capable of projecting a hologram of sufficient sophistication around itself, that would suit him exactly. It combines the sensory experience of being a hologram with the freedom to go where the infrastructure wasn't built specifically to allow him to go there. Well, he's got the better version of that from the future, but such a device would apply to others of his kind.

I should look up more about that mobile emitter of his

Lastly, I don't think Moriarty was just a result of Geordi mis-speaking when asking for an opponent. The computer of the Enterprise D was unique because of the things the Binars had done to it, and one of those changes made holodeck characters much more realistic. While whatever had allowed the creation of Minuette stopped working after the Binars returned the Enterprise, apparently enough of it was left to allow the accidental creation of a character who was self-aware.

That's a very interesting notion, I hadn't considered, & plausible, but how does that explain The Doctor? I shutter to think he is experiencing life in a different way than Moriarty. The notion could be as complex as every individual holographic AI is experiencing life in an almost unique way from one another, based on how they were programmed.

Great post btw. So much to think about there

 

[SpyOne]

The Doctor isn't particularly well explained, but in a nutshell he is a bit like the exocomps: he was a system designed to be capable of learning and adaptation that took on unplanned properties.
His doing so was a known issue, and the most likely outcome was for the program to get crashy and be reset to factory settings.
So the owners' manual specifically said not to leave it turned on for long periods of time.
Voyager had little choice.
And when he started becoming crashy, they didn't want to lose all the experience he'd gained, so they brainstormed a way to return his stability without wiping his memory.

Yes, it appears that any EMH MkI can become sentient if you leave it running and get it past that meltdown.
(I think Voyager's "bioneural gelpacks" in its computers was originally part of it, in that Voyager's computers were partly organic, but later it was shown that any Starfleet holodeck was capable of running the Doctor's program.
This really isn't the place for my rant about that, so ....

 

[Herbert]

Thus androids and holograms are only as compatible as the story of the moment requires.

Absolutely true. That answer (bold part emphasized) can be applied to sooo many of these types of discussions posted here

An android body should have solved all of Moriarty's problems but...

I'm not so sure about that. I can see Moriarty having issues with having to settle for a mechanical body, regardless of how advanced it was. Remember, his wish was that his energy form would be converted into a solid human body. He wasn't requesting an android body. He wanted the transporter technology to have the ability to turn him from a hologram into a real human permanently.

 

[Herbert]

Lastly, I don't think Moriarty was just a result of Geordi mis-speaking when asking for an opponent. The computer of the Enterprise D was unique because of the things the Binars had done to it, and one of those changes made holodeck characters much more realistic. While whatever had allowed the creation of Minuette stopped working after the Binars returned the Enterprise, apparently enough of it was left to allow the accidental creation of a character who was self-aware.

That can also be explained away by "......as the story of the moment requires." There's no evidence that Minuet was anything other than a very sophisticated hologram created for one very specific function and then erased.

Of course, I choose to go by what I've actually seen on screen instead of dismissing it and the Geordi misspeaking explanation is fine for me.

 

[Jedman67]

Star Trek's writers didn't seem to understand the basics of technology. Next Gen's and Voyager's didn't seem to know Moritarty and the EMH should be AI's using a holographic avatars, that they should be as easily backed up as the EMH was moved to his mobile emitter and back. Voyager, Next Gen and DS9 all used the "stack of PADDs" thing when a character was busy and it's debatable whether it was a visual metaphor or that the writers genuinely didn't know one tablet can store thousands and thousands of books.

Thus androids and holograms are only as compatible as the story of the moment requires. An android body should have solved all of Moriarty's problems but...

The Doctor isn't particularly well explained, but in a nutshell he is a bit like the exocomps: he was a system designed to be capable of learning and adaptation that took on unplanned properties.
His doing so was a known issue, and the most likely outcome was for the program to get crashy and be reset to factory settings.
So the owners' manual specifically said not to leave it turned on for long periods of time.
Voyager had little choice.
And when he started becoming crashy, they didn't want to lose all the experience he'd gained, so they brainstormed a way to return his stability without wiping his memory.

Yes, it appears that any EMH MkI can become sentient if you leave it running and get it past that meltdown.
(I think Voyager's "bioneural gelpacks" in its computers was originally part of it, in that Voyager's computers were partly organic, but later it was shown that any Starfleet holodeck was capable of running the Doctor's program.
This really isn't the place for my rant about that, so ....

