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Am I the same entity or person from the moment I was born?

Jay, I respect your depth in the Star Trek worlds.
I was a casual observer but some characters really stuck out as memorable, mostly.

Q was one, Khan another that kind of stuck out as real life personalities in the religious arena. My dad being a fundy had a few common attitudes with both, thankfully not actively harming others or as extreme.

The characters kinda put my mind on edge for that.
Younger me never knew why fully but now i see it. Art imitates life, and religions continue to push the bad agenda.
 
Yup. It's been years since I seen that but Jay said the same. My dad's religious cult carried those strange mannerisms.
 
Emre_1974tr said:
If the being we call "I" is merely the sum of these atoms, then the "I" of ten years ago is not the same person as the "I" of today. We have physically transformed into an almost completely renewed, re-created being. Yet, our memory, character, and stream of consciousness continue. This clearly shows that our identity is based on a foundation deeper than mere physical continuity.
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No, our memory changes, our character can change, and consciousness flickers in and out.

There is no essential "me". I am an ever-changing bundle of cells, experiences, memories and emotions.
 
arthwollipot said:
Only inasmuch as not collecting stamps is a hobby.


Or any other currently-popular religion in fact.

It occurs to me that the only actual god in the Star Trek canon who is even hinted at being real is Apollo in Who Mourns for Adonais?. The so-called "god" who needs a starship in V is clearly not a god at all. And Q is clearly not a god either, despite being near-omnipotent most of the time. The Bajoran Prophets are just an alien race that lives in the wormhole.

Star Trek is inherently atheistic in that it acknowledges no gods.
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Though they did talk about the one [god] in Who Mourns... Though that was clearly a studio mandated insert, to ensure the episode would sell in syndication.
 
JayUtah said:
I'm fortunate to hob-nob among Star Trek royalty. My company is one of the sponsors of the local fan expo, and through that sponsorship I've made a number of friends who work (or worked) on the shows as they come to meet their fans. I get that it's not everyone's cup of Earl Grey—hot. Whatever your fandoms may be, love them and respect those of others.

Honestly I wasn't sure what you were reaching for. Ricardo Mantalban did play a fallen angel (Mr. Rourke in Fantasy Island) endowed with supernatural powers. While not strictly science fiction, his character addresses the common theme, "What if you could have whatever you wanted?" The Q address that, as do the Krell and Harry Potter. Even Wesley Crusher punched out as a newly minted demigod.

Yes, that was Ricardo Mantalban's real chest as Khan, albeit with a little help from makeup. It wasn't a prosthetic. Ricardo was kind of a gym beast. What do we learn from that character? Khan is a product of aggressive eugenics, which is rooted in racism as an ideology. In the fictional Star Trek timeline, the debate over eugenics rose to the level of armed conflict. This underscores the Us v. Them theme that seems to underpin almost every religion. The purpose of religion is to establish in-groups and out-groups. The genetically superior superhumans are the in-group. But also Khan represents the Mohammed, St. Peter, Joseph Smith, and L. Ron Hubbard character. Khan is a charismatic leader that amasses a dedicated following that he objectively doesn't deserve.

The Eugenics Wars at first were said to have occurred in the 1990s. That sounded good in the 1960s, but eventually the franchise had to contend with real life creeping up on the fanciful future. Thankfully timeline fracture and manipulation is part of Star Trek, although not strictly a wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey. But we've managed to push the Eugenics Wars ahead in the timeline. And this raises a relevant issue. Among science fiction franchises that allow timeline manipulation, you have various hypothetical rules. Broadly, one is that the timeline is fragile and must be preserved at all costs, while another is that the timeline is inherently resilient. Star Trek can't decide which one it is. It has the temporal Prime Directive (i.e., the fragile timeline) but it also embraces the notion that the Eugenics Wars were inevitable. And at one point, Spock quotes Erlichmann to fellow Vulcan Valeris, admonishing her to have faith that the universe will unfold as it should. Vulcan philosophy apparently embraces the resilient timeline theory, or at least a sense of predestination that should appeal to Muslims.

Why not have faith that the properly unfolding universe can include a model of identity and continuity that allows you to beam up and down while keeping your soul intact? As someone noted up-thread, if Allah can safeguard the soul through the various observable pitfalls of ordinary life, why not through a particular flavor of teleportation? The answer, of course, is that Emre has no interest in actually exploring these concepts. His predetermined endpoint is an excoriation of mainstream science and philosophy. With that end in mind, a Star Trek transporter represents to him a travesty from science that religion should probably find a reason to abhor.


I agree. One of the persistent themes in Star Trek is the triumph of humanity over the purportedly supernatural, which is always somehow fatally flawed. Often this comes from humans exhibiting a stronger character than the allegedly more noble races. The essential nobility of the human race is one of the tenets of Roddenberry's atheism. They need no gods to guide them in the paths of true righteousness.

