Projections (Star Trek: Voyager) Projections (Star Trek: Voyager) "Projections" is the 19th (3rd in the ) episode of the American science fiction television program "". Originally slated for the first season, the episode originally aired on September 11, 1995, and tells the story of having an identity crisis on the holodeck regarding whether he or the world around him is the illusion. Brannon Braga compared "Projections" to the work of René Descartes, and wrote the episode around the premise of "cogito ergo sum", questioning whether the Doctor or the "Voyager" is the illusion. Beating out LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) for the guest appearance,
Cogito, ergo sum in the former case, and an objective thinker in the latter. He argues, first, that it is impossible to make sense of "there is thinking" without relativizing it to "something." However, this something cannot be Cartesian egos, because it is impossible to differentiate objectively between things just on the basis of the pure content of consciousness. The obvious problem is that, through introspection, or our experience of consciousness, we have no way of moving to conclude the existence of any third-personal fact, to conceive of which would require something above and beyond just the purely subjective contents of the mind.