Daystrom Institute
Welcome to Daystrom Institute!
Serious, in-depth discussion about Star Trek from both in-universe and real world perspectives.
Read more about how to comment at Daystrom.
Rules
1. Explain your reasoning
All threads and comments submitted to the Daystrom Institute must contain an explanation of the reasoning put forth.
2. No whinging, jokes, memes, and other shallow content.
This entire community has a “serious tag” on it. Shitposts are encouraged in Risa.
3. Be diplomatic.
Participate in a courteous, objective, and open-minded fashion. Be nice to other posters and the people who make Star Trek. Disagree respectfully and don’t gatekeep.
4. Assume good faith.
Assume good faith. Give other posters the benefit of the doubt, but report them if you genuinely believe they are trolling. Don’t whine about “politics.”
5. Tag spoilers.
Historically Daystrom has not had a spoiler policy, so you may encounter untagged spoilers here. Ultimately, avoiding online discussion until you are caught up is the only certain way to avoid spoilers.
6. Stay on-topic.
Threads must discuss Star Trek. Comments must discuss the topic raised in the original post.
Episode Guides
The /r/DaystromInstitute wiki held a number of popular Star Trek watch guides. We have rehosted them here:
- Kraetos’ guide to Star Trek (the original series)
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Animated Series
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: The Next Generation
- Algernon_Asimov’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- Darth_Rasputin32898’s guide to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
- OpticalData’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
- petrus4’s guide to Star Trek: Voyager
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To add to this, we have to remember that Multitronics isn't the magic formula on its own. In TOS: "The Ultimate Computer" Daystrom couldn't get it to work - Units M-1 to M-4 were in his words "not entirely successful". The breakthrough of multitronics as embodied in M-5 was the ability for the system to be overlaid with the engrams, personality and, fortunately, morality of persons.
Daystrom used his own engrams to bring M-5 to its full potential, and his anxiety and fears about wanting to prove himself and survive academically translated into an obsessive drive in M-5 to also prove itself and ensure its own survival. Luckily, Daystrom's morals also translated over, and so M-5 was forced to confront the moral implications of what it had done, eventually electing to terminate itself in atonement.
When Zimmerman created the EMH, he incorporated part of his personality into the program, so it made sense to use multitronics because the technology had the ability to do just that. DS9's "multitronic engrammatic interpreter" is an offshot of that tech, and one imagines from the name it would copy a person's engrams in order to process and manipulate it.
So while it may have been obvious to us that sapience would arise from using multitronic tech in the EMH process, multitronics by itself won't do that. It's when you use it to incorporate real people and memories into its matrix and let it percolate that the potential arises.