Category: Blog

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.

In her book Toward Embodied Virtuality, author Katherine Hayles discusses her changing perspective on dualism which is the separation of the body and mind. Hayles’ reasoning behind this shift is that humans are creating machines with intelligence which will eventually lead to humans becoming a population of cyborgs. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the term embodiment is defined as “someone or something that is a perfect representative or example of a quality, idea, etc.” Hayles uses this term to describe how information does not have an exact or ideal form. Instead, the form that information takes is more flexible (Hayles 2); it is not bound to a specific system or program and it is free from the materialistic world (Hayles 13). The lack embodiment enables information to not have any restraints or constriction by society. Hayles’ ideas of dualism and the term “embodiment virtuality” are best illustrated through the 1972 movie The Stepford Wives and the character Ash in the “Be Right Back” episode of Black Mirror.

In the movie Stepford Wives, mother and wife Joanna Eberhart moves with her husband and two children to Stepford, Connecticut. Shortly after moving to Stepford, Joanna notices how all the wives within the community are very archaic: they are very submissive towards their husbands, do not question their authority, and only do household chores. When Joanna investigates this matter she discovers that the women in Stepford are being killed by the Stepford Men’s Association and are being replaced by robot, housewife versions of themselves. At the end of the film, Joanna is murdered and a robot clone replaces her. The robot wives within the film demonstrate the concept of virtual embodiment as they are the perfect representative or idea of a wife; she does domestic/household chores and is submissive towards her husband. The husbands within Stepford have the opportunity to make perfect, idealistic versions of their wives. The film illustrates Hayles’ idea of dualism as the mind and body of the wives separated; even though the robots look exactly like their human counterparts, they do not think nor behave like them. The wives’ minds are separated from their robot counterparts and are being replaced with the minds of domestic housewives.

Another example of virtual embodiment and dualism is the Black Mirror episode, “Be Right Back”, which centers around the couple Ash and Martha. In the episode, Ash dies in a vehicle accident leaving Martha devastated and alone. Shortly after his death, however, Martha is given the opportunity to have Ash back in her life through an online computer program. This program replicates Ash’s voice and personality through Martha’s phone using his online accounts/profiles. In the middle of the episode, Martha agrees to make a physical clone of Ash and it appears as if he never passed. Martha’s happiness is short lived however as even though the clone looks like Ash, it does not fully embody who the real Ash was; the clone does fully embody Ash’s personality or his response to certain stimuli/situations regarding when he and Martha argue, his sex life with Martha, nor when his life is in danger. The clone simply does what Martha tells him to do, which frustrates Martha to the point where she attempts to get rid of it. The concept of virtual embodiment applies to Ash as his clone does not fully embody his personality. It is not the ideal or perfect representative of who Ash was as person and as a husband towards Martha. Hayles’ idea of dualism is illustrated in this episode as Ash’s mind and body are separated from his clone. Even though the clone looks exactly like Ash, it does not fully have his mind including his personality, his memories, his temperament, or his response to certain situations/stimuli. The clone’s personality and character are solely based on what the real Ash revealed online through his accounts/profiles. The real Ash’s mind is gone and could not fully be replicated even though his physical body could be. Additionally, Hayles’ idea of information being flexible and not having one specific form is illustrated through Ash; when Ash died his information on his online profiles were transferred from the internet into computer program and eventually into a clone in an attempt to recapture Ash’s character.

In summary, Hayles’ book Toward Embodied Virtuality claims that dualism, the separation of the body and mind is possible. She predicts that within the future, humans will be able to create machines with intelligence which will lead to the human population becoming cyborgs. She defines the concept of” virtual embodiment” as information not having a specific form; in time information will have the ability to change from one state into another as it is not bound to a certain system. Using the movie Stepford Wives and Black Mirror episode “Be Right Back” as examples, Hayles’ idea(s) are fully illustrated and claim that dualism and virtual embodiment are not just theories or speculations. Instead, they are ideas that fully capture humanity’s potential future.

Embodied virtuality is a topic that Katherine Hayles explored most thoroughly in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Such a concept is quite difficult to grasp even with Hayles’ explanations, but thankfully there are examples in media that can accurately represent the concept. In the show Black Mirror, the character of Ash in the episode “Be Right Back” can have the concept of embodied virtuality applied to him given his circumstances. Another example of this embodied virtuality can be found in the 1975 film based on the novel of the same name, The Stepford Wives, by observing the “wives” of the town of Stepford. Ash and the wives from Stepford represent embodied virtuality in that they are artificially created humans made for the purpose of “serving,” if you will, other humans; more specifically, both are made to fulfill the needs of a significant other, a universal need that applies to both genders.

