He is talking about the psychic abilities, mind melding, katra transferring, tokmar, and so on.
Not to mention the extreme issues with emotion, someone that no other vulcanoid race has demonstrated.
Spoilers The Romulans and the Vulcans (spoilers for Ep2 onward).
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Not to mention the extreme issues with emotion, someone that no other vulcanoid race has demonstrated.
But being a synth in name only doesn't explain any of that. This is the core of the stupidity of this argument: these 'synths' need to be completely indistinguishable from normal evolved biological beings down to sub-cellular level to the degree that over the centuries no one with super scifi medical tech ever noticed. It is just fucking pointless, they would be far less 'synths' than the augments were.
In your rush to dismiss anything that doesn't conform to TNG standards you've missed a great philosophical question that I hope gets tackled.
What makes a bio-android different from a from-birth augment?
So far, we haven't been told whether Dahj-type advanced synthetics are distinguishable from ordinary wetware or not. Might be there are bits and pieces of machinery inside, including some that send positronic signals. Might be those will show up in a scan or an autopsy, neither of which was performed on Dahj. Might be scans are blocked by jamming. OTOH, Dahj activated when threatened; if we assume Vulcans or Romulans or Hungarians or left-handed people are advanced synthetics, then this fact remaining secret might be due to them always turning into killing machines when exposed, and eliminating all witnesses. And then perhaps going passive again.
A Vulcan health check might be interesting to watch with an unjammable Mk I Eyeball, then: the Doctor goes "Hey!", the Patient assumes the tal'shaya position, the Doctor likewise springs to action, then both go "Ah..." and return to normal, with the Doctor signing a clean bill of health (even if with some reservations about that overindulgence in sandweed, and a kind reminder to Mrs Patient to pay a visit on schedule, too).
Timo Saloniemi
A Vulcan health check might be interesting to watch with an unjammable Mk I Eyeball, then: the Doctor goes "Hey!", the Patient assumes the tal'shaya position, the Doctor likewise springs to action, then both go "Ah..." and return to normal, with the Doctor signing a clean bill of health (even if with some reservations about that overindulgence in sandweed, and a kind reminder to Mrs Patient to pay a visit on schedule, too).
Timo Saloniemi
Left handed people are mutants. Totally different thing.
Is that interesting, or is it pointless navel-gazing? I think Longinus has already given you his answer on that.
You might as well argue that transporter clones like Tom Riker aren't real people, TBH.
Why? They are all real people. Augments, clones, bio-androids, Soong-type androids, etc.
That's not a philosophical question except in a sense that semantics is a subsection of philosophy.
If you are narrow-minded, sure.
Maybe they could do something with the idea you're discussing, but, to me, the value of Trek's philosophical musings is that they apply in some fashion to the questions of today. Once it moves into parsing the nuances of made-up sci-fi concepts, I lose interest. "What is humanity" is interesting to me in a way that "what is the difference in a fictitious bio-android and other fictitious synthetic or augmented life" simply isn't.
Admittedly, I'm not into hard sci-fi, and this is just my tolerance level. But the franchise seems very gung-ho about mainstream accessibility, so I am skeptical they would explore this in a meaningful or enlightening way.
Or that a person, once transported, is no longer the same person. There are already all sorts of ways for Trek to explore this sort of thing -- from genetic engineering to the convergence of man and technology -- that I don't think there's a need to go super-granular with it.
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Yeah. Maybe Orum was responsible for state of the drones in "Unity". He may have caused a system error, which liberated them from the collective...
The Zhat Vash predates the Time of Awakening. They're an ancient Vulcan organization that (I believe) works across the two polities with nary a concern about the lack of reunification. If the Romulans are synthetic (a theory which I don't believe in), then the Vulcans are synthetic. Otherwise, the Zhat Vash would've destroyed the Romulans long ago.
I'm still partial to my "Vulcans are the end result of multiple successful generations of genetic engineering" theory, especially since DS9 and Into Darkness showed us that Vulcans and genetically engineered humans are pretty comparable, physically and intellectually. Data, while modelled after Spock, has usually been shown to be a magnitude higher in knowledge retention, if not expressed computation ability.
I'm still partial to my "Vulcans are the end result of multiple successful generations of genetic engineering" theory, especially since DS9 and Into Darkness showed us that Vulcans and genetically engineered humans are pretty comparable, physically and intellectually. Data, while modelled after Spock, has usually been shown to be a magnitude higher in knowledge retention, if not expressed computation ability.
The point is, a transporter clone is fundamentally not different from a "bio-synth" which is indistinguishable from a humanoid. In both cases you have something that looks and acts exactly like a humanoid, but was not "born." Except if the bio-synths can breed, they even lose that distinguishing characteristic.
The difference between a transporter clone and a bio-android and augments is that the former is not intentionally created, its an accident. A "blameless" creation. Thomas Riker's status as a person was never in question.
Yep. If bio-synth is indistinguishable from a 'normal' lifeform down to cellelular and even reproduce sexually it just is completely pointless definition.
Or, you know, just understand that distinctions without difference are pointless.
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What would it matter? And it wouldn't even apply to these 'synths' you're proposing, they would have been perfectly normal sexually reproducing creatures for countless generations at this point.
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