Month: July 2022

In our previous lecture we learned about the many forms of empathy and how one can come to understand the emotions of others around them. The movie Possessor and the episode I Second That Emotion from Futurama both display what happens when one is disconnected from all forms of empathy. This can be described as apathy and there are many examples throughout Possessor and I Second That Emotion.

Our main character in Possessor, Tasya, is being used as an assassin that can infiltrate and take over the minds of others in order to frame them for her murders. While she was in possession of the person’s body, Tasya viciously stabbed her target as though she absorbed the memories of the possessed and was fulfilling what that person always wanted. After the murder, Tasya attempted to commit suicide with the other body using a single gun shot instead of the knife used for the murder. Tasya’s crying while trying to kill the body shows that she was not completely emotionless by thinking about the host’s life. The Theory of Mind teaches us that we understand ones emotions by differentiating them from our own and realizing why and how they feel about whatever the case may be. When someone is constantly changing from person to person and all of their emotions and beliefs are scrambled, how would they be able to distinguish how to truly feel about anything or anyone?

In the episode of Futurama, Bender does Bender things and ends up flushing Leela’s pet Nibbler down the toilet. Leela realizes that he can not understand feelings in general let alone understand how the rest of them feel. After hearing this, the professor remembers that he can implant an empathy chip into Bender’s head that will force him to have emotions. These emotions become linked to Leela’s brain, making Bender feel whatever emotion Leela was experiencing. Watching this episode after watching the lecture made me realize that this made Bender an empath, completely connecting him to Leela’s emotions which can also be seen as a form of embodied cognition. He may not have felt the exact same way about whatever Leela was sad about but Bender still cried with her because he felt her pain.    

 

Literally my face at the ending of the film, Possessor, like what!!! Possessor really was a very intriguing film that really explored empathy. I mean Tasya Vos really has such a transformative journey throughout the film.

The butterfly really represents this journey she takes. I mean usually when I think of a butterfly, I think of it escaping its cocoon finally being able to shed its skin and live freely, beautifully. I feel like this is what Vos did however she shedded her emotions, her empathy and everything else that kept her trapped in her “cocoon”, like her family. I mean she literally killed her family and lost all empathy she had. First of all I did not see that coming and I know Colin didn’t either. I mean Colin wanted her to cave and her thought he understood her weakness, I mean hey didn’t we all. Theory Theory really explains why Colin thought Vos would cave when it came to her family because I mean she was trying so hard to hide those feelings. I think at some point Colin’s theory about Vos was right but also I feel for Vos it was a perfect opportunity to destroy all attachments that cause her to feel empathy. It was a choice she had to make, and oh did she choose…

Honestly it was just so sad to see Vos murder her own family. Then when she revisited the butterfly again at the end she didn’t feel any guilt for killing it which is how I knew she lacked any empathy anymore. It really does show that once you get rid of your attachments, things or people you value most, you can really lose all feeling and understanding for everything else.

OKAY TIME FOR SOMETHING LESS SAD….

and a little funny.

 

I feel like anything written by Matt Groening can always change a mood. Now in Futurama I feel like Bender has always lacked empathy but in the episode, “I Second That Emotion”, we see that change.. or at least an attempt at it. Bender gets this empathy chip placed in him and he is actual able to feel Leela’s emotions. When he gets the chip placed in him he is ale to feel how sad Leela that Nibbler got flushed down the toilet. However at the end of the episode when the chip is removed Bender is back to being well Bender. I feel like Bender is really unable to empathize without the chip because he’s a robot. There is no really connection with mind and body because he’s a machine and they don’t really feel with sensation. I mean it really touches back to this idea of embodied cognition because Bender doesn’t have all these sensorimotor capabilities therefore he doesn’t really feel anything. Without being capable of making an actually connection with his body he can’t really even begin to understand feelings. So really how could he possibly empathize with anyone at all? It really just shows how the mind and body coexist to understand not only our self but others. Without that there really is no feelings.

I hope I never get to that point where I say , “I’m at a loss for feelings.”

 

In “Possessor” and Futurama‘s, “I Second That Emotion“, the seeming antagonists of both the pieces show apathy and even exhibit behaviors similar to sociopaths. Tasya Vos and Bender have a hard time socializing with others and being aware of the human experience. They seem to go about the world simply observing and reacting, without feeling any emotions.