In the episode “Be Right Back” from the show Black Mirror, one of the two main characters introduced, Ash, dies from an accident, leaving his girlfriend Martha alone to mourn him. Due to an acquaintance’s recommendation, Martha discovers a program that uses the information found online about Ash from his social media accounts to reconstruct his consciousness by recreating his personality. Eventually, it escalates to “Ash” getting a body and living with Martha, but she soon realizes that it will never truly be Ash and basically banishes him to the attic from then on. This version of Ash provides a strong example of what embodied virtuality is and could possibly become. Hayles herself gave a more relatable and simplistic example of the concept of virtuality, describing it as like playing a virtual game of ping-pong: “[T]he game takes place partly in real life (RL) and partly in virtual reality (VR)” (14). Just like this half-real/half-online game of ping-pong, Ash exists partly in real life and partly in virtual reality. While the simulation of Ash was able to return as a tangible entity that reacts to real-life people and stimuli, he still exists as a product of the internet and virtual reality, as his personality is just a simulation of what the program was able to gather about him from what he put out on the internet. Since he is literally embodied but still quite virtual, existing both in real life and in virtual reality, Ash is a prime example of the concept of embodied virtuality that Hayles proposed.

Looking at it from another perspective, Hayles’ concept of embodied virtuality can also be seen in examples in The Stepford Wives. In the movie, the town of Stepford seems to be an old fashioned town full of bland women who take on the roles of being the perfect housewives with little interest outside of that. The protagonist Joanna eventually discovers that the men of Stepford have recreated their wives as perfect robots and have killed their old wives in favor of these so-called improved and ideal versions. The situation of the wives from Stepford is quite similar to Ash’s: they are not real humans, but they are made to look and act like them (although an argument can be made the the Stepford robot wives acted less than human). The wives are the embodiment of a simulation of subjectively “perfect” wives, but they are embodied in real life and can react to the whims of their husbands. Hayles commented on embodied virtuality in a way applicable to this situation, saying, “[O]ne way to construct virtuality is . . . as a metanarrative about the transformation of the human into a disembodied posthuman” (22). In a way, the wives have come close to being “disembodied posthumans,” as they are not quite humans but machines that resemble them. Granted, the wives lacked a remote sense of consciousness and individual wills not directly imposed onto them, so the posthuman Hayles imagined likely would have more of a balance. Overall, though, the Stepford wives are a grim portrayal of embodied virtuality, one that hopefully will not ever come to be in the real world

Something interesting found when comparing Ash’s situation in Black Mirror to the wives’ situation in The Stepford Wives is that both situations occurred as a result of their significant others’ desires. For Ash, his lover Martha missed him and desperately wanted to see him and be with him again, so she resorted to having the virtual embodiment of Ash created for the purpose of fulfilling her needs for him and his company. In contrast to Martha’s more genuine desires, the men in Stepford created the robot “improvements” of their wives in order to have what they believed were the perfect women to fulfill their needs sexually, emotionally, socially, and domestically. These similarities in the motives for creating the virtual embodiments of their significant others lay in their romantic and sexual desires, and this offers an interesting commentary on what humanity values. These two examples place an emphasis on recreating a significant other that is gone—or will be gone in the case of The Stepford Wives—in an effort to have them near, whether for a genuine reason or a selfish reason. One could make a comparison of genders by relating the men’s selfish and twisted use of embodied virtuality in The Stepford Wives to a masculine desire to control females, but this would be a severe generalization that would be virtually impossible to prove and is quite likely untrue. So the only conclusion that can be accepted is that, in the realm of romantic and sexual relations to humans, people from both genders may be willing to dabble in the virtual in order to attain an embodiment of what once was or what could be.

Comparing Ash in “Be Right Back” from Black Mirrors and the wives from The Stepford Wives would probably take a novel itself to cover, but there certainly are similarities between the two in regards to embodied virtuality. Using the unique situations of Ash and the Stepford wives provides an accurate and interesting understanding of Katherine Hayles’ concept of embodied virtuality; the concept can more easily be grasped by studying these situations, and hopefully humans can take the lessons learned in the cases of Ash and the Stepford wives as a warning to make clear the distinction between man and machine—it’s becoming quite a hard distinction to make, after all.

Works Cited

Hayles, Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. The University of Chicago Press. 1999.

Embodied virtuality is the idea that the mind and body are separated. Katherine Hayles went into further detail discussing this topic in her essay titled “Toward Embodied Virtuality”.  The author described how there are many factors, that can separate the mind and the body. Individuals should put this concept into consideration, so that they can avoid the negative effects. One of the negative results are; becoming a Posthuman. There are two examples in which the media represents this concept. One being an episode from a television series Black Mirror. The second example is a film titled Stepford Wives. These two films represent how the mind and body can be separated, and be used for harm rather than good.

