| Was Mr Spock the goal? |
| Written by John Burch | |
| Saturday, 10 February 2007 | |
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We have all watched Star Trek. Did one character embody our goals?
Mr. Spock was suposedly a rational creature who had risen above emotion. Is that what we want? No. Spock is an impossibility. He was as motivated as anyone on the ship. Emotion is what motivates us to act. Emotion is essential to any living creature - even a robot like Data. Both Spock and Data are cartoons of reality that are impossible in practice. We all need emotion to motivate us to do anything, else we would sit and watch the world around us without a care or a concern. We would not even rise to find food without the emotional needs and desires that naturally propell us toward a solution. Pain, even that from a pricked finger, is emotion. It is hardwired motivation of our behavior. Love and devotion are less hardwired, but they too are motivational elements that move us to action. Emotion is motivation. The difference between fantasy and reality is that reality has to work. Spock and Data were not thought out deeply enough to work in the real world. They did not need to. They did exactly what they were designed to do in their fantasy world. But we live here in reality and we are using the tools that worked on the plains of Africa but they don't work so hot in a global civilization. We need to find a way to handle our emotion, use them for our daily life but find a different way to behave when we deal with powerful forces that can destroy our world. The coming age of nanotechnology will either make us or break us in this respect. |
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