A strange new guest, calling himself the ‘Traveler’, arrives on the Enterprise, along with a propulsion expert named Mr. Kosinski. Both were brought aboard to help improve warp engine efficiency. Kosinski has an inflated ego, and Riker is suspicious of him from the start. The first officer claims that Kosinski was only so successful on the previous ships he worked on because he was merely updating their out of date engines, a strategy that would not apply to the Enterprise. Kosinski is having none of it, and sees himself as a genius. The cocky new engineer and his mysterious assistant start working on trying to improve the ship’s engines, and in doing so, unwittingly send the unsuspecting ship into a warp speed so high it surpassed what any vessel had been capable of previously. After reaching dangerous levels of speed, the Enterprise ends up 2.7 million light-years from the Milky Way galaxy.
This was the farthest distance any starship has travelled from Earth in light years, and it would take the Enterprise crew several life times to reach home again, if they can. Clearly, the crew was at the mercy of this, hopefully, genius engineer, who was the only one who could possibly send them back. During the super-fast warp trip, the alien assistant had a strange reaction to traveling at such high speeds. He was phasing in and out of existence when the ship was in motion, and then became very tired. After much back and fourth, Picard and crew eventually find out that it was the alien, using his weird super powers, who actually propelled the ship outside of the galaxy. It turns out, his species has the ability to turn thought into reality. He brought the crew outside of the Galaxy too see if anyone else was ready to experience thought as reality.
The exact mechanism of thought transformation is not explained in the episode, but its premise is intriguing. One theory of consciousness is that we hallucinate our existence. In this framework, the brain is the center of everything, because it would be impossible to prove that anything exists outside of the brain. This goes back to Descartes saying “I think therefore I am”, which was the most fundamental conclusion upon which he could arrive when he realized that he had no ability to prove anything existed outside his own mind. British neuroscientist Anil Seth hypothesizes that our mind hallucinates our conscious reality (Seth, 2017). In short, our reality is an amalgamation of the sensory data perceived by our brains and the predictive capacity of our mind. One of the main issues with this type of philosophy is that if the brain is hallucinating everything outside of it, then what is real? Where is my brain? Even the word ‘halucination’ itself implies that there is an objective reality which does not match an individuals perceptions, the latter being the halucination. The whole ‘universe is a simulation’ thing has always raised more questions than answers, because it begs the question about what reality really is, and why we are hallucinating this reality and not something else. It almost solves nothing about the nature of consciousness, but it neatly gets rid of God, so atheists love it.
It is possible that the episode is trying to make the argument that thought and reality are interchangeable in much the same way that matter and energy are interchangeable. Einstein’s theory of relativity proposes that the increased energy it would take to get an object moving closer to the speed of light is proportional to the objects mass. In this way, more and more mass is converted into more and more energy the closer an object comes to approaching the speed of light. The interchangeability of matter and energy is the foundational basis for much of Star Trek technology, such as replicators, holodecks, and transporters. In a sense, Trekkies may already be primed to explore the interchangeability of two physical concepts, due to this underlying principle of the entire show. However, it is unclear as to whether the alien is saying that the relationship between thought and reality are interchangeable or simply closely linked. He says that thoughts can become reality, and that Dr. Crusher’s son Wesley may have access to this power somehow.
The idea that our thoughts can affect reality in some capacity is not new. Indeed, changing our outlook and approach can impact how we interpret and react to life events. However, manifesting a spaceship to travel outside of our galaxy is far and beyond good vibes. This strange alien visitor clearly had unique powers, but what were they? Unlike Einstein’s relativity equations, there are no mathematical formulas describing the relationship between thought and reality, but the strangeness of conscious experience is hard to ignore. We interpret phenomena such as color, taste, or emotion which objectively do not exist outside of our minds. However, these mechanisms are far from being able to propel a space ship. Instead, the Traveler was introducing the Enterprise crew to something more mystical and beyond explanation: we have not fully realized our own potential. There is no science to it, yet, but if the Enterprise can have propulsion mechanisms unheard of just a few centuries prior, than who knows what will be catapulting us into space in the far future.
Seth, A. (2017, April). Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality [Video]. Ted Conferences. https://www.ted.com/talks/anil_seth_your_brain_hallucinates_your_conscious_reality
Hopeless Trekkie 