 Now, do pay attention, 007. This may look like an ordinary fountain pen, but it's actually a portal to an extra-dimensional plane of existence that is purely unfathomable to pathetic small-minded mortals like yourself. Observe, I simply twist the cap like so, and we've talked a fair amount about Star Trek the next generation, a show that simply bleeds techno-optimism and a utopian vision of a united humanity exploring the universe. It might surprise you to hear that, although the show espouses hard-lined secularism on numerous occasions, the plot of TNG is a story about humanity going on trial for its sins in front of God Almighty. The very first episode in the first season, don't watch the first season, but the very first episode, the Enterprise crew finds themselves magically transported into a courtroom, presided over by an omnipotent entity named Q, who accuses humanity of being a savage species, listing numerous historical atrocities as evidence. Jean-Luc Picard argues that humans have evolved beyond these crimes, and agrees to be tested to see if we're still as barbaric as Q claims. Seven years later, in the final episode of the show, Q reappears in full Judge Regalia and informs Picard that he's been observing and evaluating the whole time. Every adventure, every conversation, every detail of the entire show, Q has been watching and judging whether humanity deserves a place in the universe or annihilation. Of course, anyone familiar with TNG will know that Q is hardly the sort of deity you want sitting in judgment of anything, let alone the possible genocide of the human race. He's a trickster, regularly meddling in perilous situations just because he's bored, playing cruel jokes on lesser beings, and sassing everyone in earshot. He's just as likely to kick off an interstellar war as he is to take you on a spirit quest and rescue you from the brink of death. All this is to say, Q is a long way from the sort of God we'd pick to give us an impartial trial, but what does that mean exactly? What is it that we're looking for in a properly objective judge for our species? In his 1986 book, The View From Nowhere, philosopher Thomas Nagel raises some concerns about that notion of objectivity, a position free from any influence of the observer's biases, preferences, and background, which any other reasonable observer would endorse. Nagel finds the whole idea of a perspective without a perceiver suspicious, maybe incoherent. He argues that when we make pleas or efforts to think more objectively, there are certain moves we make, rituals of thought we associate with shedding our petty individualism and observing the universe impartially, but he argues these moves don't actually have any objectivity in them, they're just thought exercises we use to feel more objective, while retaining all the bias and subjectivity we're supposedly transcending. For example, if someone gets the sense they may not be treating a situation fairly, they might take a step back, adopting a wider sort of third person perspective, contemplating their position as though they were someone else who's not personally invested in what's going on, watching things from afar. That certainly seems like it could be a more objective point of view, right? But if we were to watch someone who's taking a step back, we wouldn't see any magic brain power summoning an unbiased consultant into existence, we'd just see them thinking real hard, fantasizing that they're looking at the situation from somewhere outside themselves. This implies an interesting question. Who exactly is this virtual observer that they're imagining? What do they care about? It's a fair question. When I take a step back, I'm probably not going to imagine looking at my situation from the outside as a Malaysian woodworker who doesn't understand English and only cares about motor rally. I've got limited materials to work with in here. I'm probably going to picture someone who has my values and my interpretation of things. But, you know, more objectively or... When someone suggests that we be more objective, there's also an implication that we should ratchet down our investment in the situation, weigh our options without feeling quite so upset or head over heels in love or whatever. Nagle suggests that this emotional detachment doesn't really have anything to do with the objectivity of our judgment, but is a byproduct of the mental technique we employ to fantasize having a wider perspective, literally imagining zooming out, visualizing a little mental camera backing slowly away from the scene that has us in it. A wider shot contains more information and fewer details. And for some reason, when we imagine some observer looking on from afar, we imagine them with the same limitations of attention and concern that we would have in their place. I couldn't see or care about each individual ant crawling around on a particular tree, so when I fantasize my supposedly objective person taking in the scene, I assume they won't notice or think about those things either. None of that makes any particular sense. The ants and their struggles are just as real as anything else. But in my hallucinatory vision quest for objectivity, the further I zoom out, the less mental bandwidth I have to consider details like ants, and my own feelings about the situation seem smaller and less noteworthy. Again, that's not a feature of true objectivity or anything like that. It's a feature of me and my limitations, which I'm projecting onto my little thought experiment, which brings us back to Star Trek. The pale blue dot view of Earth is about as far out as you can get from terrestrial concerns, perhaps the most objective viewpoint we've achieved as a species. We've talked before about the overview effect, how people who visit space often come back with a vibe of having transcended petty things like borders or politics. It pairs well with the utopian message of Trek. Humanity rising above its petty squabbles over resources or ideology, looking out at the stars together with curiosity and wonder. If we take Nagel's argument seriously, that whole vibe is a simple trick of cinematography. It's very hard to see border disputes or political struggles from orbit. And even if we could, we simply don't have the mental bandwidth to process a world full of billions of people, each with a rich internal life and their own values and so on. Zoom out enough, yeah, all our problems look very small. We could zoom out even further. What if our mental camera retreated at warp nine into deep space and observed the whole solar system? No, no, no, wait, the entire Milky Way galaxy. Hell, what if we could make it omniscient and all seeing, oh no. Q himself exists outside time and space and has regarded the universe and its various life forms for eons. He's seen more than any human could possibly see, knows more than any human could even begin to comprehend, and he's kind of an ass. We started this whole exercise looking for someone more objective than Q because of his attitude. But it is the attitude of someone who can see more and farther than any human possibly could. What grounds do we have to accuse him of not being objective enough as our judge? We might not have been aware of it, but when playing the view from nowhere game with Q, it really seems as though we're trying to have our objective cake and eat it too. On the one hand, we're fantasizing about an impossibly remote observer. Someone zoomed way the hell out, who shares our limitations of attention for details and capacity to care about them. If you chase that conception of objectivity to a sloctrical conclusion, we're kind of asking for a being who's so overwhelmed by the scale of the universe that they can't care about anything at all. On the other hand, if we imagine an objective observer who does care about stuff, it seems we've already decided what their values and characters should be based loosely on what we imagine we would be like in that position. Something like aloof stoicism, detached profundity, certainly not arrogance and silly costumes. We want them to have a clear conception of the big picture and to care about certain aspects of the universe, but only in the way that we've prescribed. None of this mariachi business. Q is a bit of an oddity in the landscape of science fiction, a being who is both superior to humans in many ways, but also monumentally petty and decidedly unserious. Many authors use aliens as a narrative vehicle for sober critique of humanity's potential compared to our track record. When visitors from another world land their flying saucers and offer us their perspective from on high, it is often a moralizing message decrying our shortcomings and frivolous concerns about things that don't matter on the galactic scale. That critique seems reasonable. I certainly agree that we have a long way to go as a species, but I think there's a tendency to fall into the objectivity trap that Nagel is highlighting. To imagine that simply because these fictional visitors view Earth from the heavens, their thoughts about how we ought to be should have any more weight than yours or mine. There's no reason an alien's opinions must be insightful or accurate, even if they wield god-like technology. For every klatu or starman lamenting humanity's violence, there may as well be a Klingon or a predator who thinks we're wimps who should butcher each other for the sake of honor. Science fiction is a great vehicle for probing the things we take for granted about our world, using fantastic scenarios to force us to examine our culture and society from new perspectives. But Q is a great example of how, even with the most extreme superhuman perspective, it's still worth asking what kind of person is doing the perceiving and what their deal is. Do you think that science fiction tends to lean a little heavily on the supposed view from nowhere that Nagel's worried about? What's your favorite Q costume? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah, blah, subscribe, blah, share, and don't stop thinking.