Author: hbaalbaki

Memory is a powerful feature in the human mind. Merriam-Webster defines memory as “the power or process of reproducing or recalling what has been learned and retained especially through associative mechanisms”. It can help us remember moments we made with others, even as time has well long past. This is why I think the concept of memory was used well in the film “Marjorie Prime”, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Measure of a Man”.

Unlike all my other modules, I first started with the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Measure of a Man”. Now, I think that I can say, without a single shred of doubt, that this was one of my favorite episodes of Star Trek that I’ve seen for this class. Yes, in a show with aliens, space travel, and characters with empathic abilities, an episode where Data has a trial to fight for his right to choose ended up being my favorite. I love stories that asks deep philosophical questions, such as “Do robots have the right to choose for themselves”? It reminds me of a video game called “Detroit: Become Human”, where androids that are built to serve humans should have the same rights as humans have. I recommend it, its a really good game, and one where every single decision you make will result in a different ending.

Anyway, back on topic. In this episode, Commander Bruce Maddox, a Starfleet cyberneticist, wants to take Data from the Enterprise in order to recreate his positronic brain and create thousands of Data’s. Maddox felt that Data was not a sentient being, going as far as referring to him as “it”. Of course, Data was not down with that, because he felt that we was alive and sentient, even though he was an android created by Dr. Noonian Soong. I believe that Data and his fight for sentience is a perfect example of Socially Extended Cognition. As time marches on, social and cultural institutions that we are a part of shape the way we think, and sharing those memories with others is an important part of our cognitive lives. So, when Data was working as a crew member of the USS Enterprise, he was able to shape his positronic brain to make memories and relationships with other members of the crew, including Lt. Commander La Forge, and William Riker. As another example of him making memories is him keeping mementos during his time on the Enterprise, including his medals and a holocube portrait of Tasha Yar, a late Enterprise crewmember, who Data had strong feelings for. Some can say that he even loved her.

Afterwards, I watched the 2017 movie “Marjorie Prime”. This movie was based on the stage play of the same name, written by Jordan Harrison and released back in 2014. I am not kidding when I say that the minute I finished watching the film, I said to myself out loud, “What the hell did I just watch”? But after taking some time to process what I had just seen, it all makes sense. Marjorie, an 80 year old woman, speaks to a hologram of her late husband, Walter, and reminisce on the moments they had with each other. But, as the movie continues, there are different accounts to the relationship that Marjorie and Walter had. I think that this is a perfect example of autobiographical memory, which is defined as “a revisable and negotiable record of the personal past, constantly updated and subjected to ongoing retrospective revision”. For example, in one scene, we are to believe that Marjorie and Walter watched the film “My Best Friends Wedding” on the night he proposed to her. But later, Marjorie remembers a different film on that night, “Casablanca”.

Emotions are complex. In short, emotions are defined as “self-organizing patterns of an organism, the collection of responses, many of which are publicly observable”. We all express emotions, and without them, we wouldn’t function as a species. With this in mind, the two things I watched this week, being the movie “Inside Out”, and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Man of the People”, truly know how to convey emotions in a creative and respectable way.

The first thing that I watched was the movie “Inside Out”. I haven’t watched this movie ever since it came out in theaters back in 2015. I still remember that day, my sister and I watching the movie, and her crying when Bing Bong dies, and if I’m gonna be honest, I almost got teary eyed when that happened. One thing I wanna focus on are the emotion characters inside Riley’s head. The characters on Joy, Sadness, Disgust, Anger and Fear are the perfect example of basic emotions, which are defined as “a special class of emotions out if which all other emotions are compounded”. Each emotion in Riley’s head has a certain trait that they express, simplifying who they are. For example, Fear is always jumpy over the smallest things, Sadness always has a melancholy personality, which ends up being important at the end of the film, and Anger always has a mad tone to his voice. According to Pete Doctor, the director of the film, there were going to be more core emotions from the five in the film, including surprise, pride, and trust, but they were scrapped in favor of the core emotions in the movie.

I then watched the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Man of the People”. Honestly, after a few weeks of watching Star Trek, I think the show is starting to grow on me, and I might want to check out the show after classes are done. In this episode, the Enterprise brings in two people from a transport ship near Rekag-Seronia, Ambassador Ves Alkar, a Lumerian representative for the Federation and Sev Maylor, his mother, who seems to sense the emotions in others. So, Sev Maylor, and Deanna Troi, the Enterprise’s counselor are both empaths, which I found hilarious, because I mentioned the whole concept of empaths in one of my previous blog posts. Anyway, when Sev Maylor dies, Ves Alkar and Troi perform a grieving ritual, which was Alkar’s excuse to take over Troi’s body and dump all of his negative emotions on to her. Troi”s slow descent is a perfect example of James-Lange’s theory of emotion. In short, the theory states that “bodily changes come first and form the basis of an emotional experience. Thus, emotions are caused by bodily sensations”. So, as Troi is rapidly aging, her negative emotions are becoming for erratic, causing the aging process to rapidly advance until Troi dies. So, when Ves Alkar gets all his negative emotions placed back onto him at the end of the episode, his body rapidly ages until death.

