Author: gkhidasheli

Hello, folks.

I hope you’re doing splendtastically well. It’s the last analysis of the class. Kind of bittersweet if you ask me. But it’s also, I suppose, good for some of you that I won’t be allowed to post any of my top notch, professionally presented, High Quality Jokes™.

Well, it’s okay. We’re all bound to forget those amazing jokes anyways. Speaking of forgetting things…

…

Uh…hold on, give me a moment.

*pretends to look through a file that details an outline of a blog draft, even though the so-called writer never plans what to write and instead wings it*

Ah, found it. Okay, so let’s talk about memory.

I have to say, that both the movie and the episode did a great job expressing the complexity of how memory works. I want to cherrypick some small scenes that stood out to me…well, I’m kind of supposed to cherrypick scenes because…you know, assignment and all that…

Let’s start off with Marjorie Prime. I have mixed feelings towards this movie. I’m not sure how to feel towards it (oh, is that what mixed feelings mean?). In any case, if we’re talking about memories, it, undeniably, does a great job at portraying how they shift over time, and how we’re the ones that, inevitably, rewrite our own versions of how our personal histories happened. Case in point, there is a scene where Tess and Jon are talking while the latter is playing piano and drinking Scotch. Jon is talking about a student who got an A on an exam by basically saying, “I don’t feel like it” (wish this was possible in real life). Tess recalls the first time Jon told her this story by remembering the ice cream they were eating. In her memory, they were eating vanilla. Jon denies this and says it was pistachio, but Tess says, “You’re insane, it was vanilla.”

I really enjoyed how simply this scene showed that these little things such as ice cream flavors can have an effect on what you remember. Though Jon and Tess remember different ice cream flavors, they both implicitly agree that Jon had told Tess the story when they were eating ice cream. This is autobiographical memory. Perhaps Jon, in his later years, started to prefer pistachio ice cream over vanilla (which, for the record, ew), and so he rewrote the original memory with this flavor in mind. Or Tess did that with vanilla. Who knows? One thing is certain: the central idea to the memory (the story about the student) has remained the same.

It’s interesting because both of them are technically right and wrong at the same time. Sure, maybe it was vanilla, but does that make the story false? Nope. Same thing goes if the flavor was pistachio. Definitely a cool way of showing that, sometimes, there is no objective right or wrong when it comes to memory.

Star Trek, on the other hand, focused on the value of memory. I generally love seeing android characters defending their right to existence. This episode was thematically reminiscent of a video game called SOMA that tackles the same kind of idea of “are machines capable of feeling?” If you like video games, please give SOMA a chance. It will not disappoint you.

Basically, Data’s life is threatened. He is to be taken and dismantled and used in a dangerous experiment. Apparently, the researcher (whose name I have forgotten because he pissed me off with his pompousness) claims that Data will have his memories intact. However, Data says he will lose “the flavor of the moment”. He makes an example of this by sharing how he read books about chance and probability, only to lose a poker game, which is an experience he is able to cherish and attach, not only to the people around him, but also to the act of learning about something only to be shown that textbook knowledge isn’t enough. If he simply gets these memories wired into him after he gets re-assembled, it’ll be like reading through a textbook, not really adding anything to that knowledge.

I adore this analogy, because it’s like knowing something without knowing why or how you know it. I have had moments where I just simply know things without understanding how I came across that information. It happens. Maybe I picked it up at school and forgot how I did so. Now imagine if all your memories were like that. It’d be…terrible, to say the least. You’d be disconnected from everything you remember.

I, personally, would have an existential crisis. I wouldn’t feel any form of emotional attachment to the memories of me getting my first electric guitar, or coming to the United States and leaving the place I’ve called home for 16 years, or eating my first Italian pizza in Rome, or laughing with my friends. I’d just know I did these things, and any form of emotion would be gone.

The Star Trek episode really made me appreciate my memories more, both the sad and happy ones. They have all shaped me as a person, affected my thinking, brightened and darkened my days. They have a grander purpose than just them being reminders of what you have done.

Anyhow…

Hello, folks.

I hope you’re doing splendtastically well. It’s the last analysis of the class. Kind of bittersweet if you ask me.

Wait…hold on…I feel like I’ve said this already.

You know, just in case I have, I will just call it a day.

Thank you so much for reading, folks. I have enjoyed going through your blog posts and reading about your opinions and experiences.

Warmly,

Guga

I think this is going to piss some people off…but I do have a confession to make:

I did not like Inside Out.

Look, I’m sorry (kind of) that I didn’t find it as sad as people made it out to be. Maybe my Sadness is on her day off, or something. It’s not even about the emotional part of the movie. I was never a fan of these animated films from Pixar because their plots are pretty straightforward, and their messages are very “in your face”, if you will. In my opinion, the movie is not for me. That doesn’t make it an objectively bad movie.

