That is the same debate. The problem is that, in spite of many people explaining it, you are unwilling to accept the reference to a "soul" as not being religious in nature.
Spoilers "Measure of a man": I really dislike that the secular world of Star Trek they speak of "soul" as a requirement to prove that a being deserve freedom
But Jag doesn't know if she herself has it. So it's something intangible, indefinable, but does it need to be talked about?
Considering that up until that point they had managed to give good definitions of "intelligence, self-awareness and consciousness", should she throw the word "soul" into the mix, something that if you asked 10 different people to define you would get 10 different answers?
What was even the point?
The point, I would say, is to make you think about the issue. Soul is a very evocative term. A word that people pay attention to.
Or, too much attention to…
The fundamental axiom at issue in the episode is that there something that separates people from things: Starfleet can order the Enterprise to be disassembled for parts and analysis, but it can't order Picard to be disassembled so his organs can be studied and donated to others. The dispute is what side of the line does Data fall under, but answering that question raises another; what is the line in the first place? The Enterprise talks. It reasons. It acts to preserve its own continued existence. Through holodeck characters like Moriarty and Brahms, it even expresses itself in a human context with better fidelity than Data himself does.
So what makes the Enterprise equipment/property and Data (allegedly) a free and self-determining entity? If only there was some word that already existed that described the quality that living persons have that distinguishes them from inanimate things...
The point was that such a discussion is necessary when talking about sentient, conscious life. Data explains this much later in "Emergence." There is only so far science can go in explaining why human beings are what we are. We are more than the sum of our parts. There is something, which could reasonably be described as a soul, that endows us with consciousness, self-awareness, etc. that cannot be explained by the mechanical workings of the brain.
Her point was specifically that -- the trial was dancing around that fact and acting like it was something they could quantify, measure, and prove. She admitted it's not. You can tell these things to a point -- a car or a smartphone clearly is not even life -- but only to a point. And so she wasn't willing to subjugate him based on something we cannot know or prove in court.
Her statements make perfect sense to me.
Data has soul, but he's not a soldier. (Because of the whole Starfleet not being military thing)
The argument was not that he was a soldier, it was that he was property, like a forklift or a hypospray.
Maybe Picard should have argued that regular humans don't have souls, or that every human who has gone through a transporter has had their soul murdered and that they will never go to heaven and spend eternity with their mentally ill mother and asshole father afraid of the replicator... Oh no, thinking about how the Antivax movement spuriously started on about autism, does Maurice Picard connect replicated food with bipolar disorder?
Of course if it's only the unbalanced chemistry in her brain making her crazy, then Jean-Luc's mum in Heaven is not really anything like the real Yevette Picard at all, unless mental illness is also divine?
Get hip to what was happening over twenty years ago grandpa
Sounds like a chainsaw.
slight aside, but i think it is time for a Star Fleet JAG / law show, which is something CBS/Paramount is quite good at. Something honestly different, that can also be set in a familiar canon time period and not have to reinvent the wheel, nor have a giant budget.
The problem with a JAG show is that every Starfleet officer is a bona fide lawyer, and almost maybe probably, every human being raised on Earth, or an established colony that is not falling down, is also a lawyer...
Tasha?
What about Discovery?
Data could have produced his entire logs, and sensor recording in hard copy, flooding Riker's life to the point that he drowns and dies, or crashes the equivalence of the ships email server, if he went digital rather than physical? The point is that he could have easily paralyzed the Prosecution, without doing anything illegal, because he is a superior intellect. What if he faked an emergency, or built up a real emergency requiring the Enterprise, to force a continence, that could last years? Blowing up stars is easy, and if you don't, they are going to kill you Data.
Was the USS Discovery named after a legal process? Before the Klingon war came upon us all, was the true intent of that vessel's missions supposed to have been as a JAG Ship being legal aid to the bitter ends of the Federation?
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If they ever drop the facade of exploration, it will be my cue to move on.
it could still handle disputes between planets, ships, groups, colonies and stations and each other, star fleet officers accused of misbehavior, prime directive violations, neutral zone violations, intellectual theft, dereliction of duty, and all sorts of other varied offenses and accusations that could span the known Trek universe, just something different than the traditional model of ship explorations, which is already barely being done on SNW. I would rather see something new and different, then see the traditional formula being done badly.
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The Primary Mission of the USS Cerritos was "Second Contact" and I think that that worked out fairly well.
I did some Philosophy at University, and the thing about all these men (cough) is, that unless you go all the way back to Ancient Greece, that with the rarest of exceptions most of great western philosophers before the 21st century, were raised Judeo-christian.
It's an inescapable pigeonhole.
Don't you have a cloud to yell at?
This is where some of that head canon I employ comes in. It's plasible to figure they're being set up. Data's orders are being handed down directly, which means he must either submit to the transfer immediately, & take his chances under Maddox's command, or resign on the spot. He chooses the latter, & the trial is to block him doing so. (Which is the hugest conceit to get past. They let him join of his own free will, HTF could they ever tell whomever they let do so that they no longer have the right to leave of their own volition as well?)
But they do try to, & I think it's because they're hellbent on using Data, regardless of the infringement & impropriety, and they're already in so deep that they can't back down. This hypothetical setup I'm postulating is that Nakamura pre-arranged all this with Maddox, getting Louvois pulled out of retirement, because she'd presumably rule down Picard, who she has a history of doing so with, just at the moment the D is due to come there, & Maddox is set up to begin working on mass duplication of Data (at the neutral zone border)
There's a razor thin window to pull this off, & they'd hoped to just slide it past everybody, because they're out so far in deep space, where nobody's looking hard. They probably expected pushback from Picard (hence having Louvois on hand) & they padded the deck even more by having her still unstaffed. (which why wouldn't you just get qualified counsel on monitors over subspace communique, to represent the disputing parties?)
Because they don't want that. They want it pushed through quickly & quietly & their mistake was assuming Louvois would summarily rule against Picard (cuz history) They were probably even the ones who fed her the regulation that had her make the initial "toaster" ruling
Part of the charm of Trek, for me, is in the diversity of storytelling. If I want a legal show I can just go watch a legal show.
The Search for Spock used the S-word first (in this context).
"But even if there's a chance that Spock has an eternal soul ...then it's my responsibility." [transcript]
"But even if there's a chance that Spock has an eternal soul ...then it's my responsibility." [transcript]
Second contact missions are still exploration.
And God was mentioned a few times in TOS. DS9 was a show steeped in religion.
Folks who think we’re going to ever get rid of religion are in for a rude awakening. It will be with us in one form or another as long as we exists.
Best we can hope for is to try to push it in a direction where it is helping humanity instead of exploiting it.
