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.
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