Author: jjwaterman

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.

Emotion can be defined and explained in many different ways. Some believe that emotion is born with you while others see emotion growing and developing along with the person that wields them. In my opinion, I believe that both of these theories are correct. One is born and brought up with some form of understanding of emotions and how to respond to the people around them. However, as that person meets others and ventures past the area they were raised in, they will immediately realize that their understanding is not always true for other people.

In the movie “Inside Out” every one of the different emotions has their own quirks and personalities relating to their specific emotion. One of them is overly happy about the situations they come across while another is always viewing the negative side and how it all can go wrong. But, even though they are polar opposites, they all use each other’s opinions to understand any situation they are put through just like our emotions. When I see a dog with no collar on the street, I immediately feel anger for the owners. But after I realize that the dog is all alone and has a very good chance of being put in a kennel, my sadness makes the anger for the owners disappear and only makes me think of finding the dog a happy home. My emotions that I have developed through my own experiences worked with each other to help me decide what I thought was the right thing to do.

In the episode “Man Of The People”, Deanna Troi has an almost tragic encounter with the negative emotions of Ambassador Ves Alkar after the death of his mother. Alkar’s people are able to read the emotions of one another but not of other species and he uses this to trick Deanna into taking all of his negative emotions. This completely contradicts everything we’ve learned about emotion by placing artificial and non-original emotions into another person’s mind. What I found very interesting about this is that the negative emotions send Deanna Troi into a spiral of rapid-aging, almost leading to her death. One example of negative emotions rapidly aging people in real life would be former president of the United States Barack Obama along with many other presidents. In only 4 to 8 years of them being in office, their difference in facial structure, hair color, and overall physique before and after becoming president is frightening. Stress and anger tend to always have a negative aspect on people both mentally and physically without the release of emotions like joy.

“Meaning is not a deposit in a concept-container. It is alive and active, dynamic and distributed, constructed for local purposes of knowing and acting” (Mark Turner). We learned this week that the meaning of different words in languages are completely subjective. They are words that are created through social interactions, physical environments, and all the problems and solutions that follow each specific one. “Arrival” and Star Trek The Next Generation’s “Darmok” realize that language is not something that can be immediately understood by an outsider. There are many different factors that go into the creation and understanding of words in a new language.

The crew in Start Trek find themselves at a loss when trying to communicate with an alien race known as The Children of Tama. After failing to communicate as a group, the alien race would transport Picard and their captain to the planet’s surface in order to talk face to face. After continuously failing, Picard becomes cold after trying to start a fire for himself. Knowing that he would not sleep if Picard was cold, the alien takes a lit branch from his own fire and throws it at Picard while saying “Temba, his arms wide”. Even though Picard had no idea what the alien said, he knew that with his tone and politeness that the alien was only trying to help and become friends with him.

“Arrival” was a very interesting movie to watch for the first time. An alien race has landed in multiple different countries across the world and no one on Earth has the means to communicate with them. Top scientists and linguists from around the world are being summoned in order to understand why the aliens are on Earth and what their end goal is. After speaking in shrills and moans, linguist Louise Banks realizes that the best way for us to communicate with them is through written language. Showing the word “Human” to the aliens allowed them to realize that we were trying to communicate and they responded accordingly. When linguistics fail, simply touching or being in close proximity of another person displays trust and a want to be friendly. This is seen by Louise taking off her hazmat suit and placing her hand on the divider between her and the aliens. She wanted to show the aliens who they were really communicating with and that they only desired to learn about them.

In our previous lecture we learned about the many forms of empathy and how one can come to understand the emotions of others around them. The movie Possessor and the episode I Second That Emotion from Futurama both display what happens when one is disconnected from all forms of empathy. This can be described as apathy and there are many examples throughout Possessor and I Second That Emotion.

