Day: July 27, 2022

Sorry for the late post on this topic, but it seems I’m playing a bit of catch up !  Though out of all the topics we’ve learned about in this class, I’ve probably discussed this one the most with my friends. This is in part because I continued watching past episode 1 of Altered Carbon. A close friend had recommended it to me some time ago so I was happy to jump right in. I think I’m about halfway done with season 1 so forgive me if I accidentally drop a spoiler or two !

What I found interesting in Altered Carbon was the way bodies were treated as a resource rather than part of who we are. Because our consciousness is stored separately, the ability to change your body has become commonplace (especially for the wealthy, though that wasn’t part of the episode we watched!) In the scene where Takeshi sees his reflection for the first time after being “resleeved,” we hear the attendants warning him against doing so, as it can cause damage to his “stack” and permanently alter his mental state. I found it interesting that, despite our consciousness being stored separately, the series suggests that our sense of self is tied to our body.

In the Star Trek episode “Return to Tomorrow,” we see the bodies of Captain Kirk and his comrades being used as a similar means to an end. A resource, though we do see the importance of having a body in the scene where Sargon and company return to bodies for the first time. They marvel at the ability to feel their skin and to breathe again, not to mention the ability to kiss and touch one another. While the mind and body are physically able to separate, the body allows for a more intimate, physical connection with others. Perhaps this is why in Altered Carbon there is such a big focus on sex and physical intimacy.

I struggled to connect “The Day The Earth Stood Stupid” to this module, but I want to focus on how the brain stated that they “evolved past the need for bodies.” In this sense, a body is seen as lesser, almost as if it’s holding back their species so they discarded them like cheap toys. The lack of concern for their own bodily autonomy leads to a disregard for others safety, as well as a sense of superiority. Similarly, Sargon states he and his people had grown minds powerful enough for them to consider themselves gods.

It seems overall that bodies are seen as shells worthy of discarding in order to gain a stronger understanding of the world and yourself. And while I feel I am “supposed” to disagree, due to my relationship with my own body I almost feel that I agree. As a chronically ill queer person, there are a lot of things about my body that I would be fine giving up. In fact, sometimes I feel that my mind is working at half speed due to my day to day health struggles. If I were to be “resleeved” into a body that worked properly or one that allowed me to be perceived in a way I would prefer, perhaps I’d be a bit happier!

Additionally, as someone who streams online as a separate person with a completely different face, I have found myself looking in the mirror sometimes after a particularly long week of streaming and feeling surprised when I didn’t see my character looking back at me. I guess I’m constantly being resleeved in the process of streaming haha !

For this week’s module, we watched a few TV episodes that explore the relationship between the body and the mind. These episodes were all really trippy and made me wonder about what the mind really is and how it connects to the body.

The first show I watched for this week was the episode of Futurama titled “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid”. In this episode, Earth is attacked by giant brains who want to wipe out all thought in the universe. Everybody on the planet has been rendered stupid because of this attack – besides Fry, who is immune to this. In their final battle against the leader of the brains, it traps Fry and Leela in a series of classic books – including Moby Dick and Pride and Prejudice – in which they appear to be in scenes from each story. This is an example of the brain in a vat thought experiment, which states that if a human brain can be kept alive in a vat and fed stimuli, it would register this stimuli exactly the same as a normal human would. Though Leela, Fry, and the brain’s bodies are sitting lifeless while they are inside the books, they perceive that they are whaling with Captain Ahab and Queequeg or at a ball with Mr. Darcy – and these experiences are as real as any other they’ve had in their bodies. This scene depicts the mind as having these experiences, while the body can be left out entirely. As always, Futurama was super fun and hilarious to watch, but the concepts they tackle leave me wondering about the nature of the mind, life, and the world itself.

