Janeway, Lesbian Icon?

[Adm_Hawthorne]

But humans can be also be "deleted" (including accidentally) by a power surge, phaser, etc etc so no more human either.

I don't really care if the doctor was programmed or become sentient or actually acquired sentience....he was a very good character and played very well by Robert Picardo. Besides some very good episodes, he offerred some much needed wry humour to the show.

Yeah... I didn't say otherwise regarding any of that. But, he's still not a flesh and blood being, and I am... skeptical ...at the idea of allowing an AI to take command of its own programming.

We've all watched Terminator, right?

See my reply above to Kestrel - there is no reason why a hologram can't be greater than the sum of it's parts - just as humans are (afterall, we are comprised of atoms//elements).

What did I just say?

I said I was skeptical at best at the idea of an AI being able to program itself, and, as a continuation of that thought process, don't like the idea of an EMH being able to do so.

Holograms are programs run by machines. That's it. It's what they are. No more, no less

Gawd in Heaven, I agree with Gardner.

If the hologram is programed to react like a human, and the programming is good enough, of course it's going to seem like it is sentient. That is the point of the programming. Really good AI programming should surprise a person with its life-likeness if it's the first time the person has come in contact with it. That doesn't make it alive, however.

You are clearly in favor of giving in to the idea that the EMH was humanoid in thought and, therefore, should be thought of as a person as opposed to a program. But, no matter how you slice it, he's a program.

At his simplest, he's an application used by the computer in order to complete the tasks needed of the Voyage crew. He was specifically created and designed to be a doctor, give bedside care, and learn in order to do a better and more efficient job in sickbay. The fact that his programming adjusted to apply to learning other things is not surprising. I get the impression that he was never programmed to learn specifically about medical procedures.



We want to think of the EMH as a sentient being because we spent 7 years listening to and being primed to think that it's possible for a hologram to deserve the same rights as all other beings. But, just as a RealDoll isn't a real person, neither is a hologram.

It's a testament to the writing regarding the EMH that people want so badly for others to see him as more than just a program. But, in the end, that's all he really is.

 

[Guy Gardener]

So I see you missed the whole point of the episode on holographic rights

I juggle points.

ARBITRATOR: We're exploring new territory today so it is fitting that this hearing is being held at Pathfinder. The Doctor exhibits many of the traits we associate with a person. Intelligence, creativity, ambition, even fallibility, but are these traits real or is the Doctor merely programmed to simulate them? To be honest, I don't know. Eventually we will have to decide because the issue of holographic rights isn't going to go away, but at this time, I am not prepared to rule that the Doctor is a person under the law. However, it is obvious he is no ordinary hologram and while I can't say with certainty that he is a person I am willing to extend the legal definition of artist to include the Doctor. I therefore rule that he has the right to control his work and I'm ordering all copies of his holo-novels to be recalled immediately.

The Federation are afraid to admit that they are probably slavers.

What is it that you think escapes me?

There have been complaints that I go on a little, so excuse the one moment of brevity.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

There have been complaints that I go on a little, so excuse the one moment of brevity.

 

[Guy Gardener]

The doctor would have been been programmed to learn new medical procedures, keeping up to date with the advance of medical science, however the Doctor also reflexively creates new procedures to counter new illness and injury. It is possible that he is lying/subconsciously-fed about all this inventiveness and is really just using case-study to make underpin his personality as a genius? But it's been a hundred years since they thought the M5 could captain a Starship.

Odd.

Remember when Lore told Data that Data was the mark II who was made less human because lores too "sentient" human behaviour spooked the human villagers... Meanwhile remember Riker and Picard's reaction to Minuete after the Bynar's "upgraded" the holodeck to ease their theft of the Enterprise: "So realistic." "So human."

People can't have changed so much in just 40 years.

Oh, in my massive piece of fanfiction which has been on the backboiler for a while now, Lore is quite gay and even at one point seduced a drunk and frightened, usually straight, Jake Sisko.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

As I said, the EMH - and Vic - are sentient, because it is impossible to prove that they are not. So it is with any of us. How can we prove WE are sentient? We can't, of course.

We are no less "programmed" than the EMH or Vic. They are made of light, we're made of flesh. But we both have brains - intelligence, wisdom, even consciousness. It makes no difference whether that brain is a flesh and blood brain, or a computer brain. In the end, it's all the same.

 

[Guy Gardener]

What about those simple holograms they liberated in Flesh and blood?

They were basically men shaped forklifts.

How simple does a program have to before you won't automatically award "it" sentient rights Mr Laser Beam?

That being said how braindead (medically so, coma.) or even retarded does a "human" have to be before you limit or remove their sentient rights?

 

[henbane]

Adm - you continue to argue that the Doc is programmed etc etc but that doesn't mean that it can't become sentient. The simple answer is that no one knows. There are even some who would argue that Earth and humanity are all part a big experiment programmed by "something" who is just sitting back and watching (I'm not one of those people).

Like I said, I don't care if he's sentient or not - he was a good character in a fantasy TV show. I do however enjoy speculating about the possibility of sentience in "artificial intelligence". I'm a scientist and although I work in a black and white world - that doesn't mean that my thoughts are confined by such a Cartesian reductionist approach to the world - thank goodness we have science fiction and fantasy where we can imagine and speculate beyond what science can measure and prove.

 

[Guy Gardener]

How do you prove that a mass fabricated intelligence is not autonomous beyond it's own programming?

