Can the mind and the body be separated? If you were to ask me this before, I would’ve said no. Your body cannot function without your mind. But in our changing world, it seems like it could be possible. Based on Katherine Hayles chapter entitled “Toward Embodied Virtuality” and the episode of Black Mirror “Be Right Back”, the mind and the body of a person can be separated, but is it the same?
In the Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back”, Martha’s husband Ash dies and at his funeral, her friend tells her about a program that lets people stay in touch with their deceased loved ones. It begins as email messages, then phone calls, and eventually she gets a replica of his body. This being looks like Ash, sounds like Ash, and talks as Ash would. But as she comes to realize, it is not Ash. It’s his body but it has a synthetic mind. The only memories it has are the ones it is told or found online. There is even one point the Ash-bot says that it has no record of sexual response because it’s something Ash didn’t share online. There are many more points throughout the episode that we see Martha start to realize the Ash-bot will not make up for her husband not being there. The Ash-bot replaces his physical being but that’s all. He doesn’t have the same memories the real Ash would have. Hayles says, “We see only what our systemic organization allows us to see” (11) meaning that the information we are given is the information we have. Ash only knows the information he receives, online and from Martha. He never truly becomes Ash since he doesn’t have all the memories that Ash would have.
All of this describes what Hayles means by Embodied Virtuality. From reading Hayles chapter, one could conclude that Embodied Virtuality is the way information functions and is transmitted in humans, and machines. The idea that information can be transmitted from our bodies into a machine is the idea of dualism, that the mind and body are separate. The cyborg that is the Ash-bot is a perfect representation of this dualism. He looks like Ash, talks like Ash, but only has the information that was provided on his social media and technology. He only knows certain pieces of information. This information is “viewed as pattern and not tied to a particular instantiation is information free to travel across time and space” (Hayles 13). The information that Ash knows can be transferred to a machine that Martha creates. But it seems as this information is limited. The mind and body may be separate but there are limitations. In this changing world, technology is becoming more a part of our lives and social media is a big part of that. The information we share online is everywhere now and has the capability to end up in a machine such as Ash. Our mind and bodies are no longer together but forever separate.