Pre-Conscious Humans May Have Been Like the Borg - Issue 47: Consciousness

Captain Picard: "How do we reason with them, let them know that we are not a threat?" At least, I've never known anyone who did." With this brief, ominous exchange, the heroes of Star Trek: The Next Generation are introduced to one of their most formidable enemies: the Borg, a race of cyborgs whose minds are linked to a collective "hive mind" through sophisticated technology. The collective expands their civilization through a process of mental and physical "assimilation": They find new intelligent beings, like humans, implant them with Borg technology, and integrate them into the hive mind, erasing their previous identities. Individual Borg are not conscious in the way humans are, and they have no sense of individuality. The hive mind is a dictator, an unquestioned voice that commands each individual. The Borg nature is split in two, an executive called the collective and a follower called the drone. For the humans living in the Star Trek universe, the prospect of assimilation is terrifying. When asked why humans resist assimilation, Chief Engineer Geordi La Forge says, "For somebody like me, losing that sense of individuality is almost worse than dying." In his 2008 TED Talk, Philip Zimbardo introduced his subject by showing his audience M.C. The art, Zimbardo explained, reminds us that "good and evil are...READ MORE For many humans living in the real world, the fictional Borg are similarly unsettling.