Conversely the mid-to-late seasons of Next Generation were criticized for relying too much on essentially the same deus ex machine as Greek and Roman theater, producing unsatisfying drama. They'd spend three acts building up some conflict or dilemma, and then the answer is just to reconfigure the deflector dish to emit an inverse bogon pulse or whatever that clears it right up. The only real amusement in the episode is an English actor playing a French captain playing an American detective on the holodeck. As soon as the show made a god of technology, it ceased to entertain. It ceased to be credible.
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I just had the amusing vision of the Enterprise shooting a load of Aussie yobbos at the enemy to solve the problem of the week.

While technobabble did become a big thing as TNG progressed, the generally strong writing and acting allowed it to be somewhat ignored. Technobabble didn't really become an issue until Voyager, where the staff didn't know how to work the very interesting and unique premise they were given and relied for too long as evisioning the show as a continuation of TNG.
 
JayUtah said:
...
Yes, that was Ricardo Mantalban's real chest as Khan, albeit with a little help from makeup. It wasn't a prosthetic. Ricardo was kind of a gym beast. What do we learn from that character? Khan is a product of aggressive eugenics, which is rooted in racism as an ideology. In the fictional Star Trek timeline, the debate over eugenics rose to the level of armed conflict. This underscores the Us v. Them theme that seems to underpin almost every religion. The purpose of religion is to establish in-groups and out-groups. The genetically superior superhumans are the in-group. But also Khan represents the Mohammed, St. Peter, Joseph Smith, and L. Ron Hubbard character. Khan is a charismatic leader that amasses a dedicated following that he objectively doesn't deserve.

...
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Something that was further developed(?) in another Rodenberry branded series, Andromeda, with the Nietzscheans.

Mind you, it also has god-like figures in the form of the celestial avatars. At least, if you go by the original show runner's idea of where the series would head.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
While technobabble did become a big thing as TNG progressed, the generally strong writing and acting allowed it to be somewhat ignored.
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Even the odious "transporter made them kids" episode had the scene where Riker distracts a Ferengi with an in-universe technobabble explanation of how the computers worked. We grabbed all the nonsense words such as "Heisenfram" and "ramistat" and "ferromantle drive core" and used them as placeholders in designs we hadn't worked out names for yet. And you don't have to sell me on the acting, especially Patrick Stewart. But that's another tangent.

I can point to some forgettable original series episodes too. But the strength of Star Trek has always been its writing and its willingness to tackle hard science fiction topics like whether Data has got ghost and why you shouldn't worship jerks.

Gulliver Foyle said:
Technobabble didn't really become an issue until Voyager, where the staff didn't know how to work the very interesting and unique premise they were given and relied for too long as evisioning the show as a continuation of TNG.
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I'm partial to Voyager mostly because I got to visit the sets. I was at Paramount working on an entirely unrelated project, but we snuck onto one of the soundstages (Cargo Bay 2 and Unimatrix Zero) and were there almost a full minute before security kicked us out. When one of the PAs found out we were actually on the lot working, she introduced us to some of the cast and gave us a quick tour. Again, another tangent.

All of Emre's threads seem to have a problem with the writers not fully understanding the premise. According to the opening drivel, if something manages to create a physical copy of me (say, one with an evil beard) then we're still the same identity because—[waves hands dramatically]—somehow Allah. This strikes me as particularly hilarious because it's exactly the same magical argument that Catholics use to defend the identity of the Trinity. Emre reasonably rejects the notion of a Trinity as an expression of monotheism, but then he invokes the same magic to cobble up a purely theistic answer to the identity problem and declare himself a genius.
 
Darat said:
Or to be relevant to this thread, a Mohammed.
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arthwollipot said:
Maybe. I saw Khan's followers more as a fringe cult than as a mainstream religion.
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I included Mohammed in my original list, on purpose. Every big religion was once a fringe cult, including Christianity. The original "Space Seed" episode illustrated Khan's seductive power over one of the Enterprise crew.
 
JayUtah said:
I included Mohammed in my original list, on purpose. Every big religion was once a fringe cult, including Christianity. The original "Space Seed" episode illustrated Khan's seductive power over one of the Enterprise crew.
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And because Mantalban did have that “mysterious” charisma you did believe Khan could have founded a cult. Cumberbach is a very good actor, and can play arrogance but he doesn’t have that charisma, I couldn’t see a cult coalesce around that version.
 
Is there a Law of The Internet which I don't know about that says all discussions must degenerate into Star Trek or Star Wars or both?

Can't we talk about Gormenghast or The Third Policeman instead? Discussion about De Selby's ideas would be far more interesting (to me at least).
 
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