Richard Hanley, an Australian philosopher working in the Anglo-American “analytic tradition,” constructs more than half of his book The Metaphysics of Star Trek (also entitled Is Data Human? in a second edition) on a misviewing of the episode The Measure of a Man. Hanley misinterprets the title of this Next Generation episode nominated for a Writer’s Guild award as referring to the “controversial issue” of whether or not Data should be philosophically and juridically classified as human. But the trial is about whether or not Data has rights, not whether or not he is human. Melinda Snodgrass’ seminal literary story, also contra Hanley, is not about the “measure of Data.” It is about Data the android as a measure of us.
In addition to its dictionary definition as “standard of comparison or appraisal,” the word measure also means the “reasonable bounds or limits of something.” (Random House Webster’s College Dictionary 1995) In this case, it is the limit of the historical-epistemic founding of the era of humanism (as interrogated, for example, in the work of Foucault, Derrida, Haraway, or Hayles). What Professor Hanley is unable to see is that the episode itself already responds narratively to the question “Is Data human?” by reversing it. The question “Is Data human?” is a false question, as Captains Picard and Louvois both imply several times. It is already “taken into account” and “stood on its head” by the internal structure of the story.
The query that preoccupies Richard Hanley for hundreds of pages can only be formulated from the position of a “static universalizing naturalism.” It is the assumption that we are still human and “there is nothing new under the sun.”
Hanley believes that aspiring Star Trek philosophers have been assigned the noble task of debating what the criteria are for awarding human rights to new groups. But if humanity itself is no longer “human” – if we have been thoroughly technologized, artificialized, and cyborged – then Hanley’s Question Concerning Data is no longer germane, and we should instead be asking Heidegger’s Question Concerning Technology. We should be investigating the closure of analytic philosophy or the Star Trekking of Metaphysics, inquiring into its enabling and disabling conditions. This would bring us up to the level of the challenges raised by Picard and Louvois, which is the stuff of Star Trek at its ethical heights.
Professor Hanley would like to devise a foolproof intelligence test to be administered to new nonhuman life-forms applying for citizenship in the United Federation of Planets. If they cannot pass the test, then they can be safely slaughtered without ethical remorse.
Stupidity is suicidal! Hanley’s proposed solution to this “immigration and naturalization” regulatory problem is to restate a “very old philosophical problem called ‘the problem of other minds.’” Either we come up with a cogent answer to the perennial question “How do you know that I have a mind?,” or are forever doomed to the position of solipsism (only I have a mind), panpsychism (everything in the universe has a mind), or the argument from analogy (I’m humanoid, have a mind, and am OK; therefore you’re humanoid, have a mind, and are OK). After lengthy discussions of the Turing AI Test, free will and determinacy, and John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument, Hanley settles on a battery of behavioral tests for first contacted aliens and androids. Can the encountered new intelligent life petitioner demonstrate its successful simulation of “established human qualities” such as the aptitude for deductive and inductive reasoning, moral judgment capabilities, emotions, and self-awareness? Do androids dream of electric sheep?
The largest obstacle faced by Data as a candidate for personhood is ironically the fact that he has “too many abilities to pass as a realistic human being.” This explains why Hanley strangely echoes Maddox in constantly speaking of Data as an “it.” Maddox is obsessed with finding the Holy Grail of AI research, or the hidden truth of Data’s master heuristic algorithms and simulated neural net. It is Data’s extraordinary mimetic resemblance to a human being that makes the uncovering of Soong’s seminal deed so irresistible. But the elusiveness of knowledge of the positronic brain is a clue to the impossibility of answering the question if Data is human. The legal or philosophical question of Data’s sentience is doubled, begged, and cancelled by the “robotics science” question of how Data’s positronic brain really works. The truly interesting questions about Star Trek’s technologies of disappearance are begged by pursuing the question of “how they really work.”
Adhering to the functionalist notion of the cognitive sciences that a mind is (defined by) what a mind does, Richard Hanley “deduces” that everything worth knowing about Data is decidable by his observed behavior. But if the answer is so trivial, then perhaps the question was the wrong one. Hanley’s brand of pragmatism leads him to participate in the hyper-real nitpicking pastime, typically practiced by the Paramount Pictures-sanctioned Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future and Star Trek Encyclopedia, of ignoring fiction and instead reconstructing all the minute details of a really existing character named Data. To arrive at the pragmatist conclusion that Data does indeed have consciousness and feelings, just like a real human, Hanley has recourse to infinitesimal snippets of Data’s behavior, manifested in dozens of video clips, each lasting only a few seconds. His method, like that of thousands of Star Trek web sites, is to compile a massive compendium of tele-factual evidence. In Hanley’s instance, it is a long list of varied “human emotions” exhibited by Data in an accumulation of media moments. In the age of simulation, the vaunted logical empiricist tradition of only trusting in the facts and the pragmatic self-justification of language systems, from Bertrand Russell to W.V. Quine, ends up as a parody of itself, a descent into the hyper-reality of believing that media characters are real.
But Data is not real. He is fictional. He is an android. On the most banal possible level, the answer to Professor Hanley’s question “Is Data human?” is a resounding “no!” because Data does not exist.
