Doesn’t Moriarty get sent off in a shuttle at the end of the episode? I don’t think the full Enterprise’s computer is needed to run his mind, but even still it’s still strange you don’t see more sapient artificial life if it’s apparently this easy to make. Data getting put on “trial” for his personhood shouldn’t have been a thing because the Federation should be swimming with artificial people, maybe just in a larger form factor.
There have been at least a couple more episodes where they play with the idea that holodeck characters could be sapient without spelling it out the way they did with Moriarty. Plus, both DS9 and Voyager have definitively sapient hologram characters.
I think there’s a matter of scale to consider. The computing capabilities of a starship (and possibly more) have been crammed into a humanoid form.
Soong worked some miniaturization magic to create Data.
Edit: spelling
Doesn’t Moriarty get sent off in a shuttle at the end of the episode? I don’t think the full Enterprise’s computer is needed to run his mind, but even still it’s still strange you don’t see more sapient artificial life if it’s apparently this easy to make. Data getting put on “trial” for his personhood shouldn’t have been a thing because the Federation should be swimming with artificial people, maybe just in a larger form factor.
There have been at least a couple more episodes where they play with the idea that holodeck characters could be sapient without spelling it out the way they did with Moriarty. Plus, both DS9 and Voyager have definitively sapient hologram characters.