With Vos’s line of profession, we see that she often has to become her victims in order to occupy their mind and body, living as them until she completes her mission. With countless times spent away from her personal life imitating actions of strangers, soon it shows the psychological effects weighing on her. Slowly she becomes detached from her identity reliving herself in her last victim until bits of her reality pulls her back out. Through our lecture we learned the term “theory of mind“, which is the ability to perceive and interpret others thoughts and actions separate from our own. Connecting it to the film, I personally see Vos having a hard time with this, possibly due to her immersiveness and inability to separate her own emotions from her victims. With the first victim, her tactic for murder is quite personal, stabbing instead of using the gun provided for her. With countless Criminal Minds episodes I’ve watched, stabbing someone, especially as many times as she did, shows a personal vendetta. Possibly, she might have inhibited her victim’s emotions and was not able to differentiate it from her own or it is a means to signify something greater in herself that she wants to kill. Nonetheless, going back into her own body, she has a hard time adjusting back to her identity and seems lifeless, practicing over and over again how to say hello to her son and husband. This shows great apathy and her inability to connect with human emotions, but due to her profession she is able to act as if she feels the way she should feel.

There are many moments of embodied cognition throughout the film as well. Due to Vos’s inability to feel her emotions, she uses embodied cognition with the body language of people around her to adjust accordingly and react normally. She acts as a parasite in her own body as it seems easier for her than taking time to get back in her own identity. As she inhabits Colin, she does this with the people around him as well. The turnover of the film shows Colin trying to take control of his body again. Now that Vos and his own identity are living together in his body, they seem to fight over dominance. Both have access to each other’s memories making it difficult to differentiate reality and illusion. With two minds in one body, they fight for control. However, Colin’s consciousness is full of empathy and normal human emotions, while Vos is without, so ultimately it seems to be a fight of empathy vs. apathy. In the end, Colin loses the fight with Vos in complete control of the body as she kills her son. Does this mean that apathy is stronger than empathy? Does having emotions signify a weakness in humans?

In turn, we see that Bender has no human emotions because he is a robot. However, we see this gets out of hand when he flushes Nibbler down the toilet. To reflect on his actions, the professor inserts an empathy chip into him that radiates on Leela’s frequency, allowing him to feel everything that she feels. Bender’s emotions after insertion shows empathy; he literally feels every single emotion that Leela does. He cries when she cries, gets angry with her, and even misses Nibbler. It is a great example of embedded cognition and theory of mind as well because of the connection to her. He is able to feel what she feels, but is able state that this is not his own emotions. In the end, it shows he was able to imitate his own feelings in response to Leela’s, but is still unable to actually feel emotions. Leela states she learned more from Bender than he did her, showing her preference to apathy. Does this make apathy better than empathy? Does empathy just get in the way of the human experience?

It was very enjoyable to focus on and consider empathy during this module. I’ve always kind of felt like empathy either happens or doesn’t happen in any given moment, and people may not even realize if they are showing empathy or not. At the same time, I feel like I’ve heard people say that they cannot relate to how other people feel a million times before. After considering the information and ideas throughout this module, I believe a lot of people who claim they are not empathetic actually are, and they just don’t realize they are.

Futurama

In the episode, “I Second that Emotion,” we observe Bender showing a lack of empathy toward pretty much everything around him. He definitely does not show any empathy toward the loss of Nibbler. After flushing Nibbler down the toilet, Bender does not show any signs of regret, sadness, or grief for the circumstances. When Leela says to Bender, “You have no sympathy for anyone else’s feelings,” Bender claims that he does. Not for Leela’s sadness and grief at the loss of Nibble, though. He feels sorry that Leela has, “one cantaloupe sized bloodshot eye.” Not only that, as they are all grieving Nibbler’s death, Bender is watching T.V. and laughing at a show where a character is experiencing great tragedies. Through these examples, it is clear that Bender lacks what is explained in Simulation Theory because we know that Bender has experienced loss previously when he says that the can opener had killed his father, but he does not simulate and empathize with Leela when she is grieving the loss of Nibbler. Another thing to mention is that Bender most likely doesn’t demonstrate the idea of Theory Theory because he is a robot and the other characters are human. Maybe? I don’t know. Maybe his experiences are different because he is a robot, so his experiences have been different to others. When they install the “empathy chip” into Bender’s head, they basically just downloaded Embodied Cognition into him like installing a software into a computer. Not only does he understand other characters’ feelings, he experiences them as well.

