Doctor's eyes and ears

[Fleet Admiral Tuvix]

Mobile emitter aside, does the Doctor only see through his holographically projected eyes? When he's in Sick Bay I would have assumed that there would be thousands of cameras and mics that he could see and hear through.

For that matter while I'm nitpicking the Doctor it seems wasteful to let him use the Holodeck solo. Activities involving him and others? Sure, fine. But anything renderable by the Holodeck can surely be simulated and streamed directly to his virtual brain (à la The Matrix) without needing to tie up the deck. In the ep where Tom and B'Elanna race the Delta Flyer the Doc traded a golf trip on the Holodeck with her and I got to wondering why the piece of software needs to be rendered expensively for solo activities.

 

[Oddish]

Holograms, their abilities, their limitations, their sentience, and their implications are one of Trek's stickiest subjects.

 

[Finn]

He IS a computer program, that manifests itself as a hologram that presents as a coherent being. As for how he sees or hears.... I'm guessing through the sensors tied to the EMH program....and plot. I guess there are sensors within the mobile emitter as we saw B'Elanna tweak it to help him find the portal in Displaced.

 

[BK613]

Holograms, their abilities, their limitations, their sentience, and their implications are one of Trek's stickiest subjects.

No worries, the ship cleans itself...

 

[fireproof78]

To make the EMH the most efficient at this task, the computer runs him as a solo program, utilizing only relevant input from sickbay.

Since the hologram is interacting with primarily bipedal humanoids, his data is routed through eyes and ears to ensure a more naturalistic interaction.

 

[nightwolf1982]

I imagine the Doctor is allowed to use the Holodeck to make him feel like one of the crew, and to keep him from malfunctioning. Remember his daydream episode? He was just playing small fantasies in his head and ended up nearly getting taken over by aliens, all so he could imagine the women on the ship fighting over him.

 

[Michael]

Mobile emitter aside, does the Doctor only see through his holographically projected eyes? When he's in Sick Bay I would have assumed that there would be thousands of cameras and mics that he could see and hear through.

My last full rewatch is a couple of years in the past, but I don’t recall them ever portraying it like he’s using anything but his simulated senses. Largely the intention seems to have been that he was a simulated person who uses his own simulated body and senses to experience the world around him and interact with it. The doctor uses his (simulated) hands to operate a tricorder or other medical equipment and uses his (simulated) eyes to read from PADDs or computer panels. There’s practically nothing in the show to indicate he’s in any way linked to the ship computer with his mind and plenty to indicate the opposite: When he wants to contact someone else on the ship, he has to tap his commbadge and use his (simulated) mouth and ears to talk to them (as opposed to his voice just emanating from a speaker on the other end without him being activated) and when he examines a patient he will use his (simulated) eyes to observe them from every necessary angle. When he wants to deactivate himself, he does that as a voice command to the computer, not simply by “mentally” giving the command.

I suggest that if the holographic doctor was a real thing on a starship like the Voyager, it would indeed make a lot of sense to have him tap into the ships sensors at all times. And it’s probably done for the audience’s benefit to treat him more like a actual, separate being. Because imagine how weird it would be to never see him give commands to the computer. Makes it really tough to tell a lot of scenes.

By the way, I love your screen name, @Fleet Admiral Tuvix!

 

[Paul Weaver]

No worries, the ship cleans itself...

Well we've seen DOTs in Discovery, but then we've also seen Lower Decks cleaning out the holodeck biofilter (which is odd, you'd think they could simply beam the contents to wherever they need to go)

 

[Macintosh]

I always thought it was an odd oversight that the EMH needed a medical tricorder or physical surgical tools, rather than just materialising whatever sickbay equipment he needed and relying on sickbay's built-in medical sensors. Presumably this was to keep him relatable and stop him being too "superhuman". I'd have presented him as more of an avatar of sickbay itself.

 

[fireproof78]

But that's not the program's purpose.

 

[BK613]

Well we've seen DOTs in Discovery, but then we've also seen Lower Decks cleaning out the holodeck biofilter (which is odd, you'd think they could simply beam the contents to wherever they need to go)

Twas a wee joke...

I always thought it was an odd oversight that the EMH needed a medical tricorder or physical surgical tools, rather than just materialising whatever sickbay equipment he needed and relying on sickbay's built-in medical sensors. Presumably this was to keep him relatable and stop him being too "superhuman". I'd have presented him as more of an avatar of sickbay itself.

Presumably, it was to keep the FX budget in check...

 

[Guy Gardener]

The sickbay is a full body medical scanner.

The moment you walk into that room, your full body scan begins.

Any delay in diagnosis is pageantry.

 

[Ragitsu]

The sickbay is a full body medical scanner.

The moment you walk into that room, your full body scan begins.

Any delay in diagnosis is pageantry.

Sickbay instantly knows if you've - say - recently carved a notch on your bedpost?

 

[Guy Gardener]

Sickbay instantly knows if you've - say - recently carved a notch on your bedpost?

Tuvok knows before that.

The Universal Translator keeps logs.

It's like in Loki when they brought out that big book of everything he had ever said in his life, since he was born, and then they asked him to confirm that there were no typos.

Actually, what with being thousands of years old, shouldn't Loki's book have been much larger, than the book belonging to that mortal we also saw, who went through the same process?

It's possible that the "right to privacy" wingnuts called for the creation of a black box UT. Alien goes in, and then Human come out, but no one knows what happens inbetween, but that would just make maintenance and repairs impossible.

 

[Macintosh]

Sickbay instantly knows if you've - say - recently carved a notch on your bedpost?

It's fine, everyone on deck 9 section 12 already knows too...