Maybe it's just a doctor of the future thing; not just McCoy, Pulaski didn't like transporters either. Which is an entire other class of in-joke as well.TarsTarkas wrote: ↑Wed Aug 02, 2017 1:10 pmIf Ping were to do a full reboot, would she still be Ping? Sort of like transporter technology as viewed in Sci Fi movies. They disassemble (kill) you, then reassemble you at the final destination. Does the disassembled person, actually walk off the transporter grid, or is it a perfect clone with perfect memories, all gloriously recreated in exact detail. Would a full reboot for Ping, actually correct many things that aren't problems, but don't meet system parameters. Thus changing Ping in thought and mind.Considering Bones disdain for transporters, I wonder if he was more right than he ever thought.
Aside from issues of information versus matter, philosophical questions of personal identity, and how that fits into discussions of things akin to cloning (or not), transporters supposedly convert everything to energy patterns and send that someplace else where it is reconverted back to matter. The way this notional technology is presented (Heisenberg compensators, computer pattern buffers, memory files, etc) the first half is a quantum-level dematerialization, not death. (and the second half just a reversal to how things originally were) But as far as Ping, that's another issue.
One would imagine that whatever Ping's basic intelligence is, it's somehow an integral part of what physically comprises her, and experiences and memories and whatever she absorbs becomes part of that. Create hard save points if not a new base-state. A reboot might do much of anything but reset it all to normal. A full reboot might not include any kind of memory wipe, highly dependent upon how that all works.
Keeping with the earlier motif, a clean reboot could put Ping into a state somewhat like the way Spock was on the Genesis planet. Yet without a McCoy-held katra to perform fal-tor-pan with, it would be a new fresh Ping of sorts, missing the rest. Unless Largo has backed up the equivalent of a katra that could be reunited... But again, that depends on how it all works, and of course, we don't know that any reboot or reset could erase anything, or if it does if there's a backup or if it could be restored, or if none of that sort of thing applies to how Ping's brain and emotional and mental capacities function.