Next I watched the first episode of Altered Carbon – a complete 180 in tone from Futurama. Altered Carbon details the past of a super soldier/rebel leader, Takeshi Kovacs, who gets “resleeved” – placed into a new body – 250 years after his death. There is a dissonance that happens between him and his body, along with everyone else who has been recently resleeved. In a scene where Kovacs is being given a presentation about his new body along with the other recently resleeved, everybody looks wildly uncomfortable with themselves – their eyes wide with terror and confusion, gripping at their skin like it isn’t theirs, pulling and clenching their clothes like they’ve never worn them before. It displays the idea of embodied cognition – that cognition is integrated with our bodies and emotions, not entirely separate from each other. When these people were separated from their previous bodies, they lost a piece of themselves, as well. The most haunting part of the episode was when they show a family reuniting with their daughter who has been resleeved into an older woman. I cannot imagine how horrifying it would be as a little girl to look in the mirror and see someone who looks older than your parents. Though terrifying, it was a great way to show the audience how strange it would truly be to be resleeved.

The last piece of media I watched was the episode of Star Trek: The Original Series titled “Return to Tomorrow”. The starship Enterprise is travelling far into uncharted space when they receive a transmission from a planet that has seemingly had no life for half a million years. They are contacted by a being who has no body and is made of “pure energy”, powerful enough to speak to the crew from their spaceship and turn off their power. When Captain Kirk goes down to the planet to meet this entity – named Sargon – they find a glass ball that contains his mind. This is another example of the brain in the vat, as Sargon is able to perceive the world around him the same as when he had a body. Sargon then takes control of Kirk’s body in a scene that can only be described as beautiful. Sargon moves as if uncomfortable in a body again yet looks enamored with the world as a bombastic and almost romantic song plays, saying that it felt amazing to simply breathe again. This is similar to the reaction of people resleeving in Altered Carbon; they feel strange being in a different body because of the idea of embodied cognition. In Star Trek, however, Sargon has been conscious for half a million years without his body, making his reunion with a body glorious and emotional experience instead of strange and uncomfortable. This scene was executed really well and William Shatner did an incredible job of showing the nuances of Sargon’s emotions while unadjusted to his body.

Emotions are what makes us human. Many people believe showing your emotions make you weak, but I have come to realize that showing your emotions does quite the opposite of that. In the voice thread, we learned that emotions are something we construct. By constructing an emotion, we learn how were feeling. Emotions are not something that happens to us, they are something we do. They are created by the experience of our body and context of the situation. Emotions begin in our conceptual system from there we begin to have bodily sensations and then culture plays a role on where we would categorize this emotion.

In the movie, Inside out we see Riley learning all the emotions of life starting right when she is born to being an adult. All the different emotions come into her life at the different stages of her life. First, we start with joy as when she is born, and then sad appears 33 seconds after joy arrived.  Of course, emotions are a little more complicated on how they are created but “inside out” creates a good children’s movie to give them an understanding of what different emotions that they are feeling. Showing them that emotions are normal and safe to show and have. When the sad character is glitching and not working correctly, it made me feel that it was a stress was being created from Riley body and in our culture, we can put stress as us being sad.

I feel like most people have had an emotion of loss of words or no emotions to really describe something. On Riley first day or school, her “brain” aka headquarters with all her emotions get distracted leaving joy and sad to get sucked away and Riley cannot feel the two important core emotions. Which than she becomes confused and different. When we are confused, we feel a bunch of emotions at the same time. One second were mad, the next were scared.  We create ideas of what we’re feeling. At the end of the film, we learn that it’s okay to be confused about your feelings and feel happy and sad at the same time. We believe that there are multiple feelings, and we construct ourselves to feel more than one emotion.  By using Riley’s conceptual system of old memories, then her bodily sensations starts kicking in and she is crying. By crying and being the way, she was raised headquarters finds a memory ball of sad and joy mixed in one and riley personalities return.

In the episode “Man of the people”, we see that Deanna- half human and half Betazoid and has the psionic ability to sense emotions. One scene in the episode that had a lot of emotions was when Deanna was trying to get Riker jealous. Deanna keeps insisting that Riker must be upset and jealous. He finally leaves gets upset and says when she is ready to work, to let him know. I feel at this point he thinks something is wrong and she is not her normal self.Deanna has the capability of emotional concept. By predicting what he is feeling because of her actions. Emotions are built, they just don’t happen. Deanna made Riker angry but trying to poke him and make him feel new emotions. Riker and Deanna have a strong connection for each other has been built over time. Since she is an empath, she can investigate the person and watch their body reactions and categorize the behavior they are feeling. Alkar is the reason that poor Deanna is seen like this.  It seems as Alkar has no emotions and does not care. He is using Deanna and does not care if she dies. Throughout the entire episode there is a rollercoaster of emotions.