The concept of language is very interesting. While one group of people understand words and sentences from a certain language, other groups might not understand the language and it can take us time to work together in order to understand each other. The act of understanding each other is expressed creatively in the movie “The Arrival” and the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “Darmok”.

The first thing that I watched was “Arrival”, a film that was released in 2016, and was based on the 1998 novella “Story of Your Life”, and after watching the movie, I have to say that is an appropriate title. This movie was an experience to say the least. When I first started watching the film, I thought this was gonna be a simple alien invasion story, akin to “Independence Day”. But, as the movie continued, I realized that the flashbacks and the current story unfolding are being more interconnected, such as with “The Universal Language” book, and Ian being Louise’s husband.

Also, quick nerd fact before I continue, Ian is played by Jeremy Renner who played Hawkeye in “The Avengers”, and Colonel Weber is played by Forest Whitaker, who played Saw Gerrera from “Rouge One: A Star Wars Story”. I love how I first picked that up when I saw them on screen.

Anyway, back to the point, the film does a good job expressing the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. They even mentioned it by name in the movie. To sum it up, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is a hypothesis created back in 1929 by Edward Sapir and later endorsed by Benjamin Whorf. It is defined as “language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories”. This is shown well in the movie, especially near the end where Louise has Agent Halpern’s phone and is trying to call General Shang in China. Thanks to the Heptapods, they tell Louise that she has a weapon that can save their people, with that weapon being her and her memories. She used her mind to remember a future moment of her talking to General Shang and telling him his wife’s dying words, stopping him and his army from firing at the Heptapods. Their language determined Louise’s thoughts and actions.

Afterwards, I watched the Star Trek” The Next Generation episode called “Darmok”. After watching the original series episode and the next generation episode, I can see why people have debates on who’s better: Captain Kirk or Captain Picard. In this episode, captain Kirk and a Tamarian captain, who we later learn is named Dathon, and not Darmok like I thought, are stuck on the planet El-Adrel IV. Picard is unable to understand Captain Dathon, because even though he is speaking English, he’s speaking in phrases such as “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” and “Temba, his arms wide”. The one scene I want to focus on is the scene where Picard is speaking to the dying Dathon, finally understanding his language. Dathon and the other Tamarians show the best examples of Conceptual Metaphors. Conceptual Metaphors are defined as “anchored in our physical and cultural experience, which functions as the source domain for the the metaphors”. So, they use metaphors of previous events in their species’ history in order to explain what they want and mean. So, when Dathon states “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra”, its basically a metaphor for him and Picard becoming friends by fighting a common enemy, being the invisible monster on El-Adrel IV.

Emotions are powerful. They show to others that the human body is not just an emotionless slab of stone. And with emotions comes empathy. According to Merriam Webster, empathy is defined as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thought, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner”.

When I think of the word empathy, the first thing that comes to mind is empath, which is defined as “a person with the paranormal ability to apprehend the mental or emotional state of another individual”. The first example that came to my mind was the character “Alex Chen” from the videogame “Life is Strange: True Colors”, who has the ability to read a persons mind and emotions, and in some cases can forcefully change a persons emotions. I would highly recommend playing it.

Anyway, back to the point of this blog post, two things that I watched this week that explored the concept of empathy and embodied cognition, being the movie “Possessor” and the Futurama episode “I Second that Emotion”.

The first thing that I watched was the movie “Possessor”. The film was released back in 2020, and to my surprise it was directed by Brandon Cronenberg. I first thought to myself “wait, why does that last name sound so familiar”? So, I looked it up and I realized that Brandon was the son of David Cronenberg, a Canadian film director who is best known for his body horror movies such as “Videodrome” and “The Fly”. So, after watching the movie, I can say without any uncertainty “Like father, like son”, because Brandon’s use of body horror was phenomenal. One scene that I want to focus on is the scene that takes place in the middle of the movie where Vos, already possessing Colin’s body, is feeling sick and heads to the bathroom. When we see Colin’s eyes, we see a light cross, which is apparently what Vos is currently seeing through her eyes from being strapped to the possession machine. This is an example of perception, because we are seeing things from Vos’ point of view thru the body of Colin as Vos’ perspective is being perceived from somewhere else.

After watching “Possessor”, I watched the Futurama episode “I Second that Emotion”. In this episode, Bender flushes Leela’s pet Nibbler out of jealousy, so to get back at him, Professor Farnsworth installs an empathy chip to Bender so he can feel all the emotions Leela is feeling. The scene that I want to focus on is at the end of the episode, when Leela is tied to a pole and is about to be eaten by El Chupanibre, and thanks to the chip, Bender is too scared to fight El Chupanibre because Leela’s afraid. This is the perfect example of embodied cognition, where we see the body of another person and we “sense in” into their body and “live through it”. Now, even though Bender “sensing” Leela’s emotions is coming from an empathy chip, the point still stands.

The brain is an interesting concept to describe in television. At first, it seemed hard to understand. But after watching all the episode and giving myself time to think about it, I thought all three shows showed great levels of respect and intrigue towards the concept of mind vs. body.