Possessor

This movie was a lot more aggressive and gory than the episode of Futurama we watched. We went from a cartoon of one character flushing a pet down a toilet to brutal, intense murders. Going back to what I mentioned earlier about people saying they can’t relate to others’ emotions, Possessor may just depict this idea through the protagonist, Tasya Vos. Bascially, Tasya possess other peoples’ bodies and takes control over them in order to kill someone that they (The Agency) would like killed. After they have killed someone while in the other person’s body, they are to kill themselves (the host) in order to return to their own body. Tasya demonstrates Embodied Cognition here, as she struggles to kill the host body in order to return to her own. In the first scenes, she waits for the police officers to kill her host body instead. She feels empathy for the feelings of the host body as she tries to kill it. After completing a task, Tasya goes through a series of questions to ensure her mind is still intact. One of the things she analyzes is a butterfly. At the beginning of the film, she states, “I killed and mounted it one summer when I was a girl, and then I felt guilty about it. I still feel guilty about it.” This scene shows that Tasya, although being in a host body and ruthlessly killing someone, still has empathy for having killed a butterfly as a girl. However, at the end of the film, after experiencing such traumatic events, such as killing her own family while battling with Colin’s mind while in Colin’s body, loses her empathetic feelings. This is depicted through the scene when she is holding the butterfly again, but this time, she does not say she feels guilty for having killed the butterfly. At the conclusion of the film, Tasya is totally psychotic and has lost her ability to emphasize.

 

After watching and analyzing these episodes/films, empathy and Embodied Theory are incredibly intriguing emotions/ideas to consider. I definitely think people don’t realize when they are being empathetic, but what happens when people truly are incapable of being empathetic? It is a crazy thing to consider.

After watching these two films, I immediately feel empathy is a way of “understanding” and”perception,” sympathy is a “relationship.” In empathy, we substitute ourselves for another person. And in compassion, we replace others for us. Empathy is like a brain parasite, parasitic in the host’s body, perceiving everything about him. How does a person feel when he is empathizing with others? Just said: “Hello~! Friend, I am no longer who I am. Are you still my friend?”

Possessor

Empathy? Parasites?
In this film, Vos has to control the target host through “spiritual parasitism” to complete the company’s requirements and tasks. The copyright belongs to the author. When Vos’s “object consciousness” is “withdrawn” from other people’s bodies and consciousness, Girder will have to evaluate her “mental health” to ensure that her consciousness is not contaminated, carry playing the “pretend mentality” generated by others, it gradually gets out of control. Also, this process is realized through two of Vos’ items—a pipe and a stuffed butterfly. In the framework of “consciousness manipulation,” the possessor takes the “competition” of “two consciousnesses” for a body as a breakthrough point, trying to interpret the relationship between embodied cognition and theory of mind in an existential way. As mentioned in Voicethread Theory of Mind refers to a developmental moment in our cognitive process where we begin to understand that other people do not necessarily have the same thoughts, beliefs, perceptions, feelings, desires, and knowledge that we do. Butterfly specimens are a concrete manifestation of empathy. Vos said, “I killed and mounted it one summer when I was a girl, and then I felt guilty about it.” “Guilty” shows Vos has empathy because it was the first person she killed when she was a little girl; In the final answer, Vos also recounted the origin of the butterfly specimen but did not say that she was very guilty. And this subtle difference reflects the change in Vos’ psychological situation; that is to say, she used the fact that “Tate & Vos” killed Michael and her son, wholly abandoned her concern and identity questioning, let her subconscious mind peel off, get rid of the shackles of self, and bring closer to a more pure self. “I am absolutely starving.” Before going home, Tate and Voss talked, indicating that they controlled each other and eventually became one. Both became parasites to each other.

As Giovanna Cohen Betty theorizes, she argues that we see another person’s body; we feed into their body and live through it. The idea that we feel or feel is our acknowledgment of the place of another person’s body as subjectivity. For example, when she uses Tate’s body is inevitably brought into the host consciousness, she begins to question her identity and, trapped in Tate’s body, begins to rethink who she is. Vos becomes Tate; at this moment, she can understand and perceive that Tate/male is different from what she sees. And Tate’s girlfriend uttered words similar to Michael’s and continued passion. So it made Vos and Tate’s bodies highly integrated, and the previous indifference was no longer there. The excessive immersion allowed Vos to enjoy this body, and at the same time, it was also counterattacked by this body. Through the parasitic method, Vos does not need to read the mind. Although the body belongs to other people, the body she perceives directly gives her the information she needs. Just as in simulation theory, when we interact with another person, we simulate what the other person is feeling in our minds.

