Yeah, I think those are two sides of the same coin, that's Roddenberry's spirituality as expressed in TOS and TNG and inherited by the rest (and lampooned in LD with the smiling koala.) Organic intelligence can reach a point of enlightenment where it transcends the body and becomes incorporeal. It's space Buddhism, from V'Ger to the Traveller. Nobody gets there by becoming the Borg first, V'Ger needed a human brain or "soul" to do it, and despite handwaving references to "evolution", it has nothing to do with natural selection over a course of eons. It just takes some insufferably smart kid who likes causing warp accidents who's truly pure of spirit.
I take Bashir at his word though, and Bareil's condition at face value. Bashir even name-checks "positronic components" to tell us that this is the same technology used in Data - and not fully realized into truly successful synthetic intelligence in Federation science. Dr. Noonian Soong and Dr. Agnes Jurati are simply the only people who have ever successfully transferred the full human consciousness of a humanoid being into a synthetic brain in Star Trek lore. If we take some of the other magical technologies present in the setting at face value, it seems like it ought to be a trivial task, but it simply isn't. The human mind is something special and possibly spiritual, and that's just lore of the setting we have to accept as canon even if it can be cleverly subverted in some ways. So this particular situation in Deep Space Nine didn't bother me at all.
If it had been possible to replace Bareil's brain with a machine, a whole host of other problems present themselves. In fact no one in Starfleet could ever really die at all, because anyone with a terminal condition could simply be transferred into a positronic matrix in sickbay and stored for later resleeving like Altered Carbon. Immortality technologies already crop up from time to time in Star Trek, like that time Dr. Pulaski was de-aged using a hairbrush, but the last thing it needs is another one.
I take Bashir at his word though, and Bareil's condition at face value. Bashir even name-checks "positronic components" to tell us that this is the same technology used in Data - and not fully realized into truly successful synthetic intelligence in Federation science. Dr. Noonian Soong and Dr. Agnes Jurati are simply the only people who have ever successfully transferred the full human consciousness of a humanoid being into a synthetic brain in Star Trek lore. If we take some of the other magical technologies present in the setting at face value, it seems like it ought to be a trivial task, but it simply isn't. The human mind is something special and possibly spiritual, and that's just lore of the setting we have to accept as canon even if it can be cleverly subverted in some ways. So this particular situation in Deep Space Nine didn't bother me at all.
If it had been possible to replace Bareil's brain with a machine, a whole host of other problems present themselves. In fact no one in Starfleet could ever really die at all, because anyone with a terminal condition could simply be transferred into a positronic matrix in sickbay and stored for later resleeving like Altered Carbon. Immortality technologies already crop up from time to time in Star Trek, like that time Dr. Pulaski was de-aged using a hairbrush, but the last thing it needs is another one.