You take a thousand EMH Mark 1s. Ask them all the same one hundred questions. Wipe their short term memory. Ask them the same questions again. Repeat steps two and three a hundred times.

A computer is a machine that returns certain to predictable results when specific data has been inputted. Fuzzy means that they have sampling to draw from depending how skewed from predictable they want to.can be, when means that these holograms may have a hundred different answers to the same question, and heuristic means they learn from past experiences which means that they will get miffed if they begin to notice pasterns in your questions like asking the same hundred questions one hundred times.

And that's just externally finding out if they are autonomous or "concious" there's also the simple fact that there is math and data and graphs and readouts and analysis on everything they say do and reason, that is being constantly annotated, justified and ratified in/with the fucks programming in the same way that we can be sure that every calculator will always tell us that 2 + 2 = 4, and it's very easy to figure out some thign is wrong or why 2 + 2 = 5.

Pleae take into account the process with which the terminator in the first movie went through while trying to summon the correct response for the idiots banging on his door while he was gouging his eye out. He gave him self at least five appropriate responses for the current situation but he chose to say "Go fuck yourself."

The doctors programming was altered a few times, in so that he was committing suicide in favour of replacing himself with a superior model who thought he was still the same hologram? Darkling and Equinox come to mind, and less so the back up program from Living Witness would be the same as ones wife keeping her next husband in a box in the closet patiently waiting for you to fuck up that you need to be replaced.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

Minus the rambling, Garnder is correct.

A program's reasons for doing something can be justified with printed out data giving the subroutine processes as to how that program came to that conclusion.

We still don't get how the mind works. We still don't understand why we have morals or some innate personality characteristics. There is a difference between the human mind and a program.

 

[Deckerd]

In No particular order...

snip
Hmm?

So who is the biggest lesbian icon and where in this hierarchy sampling does Kathryn Janeway fit?

First of all, no icon for any group is ever the "weaker one", so you're already running with fallacies.

The following are strong female characters that are not Lesbian Icons:

Murphy Brown
Julia Sugarbaker
Dorthy Zbornak
Katherine Pulaski
Miss Anna (From The King and I)
River Tam
The Bride (From Kill Bill)
Hermione Granger

I don't see Ellen Ripley anywhere in your long lists. Surely the epitome of the Strong Female Character?

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

She's also a lesbian Icon.

 

[Deckerd]

So when you say "lesbian icon" you actually mean a "woman in a leading role"? Because it seems there isn't any discrimination going on here whatsoever. Your list of women who weren't lesbian icons was immediately disputed by someone else, which means your list is purely personal.

I was expecting more substance to this for some reason. I don't know why.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

So when you say "lesbian icon" you actually mean a "woman in a leading role"? Because it seems there isn't any discrimination going on here whatsoever. Your list of women who weren't lesbian icons was immediately disputed by someone else, which means your list is purely personal.

I was expecting more substance to this for some reason. I don't know why.

No, I polled the lesbians I know first. But, all icon statuses are more-or-less subjective, and not all lesbian icons are in lead roles. Willow from Buffy comes to mind.

Tell you what, you put together a polling system listing strong female characters from tv shows over the past 3 decades, run it by a group of 100 lesbians, and we'll use your data as the absolute standard.

 

[henbane]

Nowhere near enough sampling to produce an "absolute standard".

I do agree with Derkerd that the Adm's list seems personal and weighted toward strong female leading role = lesbian icon. As I mentioned before, many of my lesbian female friends disagree with this.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

Then give a list, for pity's sake.

 

[henbane]

Minus the rambling, Garnder is correct.

We still don't get how the mind works. We still don't understand why we have morals or some innate personality characteristics. There is a difference between the human mind and a program.

Sure we can distinguish between a program (as they stand now in the 21st century) and a human BUT you're forgetting that Star Trek is set in the 24th century where technology is way beyond our current understanding - who knows what may happen to heuristic and self-learning technology in the future.

Although I'm a scientist I learned a long time ago not to confine my thoughts to that which science can only prove at the current time. Thinking beyond the current provable data is the stuff of which discoveries (both good and bad) are made.

I believe this very topic was dealt with quite well in the Voyager episode "Sacred Ground" where Janeway was challenged to go beyond the measureable and go with that which is currently inexplicable by science (ie have faith) I distinctly recall a line where one of the attendents said "Still believes in science even when it fails before her very eyes. Now that's blind faith!"

I must concur - blind faith in science severely restricts possibilities. Mind you, while conducting creditable research (I am talking mainstream here) we must work within the current framework, but that it no ways rules out speculation and ideas about the "unproven".

For instance, acupuncture works - we don't know how (from a western biomedical//scientific perspective) but we can measure the effects and outcomes of acupuncture treatment, indicating that it is working beyond the placebo effect. In addition, the same can be said for many medications - their exact mechanisms of action are not understood, but they seem to control symptoms//diseases.

 

[Deckerd]

For instance, acupuncture works

Not if you read Ben Goldacre it doesn't.

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

For instance, acupuncture works

Not if you read Ben Goldacre it doesn't.

You beat me to it.

Some things are more placebo effect than actual working solutions, anyway.

 

[Mr Silver]

Without actually being A) Female and B) Lesbian, its very difficult for me to actually compile a list to support Adm_Hawthorne's suggestion, however from what I can gather, there are several "Lesbian Icon" characters who aren't just "Leading Roles"

 

[Adm_Hawthorne]

I used leading roles because they were characters I assumed people would actually know.