“Just think one day your wife is cleaning the cat litter and that worm ends up her brain. Whether you really married to her or married to the worm” (1:28:47). This passage shows that Vos is the parasite and Tate is the wife. Meanwhile, Vos is that wife, and Holly’s killing memories are the parasites fueling her killing genes. What is interesting is that in the scene of the implantation of consciousness, the appearance of the reconstruction of consciousness is expressed in a way that imitates the melting of wax people: that is, the consciousness is the electric wave, the soul is the body, and the body is the soul. Voicethread also mentions embodied cognition, we live through the body, which is other people, and the body is the brain. Our bodies constantly adjust to stabilize our perceptions; we often don’t even know about that.

Futurama

What does it mean if humans lose empathy? Leela complained, “You have no sympathy for anyone else’s feeling” (7:10) after seeing Bender throw Nibbler down and flush it down the toilet. But after he was forced to implant an empathy chip, in the scene at Futurama‘s bar, Bender could sense Leela’s emotions at the bar, including jealousy and loneliness, from the couch at home. And these two things happened simultaneously as if an invisible thread was pulling Bender to feel the same emotions as Leela. This thread is the empathy chip through which Leela’s mood changes are transplanted to Bender. Because of the chip’s empathy, Bender can synchronize with Leela’s emotions. He could realize he was crying because he felt Leela’s grief.

Can emotional empathy be forced? When the professor implanted an emotion chip in Bender’s head, he said, “I’m installing an empathy chip. Yes…If by “allow” you mean “Force” (8:51). The professor’s move of implanting the chip into Bender’s head can be understood as empathy can be placed in our brain, just like the intervention method used by psychotherapists when treating autistic patients, but this also requires the patient’s thinking. To understand, not force. As explained in Empathy in Voicethread, I can understand a friend’s happiness. But it’s empathy. I know that’s not my happiness. While we’re emotionally disconnected to some extent, we can sympathize with what’s going on with others, but we can’t necessarily have natural empathy. On the other hand, how we perceive and empathize things is part of our cognitive process. Cognition exists in the brain, the brain in the body, and the body in the environment. The three interact to perceive things, form concepts, and solve problems.

     According to Voicethread, the Theory of Mind is the understanding that other people’s perspectives and ideas differ from one’s own, including thoughts, experiences, feelings, desires, and beliefs. This point is demonstrated when Bender admits that the emotions he feels are not his own and that he can distinguish between the two. Bender said, “Now, I’ll simply turn it to Leela’s emotional frequency. I’m overcome with …Feeling” (9:16). Bender experienced Leela’s emotional change from being happy to angry to sobbing. We can think of this empathy chip as the neurons in Leela’s brain. When Bender was forced to implant the chip, he could directly feel Leela’s love and desire for Nibbler through the chip. It is also the mention of empathy and neurons in Voicethread; we see someone unhappy, and our neurons fire, so we see someone laughing, and our neurons fire in response. What does it feel like to be forced into empathy? If an empathy chip could be implanted, would there be no autism and AHDH?

Hello everybody, I am

How in the world did this get in-

You know what, never mind. Hello everyone.

I’ve always enjoyed thinking about how empathy works. Jokes aside, the picture above is from BBC’s Sherlock, a show that also brings empathy and the human mind into discussion. It’s interesting seeing a highly functioning sociopath like Sherlock interact with people close to him.

But of course, this isn’t about Sherlock, whose gore and insults might as well be considered PG 13 compared to the nightmare that is Possessor. It’s not for the faint of heart, that’s for sure.

Before we get into it, I have to say that I was not the biggest fan of the movie. It’s definitely a slow-burn, and the assassin part of the movie takes its time building up. However, it does a good job expressing empathy and the lack thereof.

Tasya Vos (cool name btw) is an assassin that possesses (title drop—kinda) people to kill people. After she possesses someone and finishes the job, she always has to go through a set of questions that concern her past. It acts as a way to see if there’s any brain damage done to her. And let me just tell you, the damage has been done. Nay, it had been done before the main plot began.

Some folks have mentioned the butterfly scenes, so I want to focus on something different. In order to properly fool other people, Vos has to know a lot about the person she is to possess. She has to know how they talk, the way their bodies move when they talk, their overall mannerisms when approaching someone else, etc.

