Thinkpiece where I consider NK Jemisin’s short story Emergency Skin and explicit cultural values in it to the implicit values in The Artful Brain by V.S. Ramachandran. How does the idea of what a body is in Emergency Skin connect to what Hayles and Sheet-Johnstone think the body and emotion?

The novel Emergency Skin explores the topic of how people’s cognition is shaped, by telling the story of an interstellar soldier returning to the earth. Before landing, the protagonist’s cognition of the Tellus comes from the AI in his brain, believing that the Tellus is barren and polluted; after landing, the protagonist’s observing and the communicating with the inhabitants changed his cognition of the Tellus, and finally decided to stay on there. Where does our cognition come from? As explained in Artful Brain (Ramachandran, 2005), it consists of two parts: one is the response of innate nerves to the environment; the other is acquired from learning and life experience. Founder’s AI in the novel is like the protagonist’s innate cognition, shaping the protagonist’s impression of the earth, while the experience on the earth is a new cognition composed of acquired experience; such a contradictory set of cognition will follow the increase in personal experience and change dynamically, people will eventually tend to choose someone real-time or real-life (Sheets-Johnstone, 2008, p.456).

The experience of contact with people on the Tellus defeated the AI in the brain; People’s cognition and the environment are not separated, they are made in social and cultural interactions. Or in other words, Thinking in terms of action, It will make people feel emotion, which will also be one of the driving forces for people to take action; and computers can only use emotion as data input and output, but cannot feel it. This is also reflected in the novel. AI always uses various benefits to convince the protagonist, that founders choose to emigrate outside because of the high cost of repairing the earth; he can get a perfect skin after he returns; however, the people on earth will choose to stay here to take care of each other, and will not feel noble or ashamed for their skin; As the anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss said, “movement is good to think.”. As a member of human beings, the protagonist can feel the resonance of human nature, so as a human, he decides to stay here.

Illustration Created by Bryce York

There is no direct description of the protagonist’s emotional activities, but AI and people can detect changes and adjust the way of communication. That’s because people’s emotions can be expressed through partial facial expressions or actions, as if anger were simply a matter of clenched teeth and fists, or surprise simply a matter of a gasp and a pounding heart, and in infancy, the way infant express their emotions is -whole-body experience; ethologist Lisa Parr is also in her book, The reaction of chimpanzees to dynamic expressions proved that emotions between creatures can be transmitted through facial expressions (Parr, 2003, p.80).

Overall, human cognition is composed of two parts: congenital and acquired. It is more inclined to choose real-life cognition; while computers use emotion as data input and output, and cannot feel it. People’s emotions are delicate and can be transmitted to other people through partial expressions and actions.

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References:

1. Ramachandran, V.S., 2004. The artful brain. A brief tour of human consciousness, pp.47-50.
2. Sheets-Johnstone, M., 2008. Getting to the heart of emotions and consciousness. In Handbook of cognitive science (pp. 453-465). Elsevier.
3. Paar , L. A. ( 2003 ). The discrimination of faces and their emotional content by chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes ) . In P. Ekman , J. J. Campos , R. J. Davidson , & F. B. M. de Waal (Eds.), Emotions Inside
4. Out: 130 Years after Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals ( pp. 56 – 78 ).