Author: alnunez

This week we had to watch two films in which people who weren’t actually people were the stars. In Marjorie Prime we saw a prime, Walter, which was like a holographic person of Majorie’s husband. It took me a little while to realize he wasn’t real, but Marjorie walked over what should’ve been his solid feet. In the Star Trek episode we see Data, which is literally Data. He knows everything about the Enterprise and is almost like a human on the ship.

Marjorie uses Walter to listen to all the memories she’s soon going to forget because of Alzheimer’s. Since he’s a holographic projection, he doesn’t forget the things Marjorie tells him. She often asks him to tell her stories of things like her old dog and adds in details before he does. This shows Marjorie’s memory isn’t totally gone, but when it is, she’ll rely on Walter for all her memories.

One time Walter was telling her the story of when he proposed to her. She was adding in details that didn’t happen and essentially said that if they think about it enough, the next time they talk it’ll be true. This was Marjorie trying to change her autobiographical memory since this memory is a revisable and negotiable record of ones personal history. Her emotions were influencing this change because she was visibly more excited and happy about being proposed to after watching Casablanca. I know memories change because we think about them in different contexts, but Marjorie was just changing the whole memory which made me laugh. Marjorie was trying to change the memory with the Toni example, but I wonder how she would have reacted if let’s say Walter said the dog’s name wasn’t Toni and instead something else. 

I feel like the Star Trek episode connected more with the emotions of Inside Out. When Picard finds out that Maddox has an ulterior motive, he first becomes sad and then angry. I imagined the emotions from Inside Out being in Picard’s head.

Maddox plans on putting all Data’s data in a positronic brain in order for him to figure out how he works. Data doesn’t want this to happen because even though he’s not human, he still remembers events and experiences with emotion, just like a human does. He’s scared that the episodic memory won’t come back to him and it’ll just be the semantics. Without his memories, he wouldn’t be himself. The flavor of the memory would be gone and this is how Data explained which I thought was perfect.

Memories are extremely important to when it comes to one’s identity. Memories and the way people recall certain events are the reason they act and behave in certain ways. This is the affective dimension of memory and all the characters in both films experienced it.

This week we had to watch two films that both dealt with emotions in some way. People don’t tend to realize that emotions just don’t happen, they exist because we create them. As social creatures, human go through experiences that allow these said emotions to be felt and publicly observed. Human can tell for the most part what emotion someone is feeling because emotions are socially constructed. We collectively have agreed that if someone is happy, they might be smiling and someone that is sad might be crying. With that being said, emotions aren’t just shown in one way, people express themselves differently.

In the film Inside Out Riley is a joyful person. We know this because it’s the emotion that leads all the other ones. In the film, the emotions are little characters that live in the heads of people.  Riley was a joyful little baby, but when she didn’t get what she wanted or needed, she began to cry as do most babies. This “unlocked” a new emotion, sadness. This directly connects to the Theory of Constructed Emotion because Riley constructed new emotions as she experienced feelings.

Right at the beginning of the film as we see Riley growing up, we also see the events that caused her to create more emotions. Riley not getting dessert triggers Anger and running and tripping over a cord causes Fear to be visible.

Something that I was wondering about the film was that we see Riley’s lead emotion as Joy, the Mom’s as Sadness, and the Dad’s as Anger. I wonder what it took for emotions to switch leads or if it was always Sadness/Anger. Since the Mom, Dad, and Riley all have the same basic emotions, I feel like emotions in the movie were basic and universal. The emotions all acted in similar ways, but were specific to one’s life experience.

Star Trek’s “Man of the People” also showed me the Theory of Constructed Emotion. It is not explicitly said in the film, but Deanna’s body language showed that she was trying to get with Alkar. I’m assuming this because of the way humans have socially constructed emotions and could assume without being told. Deanna quickly changed emotions when Alkar refused her. We can’t say that she constructed the feeling of disgust and anger right then and there because she probably has experienced them in the past. Emotions, the mind, and body all work together. Once the mind was able to comprehend what was happening, the emotions started being projected and shown through the bodies actions.