There’s a scene where she is spying on Colin Tate. Unfortunately, I cannot take screenshots because the website blacks them out, so imagine Tasya Vos is peering through a camera, imitating what Tate is saying. She directly perceives Tate’s body and places herself in his skin (figuratively, for now). However, we can see that empathy does not equate to total understanding. When Vos is in Tate’s body (literally), his girlfriend notices that he is acting off. Though Vos can try her best to act like Tate, emulate his feelings, actually being him is not possible because Tate naturally interacts with the environment and other people differently due to his past. Something is off about him, and Ava notices.

This fits the Embodied Theory about empathy. Ava doesn’t need to analyze every bit of Tate that is off. Just from being with him long enough, she can tell, he is acting slightly differently.

I am firm in believing that empathizing and understanding are two different things. I can feel bad for a person losing someone, but can I understand the exact feeling unless I go through it myself? Not really.

The Futurama episode shows this well. Bender is a largely psychopathic character that cannot empathize with other people. That doesn’t mean he can’t feel emotions. The reason he flushes Nibbler in the toilet is because he is annoyed at how much attention the pet is getting compared to him. In other words, he’s a bit jealous. It didn’t help that Nibbler ate the cake Bender was making and going to present.

Eventually, he gets an empathy chip that makes him feel exactly how Leela is feeling. What’s interesting is that he can still complain about the emotions he’s experiencing as they are happening, which implies that simply feeling someone else’s emotions does not equate to understanding them. Bender, by the end of the episode, is back to his old self. In fact, the empathy chip was working “at triple capacity”. Bender wasn’t “feeling” Leela’s emotions. He was “emulating/simulating” them.

Possessor has a more complex view on empathy, but don’t sleep on Futurama. Both of them reinforce my opinion that while we are capable of somewhat feeling other people’s emotions by drawing on our own experiences, it is the lack of that same experience that doesn’t allow us to have a perfect recreation of how the they feel.

Thanks for reading my TED Tal—

Wait, that’s not right.

Warmly,

Guga Khidasheli

There we go.

This week we watched the movie Possessor and the episode “I Second that Emotion” from Futurama. From watching these two we are able to see how they deal with the topic of empathy in their own ways 

In the episode “I Second that Emotion” from Futurama,  we were able to see directly how empathy was addressed. When Bender shows a lack of emotion towards his action of flushing Gibbler down the toilet Leela is upset and wants Bender to understand how she feels. Because of this they choose to implant a chip into Bender’s head to make him feel Leelas emotions. When Leela would feel angry Bender would feel angry; when Leela felt scared Bender would feel scared etc. It helped him to dial into her emotions so that he would develop an empathy for her. And while in the end it seems as though he didn’t fully develop an understanding even after the experience Leela mentions that she understands him better so in the end it worked out for both of them.

The movie Possessor was very different and not as direct in its approach on the topic. The feel starts off with a woman (very graphically) injecting something into her head. And soon after she is out and about and kills a man before getting killed by the police. We quickly learn that this was the main character of this movie; Tasya Vos, whose job is to learn about a person so that she is able to mimic that person when she takes control of their body. Vos seems to be unable to feel emotion very well based on how she holds herself after she comes back from that first mission as well as how she interacts with her family. When she is going home she has to say the same sentences over and over again to be able to say them in a certain way so that her son doesn’t notice something off. When her mind is in Colins body we can see his mind fight for dominance but in the end after feeling disconnected from reality, her family was dead and she seemed to feel nothing over it.

In this week’s module, we watch one film, “Possessor,” and an episode of Futurama, “I Second That Emotion, and connect them to the lesson about empathy and how one processes empathy as it correlates not only to themselves but how they observe, interact and process the empathy of others.

In the movie Possessor, we are introduced to the main character Tasya Vos, who is not her physical self, but she has possessed the body of another woman. In this first scene, the young African American woman Vos has inhabited turns a dial linked to a device in her head. The device allows Vos to feel emotions daily to keep her consciousness grounded. The young woman then goes from laughing to crying and then almost instantly emotionless on her face. I do not know what causes the range of emotions or why Vos displays them in that order, but it caused me to feel cognitive empathy. The 13th anniversary of my grandfather’s passing last month, a few days after his birthday, is still fresh in my mind. I remember smiling and laughing at stories my dad told me mixed with my memories of fishing and bowling with my grandfather and then the pang of sadness that brought on tears because my children will never know the joys of being around their great-grandfather and then holding back the pain because I know my gramps would not want me to be sad.

