I'm about to head out the door soon. And this requires a deep, insightful answer that spans not only science but also the supernatural and possibly also religion. And it's dependent on what each of us believes.
That much is true all right. Will you be the same person after you have walked through that door? After the night's sleep? Religion barely touches on the issue of doors, and while significance is given to sleep, little of the due concern is extended to the issue of waking up. And science has yet to figure out what the subject matter of this discussion is to begin with...
So these are my thoughts. Deep, philosophical thoughts that not everyone is going to agree with. I already know this in advance.
"Return to Tomorrow" (TOS) was written by John T. Dugan, who was a deeply religious person. His belief was that Sargon, Thalassa, and Henoch existed as Spirits. These spirits either inhabited their original bodies, the bodies of the spheres they were in, the bodies of Kirk, Mulhall, and Spock, and then finally android bodies. Wherever the spirits put themselves, that was their body. They could also exist without bodies. At the end of the original version of "Return to Tomorrow", Sargon and Thalassa would've existed as Spirits. John Dugan believed in an Afterlife. Gene Roddenberry did not, vetoed that idea, and they went into non-existence/oblivion. John Dugan hated this revision to his ending so much that he went by his pen name John Kingsbridge instead.
Absolutely fascinating! Of course, the issue is left somewhat open: were those spheres really vital in the survival of these persons, or mere placebos within which the Spirits could sleep, even though they'd fare equally well outdoors?
My stance on religion and spirituality is that the two don't have to be connected to each other. Just because there are Spirits doesn't mean there has to be a God. I won't know about the existence of God, or a God, until I die and I'm not in a hurry to die. That makes me an Agnostic. Since we're created by our parents, our bodies and our spirit could've been created at the same time. If it's possible for the spirit to continue without the body, then spirits can move into another body that's without one. It can be transferred from one shell to another.
...And all the better if all Spirits are created at, uh, Creation, and merely distributed across bodies and time. The act of distributing could then be repeated or altered until otherwise proven.
"Return to Tomorrow" doesn't contradict the idea of a spirit that can be transferred from one body to another. It reinforces that belief. The only Roddenberry-imposed mandate was that the spirit could not exist without a body. Doesn't matter what the body is. It just has to be inside of it.
...If that. Perhaps it just loses its voice if it loses vocal cords or a nice spherical membrane for its loudspeaker.
Skipping ahead to Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Kirk and Sarek find out that Spock's katra -- which I interpret to be another word for his spirit -- was transplanted onto McCoy.
...Without killing or diminishing Spock in the process, interestingly enough. So copy/paste rather than cut/paste? Or merely "I'm my body, plus this little mostly irrelevant bit of extra we wear for decoration, and you get to have some of it for a while to remember me by - and to ensure my dad never gets hold of it, that bastard"?
Since the regenerated Spock's mind was a blank slate, the original Spock's katra was able to become dominant easily. Except the regenerated Spock's mind had to process a lifetime's worth of memories and experiences all at once. Too much for any brain to handle, which is why Spock was the way he was the end of TSFS and Sarek said, "Only time will answer." When Spock was talking to Kirk at the end, his brain was still processing everything. If his brain were like a computer booting up, he'd be like: "1%... 2%... 3%.... " and that's where he was when he said, "Jim. Your name is Jim."
This sure works - but the new Spock had already accumulated at least some memories, perhaps at an accelerated rate since his body and thus his brain grew faster than natural. Putting a katra in need not be something that requires a blank template; rather, it might just require a compatible template, that is, a Vulcan mind. Which is why McCoy and, in that other adventure, Archer had difficulty sharing, but why a trained Vulcan in that other adventure eventually absorbed the extra katra, perhaps as normally done.
"Return to Tomorrow" plus The Search for Spock equals "Et in Arcadia Ego".
Picard's spirit was transferred into a biosynthethic body. Picard's biosynthetic body can subconsciously process information much faster than a Human or Vulcan brain. Consciously, Picard 2 won't notice any difference, but subconsciously his brain sorted out everything before he even woke up in a way that Regenerated Spock's subconsciousness couldn't.
Whether the transfer was cut/paste or copy/paste isn't particularly relevant in the circumstances. And probably it wouldn't matter whether the donor was a human, with no tradition of katra passing, or a Vulcan, with such a tradition: humans aren't soulless in face of the evidence, and Vulcans don't have souls in face of the evidence, they merely stand on the same line when machinery is used to transfer self.
Physically, we're not that different ourselves. Our cells regenerate constantly. We're technically not the same people we were even one year ago. Our spirits are in a different body. It's just that Picard's spirit was put into a different body all at once instead of a little at a time constantly.
...The truly interesting case would have been in putting Picard's spirit in two bodies. Or 4.7 bodies, or 0.47 bodies. Which is what our favorite holographic lifeforms supposedly can do just fine, but this might actually distinguish them from "real" life.
PIC puts a nice twist to that by making Soongian souls "quantum": they aren't units contained in a positronic brain that stacks a lot of points to produce a whole, but can be extrapolated from a single point, which may not be quite the same as being contained in a single point but nicely stretches the definition past the primitive model of building blocks.
This might be what makes Soongians distinct from the rest of life. If all souls were "quantum", the telepathic species might have noticed. But certain types of mind might not be unitary - perhaps the Link is another case of a single mind getting stretched but never split?
In comparison, a simple transfer would be trivially easy for the subject to handle, physically, mentally and metaphysically.
Timo Saloniemi
