Author: gcoito

In this week’s module, the film Marjorie Prime and the Star Trek episode “Measure of a Man” demonstrates how memory can be remembered in different ways and how it can explain who a person is. In Marjorie Prime we learn about how Alzheimer’s plays with your memory. Alzheimer’s is a horrible disease. As someone who has multiple family members who has this disease, firsthand I can honestly say it’s terrifying. Since there is no cure, the best thing anyone can do for them is giving them the best years, the months, and the days they have left.

Marjorie Prime the movie is quite interesting. Right in the beginning of the movie, we are introduced to the main characters, Marjorie, and Walter. Marjorie prime is 86-year-old women who has Alzheimer’s and Walter Prime is a hologram of her late husband. As someone who understands Alzheimer’s very well, I have learned that the people with Alzheimer’s last memory to go is their significant others. First would be people they once met, then it would be friends, followed by cousins, and lastly would be their children than significant others. Marjorie gets to live her last couple of days talking to her late husband and reliving all their memories together.

In the film, there is a particular scene that Tess states, “When you remember something, you remember the memory. You remember the last time you remembered it, not the source. So, it’s always getting fuzzier, like a photocopy of a photocopy……even a very strong memory can be unreliable because it’s always in the process of dissolving”.  This to me made understand what the voice thread was explaining in memory. Memory is constructed not recorded or stored in the mind but built in the mind. Memory is a complex, it’s not just black and white. By talking to her late husband its possibly the best way of remembering her emotions. Memory and emotions work hand in hand. We have a better chance of remembering a happy emotional memory than a sad memory. Connecting this back to Inside out, we learn that all her memories were stored as a happy and a sad memory and with each memory she felt a different emotion attached to it. Which is why when joy felt like she needed to feel that emotion again she brought up the sad and happy emotions. In the voice thread we talked about affect priming, the influence of emotion what we pay attention to and remember.  Marjorie remembers how she felt during these memories that Walter speaks about. but remembering how she felt during that memory she than starts remembering the memory by understanding the emotion she felt with Walter help.

Extended cognition is shown thru out the movie. Walter Prime the hologram would be considered an extended cognition example because they use “the brain, body, external tools and technology, interpersonal and social supports, and culture create complex and interactions that form a cognitive system”.  Marjorie prime can talk to her late husband by having Tess and her husband talks about what memories and fills in details for Walter to be realistic. By using all these components, Marjorie can speak to Walter in a way that many of us wish we could do with loved ones who have passed away.  We see that when Walter learns something new, he states “I’ll remember that next time”.  Showing how he is just going to remember what he was told, he does not actually that build the memory because it’s not his memory, it’s just a story.

Star Trek episode “Measure of a Man” was my favorite star trek episode so far. Data is the focus of this episode.  Quickly in the episode we find out that data is a robot and not human.  As we have found out in multiple texts in this semester, robots don’t have their own memory or emotions. His memory would not be his own without any emotion to it. But to everyone Data was more than a robot, he was family. Data was being called an IT, when to me an IT is something that doesn’t feel emotion, Like a tree. but, Data did have emotions and he had his memories. He was no star-trek “property”. History has always showed us that us humans can be judgmental and always need to put down someone. If it wasn’t people of color then it had to be people of religious beliefs. In this case, it was a robot, but a robot who felt more than any of them. all his memories had deep emotion attached to it. That to me is more human than any of them.

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.

“The highest form of knowledge is empathy, for it requires us to suspend our egos and live in another’s world”- Plato. This quote in my opinion really is what empathy is all about in a few words.  I believe it really explains Possessor and the episode, “I Second That Emotion” in Futurama.

In an ultra- violent sci-fi- horror freak- out, Possessor has different scenes where empathy plays a huge role. The main character Tasya Vos is an agent whose job is to learn about one person at a time, enough to be able to mimic that person when she is in control of their body. This time Colin is her next victim. Tasya’s one task is to kill John who is the owner of a big company and Ava who is his daughter. By using Colin’s body (Ava’s fiancé), Tasya’s mission is possible. Tasya has shown throughout the movie that she has a conscious, unlike the people she works for. Her conscious can be seen as embodied empathy because many times during the movie, she has a hard time about killing the person’s body she was in. She starts feeling their emotions and she has internal battle of killing them off. Having her small family can be seen as dangerous in her line of work because she cannot have empathy when in someone’s body. Tasya goes through exercises in the beginning and end of the movie to check her consciousness is back in her own mind and there are no gaps in memories. One example was a framed butterfly, in the beginning of the movie 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 is an example of who she is and the empathy she has. In the end, after killing her family, when Tasya returns to her own body, she picks up the same butterfly. She says, “I killed and mounted it one summer when I was a little girl”. This now shows a different Tasya and that she no longer feels empathy or guilt for her kills, be it the butterfly, her ex-husband, or her own child. Vos no longer feels any emotions of her own because of how many times she had to train to be someone else in another person’s body.