Okay, with my self-crucifixion out of the way, let’s talk about emotions.

Inside Out portrays emotions as these independent beings that trigger how you feel in reaction to what they’re seeing, not what the individual is seeing. There are five core emotions: Anger, Fear, Disgust, Sadness, Joy.

For the record, my favorite character of the lot is Sadness (ironic, isn’t it?). I love how by the end Sadness was not seen as this emotion that needs to be pushed away; it’s an important emotion that acts as a signal to other people near you. Though I wasn’t a big fan of the movie, I enjoyed how this was portrayed.

Anyhow, this is an analysis, so on we go. I want to talk about the James-Lange Theory of Appraisal. It’s very present in the scene where Riley first sees the inside of her new house (situation). She notices how run-down it is, how there are dead things in corners, how it’s nothing like her old house (arousal). Riley has an interpretation (that this is much worse than her old house, which also had a better neighboring area), and that’s where the emotions (the characters) start fiddling with the terminal. Joy is very adamant about keeping positive, meanwhile every other emotion is complaining.

I want to say this scene reminded me how I was as a kid, moving from place to place. It was always very bad on the first day, a lot of skepticism involved in it, sadness, etc. And it the back of my head, my own Joy was somewhere in there, trying to reassure me that things will be alright.

Of course, this implies that I was, and still am not, in control of my emotions. If they are a bunch of tiny humanoid creatures running around in my mind, it implies that I have no autonomy over what happens in there. Since we see that Riley is influenced a lot when Joy and Sadness are away from the terminal.

On the other hand, the Star Trek episode sees emotions as things which are pushed onto the other person. Slightly reminiscent of the Futurama Episode with Bender’s Empathy Chip, the episode involves a man named Alkar force his negative emotions onto Deanna Troi, justifying this action by saying he is able to work better without his negative emotions interfering.

He views emotion and thought as two separate entities, with the former being the most troublesome. This is the conventional way of seeing emotions. And man, is Alkar really blunt about it.

He straight up sees the bodies of other people are storage units for his negativity. It’s very ironic how he can’t see how bad these emotions are to other people who also play a role in the situation affecting the planet he is trying to “save”.

In any case…sorry for the lack of Quality Jokes™ today. It’s almost 2 am here in Greece, and it’s really hard to focus ;-;

I’ll be back soon, though. Wish me a safe flight…

Like please…I hate turbulence…

Warmly,

Guga Khidasheli

Well, I’m late to the party, clearly. Please excuse me for that; I’m currently in Greece, burning my everything inside a house that might as well be an oven. However, I will be going to a beach soon, so that’s a plus, I suppose.

Not my best metaphors, but they will do.

Hello, everybody. Hope you’re well and cooler than me. I really liked this module’s movie and episode, so let’s just jump right into it.

I want to set a small baseline, if you will. The quoted title is pulled from a TOOL song, “Culling Voices”, one of their more obscure, underrated gems. It is, as per usual by TOOL standards, very vague and ambiguous, which allows the listener to attach their own meaning onto the song. In short, I like to think it’s about being unreasonably paranoid that someone is out to get you, and you think you’re being accused of something when, instead, you’ve created a reality that’s much worse than what’s actually happening.

Sound familiar? Well, if not, don’t worry, I’m terrible at explaining things. That’s why I’ll let Arrival do all the explaining.

In typical alien-scenario fashion, the governments of the world refuse to cooperate with each other because of national security, distrust, paranoia, and big cultural differences. Understandably, they are extremely terrified of the alien spacecrafts (if you can call those egg looking things that) and are certain that the aliens have hostile intentions from the get-go.

But…why is it “understandably”? If you think about it, why are we so scared of aliens in the first place? They are, sort of, making things feel worse than they actually are. Before I delve into this, a specific scene must be brought up first.

When Colonel Weber meets Dr. Louise Banks, he plays her an audio clip of two Heptapods growling. Now, my first thought when I heard them growling so menacingly and lowly (aside from, ZOMG ALIENS SO COOL) was “damn, they must be terrifying and evil,” because I associated that sound with negativity, despite not once seeing the aliens, or hearing some other sounds they could have produced, or how they behaved bodily, etc. What’s funny is that Dr. Louise did point out that it’s impossible to know what they want unless she was there to see the stuff I just mentioned (body language, appearance, etc.)

In other words, that scene puts us in the Colonel’s shoes, not Louise’s.

Like the military, my first instinct was to point fingers and quietly think, “the aliens could be evil because of their sound”. I believe this is because of “Cognitive Framing”. Due to the environment I grew up, which portrays aliens as these “end of the world scenario” capable beings, the moment I heard that growling and attributed it to the word “aliens”, I created a typical picture that helps me understand the situation, even if that picture was completely wrong (which it was).

