1. The mind-sifter only talks about thoughts and knowledge. A person has more than that: consciousness, free will, personality etc.
2. So Voq is now a vegetable and his thoughts and knowledge have been force-transferred into Tyler? The mind-sifter can force download onto a person without leaving the target a vegetable? Does Voq exist along side Tyler in the same body? Or is it only his thoughts and knowledge that got transferred?
It seems too nebulous to me.
Well, it certainly
is rather nebulous. Obviously, the writer of "Errand" never had a story like this still-as-yet-hypothetical one in mind (no pun intended). I'm assuming that when DSC was being conceived and planned, they went back and looked over past Klingon stories—and they certainly wouldn't miss out the very
first—to see what could be mined for inspiration, found this tidbit, and decided to run with the idea and put a new spin on it.
We never hear any mention of this device again in subsequent stories on TV, so far as I recall. We only know what we can glean from this one. So with the caveat that I'm no surer than the next fellow about any of this, and have no insider knowledge of what they've planned—for all I know, maybe tomorrow's episode will completely invalidate any or all of these ideas—let's ruminate on it...
The thing clearly has adjustable settings over which the user has some control. It can "scan," it can "sift," it can "record," it can "rip," and it can "empty." The nuances of each, and what else it might be capable of, are unknown to us. Are consciousness and free will and personality really entirely separate things from thoughts and knowledge? Could a device that can "reach directly into the mind" against which humans can offer "no protection" affect only one without affecting the other? Does "a mental vegetable" still retain any consciousness or free will whatsoever, and if so, to what extent? We can't really say with any certainty.
Kor says that when taken to its extreme, the emptying of the subject's mind is "permanent" and they are left a "vegetable." Not biologically
dead, though. It seems implied that the
body, at least, still lives. He also doesn't say what happens to the mind that is "ripped"—note the connotations that this term has taken on since the original story was written, which despite not being intended at the time surely cannot be ignored in reading it today. He does talk about "recording" the contents. Is it possible that a subject's emptied-out vegetable shell, despite the ostensible impossibility—or merely
impracticality under the Klingons' standard operating procedures for interrogation?—of simply restoring its
own original mind back to it, could nevertheless act as a receptacle for
someone else's? Is it possible that the contents of
two minds, separately extracted from two different subjects, could be "sifted" together? Is it possible that one could be only
partly emptied of certain
selected elements, and then having those replaced by sifting in aspects of another? We can't really say with any certainty.
The more I've thought about it, the more I'm thinking this could play out somewhat like "Tuvix" (VGR), in that Tyler and Voq—or parts of each—have been "sifted" together and are now something new that retains some characteristics of both, but is in fact neither. Think of the original Ash Tyler as a bag of sugar and Voq as a bag of salt. The Klingons empty out some of one and sift in some of the other, ending up with a full bag that is neither pure salt nor sugar. It could be looked at as bag of salty sugar or sugary salt, depending on one's point of view. (Is there a difference?) Seems to me like there are a lot of fertile storytelling possibilities in this idea. But we can only speculate which ones DSC might choose to explore.
I realize that these are not complete and definitive answers to the questions you have posed. They simply cannot
be answered completely and definitively as yet, going only by the limited information we have. We'll have to wait and see!
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MMoM
)
