The three episodes we watched this week allowed us to see different interpretations of cognition and whether or not bodies and brains work together as one entity or as separate entities. They were all quite different, but also similar because of the concept they were portraying.
In Altered Carbon’s “Out of the Past,” viewers were shown a completely different society full of people that essentially lived forever because they were controlled by a disk that encapsulated memories and knowledge. The idea of cybernetics was used greatly because the mind or the chip that was installed acted as the software and the physical body which was easily replaceable was the hardware. The body wasn’t important, just used as a form for the chip to live and experience life. The “software” could be running for years and years and never die off, unless destroyed, unlike a normal body.
Star Trek’s “Return to Tomorrow” was a bit similar in portraying the idea that a body was needed to live. Sargon was energy in the universe, but it was never able to experience life because without a body, thoughts weren’t able to fully exist. It was almost as if Sargon and all the other energies were trapped and had no real purpose. This made me think of a person who is in jail for a very long time. In jail, the person has thoughts and feelings, but their bodies are physically trapped and they can’t really experience life in a way that others can or in a way that they probably would like to. When Sargon first came into Jim’s body, he felt the air in his lungs, he saw things, he felt his heart beating (13 minutes)– it was something that as energy without a body, he would’ve never been able to experience. This is showing embodied cognition because the body and emotions are integrated into the cognitive system, so both are needed simultaneously.
Futurama’s “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid” also uses embodied cognition to show that brains and bodies are needed simultaneously. In this episode, brains that make people stupid take over the world and everyone but Fry was affected. The brain was winning, but it lacked one important thing… a body. Fry isn’t the smartest person in the show, but he had a brain, that wasn’t affected by the brain attacks, and a body of course. Fry was able to beat the brain by literally thinking. When the brain was beat and Leela came back to her senses, she felt “a bit better in cognitive faculties” (21 minutes). The brain is a very strong in life, but the episode showed that without the body to complete the cognitive system, it was essentially useless. The cognitive system is made up from bodies and the brain and both are needed to experience a lived life.
In all three episodes, the idea of cognition being made up of some form of a body and brain were used to show full life. In the episodes, the brain concept was alive, but it didn’t have the body there to aid the life experience. I feel the episodes showed cognition as being embedded because the brain or the idea of a brain wasn’t able to be successful living on its own without a body. Yes, it could be there thinking, but it wouldn’t mean anything because no action or real experiences could take place. A brain in a vat, is just a brain in a vat. It doesn’t have any definite characteristics that make it a full on living thing that has the same experiences and motives as a brain in a body.
3 thoughts on “Bodies with brains or bodies and brains?”
Hey Alexandra,
I really liked your blog this week, I think you did an excellent job on talking about the three episodes and connecting them back to the voice threads. SIFI is very challenging for me to understand because I don’t really view things other than what they are showing me. Your blog post really helped me see what each episode was portraying about the body and the mind. I really liked your analogy that was used about when people are in jail, they can still feel but are trapped inside the jail and not being able to experience life. I agree with you that all three episodes show that the brain concept was alive, but it didn’t have a body to aid the life experiences. Being alive is not just considered having brain function but being able to use our body as well. Using our lungs and heart and feeling that our heartbeats, well that makes me feel alive.
gcoito
Hey Alex!
I really enjoyed your perspective. I loved how you concluded that all three shows depicted the brain as embedded because it really clicked for me when you explained it. The connection between the brain just being able to think and a brain in a vat was perfect. I found your perspective on the Futurama episode super interesting because I saw it as the brain being able to function cognitively on it’s own but you bring up such an important point. I think you explain why in order to be full cognitive a brain and body must be working together. This post helped me to digest the content in the voice thread even more.
chowland
Hi Alex,
You do a great job of connecting the premise of the stack in Altered Carbon to the concept of cybernetics that you learned about in my VoiceThread this week. As you note, the mind is “downloaded” into the stack, which is then “uploaded” in a sleeve—installed like computer software. The wealthy can even “back-up” their minds. What does using this metaphor of a computer to talk about our minds affect the way that we think about cognition (like the way that we process information or how memory works).
Your discussion about how it felt like Sargon and his companions were—without their bodies—in jail is super interesting, and I wonder if you can’t draw a further connection to Altered Carbon. After all, Kovacs was in prison before he was resleeved (for over 200 years!) for his current mission. In that world, being imprisoned means that you are denied a body.
Also, love that you are thinking about the role of emotions in our cognitive system (and how that connects the body—can we feel without our bodies?). We’ll be diving more into emotions in a few weeks. I think this connects to your final point about the brain in the vat. A brain in a vat is a brain, but it is not necessarily a human mind.
Jessica Hautsch