When I watched the episodes, I started with the Futurama episode “The Day the Earth Stood Stupid”, whose title is a parody of the 1951 film “The Day the Earth Stood Still’ which I’ve heard of but never seen.  To sum up, an army of brains attack Earth, turning everyone on the planet stupid, except for Fry. I thought this was because he was already a pretty stupid character, but after doing a bit of research, I learned that he lacks a Delta brainwave, which is referenced in the Season 3 episode “Roswell That Ends Well”. So, it’s up to Fry, who is the dumbest character in the planet to defeat the smartest creature in the galaxy. Two scenes I want to focus on happen in the same location, the library at the end.

The first one is when Fry defeats the big brain by writing a grammatically incorrect book. This is an example of the embodied section of 4e cognition. Not only did fry have to think with brain, he also had to use his body to write the book to defeat the brain creature. The second one is when Leela gains her intelligence back. Before she does, she believes that Fry broke his neck from a fallen bookshelf, so her body was acting emotional. After she gains her intelligence back, she starts to fix her sentence structure, showing the audience that no body can work without a mind and vice versa. Unlike other shows, Futurama is seen as one of the most smartly written shows on television, considering that the shows writing team have 3 PHD’s, 7 Masters degrees, and a collective 50 years in Harvard university.

After Futurama, I watch the Altered Carbon episode “Out of the Past”. It was hard for me to get into it at first. But after getting to the 10 min mark, I became intrigued. Honestly, I might start watching the show for fun. The one scene I want to elaborate on is the exposition scene at Alcatraz Prison.

Takeshi Kovacs, played by Joel Kinnaman, is told by a hologram about the functions of cortical stacks. Basically, a persons mind and personality are stored in chips that are the size of poker chips, and the bodies are seen as sleeves, disposable bodies that the person can control. Kind of like a CD and a CD player, the machine might break down, but as long as the CD is intact, it will work in another machine. This is shown later when a prisoner with a cortical stack of a seven year old girl is placed in the body of an elderly woman. I absolutely loved this concept, because the contrast of mind vs. body was a very unique way to describe the concept of cybernetics, or the mind as a computer, where ones memories are “stored” in the mind, and are remain alive as long as the chip is undamaged. So, this is technically seen as gaining immortality, despite going thru multiple bodies. This also contradicts Futurama and their understanding of mind vs. body. Unlike Futurama, the cortical stacks, or brain, retain not only a persons intelligence, but also their feelings and personality.

Finally, the last show I watched was the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Return to Tomorrow”. Now as someone who has barely seen any Star Trek content, aside from two of the James Gunn movies, and is a Star Wars fan, I didn’t know what to expect from this show. But, after seeing the episode, I can see where the respect for this series comes from. Unlike Star Wars, where it’s mainly rooted in fantasy, Star Trek has more of a grounded to reality approach to space travel and exploration, such as Kirk’s captain’s logs taking weeks to be sent to HQ.

Anyway, this episode was fun to watch, and the scene I wanna focus on is the beginning. In it, Captain Kirk, Spock, Dr. Bones, and Ann Mulhall are beamed down to a planet, and meet an ancient being called Sargon. The character of Sargon is the biggest example of the concept of a brain in a vat. When Sargon is in the ball, or vat in this case, he shows signs of high intelligence and some signs of emotion when he talks about his wife Thalassa. When Sargon takes over Captain Kirk’s body, he reminisces on how he misses having a body.

In my opinion, these show have done a fantastic job portraying the concept of cognition and how the mind differs from the body. If I had to pick a favorite interpretation, I would have to go with Altered Carbon, and how the characters are technically immortal as long as the cortical stack is unharmed. I can say now that this is gonna be a fun class.

My name is Hasan Baalbaki, and my pronouns are he/him. My interests are Video games, and I’m a fan of Marvel and Star Wars, as you can tell by the first picture I posted. My favorite shows include The Mandalorian, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, and Dragon Ball Z. I was born in the US but I have family roots in Beirut, Lebanon. I have been studying in AUB (American University of Beirut) for 4 years before transferring to Stonybrook. During my time at AUB, the country was going through the Lebanese Revolution, and It was LITERALLY happening right outside my house. It was happening downtown, and I live 5 minutes away from downtown. The photo above is a sculpture that was made by the people. There were a lot of these sculptures by the pier and downtown. I think its safe to say that I have a lot of stories to tell my future kids lol. This is a picture of me back in 2014, when I took a trip to South Africa. My group and I went to a wild cat sanctuary and we got to pet the cheetahs. I’m currently working at a retail job, so I’m gonna have to juggle with both my job and school work. But, since I did a Summer I course with no issue, I’m not really worried. I was searching for classes to do during summer II and I was recommended this course and another. I took this course to help fulfill requirements for my English Lit Major, and I am interested in films and the art of filmmaking. So, when I heard about a class that talks about it and how the mind is represented in those films, I immediately signed up. Hopefully ,by the end of this course, I will have a better understanding of the mind, and how it’s represented in film.