Looking back at the episode, I believe that they chose Deanna because she is an empath but also because she is a female. It seems as if they use gender roles when creating this episode. One scene Deanna is using her sexual figure to seduce men, then she becomes angry and scratched Riker face.  She constructed the feeling of anger because she got denied. Showing how emotions can change so quickly.

1 obvious and prevalent theme throughout both Arrival (2016) and the episode “Darmok” is how nuanced language and communication is and how it can serve as a barrier between people. The movie and episode showed significant misunderstandings stemming from inability to communicate. Not understanding a person’s culture can lead to not understanding a language (and vice versa) and not understanding intentions/meaning in words. This doesn’t only apply to people that speak different languages, even when speaking the same language, the words people use have different meanings to different people.

In Arrival (2016) there was a lot going on to try and make sense of. I want to start with the repetition of language as a tool versus language as weapon. When the heptapods were offering something, it was immediately translated as weapon but as Louise points out, languages isn’t that simple (as she demonstrated in a previous scene by stating the different translations for the Sanskrit word for war as either an argument versus a desire for more cows). The “mistaken” definition of weapon versus a tool reinforces the notion throughout the movie of language representing both a weapon and a tool. The words in the preface of her book even states that it is the foundation of civilization and “the first weapon drawn in a conflict” The whole movies demonstrate the way words are weaponized.  The colonel makes Louise have the words she’s teaching them approved, because he worries about teaching them too much and having it used against them. In the end, what they were offering wasn’t a weapon, it was a gift or a tool in teaching their language.

Another prevalent aspect of arrival (probably the most prevalent)  is the way our cognition is shaped by language. The characters discuss The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and how learning a new language can change your cognition/brain and the way you perceive the world (spatial/temporal processing), this hypothesis is explored to the extreme in the movie through learning an alien language that allows her to experience time different, however the movie also highlight more realistic/subtle ways it alters cognition. The best example is the Chinese decision to communicate/connect with the heptapods through a game. Louise explains this is a horrible method because all the words they’re learning every way of communication will be filtered through terms of winning, strategy, victory and defeat – she uses our own conceptual metaphor “when all you’re given is a hammer, everything is a nail” to explain how this will shape cognition and set the framework for all future communication and attitudes between them.

The Star Trek episode “Darmok” is all about a race that’s entire communication uses these conceptual metaphors anchored in their mythology, as explained in the episode, knowing the words isn’t enough. To understand their language a person needs to have knowledge of all of the stories their language is based upon. The episode highlights the detriment of not understanding the meaning behind language. When shown 2 knives, Picard kept thinking he wanted to fight against him rather than fight with him in order to unite them – had Picard acted on that assumption, the effect could have led to war between their civilizations rather than a step closer to understanding each other. Something that interested me that I thought also demonstrated the Sapir-whorf hypothesis was the statement that their race had no sense of ego, they spoke through imagery and metaphors of the stories of their past and interpreted meaning through those stories.  Does having this language that speaks of other people’s story and places such high value lessen each individual’s perception of their own value. The captain of the other ship was knowingly willing to put his life in jeopardy for the advancement of his people and his crewmates while upset, let him go alone and left him there to die, while knowing he was in danger. Is this because the culture values are shaped by their lowered self-identity due to their collective identity through these stories?

Do you constantly have fights with your significant other? Went to Facebook jail or got ratioed on Twitter after saying something that was supposedly well-intentioned? Been accused of misusing a phrase? The reason for this is that most of us fail to recognize that everyone encounters language differently, which is why so many of us fail at communicating effectively.

I’m not the best communicator, but after I watched the 2016 film Arrival and Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Darmok”, I’d say that ‘I’m on track to becoming one. What they taught me about language ensured that I will never ever have to say, “Maybe it was lost in translation” again.

