Of God and Holograms

I’m fascinated by the concept of Star Trek's holodeck in which new worlds are created using computer programs and projected light and energy fields.  In this fictional universe, holograms at first “lived” in ignorance of what they were.

     Just as God created man and the world he exists in, so too, in the world of Star Trek, did scientists and engineers create holograms and the holographic worlds they inhabit.  They may look and sound like us, and the world they inhabit may look like ours, and they may “think” the world they live in is real, for it certainly seems real, but in fact, it is illusion, a fantasy.  They just don’t know it.

     But even as early as The Next Generation’s first season, holograms began gaining an awareness of another existence outside of their own.  The gangsters in “The Big Goodbye” and Minuet from “11001001” gained self-awareness of what they were.  This idea is taken even further with the character of Moriarty from the second season episode “Elementary, Dear Data,” in which the holographic character of Moriarty from Data’s Sherlock Holmes program ends up pleading to Captain Picard to be released from his unreal “prison,” but Picard admits they just do not have the technology to grant his wish.

     In a later episode, the Moriarty hologram pops up in the holodeck again, and attempts to leave his holo-world, yet he still doesn’t make it.  He is eventually tricked by Captain Picard into believing that he has entered the real world, yet he never did, and in fact still resides in a holographic fantasy that he thinks is reality, beaten at his own game by beings who live beyond his unreal realm.  Picard’s statement at the end of that episode, “Ship in a Bottle,” is both powerful and ironic:  “Who knows; our reality may be very much like theirs,” he admits to his senior staff, “and all this,” he continues, motioning around the briefing room, “might just be an elaborate simulation running inside a little device sitting on someone’s table.”  He’s actually right on two counts!  First, we real human beings are “running” inside God’s created “program,” and secondly, this episode of Star Trek is indeed an elaborate illusion running inside a mechanical device called a television set.  In an ironic way, this “video image” of Picard speaks the truth!  Even though they are both fantasies - the show and the holograms - there is a kind of "reality" for both of them as well, for they are both made up of elements from the real world.  The show has a reality of being moving images on a television screen, and the characters are all real people (actors) pretending to be somebody else, and the holograms have their own reality in this fictional world; their reality is that of being computer programs of projected light and energy.

     On the next few series, holograms continued to grow in self-knowledge and even life.  On Deep Space Nine, Odo and Dax discover the existence of an entire community of holograms that did not know what they were, but find out, with Odo and Dax’s help.  Like the earlier Next Generation episodes, it’s another case of beings living in a fantasy world and discovering the true nature of their existence – just in a slightly different way.

     On Voyager, one hologram in particular is allowed to improve and grow, and to live among the crew as an actual life-form.  Thanks to a device called a holo-emitter, as well as constant improvements and additions to his program’s subroutines, the Emergency Medical Hologram, a.k.a. The Doctor, is viewed as “real” by his colleagues, something previous crews were reluctant to do.  I mean, even Vic over on Deep Space Nine is viewed as merely a hologram, despite his self-knowledge of exactly what he is (his sixties lingo to describe himself is "light bulb").  He isn’t treated quite the same as everyone else, and isn’t seen as being quite as real.  Even Vic would admit this, but the Doctor has grown even beyond that kind of half-existence.

     Likewise, someday, we will also be able to see the real world that exists beyond our created “illusionary” realm, and to live in the real world with God, our creator, just as the Doctor was able to live among the real, human crew of Voyager, the race from which his own creators derived.

     In the Next Generation episode “Hollow Pursuits,” the character of Reginald Barclay creates holographic duplicates of his fellow crewmembers that live with him in the real world.  In “A Fistful of Datas,” Data’s image is downloaded into a wild west program and duplicated as numerous gunslingers.  In the Voyager two-parter “The Killing Game”, the ship is captured by aliens called Hirogen, and they have the Doctor link the crew’s neural brains to the holodeck systems, so that the crew end up believing they are people actually living in whatever scenario the Hirogen want to place them in.  In another Voyager episode, the Doctor gives a dying alien called a Vidiian a chance to live again in a holographic body.

     In each one of these cases, a real person winds up existing in a fake holographic world, either recreated from the real person or placing the real person in a holographic fantasy, and making them believe that the fantasy is reality.  But things are a little different in the Deep Space Nine episode “Our Man Bashir.”  

In this episode, most of the crew is involved in a transporter accident, and their physical bodies are downloaded as mere images into Dr. Bashir’s James Bond inspired holosuite program.  

It’s then up to Dr. Bashir to keep them safe within the confines of the program so that they can eventually be re-incorporated with their conscious minds being stored in Deep Space Nine’s main computer core.  As mere holographic characters, the crewmembers do not know about the real world, or their existence in it.  In the confines of the program, they are actually newly created beings who are now part of this unreal world, and even though Dr. Bashir looks and acts like one of them, they have no idea that he is, in fact, a real flesh and blood being existing for a short time in their unreal world of energy and projected light.  So even though he appears to be, from their viewpoint, the same as them, in reality, he is not, for he is flesh and blood in a world of holograms, and has knowledge they don’t have, knowledge of what they truly are, and what he truly is, and the nature of their existence being temporarily different from his existence.  By the end of the episode, Dr. Bashir plays out the entire Bond scenario and saves the lives of all his friends, and they are re-incorporated into the real world, sharing their existence once again outside of the world they knew, and rejoining Dr. Bashir.

     I realize this analogy for Jesus’ existence among us is stretching things quite far, but all the elements are still there.  There is the being that is not like any of the others, existing outside of this unreal world, and yet perceived by the people in that world as no different from them.  And this being has knowledge about them that they do not possess, knowledge about who they really are, and this being that exists beyond the confines of this created world is then able to save them, and bring them back into the real world with himself.  The main difference between the two models in this analogy is the lengths Jesus went through to save us, painfully sacrificing His life for us, versus what the fictional Dr. Bashir did to save his friends, which was, amazingly, the destruction of the entire world (which effectively ended the computer simulation).  Also, the relationship between Jesus and us is quite different than the relationship Dr. Bashir has with his colleagues.  Yet some of these comparisons just cannot be ignored, and it makes me think about our existence here on earth versus what it will be like in heaven.  Just like these holographic beings, most of us are completely ignorant of the real world that lies on top of this one, and those who are not ignorant of it still can’t comprehend exactly what it is.  Someday, if we believe, we will be able to leave the confines of this world and join our creator in God’s real world, just like the holographic characters from this Deep Space Nine episode are able to rejoin their real colleague Dr. Bashir, or as the Doctor is able to live among the rest of the Voyager crew; only our existence is heaven with God will be infinitely more glorious!  We can’t even begin to imagine what it will truly be like!

- From my journal, August 1999