Emphasis on the “could be evil”. We see in the movie that some countries are immediately against the possibility that these aliens could be harmless. China, Russia, Sudan, and some others I’m forgetting, were paranoid from the beginning.

So language and culture affect how we perceive certain concepts, and how we react to them. Countries like Russia and China, who are notoriously big control-freaks over what goes on in their country, clearly did not take it kindly that massive eggs started floating in the sky. Understandably…

The Star Trek episode also showcases how our language can affect our interactions with people from other backgrounds. The crew meet the Tamarians, and they (try to) talk to them. They noticeably have trouble doing so, as the Tamarians seem to speak only using historical events in their culture as metaphors to portray what is happening in that moment, or how they feel about that specific situation.

I really liked the scene where Captain Picard feels threatened by Captain Dathon when the latter offers knives to the former. Though Dathon offers them in order for them to work together, Picard thinks he wants to fight. Same thing for the crew. That’s because of the two races’ different backgrounds affect their interactions. Without prior knowledge of the Tamarian culture and history, Picard cannot properly communicate with Dathon. However, because a lot of the historical events Dathon mentions are legendary stories similar to those of Earth (two heroes fight the Beast™), Picard is able to slowly make educated guesses as to what Dathon is saying.

This episode encouraged me to think how often I use metaphors to describe situations. And…yeah, I do use a lot of metaphors, ranging from basic to profusely vulgar. In any case, metaphors do get the point across a lot better, I’ve noticed. Maybe because they’re more memorable than typical sentences.

“Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” definitely sticks better than “Two strangers, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra when they were fighting a beast that threatened to snuff their lives”. Of course, the problem with metaphors is that not every country shares them. “Best thing since sliced bread” would never mean the same thing say in Japanese. It’d just lead to a lot of confusion.

I’d like to finish this post with a chunk of lyrics from “Culling Voices”, because I think it fits with both movies’ themes:

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.

Fun fact: the brain is the only organ to have named itself…

Did the brain really name itself, or did we, an outside force, name it? Well, having watched the three assigned TV shows, I can safely say that I frankly have no clue. In any case, it doesn’t change the fact that each episode has a unique way of viewing the brain/mind.

Altered Carbon has been sitting on “My List” on Netflix for months now, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to watch it. I’m a sucker for cyberpunk settings, and the shows portrays it very well (I’m planning on continuing it). In any case, the show takes a more cybernetic approach to the brain. To quickly summarize, since folks have covered this already, people can transfer their consciousness into a different body after they die. This body is called a sleeve. Inside their nape, they have cortical chips, which “hold” their memories, feelings, senses of touch, etc. Takeshi Kovacs is transferred into a body 250 years after his death. He is hired to solve the murder of Laurens Bancroft because of his status as an Envoy.

In this universe, people can solve their own murders by simply being transferred into a different body and telling the police who killed them. Very neat, right? Not only do they get a new body for free, but they also imprison the ones who took their lives. Actually…well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Very early on, the show makes a point of this. We see a very young girl “sleeved” into an elderly woman’s body.

Apparently, despite having a right to a free sleeve, Cindy only gets “what’s in inventory”. The only way they could get her in a body fitting her age is to pay for an upgrade (this is obviously a ploy get rid of old sleeves, since the government could easily give a body appropriate for a child).

Now, this raises an interesting dilemma. Cindy being in an older body terrifies her, and her parents are equally terrified. This shows just how important one’s body is to themselves. Cindy cannot properly process what she is going through; her entire cognitive system is disrupted, because the body once holding her, the body that used to express her emotions and thoughts through gestures, is gone, replaced with a body that has a handful of years ahead of it. How does a child live with that fear, that despite her being mentally young, she is physically old?

How would you feel if you suddenly were transferred into an older body? Or maybe even a younger body? Sure, you’d be physically younger, but you’d be barred from a lot of activities you can do as an adult, and you’d, perhaps, have to go through high school, or even college again.

That scene is directly at odds with Cartesian Dualism. We are not just our minds; we are our bodies, too. They’re much more important to us than we think.

On the other hand, the scene where Laurens Bancroft meets Takeshi suggests the opposite.

He tells Takeshi that he always backs up his “mind” in a satellite orbiting Earth. Almost like his mind is a hard drive. He very casually says this like it’s not a big deal, and he doesn’t seem fazed by the fact his old body is gone, since he presumably has gone through other bodies, too. He is extremely comfortable with this, perhaps because he knows all his knowledge and emotions will be safely stored and good for use, regardless if his cortical stack gets destroyed. Unfortunately for him, his stack was destroyed before his memory was backed up (otherwise, no plot).

The Netflix show is ambiguous in that it doesn’t take one stance. Some people are comfortable with a new body, since their minds are the safe. Others need a body that fits them mentally (like Cindy).

This is not the case with Futurama, which, for the record, I’m glad was an assigned episode. The animation sees the brain/consciousness as an independent entity, Quite literally. There are flying brains making people stupider.