1. Viewing foreign languages/people as scary impacts communication.                                   The first thing that I noticed is that in Arrival and Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok”, foreign languages were either met with fear or hostility. In Arrival, the military is sent to deal with the issue of a possible invasion. At first, when they couldn’t understand what the heptapods were saying, they went with the worst possible scenario: that the heptapods were there to harm them. But, Dr. Banks breaks the language barrier by putting down her own by removing her hazmat suit and abandoning conceptual metaphors in order to understand how the Heptapods’ brains worked. For example, she started to think of herself moving through time rather than time moving towards her, which allowed her mind to travel to the future and decipher the language.
2.   The Importance of Context

Metaphors gave meaning to the Tamarian Language: In Darmok, the Tamarian captain kept repeating the phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”. While the phrase held meaning for the Tamarians, it sounded like gibberish to the humans. Even after they cross-referenced Darmok and Tanagra, they still came to the conclusion that the Tamarians wanted to fight because they didn’t have the full narrative. Had they known Tamarian history, they would’ve realized that ‘Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra’ was a request to join forces.

Dual Meanings of ‘Weapon’: 

In Arrival, there is a moment when Dr. Banks translates a logogram and it comes out as “weapon”. Though Dr. Banks tries to defend the heptapods, the military interprets the word as a threat and starts shooting at the heptapod ship. The men in the military are surrounded by guns, explosives, etc., which they use to attack people hence why ‘weapon’ is associated with violence. On the other hand, the heptapods did not associate weapons with war and division as the humans did. Rather, they saw a weapon as a tool of collaboration. Here, we see that a difference in framing brought about two interpretations. This is similar to Captain Picard and the Tamarian’s time in the woods.

“A shared danger might bring people together”

Captain assumed that when the Tamarian handed him the dagger, he was challenging him to a fight. However, it’s later revealed that the weapon was not meant for fighting each other; it was meant to help each other. In the words of the Captain, the Tamarian hoped they would meet because the story of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra showed him thatThe act of throwing the knife now being regarded as positive is an example of frameshifting. With more information, the alien species was no longer seen as harmful.

This week, we were tasked to watch Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival and Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Season 5, Episode 2 entitled “Darmok”. As a quick side note, I thoroughly enjoyed this week’s texts; Arrival falls right below Interstellar on my “Top 5 Favorite Sci-Fi Movies” list (Interstellar being first and Arrival being a close second) and Star Trek: The Next Generation is my favorite Star Trek show, although Strange New Worlds might knock TNG out of that spot. Anyways both texts show how language is communicated between a human mind and an alien mind. They also shows that our linguistic and conceptual systems are part of the same system.

At the beginning of Arrival, Ian reads a line from the preface of Louise’s novel: “Language is the foundation of civilization. It is the glue that holds a people to together. It is the first weapon drawn in a conflict.” I feel as if the quote holds true to the “foundation” of the film. Louise, along with Ian, is tasked to learn the Heptapods’ language and to teach them how to speak to us. As the film goes along, Louise and the Heptapods form a temporal telepathic connection (along with the Chinese military commander Shang who is of no importance to this analysis but this was just the first viewing where I realized he was telepathically linked with the Heptopods). This connection between Louise and the Heptopods reinforce the meaning of the scene, which starts at 01:01:50, where Ian discusses that “if you immerse yourself into a foreign language […] you can actually rewire your brain.” This is an example of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is, Louise explains: “[…] is the theory that the language you speak determines how you think [and everything you see].” In other words, if we change our lamguage, we essentially alter the frames through which we conceptualize things. After this scene and throughout the rest of the movie, we learn that the visions she has been seeing of her with her daughter aren’t memories but are premonitions, so to speak. Through their telepathic link, the Heptapods use their conception of time (which to them is non-linear but simultaneous) to help Louise (who conceptualizes time as linear) understand and learn their langauge. In terms of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Louise learns their language and has her brain essentially rewired to conceive time how the Heptapods conceive it.