Modern AI technology uses machine learning and other techniques to carry out tasks and self-programming.
Basically, Moriarty was created not as a person but a highly advanced AI, indistinguishable from Data in self-awareness; but really the computer was programming him to be this advanced. Same for the EMH - Holograms are programmed to interact with the crew members and to represent, at least on a surface level, human-level consciousness or awareness. In fact, much like the Wizard of Oz, all this awareness is generated by the ships holographic computer (or the "matrix" or whatever actually runs the doctors program).
Holographic characters have been interactive since Farpoint; its just a matter of the computer being able to keep up with the humans; in a scripted holodeck program its fairly easy.
The Binars were able to make an even more sophisticated program for Minuet, by Voyagers time the software and programming had advanced considerably making it even more difficult for anyone, even the program himself, to take him as anything else.
Where the writers of Voyager screwed up was making the Doctor into person who just happened to have a holographic body (you can't duplicate or back up a human, you can do that to a program) instead of treating him as a sentient computer program.

 

[Roundabout]

Which brings us to Moriarty. He's a special problem, because he's a hologram programmed to think he's human.

Moriarty poses problems in more ways than one.

Whether or not Moriarty's essence is compatible with the Soong technology, a more important consideration is whether it is wise to let loose a criminal mastermind within a body that is in so many ways superior to ordinary humans.

In any case, neither Picard nor Starfleet owe Moriarty anything. No one is obligated to give Moriarty a body or an existence beyond the holodeck programming.

If someone were determined to experiment with combining the two technologies, wouldn't it be safer to use a hologram personality that was more virtuous? What about Vic Fontaine, that is if Vic is considered sentient? If the melding of the two technologies succeed, at least, the result wouldn't be a super villain. On the other hand, you may be stuck with a cheesy lounge singing android.

 

[Vger23]

Fuck that, I'd rather see an android in a hologram's body.

 

[Mojochi]

I'm not so sure about that. I can see Moriarty having issues with having to settle for a mechanical body, regardless of how advanced it was. Remember, his wish was that his energy form would be converted into a solid human body. He wasn't requesting an android body. He wanted the transporter technology to have the ability to turn him from a hologram into a real human permanently.

Yeah, but that was only after the crew planted that idea. Originally, his only wish was to leave the confines of the holodeck. To exist, as he understood existence, among our authentic reality. He seemed capable of understanding the issues preventing that, until they gave him the false hope of being transported as a human. He's not a human, & that would have to be made perfectly clear, & seeing how his 1st acquaintance was Data, Data might be the best person to give him guidance in relating to the universe as an AI.

After all, that Geordi asked the computer to conjure an adversary capable of defeating him, is absolutely asking the computer to make an AI. No one knew it could do that though, apparently. Now that they have, you'd think the best solution is for him to find a way to benefit from what Data has at his disposal... however...

Moriarty poses problems in more ways than one.

Whether or not Moriarty's essence is compatible with the Soong technology, a more important consideration is whether it is wise to let loose a criminal mastermind within a body that is in so many ways superior to ordinary humans.

In any case, neither Picard nor Starfleet owe Moriarty anything. No one is obligated to give Moriarty a body or an existence beyond the holodeck programming.

If someone were determined to experiment with combining the two technologies, wouldn't it be safer to use a hologram personality that was more virtuous? What about Vic Fontaine, that is if Vic is considered sentient? If the melding of the two technologies succeed, at least, the result wouldn't be a super villain. On the other hand, you may be stuck with a cheesy lounge singing android.

Oh... I addressed that concern, & I agree. I'm only using his example because it is one of the few we have presented to us. I'd much rather be entertaining this with some kind of holographic recreation of Gandhi or something lol

& I suppose they don't owe him anything legitimately or legally, but ethically? Yeah, they kind of birthed this dude, & he's not a whole dude, just a fraction of a dude, wanting to be as much a dude as any dude

But seriously, it's kind of a handicap, that they caused

Fuck that, I'd rather see an android in a hologram's body.

Honestly though, wouldn't that also be possible? There really is no need for Data to ever dress up to play in a holodeck, especially given what we see he can do in Phantasms. Heck, I'd think it might even be possible for Seven of Nine, to patch into the holodeck, or even an exocomp

 

[sasser]

It's hard to do that ,sure ?

 

[Mojochi]

It's hard to do that ,sure ?

I wouldn't think it's any harder than what Data does in Phantasms, where he essentially patches his dreaming into the holodeck, only the opposite way around, dumping the holodeck characters' programming into an android mainframe. Well, maybe a little harder lol