The first example is the Black Mirror series. Here is a clear description of the episode. A couple has decided to move into a home together. The character Ash, has died (it is not told to the audience how he has died). The woman names Martha becomes depressed. In the episode she later realizes that she is pregnant. Unable to cope with the loss of her lover Martha decides to sign up for a program that create a virtual embodiment of Ash. How this works is every text message, email, social media that Ash has used has been saved. The computer program then uses the recent words that Ash has used to talk to Martha.  Martha then becomes obsessed with this technology. With her baby on the way Martha wants her boyfriend to be there, so she takes the next step, and orders a robot version of Ash. The robot not only looks like Ash, but has studied every word/phrase Ash has ever said/written.  Ash best represents the concept of what it means to be Posthuman. From Katherine Hayles essay she described what a Posthuman is “It is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg. Whether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman.”  This concept applies to Ash, since before he died, he was always glued to his technology. Examples include: In the car, when Martha was getting coffee. Or on the couch when he was on twitter. In a way his phone was a part of him, he could not go a day without out it. This makes him posthuman, how he needs access to technology at all times. Since he was always on his phone, this allowed an opportunity for humans to create a computer version of Ash. This is also what the author Katherine Hayles worries, that technology will be used for the wrong purposes. Now-a-days everyone can be considered a posthuman. Children, teens, adults always have their phones on them at all times, and this is considered “normal”. In a way we all are cyborgs because we need this technology to survive. The argument to this is, could be: Are these programs that create a robot version of an individual be all bad? Some individuals, are unable to move on with their lives when someone has died. Some go to extreme measures such as suicide, because they are unable to cope with their loss. Would it be a bad thing if an individual who had just lost a family member, wanted to have one last conversation with them?

The second example is the film Stepford Wives. This film is about a group of men who have total control of a small town. In result, the wives plan to start their own clubs, and businesses. Suddenly one-by-one all of them decided its best that they do the housework instead. The wives even look, and sound different. The main character Joanna Eberhart  tries to find a reason to why all these women have suddenly change. The more Joanna investigates the more she realized that the women have not only changed their appearances, but also their hobbies. An example could be; one of the women who was excellent in tennis, had suddenly given up. Claiming that her priority is to make sure, her husband is pleased. Towards the end of the film Joanna finds out that, the husbands have killed all of the wives, and replace them with robots. These robots look, and sound just like the wives. However, there is a clear distinguishing between the wives, and cyborgs personality. Katherine Hayles mentioned in her essay,“Human essence is freedom from the wills of others, the posthuman is ‘post’ not because it is necessarily unfree but because there is no priori way to identify a self-will that can be clearly distinguished from an other-will.”  My interpretation of this is that, we as humans have our own-will, but there could be other people, or elements such as faith that destroy that freedom. This applies to Stepford wives, because the husband’s took their wives freedom. The wives can no longer play tennis, paint, bake, or take photographs, because the husbands to that away from.

In conclusion, both films show how embodied virtuality could be applied, in reality. In my opinion, both films do display wonderful examples, of dualism. I however would never agree on the fact that we should record everyone’s social media in order to “recreate” them. Even though this could help someone cope with the loss of a loved one, I believe that things that are natural should stay natural. This phrase also refers to Stepford Wives, how robots who look exactly like humans should never be created. The mind and body are separate, and shouldn’t be tainted by science.

In Katherine Hayles article “Towards Embodies Virtuality”, Hayles discusses the topic of dualism, or the separation of the body and mind. She believes that this shift in perspective comes from the creation of intelligent machines and the possibility of a population of cyborgs. In the episode of Black Mirror and in the film Stepford Wives, the idea of embodied virtuality is portrayed through the cyborg wives and through Ash, showing the disconnect of the mind and the body through the idea of disembodiment.

The definition of embodiment is “a tangible or visible form of an idea, quality, or feeling.” In Hayles article, she describes information “as a (disembodied) entity that can flow between carbon-based organic components and silicon-based electronic components to make protein and silicon operate as a Single system” (Hayles 2). This concept of embodiment, or rather disembodiment can be found in the episode of Black Mirror titles “Be Right Back.” When the main character Ash dies, his girlfriend Martha uses an online chatroom that uses the information found on Ash’s social media and emails to type like he would. This information about Ash helps to display the separation of mind and body, by showing how a majority of a man’s thoughts can still exist without a body for them to reside in. Things like his opinions, his voice, strange terms that Ash has used are analyzed and used by this program to recreate a person’s mind. And he can be carried everywhere with Martha. He is on her phone for when she is hiking, at the doctor, and driving. And when she is at home, he is on her computer. The information found online is a disembodied object, after his body has died, parts of his mind can be recreated and formed into a new machine. This information becomes a “single system” when Martha decides to buy a cyborg version of Ash to put this information into. The cyborg looks exactly like Ash, talks like Ash, and can evolve to act like him using the information from the internet and Martha. This cyborg is the perfect representation of dualism, showing that how the information put into the machine is a separate entity from the machine itself.

This concept of disembodied information can also be seen in the film Stepford Wives. The film is based around a town whose men replace their wives with cyborgs that looks and acts as a stereotypical house wife would. This idea of disembodied information can be seen through the wives and their behavior. Once a wife has been replaced with a cyborg, they act the same as the rest of the other women. For example, they only talk about cleaning, spend all their time in the kitchen, dress the same, and only try to please their husbands. The cyborgs have all been programmed to act like a housewife, and nothing like themselves. The mind and body are separated in this process. While the body may look the same as the original house wife, the mind is completely altered, wiped clean of any of their previous personality and replaced with one that the men find suitable.

The idea that the mind and body are separate is a concept that can be found throughout fiction. Dualism helps to show how cyborgs and human are different, and the future for humans if cyborgs become part of the population.