The Star Trek: TNG episode “Darmok” follows the same path as Arrival. The Tamarians speak in metaphors, which at first glance catches the crew of the Enterprise off guard, even Data. It isn’t until Picard and the Tamarian captain are beemed down to the surface of planet where they force themselve to try to understand each other. After the Tamarian captain’s fight against the Beast, him and Picard sit beside a campfire. In this moment, I feel that Picard’s brain has been rewired to understand the Tamarian captains language of metaphors. The Tamarians use stories from mythos to express what they are trying to say and so Picard uses a story to convey that he understands the Tamarian captain. In addition to this, the Tamarian langauge shows that the Tamarians are a unified species in a way. This is due to the fact that they speak collectively rather than just individually. The captains goal was to unite, not just himself with Picard, but the Tamarian species with the Federation.

This week we learned about Cognitive Linguistics by watching Arrival (2016) and “Darmok” Star Trek: The Next Generation. They were great examples of how important and complex language can be. Being bilingual myself, it made me realize how phrases and jokes are lost through interpretation when trying to translate Spanish to English. Which makes languages that are incredibly different, that much more difficult to interpret and understand even after years of study.

“Darmok” Star Trek: The Next Generation

In the episode Darmok, the Enterprise is arriving on a planet called El-Adrel, a planet in which communication hasn’t been established, and therefore formal relations haven’t either. In order to try to communicate, the Enterprise observes the Tamarians when they are talking, and the same could be said about the Tamarians observing how the Enterprise is communicating. This could be through their tone of voice, their facial expressions, and objects being exchanged or shown. This causes confusion when the Tamarians hold out two knives and Captain Picard interprets it as a means to start a war. Captain Picard mentions how in order to communicate they need to have patience and imagination. Through patience Captain Ricard doesn’t act immediately, but waits for additional information to provide new context; “Darmok and Jalad” changes to “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” This clarifies that two individuals are together in a place, and not just naming two individuals. Imagination was needed by putting certain phrases together and their meaning, which happens when Captain Picard realizes that the Tamarians communicate in metaphors. This important aspect of the way they communicate and the experiences they encountered while alone on the island, leads Captain Picard to bond with the Tamarian captain by sharing a similar story about the Gilgamesh. Even though they barely understand each other, they are able to understand some words, and the meaning behind those words ultimately is enough for them to bond.

Arrival (2016)

In Arrival (2016), Dr. Louise Banks is a linguistics professor on a mission to try to translate and communicate with an alien species (heptapods) that have arrived on a spaceship. In the beginning, she states that “It would be impossible to translate from an audio file. I would need to be there to interpret with them.” This shows the importance of being able to observe how others communicate, their tone of voice, their hand movements, and any form of writing. Dr. Banks explains how easy it is to misinterpret a word or phrase because their usage might mean something else in another language/culture, or in this case, a species. Dr. Banks had to study each individual symbol and the way they were formed, as a way to also study the heptapods. Studying their way of communicating would help them figure out how they operate as a species, and what their purpose is. I thought it was interesting how the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was brought up on how the language you speak determines how you think and see everything, even though it influences thought and decisions instead.

Does thinking determine language, or does language determine thinking? When I watch Arrival, I think hundreds of thousands of scripts are written worldwide, but why are most written linearly? Of course, the expression is line by line with the writing method of letters, and even the complex Chinese characters are still written. Why don’t humans tile language into two dimensions like drawing?

Arrival

When the heroine and the alien learn each other’s language, the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis mentioned is the hypothesis of the relationship between language and thinking. All high-level thinking depends on the tongue. Language determines thinking. “The language you speak determines how you think and yeah it affects how you see everything” (1.02.18). People who use different languages, the feelings and experiences of the world are other. This assumption leads to the conclusion that there is no accurate translation at all, and the learner cannot simply learn the language of another area completely unless he abandons his thinking mode and acquires the thinking mode of the other language. I think that many students who are good at learning languages ​​must feel the same way. Those who are good at foreign languages ​​have partially abandoned their original thinking habits. People who know foreign languages, such as Howard Goldblatt, have two thinking systems in their brains, just like the two systems of Windows and Apple installed on the computer. One of the problems with poor foreign language studies is the inability to transform thinking patterns. In the same way, generally speaking, all human languages ​​have a timeline, which shows that human thinking is also trapped in time. It is impossible to transform language and thinking modes, and a breakthrough will take a long time.