This movie is not something I would watch myself because I am not a psychological thriller fan (well depends on the movie), and I do not like horror. Still, I found it exciting and realized a few types of empathies learned in this module in the movie. The movie “Possessor” displays a type of embodied cognition because specific individuals’ consciousness is uploaded into the body of an unwilling host. Therefore the possessor is linked or sensing the host body and living through it. Tasya Vos is very disconnected from her emotions which I would assume is why she was chosen to be an assassin. However, she could not do it when it was time to kill herself or, more accurately, the host body. Being directly linked to the host’s emotions, the reluctance to take the host’s life was a display of mirror neurons because before the police take out the assassin, the host cries out, and Vos second guesses her decision; one could assume that was the host’s consciousness unwilling to  “take her own life.”

The episode from Futurama, “I Second That Emotion,” had me singing Smokey Robinson and The Miracles’ song, I Second That Emotion, around my house! Lol.

This episode is centered around Bender, his disdain, and his jealousy of Nibbler because everyone treats Nibbler with the type of love and respect Bender wants. Bender lacks basic empathy, so he causes Nibbler to go to the hospital, and the crew discovers he is 5, so they give him a birthday party. Bender’s need for attention causes him to flush Nibbler down the toilet, Leela becomes extremely emotional, and those around her directly perceive how she is feeling, except Bender. The professor then links Bender to Leela’s emotions which causes Bender to be influx with sad emotions.

In this episode, Bender’s lack of basic empathy creates a hostile environment between him and Leela. The empathy chip created by the professor is an example of an ecological perspective on perception in Bender, who is now connected to Leela’s consciousness; he can sense the environment indirectly through her and how she relates to situations that may not affect him similarly. This link is also embedded cognition because he is connected to a host consciousness and can cognitively think as another being. However, he is not exactly in her body but sharing her consciousness.

These episodes also remind me of the link between Jake Sully and his brothers Avatar in the James Cameron movie Avatar. Jake and the other humans linked to their Na Vi avatar experience the cultural and religious love and respect the Na Vi have not only for each other and their land but also empathize with them when their existence and the home tree are threatened by earth’s capitalism and military bullies. The link between the host and the possessor creates a different kind of embodied cognition because the perception of another person and how they live through things are more closely related than individual sensing from the outside. After all, the cognitions are linked.

In this weeks movie and TV show, we explored empathy, embodied theory, and the theory of mind. As human beings, we experience all three of these states without even realizing we are. When creating films that deal with them, it’s much easier to be creative with how actors show these types of behavior.

Possessor was a very different film, one that I wouldn’t have watched on a normal day.  The film uses the theory of mind highly as the whole idea of what is happening in the film is that Vos uses other people’s bodies and while in them kills people who haven’t been the best to others. After the “host” kills, they are left to deal with the consequences of a murder or they get killed themselves by suicide that was not actually them.

Vos embodied different bodies in the film and the last one, Colin Tate, really showed how nonempathetic Vos became after killing in other bodies. After she gets out of their bodies, she has to complete a test that shows others above her that she is still herself and not affected by the murders. After she completes the first kill in the first body the film shows, one of her test questions are seeing if she remember a butterfly. She says that she remembers killing the butterfly when she was young, but feels bad about it. By saying she feels bad for killing something living, it shows she’s empathetic and aware that she took a life.

While Vos is in Colin Tate’s body, she ends up killing way more people than she was supposed to kill because she wasn’t in full control of the body. She ends up killing both her child and her husband too. When she finally gets out of the body and does her test, she mentions killing the butterfly, but not feeling guilty. She no longer feels empathy like a normal human would. This was a subtle hint in the movie that symbolized the change Vos had gone through.

Before all the killing and the crazy non-empathetic Vos returned, the film showed the embodied theory. Ava, Colin’s girlfriend read body language and felt something was off. Colin said that he was fine, but Ava was right. Colin’s body was being embodied by Vos.

I Second That Emotion explores the idea of empathy. Bender is a robot that has no empathy. He does and says things without repercussions because he simply can’t care. He gets jealous of Nibbler because he’s getting all the attention so he flushes him down the toilet. Leela is horrified and extremely sad because that was her pet–she loved him. Leela states, ” I wish just once Bender would feel exactly what I feel” because while she’s crying over her flushed pet, Bender is laughing. The Professor end up putting a chip on Bender that allows his emotions to be in sync with Leela’s.

With the chip in place, Bender finally knows how Leela is feeling and he doesn’t exactly like it. The chip allows for Bender to feel Leela’s emotions and his own ones as well. He is aware of the emotions others feel now and will be more respectful of them.