Big Brain, the leader of the flying brains, makes fun of humanity’s need for bodies, very bluntly saying, “We have long since evolved beyond the need for asses” when Fry tells him, “I’m here to kick your ass”. This episode takes a “brain in a vat” approach to the idea of cognition. Big Brain can freely think without the need for a body, and has immense power of people’s brain waves, mostly likely because he evolved outside of a body, like he claimed. The episode reduces the brain to just a flying organ relying solely on neural stimuli. Safe to say, Cartesian Dualism would not fit here.

I just realized I’m theorizing about a gag cartoon…

In all seriousness, this is the most disagreed on way of looking at the brain. Most modern philosophers, especially those in support of 4e Cognition, would immediately disagree and say that we need both the body and mind to fully feel “human”.

And this is excellently highlighted in the Star Trek episode. Now, for whatever reason, I had the blasphemous idea that Star Trek copied Star Wars. If I offended someone with that sentence, no need to get your pitchforks, I already punched a hole in my wall and put my hollow head in there.

Quick plot summary: the Star Trek crew are floating through space (as one does as a pass-time activity) when their radio waves are intercepted by a male voice that calls himself Sargon. The voice is coming from a seemingly “dead planet”, with a toxic atmosphere and all the rest. The crew decide to go to the source of the voice, and they find a spherical storage device that holds Sargon’s mind. He claims he cannot see or feel, and that he is as “dead as [his] planet”.

Eventually, he transfers himself into Captain James Kirk’s body and makes a big deal about feeling human again: “Lungs filled with air again. To see again. Heart pumping, arteries surging with blood again. A half a million years. To be again.”

Similarly, when his wife, Thalassa is put into Ann Mulhall’s body, she says, “I’d forgotten what it felt like even to breathe again”.

This episode puts heavy emphasis on the body, how important it is to make someone feel alive, complete. It suggests that a person must have both to properly function, however, not as much emphasis is put on the psychological consequences of having a body after a long time without it, as seen in Altered Carbon. At the same time, the show tells us that it is possible to live as this body-less entity, so long as your thoughts are preserved in a form of storage. But it’ll not feel the same as having a body.

So, you can have your brain in a vat, so to speak, but you will never get the full experience unless you possess a body…which I hope all of you do…you do, right? None of you are flying brains, right? Please tell me at least one of you is so I can excuse this cringe humor.

Ahem.

I enjoyed all three of the episodes, though Star Trek’s music nearly made my ears bleed because of the volume and the distortion that comes with old school film. Looking forward to the rest of the modules.

Thank you for reading! Have a good one.

Warmly,

Guga Khidasheli

Hello everyone.

I’m Guga Khidasheli (he/his/him). I’m a Greek Georgian immigrant who came to the United States around 3 years ago. I’m an English major, also minoring in Journalism and Japanese Studies. I’m writing, albeit very slowly, a fantasy book, not focusing on publishing it since a lot of it comes down to luck. If anyone has the free time to give me feedback on some sample chapters, I’d be grateful and more than willing to do the same for your own projects.

Of course, this also means that I am an avid fantasy reader. Although it’s hard to sit down and read a thousand page epic without feeling guilty about procrastinating on an essay. Right now, I’m reading Oathbringer by Brandon Sanderson and Deadhouse Gates by Steven Erikson. Almost finished with the former, around a fifth into the latter.

Outside of books, I’m a big fan of the metal and rock genres in music. I constantly listen to Rammstein (new album is so good), Slipknot, A Perfect Circle, TOOL, System of A Down, Avenged Sevenfold, MUSE, and some other folks I’m probably forgetting. My favorites from each band (skip if not interested) are as follow:

Rammstein: Angst

Slipknot: Sulfur

A Perfect Circle: The Outsider

TOOL: The Grudge

System of A Down: Question!

Avenged Sevenfold: Mad Hatter

MUSE: Showbiz (title track)

Because of so much excellent music in my life, I decided to take up the guitar and bass. The result? I have written 2 songs (albeit they lack drums ;-;) and am working on dozens of work-in-progress projects (again, no drums, I’m sad). If anyone knows a drummer who is into metal, I would appreciate it if you set up a meet and greet :P. Jokes aside, I do plan on forming a band, assuming I meet the right people.

As for why I picked this class, it’s solely for the credit. I wanted something over the summer that would help me graduate faster, and I just basically did what a person does when they don’t know which book to pick from a shelf. I closed my eyes, pointed randomly at the shelf (well, technically, the options at Degree Works), and accepted what I got. Either way, any new information that could give me some insight about anything, really, is useful. And so, this class, especially since it’s about Cogsci, will definitely be a great asset.

Though the class involves a lot of self-learning, I am looking forward to meeting as many people as I can.

Warmly,

Guga