Metaphor is the most significant metaphor in this film and is closely related to language. If we regard language as a belief with a mystical solid color, like the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, a linguistic theory that appears in the film, then All language-related behavior directly affects the changes in the world. Therefore, the film quickly establishes various causal models. For instance, the last words of the Shang’s wife, which is the passcode, are deeply symbolic – the life of the entire earth depends on a personal death that has already occurred. To understand the film or the original novel, one must start with the metaphorical language of poetry and learn how the metaphor and the parasitic imagery are close to the truth. The words of the “heptapods “are inevitably presented in the form of ink circles. This state most intuitively illustrates what imagery language thinking is. The metaphor of time moving. So, in this case, we are stationary, and time is moving towards us. For example, Louise’s future in the movie shows that she is still while time moves toward her, and she sees herself, her daughter, and her husband in the future, as well as divorce and death.

It is also a pity that Dr.Brank and her collaborators’ interpretation of the ink language in the film still cannot escape the Western thinking of technological analysis. It may be a self-irony of the movie. At the last minute, Heptapod can’t wait and adopts a direct way to teach the opportunity, just like the Zen of Buddhism. The universe is a palindrome, but it has no words. Also as mentioned in Voicethread, conceptual metaphors are based on culture and experience, and metaphors in different cultures are not the same. For example, the name Hannah ‘Hannah’ is also a circle. It mirrors the film’s theme in a non-linear timeline, where the past is the future, and the future is the past. Louise knows the new language has mastered, giving her the same way of thinking as the heptapod. She can see both the “past” and the “future.” Simultaneously, now that the ending is known will it change the future?

In the film Dr. Brank and China, Russian experts almost simultaneously translated an alien language that could destroy the world: offer weapons, nearly a world war. It also shows that a lack of communication can create many unnecessary problems. In the end, we understand that the language of the heptapods is precisely the weapon (gift/technology/tool, gift to humanity) because once the language is truly mastered, it is possible to sense time and even turn it on. Language does affect our perception and understanding of the world. On the other hand, the process of Heptapod and Louise learning languages ​​also deepens their understanding of each other’s world, showing the concept of frame switching. Dr. Banks and Ian used their own body and body language to connect with heptapods, the body-brain connection we learned earlier about embodied cognition.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

In the episode “Darmok” of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Captain Picard, and the Tamarian are teleported to a planet and stranded. The language barrier is the problem they need to solve the most; otherwise, they can’t understand each other. So “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” Picard could not understand the meaning of this sentence as he tried to understand the definition of each word to understand the sentence. As a result, it is conceivable that he could not understand the meaning of each word. As mentioned in Voicethread, we need to understand these words in a specific context. The Tamarian said, “Tamba, his arms are wide,” and threw the fire. Picard can guess from his body language that the Tamarian fires him in good faith, even without knowing the sentence’s meaning. Judging from Picard and Captain Tamaria’s initial reaction and request for the second knife, he knew of the danger on the planet that he had tried to warn Captain Picard about. As they confront this enemy, Captain Picard realizes that the Tamaris speak metaphorically. Moreover, Picard could turn their conceptual metaphors into his own based on his interactions. “Give me more about Darmok. Darmok on the ocean. A meraphor for being alone. Isolation? … He went the same island as Darmok….” Judging from the conversation between Picard and Captain Tamarind, he was in Speak with metaphors of self-moving rather than time-moving metaphors. In addition, the relationship between mind, language, and body is embodied in the theory of conceptual metaphor, which is the basis of people’s experience, cognition, thinking, language, and behavior; it is the top and fundamental way of human existence. For example, the Tamarian and the way they communicate. The Tamarians use visualizations and situations from their culture and history to share what is happening in the present. In addition, after Captain Picard, and the Tamarian fought off the enemy together, even if they did not fully understand each other’s meaning, in constant communication, through some phrases, context, and body language, they also showed the theory of empathy and frame-shifting theory. So we learn that metaphor is one of the main ways we understand the world. These metaphors are rooted in our material and cultural experiences. Because each language has many metaphors, such as Chinese and English, our thinking about their understanding is entirely different not just because the conceptual systems in language and patterns are fixed in the body, but more importantly, because the body is an essential part of how we understand and physically comprehend language.