 

Emotions are a very powerful thing that human experience. Not everyone expresses emotion in the same way, but for the most part, others can tell what one is feeling. Emotions are essential because a human mind without emotion really won’t be a human mind.

We can assume that Deanna had her seven primary emotions, but Riley only has five. I wonder which of her five emotions picked up the other two primary emotions…

 

 

In this weeks films, cognitive linguistics was very much apparent. We noticed it because we had to for the assignment otherwise, we would have just watched the movie and episode without thinking about the relationship between mind, language, body, and communication.

Something that stood out to me a lot in this weeks VoiceThread was the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In Arrival Louise explained the hypothesis as a theory that states “[the] language you speak determines how you think… it affects how you see everything” (Arrival 1.02). I really liked how the film explicitly used something we learned. I also really liked the hypothesis in general because it’s something that is true, but nobody thinks about because it’s such a normal thing. One only thinks about it when they come into contact with something different that isn’t like they’re used to.

In the film, the heptapods communicate using strange figures that the humans know nothing about. Louise is there helping to translate the symbols, but it’s difficult for her too. At one point the heptapods create a symbol that Louise translated to say “offer weapon.” Because of the cognitive linguistics and the cognitive frame that humans have, the scientists believed the heptapods were giving a warning and basically trying to accentuate danger. Louise was able to explain to the scientists that they don’t truly know if the heptapods know the difference between a weapon and a tool. Louise was objective and didn’t want to assume Abbott and Costello wanted to fight. She was aware that the creatures and humans obviously didn’t communicate in the same way.

 

 

 

 

 

In the Star Trek episode, it took me a little while to realize that the aliens that they encountered spoke in metaphors and not exactly English which is why the crew had trouble understanding. The captain Dathon told the captain of the crew “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” and this is actually a metaphor which means working together. They use events that have happened in Tamarian history to communicate how they feel and what they believe is happening.

In a similar way to Arrival, the strange beings didn’t use weapons in the same way humans, or Star Trek aliens, see weapons as. Dathon holding up two knives didn’t mean he wanted to fight, he was just trying to communicate.

In both films, strange beings are interacting with the “normal” characters. Communication played a huge role because both parties communicated differently. They had to figure out how to understand each other and to know the needs of the strange beings. Both respective parties and even readers saw just how important meaning in languages is embedded in the context of a person, or thing for the heptapods. Language is truly a remarkable form of communication that is so different, yet so similar depending on where it’s coming from.

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.

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.

Hello!

My name is Alexandra Nunez, but I go by Alex and my pronouns are she/her/hers. I will be a Senior this upcoming school year and I am a Mathematics major on the education track as well as an English minor. I plan on graduating Spring 2024 instead of Spring 2023 with my Masters in Education and my licensing to teach. My plan is to be a teacher for a couple of years and then eventually become a Principal. I’ve always been super close to my Middle School/High School Principal and she was the one who inspired me to go into the Education field. 

I love to go on adventures and spend time with friends and family. I also really like to go on vacation and do exotic things. I have an 11 year old red-eared slider named Skipper and for some reason my parents and teachers allowed me to bring her to Show-and-Tell when I was in the 4th grade! I’m Dominican, but born and raised in NYC and I have enjoyed the different cultures and experiences both locations offer. 

I decided to take an English course because it was the last one I needed to complete my English minor. I just didn’t want to take any English course to fulfill my requirement and EGL 309 seemed interesting so I decided to enroll. I took a similar course that was about the human body, thinking, and science a couple of semesters ago and I really enjoyed it, so I’m excited for this course. I usually read a lot of historical fiction books about the Holocaust and World War 2, so a change in what I read and watch is going to be nice. Overall, I’m excited for this course and to explore different realms of literature that I haven’t before!