After watching possessor, Futurama was a breath of fresh air (literally). The entire episode had perfect examples how Bender the robot does not feel empathy. It also seems like Bender does not mind NOT feeling this emotion. Of course, the professor puts an empathy chip, as if it was so easy to give someone the feeling of empathy. After feeling all Leela emotions, he fights it every time. He does not want to feel this way, maybe because he feels weak. Of course, when Leela feels something now he feels it as well. What I thought was interesting is how he knows that is Leela’s feelings and not his own. So, the chip gave him the feeling, but it wasn’t true empathy it was Leela’s feelings. Showing that what we learned in this week’s lesson of theory of mind. The professor even states at the end of the episode that the chip was turned off, viewers believe that bender can feel empathy without the chip. Quickly after the professor states that the chip was working in triple capacity. Which than we see the normal Bender that did not change because of this adventure. Bender really had no empathy for Leela’s feelings when she lost Nibbler. At the end, when Leela is crying and tied up and needs Bender to save her, Bender can’t because of Leela’s emotions. How ironic, that now he feels so much of Leela’s feelings and can’t help her. This is a true example of Embodied Cognition, how the body influences the mind. Bender can’t save her until she figured out how to not feel her sad emotions, she needed to be selfish and only care about her own emotions.

Not everyone can feel empathy, it takes a human form to have the capability of feeling ones feeling. But the feeling empathy does not make you weak- like I stated above, it is the highest form of knowledge.

In Altered Carbon bodies are viewed as “sleeves”. Sleeves are a body that the government can put anyone stack in. A stack is basically a small computer containing a person’s digital consciousness and is inserted into the back of the neck. Inserted into the persons spine, the medical person in me has to say it seems like the cervical spine of C4-C5. After Takeshi Kovacs wakes up after 250 years of being dead, he is put into a random sleeve that they had available at the time. The government gives what is available at the time and if you want a better sleeve or an upgrade you must pay for it. Showing how they think of bodies, that they are just vessels to hold our DHF: Digital human freight. It shows that if they keep the DHF safe, they can live in any sleeve- even multiple sleeves. Bodies are easily replaceable, but the mind is not. Once the chip that holds the DHF gets destroyed there is no way in saving that mind. That person is now considered officially dead. Just like a computer, if the motor board is safe and not broken it can be used in a different computer. The mind in this case is the chip that holds the DHF. The mind is the software, and the body is the hardware.

The episode of Star Trek “Return to tomorrow”, viewed bodies differently. A person’s body was seen more than just a vessel but something that was needed to live a life. A body can feel, touch and in the episode that was a big component. Having a brain full of knowledge is one thing but you’re not able to live life fully. For example, when the crew went to go see Sargon, the crew witnessed how these “peoples” mind was stuck in a sphere alien like object. They did not have a body to live in, there were stuck in this sphere.  All they wanted were bodies for them self’s and they wanted to create them by being in three crew members bodies. But once they were in the crew members bodies, they quickly fell in love their new borrowed bodies. Sargon even explained what it was like going into Jim’s body, he felt the air in his lungs, he saw things, and he felt his heart beating. The classic things our bodies do every day automatically and we don’t cherish that enough. We take something like breathing for granted.

Going back to the 4E cognition this is an example of embodied cognition because the idea that the mind is not only connected to the brain but that the body influences the mind. The idea that you need a body to live a complete life.  At first, I thought that Sargon felt more superior to the crew because he is light years more intelligent but once he was in a body, I could tell that it was an act and he missed feeling alive. Sargon stated that he needed a body to live again. Being stuck in a sphere is not living, it’s the bare minimum of being alive.  During the lecture this really stuck out to me, “a body is not something you have; it is something you are”. Showing that you won’t feel complete without a body to live experiences from.

At the end all he wanted to do was be able to kiss his wife one last time, to be able to touch and feel her kiss. Viewers were shown of their love for each other and how precious it is to feel and touch.

Lastly the show futurama really had me thinking on what this episode really meant about the body and mind. In this episode everyone who lived in earth became stupid. As the title of the episode suggests, but one character was not affected. Fry was not affected because he was seen as the most unintelligent character. When the brains came to earth, I instantly saw that everyone was looking up at these brains. The floating brains were higher than anyone there. And it showed to me that the brains wanted to feel like they were superior to the people living there. However, these brains did not speak. I thought that was comical considering to be intelligent people believe that you need to speak. The only brain that spoke was the “big brain”. He is the master mind behind all the other attacks on the planets. The big brain states “We have long since evolved beyond the need for asses”.  Demonstrating that he doesn’t need a body, his mind was far superior to anyone else’s. He was able to attack other planets and take over them without having a body.  Fry knew he needed to do something, he noticed he was alone, and everyone was now stupid. When Fry was thinking of ways to stop the big brain, he realized that the big brain was losing his powers and becoming substantially weaker and smaller. Demonstrating embodied cognition that the brain and body are needed; fry was able to beat the brain by thinking. When Fry thought more, he decided to write a story and that is what ultimately made the big brain loose and everyone turned back to their normal self’s.

As shown in all three episodes in different ways, we need a brain and a body to feel alive. without the other, we are not complete. That embodied cognition is not limited to the brain, rather we think through with our bodies. Being able to touch and feel something thru our bodies help us feel alive. If we just all were brains with no body, we wouldn’t be able to enjoy life to its full capacity. We think with and through our bodies and not just our mind.