Hey there,
I have always been of the opinion that so-called Treknobabble actually (with only few exceptions) is internally consistent and makes sense if you accept some of its premises. It’s not just random words strung together, it makes sense if you simply listen to the characters and accept that their scientific understanding differs from ours.
Therefore, this is actually a piece of head-canon that I assume is largely intentional, and it’s about the concept of a soul, and where consciousness comes from in the Trek universe. So far, I have not been disappointed with this explanation; and it actually explains some of the more illogical parts of how consciousness and “a soul” supposedly exist in Star Trek.
Sentient beings in the Star Trek universe have a “soul”; some kind of energy field that is created by their neural system naturally. We call it a neural energy field or a bio-neural energy field; and we don’t yet know how to create or replicate ones ourselves, only how to move them.
This is the reason why we cannot clone-transport or replicate conscious beings: we have a way to move the neuro-electric field from A to B via the transporter beam, but we cannot create any new ones; any living being we would replicate would be just cells, out of a consciousness, practically a zombie.
That’s how we can transport someone from here to there, but not clone them; this is how we can replicate meat, but not a living animal.
This is also how telepathy works: if consciousness is merely some kind of energy field, we can manipulate it however we want by simply applying physical methods.
Let’s look at a few of the appearances in canon:
- In VOY 1x13 (Cathexis), Chakotay’s “bio-neural energy” is displaced, practically his consciousness, and can even ‘enter’ other beings. This implies that his consciousness is separate from his body, and can be moved around, and even “possess” others: the mind is totally separate from the body.
- In DIS 2x11/2x12, they store someone’s “bio-neural energy”, a representation of their consciousness, and it is said that it can uniquely identify a person.
- According to DS9 4x10 (Our Man Bashir), during transport, someone’s “neural energy” pattern is stored within the transporter buffer. The energy pattern occupies a huge amount of memory and so cannot be stored for a long period of time. In the same episode, they also establish “neural energy” to be separate from the physical form. They use the word “store” instead of “save”; I think that’s because it’s literally something like a battery, not a photocopier. You can only move around the consciousness.
- In VOY 4x13 (Waking Moments), they encounter a species which seems to be unconscious, but actually has a consciousness independent of its physical form; that even is able to pull others in with it. This is, once again, called a “neurogenic field”. This implies that the consciousness (the neural energy field) of people can be physically manipulated like any other energy, to induce hallucinations or dreams.
- In VOY 6x05 (Alice), there is a “neurogenic interface”, which seems to enable the user to connect their own neuro-electric field with the computer in order to transfer data from one source to the other, to connect the consciousness to another body, so to speak. This mirrors the ability to possess others from Cathexis.
- In ENT 4x10 (Daedalus) we find a disembodied transporter signal that contains a human’s consciousness and that can once again haunt things and people. This could very well be the person’s neuro-electric field from the pattern buffer, somehow broken free, in a very similar way to the independent-soul possession mechanics from Cathexis and Alice.
- In TOS and Enterprise, we also see many references to the Vulcan concept of “katra”; a person’s consciousness, independent from a body, that can be stored in a device, transferred to others, and communicated with for example via a mind meld. Sound familiar?
- In DS9 1x09 (The Passenger), Julian Bashir is possessed by a Vulcan’s consciousness, and Dax ends up removing the consciousness by using an “electromagnetic pulse” to “displace the pattern”. This once again strengthens the idea of consciousness being nothing but an electromagnetic field.
There are tons more (literally, dozens) examples of people’s consciousnesses being represented by some kind of electromagnetic field independent of their bodies; often called “neural pattern”, “neural energy”, or a variation thereof. It is surprisingly consistent.
So, what about Data, and the Doctor, and all the other artificial life forms? It seems to be simple to say now that the “measure of a man” is simply whether they are able to create a neuro-electric field or not. However, if this was the case, the entire philosophical debate on whether Data is a being or not would not make much sense: they could simply scan him to find out whether there is, in fact, one, or not. I therefore assume that he does not have one (there is also no canon reference to any neuro-anything when it comes to Data), and that positronic brains “merely” simulate consciousness.
I propose a more radical approach: it does not matter whether an artificial lifeform is actually conscious or only simulates consciousness perfectly; for all intents and purposes, they should be treated equal to all other beings.
The TNG Technical Manual explanation is pretty straightforward - storing “neural energy” (and indeed replicating any living creature) requires capturing the quantum state of every particle in the organism, with a zero percent error rate, and they simply don’t have the storage capacity to do so reliably. The one time they managed to store neural patterns long-term, it required the entire storage capacity of Deep Space 9 to store the neural patterns of five people (“Our Man Bashir”).
The transporter buffers can handle these patterns on a short-term basis, but the tradeoff is that they start to degrade over time (typically portrayed as within a few minutes, though there’s some variability).
That model breaks down a little bit (well, a lot) when you try and reconsile the TNG EP where Picard and Guinan and Kieko and Ro turn into kids and they use some transporter fuckery to get them back.
The physical structures of their brains strictly would have been different post-transport as they went from a physically smaller child’s brain to a physically more massive adult one… if consciousness and memory were strictly a function of molecular and energy arrangement, they couldn’t have done it (or at least, they wouldn’t remember the time when they were in a child’s body)
Sure, “Rascals” breaks the transporter rules in pretty much every way.
One thing that Trek consistently garbles up is evolution and biology in a larger sense, and it’s really frustrating! I can accept some premises to make the science possible (like, for example, that parallel timelines attract in order to merge, making the ‘butterfly effect’ not a thing and things like the time-loop in that one TNG episode possible where the universe doesn’t behave deterministically), but that evolution isn’t just a side-effect of efficient species living longer on average, but actually something encoded in the genes that just has to be “activated” somehow epigenetically… ehhh. I guess you can handwave that with the progenitors somehow, given that the DNA of humanoids is already artificially constructed.
I find it positive to think about these writers, inspired to try to create something scientific and exciting but lacking the education themselves to do it justice, but then inspiring generations to learn and explore, who then return having learned enough to spot the problems.
I hope Star Trek can use science, and the generations of fans now inspired, to keep pushing these stories further because it feels like our collective need for Star Trek’s vision is as deep as ever.
Hence why I theorize that the neural energy field is completely independent from the vessel it occupies; just like people can “possess” others. In “Rascals”, the neural energy fields were transported correctly, only their bodies were misconfigured in some way (a way that I really can’t be bothered to theorize about, lol).
Uh… Scotty managed to keep a whole ship crew alive for decades in the buffer of a transporter, and did not need the entire ship’s storage. (TNG - “Relics”)
I may need to watch the episode again, but didn’t the DS9 incident happen entirely on accident? That’s the James Bond holodeck episode, isn’t it? Scotty did this on purpose. The only accident there was whatever happened to the ship that forced storing them in the pattern buffer their only escape. That and not being able to get out again until The Enterprise found 'em.
Scotty’s crew was two people and one of them died; he was the sole survivor. His method has a 50% fatality rate.
Guess I need to rewatch both.
Although that was due to hardware failure on the transporter itself, rather than an issue with the process. Even so, it’s not a perfect process, since Geordi mentions that Scotty’s pattern had some minor degradation (0.03%?) before Scotty was retrieved.
From the description of the process, it’s not exactly a stable form of long term storage either. It’s closer to constantly transporting someone in a loop, and refreshing the pattern that way. Basically the equivalent of preventing all the water from leaking out of a bucket by constantly moving it between buckets.
It was just him and Ensign Franklin, and Franklin didn’t survive the attempt.
No, it was a deliberate decision by Eddington.