Synopsis: The Enterprise is chosen to host the M-5 multitronic computer in wargames.
In “The Ultimate Computer” there are many concepts of depth psychology at issue, but I will focus on the idea that the individuation process is in fact a process toward balance in the various aspects of our conscious and unconscious personality – but that this goal is also never to be achieved.
In the episode the brilliant scientist, Dr. Richard Daystrom, has created a computer that he says can think. Mr. Spock, several times in the episode notes that the M-5 multitronic computer is behaving illogically. But we do not understand why until Daystrom informs Spock and Captain James T. Kirk that he has tried to implant his own psyche into the computer so that it will be able to learn and think for itself. As Spock remarks: “Every living thing wants to survive,” and so this has become the thought process behind all M-5’s calculations.
Several posts ago, commenting on the episode “Return to Tomorrow,” I wrote how inflation is a necessary part of the individuation process, as long as it is transitional. But here the M-5 is experiencing inflation, but does not have the human intuition, despite Daystrom’s programming expertise, to understand that it is not a god. That is not until Kirk, in another enactment of an ongoing trope in the series of him using logic to tell a computer that it is in error and must destroy itself, saves the day. Daystrom was broken by the fact that he thought he had created perfection and then learned that he had not. The M-5 device, on which Daystrom had programed his thought processes into, tried to destroy itself when it reasoned that it was imperfect. The whole idea of ultimate truth or striving toward a perfection of our soul or our psyche is an invalid goal. Instead, Jungian and Archetypal Psychology teach us to accept and integrate the positive and negative aspects of ourselves into our soul, or psyche, to make it whole. Not all-good, or all-evil, just whole.
Original post created 4 March 2021
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