Our main character in Possessor, Tasya, is being used as an assassin that can infiltrate and take over the minds of others in order to frame them for her murders. While she was in possession of the person’s body, Tasya viciously stabbed her target as though she absorbed the memories of the possessed and was fulfilling what that person always wanted. After the murder, Tasya attempted to commit suicide with the other body using a single gun shot instead of the knife used for the murder. Tasya’s crying while trying to kill the body shows that she was not completely emotionless by thinking about the host’s life. The Theory of Mind teaches us that we understand ones emotions by differentiating them from our own and realizing why and how they feel about whatever the case may be. When someone is constantly changing from person to person and all of their emotions and beliefs are scrambled, how would they be able to distinguish how to truly feel about anything or anyone?

In the episode of Futurama, Bender does Bender things and ends up flushing Leela’s pet Nibbler down the toilet. Leela realizes that he can not understand feelings in general let alone understand how the rest of them feel. After hearing this, the professor remembers that he can implant an empathy chip into Bender’s head that will force him to have emotions. These emotions become linked to Leela’s brain, making Bender feel whatever emotion Leela was experiencing. Watching this episode after watching the lecture made me realize that this made Bender an empath, completely connecting him to Leela’s emotions which can also be seen as a form of embodied cognition. He may not have felt the exact same way about whatever Leela was sad about but Bender still cried with her because he felt her pain.    

The first show that I watched was Altered Carbon. It starts by introducing the main character Takeshi Kovacs who is shown looking out the window of a futuristic cyber-punk city. Before we learn what sleeves are, how they are transferred, and how they work the Russian woman would ask Kovacs “Have you always been such an asshole?” to which he replies “Every sleeve, every time”(5:10-5:25). Takeshi has obviously been transferred from body to body and says that he always acts the same. Even though his body is completely different from the one he was born with, Takeshi still knows who he is mentally.

The second show I watched was Star Trek: The Original Series with an episode involving the character known as Sargon. As he explains, his people were able to separate the “essence of their minds” into receptacles of pure energy (9:50-10:00). They would do this to leave “seeds” of their people across many different planets in the galaxy. However, when turned into these beings of energy, are they still the people they were originally or new conscious beings? Sargon talks about how the memories of his people and their conquests are long gone. If he cannot remember his past and who he lived with, is he truly still himself?

The last show I watched was the American cartoon Futurama. In this episode, aliens in the form of brains are attempting to take over Earth by making all its inhabitants lose their intellect. This relates to the Star Trek episode regarding the loss of memories and other key brain functions However, Futurama (Like most of it’s episodes) approaches most scenarios in a completely different way than most shows. Sargon lost his memories over thousands of years but kept his intelligence and abilities. On the other hand, Futurama shows the people of Earth in rebellion against themselves because they can’t comprehend anything on their own. Sargon may have had some form of his own personality left but those infected by the brains lost their memories, interests, and most importantly, their personalities..

My name is Jeremy Waterman(He/Him) and I don’t have any cool nicknames or other things to be called by. I had a decent amount of summer plans but college comes first…. right? I am a senior and already walked so I may be not too amazing but I will definitely be trying my best to analyze and all that stuff haha. I took this class because the subject matter seemed interesting and I need it to fully graduate. When it comes to sports I only watch Hockey(Rangers), Soccer(Barcelona), and Baseball(Mets) but I have not really had time to watch any of them. Some of my favorite books and movies would be American Gods, Breaking Bad, the Iron Man trilogy, Game of Thrones, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, and just recently The Boys. I have been constantly trying to find new books to dive into but I always end up rereading The Outsiders, Normal People, and every Stephen King horror book. I am also obsessed with Marvel and 99 percent of the characters that come from it. If I had to guess what got me so interested in reading and writing for myself it would definitely be Stan Lee and all of his work. I have been trying to exercise a little more lately because Covid praised me for being a shut in. Whether its running, playing with my dog, or just going for a walk I’ve been trying my best to stay active in any way possible. I also love to watch anime that I have seen over a hundred times as well like Naruto, Dragon Ball, and Yu Yu Hakusho.