Hayles describes this concept of “Embodied Virtuality” as the mind and body being two totally different units that can work without each other, but should not. A mind without a body is simply a machine, as a mind means nothing if it hasn’t gone through the experiences and events with a body. In the Netflix show Black Mirror we can see that a mind is lifeless without a body.
The episode we watched of Black Mirror is a story about the main characters Ash and his wife Martha. Early on in the story Ash suddenly dies in a car accident. Martha speaks to a friend at his funeral who tells her of something she can do to be able to speak to him. Martha immediately rejects the idea, until she discovers she is pregnant with Ash’s child. This program takes all of Ash’s public conversations, tweets, statuses, etc. from online and puts them all together so that the computer can regenerate a conversation that sounds like it is Ash. Martha starts simply by chatting and then moves onto calling, where she runs into the first distinguishing thing that can make us realize Ash is more than just what he typed online. There are things he said and ways he reacted that made him who he was, for example how he would view the land when Martha goes on her hike. She says he would not find It fascinating but the computerized version of him does not know that because it was never online. Eventually Martha tries to combine Ash’s computerized mind with an actual robot that looks like him. This is when things begin to become clear that you cannot separate mind and body and it be the same thing as if they were together. Your body goes through things that make your mind what it is. You think certain ways because of how you look and where you’re from. It is not as simple as being able to move one mind to another body and it be the same person.
Ash represents this idea of “Embodied Virtuality” as it proves that taking his public mind and putting it into a different body can work, but it does not make him the same person. The mind is dependent on the body to make a person who they are and if they try to work independently from each other the mind and body become robotic.