Memory and its uses are considered to be one of the main characteristics that make us human. Animals remember feeding grounds and their predators, but humans are able to remember almost every event that they experience whether it be small or significant. With our memories comes how we perceive and react to all different forms of events and situations. Creating our personalities, what we like and dislike, and how we deal with certain situations all derive from how we felt about the same thing originally. Both Marjorie Prime and Measure of a Man display how memory can not only create happiness out of past events but also how they create the personalities of each character.
Marjorie Prime depicts a woman names Marjorie that has a holographic connection to an AI hologram of her late husband. Through the brain, body, and interpersonal support this hologram would remind Marjorie about events that happened in their past. It seems that the whole point of this hologram was so Marjorie can continue to have good memories of her life with him. This can be seen as “Good Remembering” due to the emotional content of her memories and the variety of these memories. One example of this is when Tess and Jon are remembering themselves something that happened in the past before talking about firing Julie. “Memory is not like a well that you dip into or a filing cabinet. You don’t remember the memory; you remember the last time you remembered it”. Tess believes that he was eating vanilla ice cream back then while Jon thinks that he was eating pistachio. They are both relieving good memories that, for the most part, stayed true. However, there are always little details that are forgotten for the purpose of remembering the major ones.
“Yet when I finally played poker, I discovered that the reality bore little resemblance to the rules”. Data is a robotic member of the ship in Star Trek and has good and bad memories of the crew. He can feel love and friendship towards others, and he is one of the most valued members of the team. Even with this, many different people aboard the ship like his inspector only view him as a robot that does not deserve the respect of a human. When confronted with the question of whether or not humans had souls to separate themselves from robots, both Captain Louvis and Maddox could not produce an answer. It is also shown that he remembers romantic feelings for Tasha and that he valued the friendships of all the crew members, especially Captain Picard. Overall, Data may be considered a robot but he feels and remembers the same if not more than any member on the Starship Enterprise. 
One thought on “Analysis Blog #5”
Hi Jeremy,
It is very interesting that you brought up how and what animals remember. The truth is, that we know little about the cognition of animals. We tend to project our experience of them, but, because, as we have learned, cognition is embodied, it is very difficult to imagine what their cognitive experience is like, because their bodies and perceptions are so difference from ours. There is actually a thought experiment called “What is it like to be a bat?” and the truth is that we can’t answer that question because a bat’s experience in the world and the way that it makes meaning from it is so fundamentally different from our own. This is also part of the reason why it is nearly impossible for us to know what Data’s cognition is actually like. AI is a fundamentally different way of thinking than anything we have experienced. As awesome as Data is, our understanding of him is necessarily filtered through out understanding of our own cognitive functioning (also, because he is written by humans, he certainly feels very human.
Jessica Hautsch