Selfhood - Tumblr Posts

Leila Chatti, “Tea”

I think this is one of those examples of how MB and ART’s relationship and even way of thinking about each other is inhuman. ARTDrone is a container - like a vehicle that ART Prime rides in. (Not all of it, but if you’re sitting in a car, for example, you don’t have the same range of movement or field of vision you would have while traveling in your own body directly.

Iris is worried about losing parts of ART, and MB agrees, but Iris attaches that feeling to the tangible container (its corporeal representation) while MB, who perceives it primarily non-corporeally (note lack of attention to anything about it that isn’t about capability or feed connection - it’s those aspects of it that “are” ART to MB. Iris is obviously aware of its iterations as such, but she is also influenced by the vey human way she thinks of those iterations differently. The drone is literally more “personable” to work with, while ART’s real body is essentially *also* home. Bot pilot iteration is part of the shuttle and gets no interaction from Iris, but despite it not being verbal, MB frequently includes a check-in with it.

So between the human tendency to privilege tangible over intangible (looking at the ceiling to talk to ART is another example of this - and MB only does it to make its communication legible to the humans) and the different ways humans and MB conceptualize ART as an entity, I think its reaction actually makes a ton of sense. Added to that is MB’s tendency not to think of detachable or replaceable as being integral to its sense of self or its sense of other MI’s selves. “Everything that made it Mikki” is contained in its processors, and MB is unphased by its “injuries” before that critical hit - all the while Don Abene is gasping “your poor hand!” I think the message is simply that MI’s selfhood just sits somewhere different than it does for a human, and that bias has ripple effects in how either reacts to danger or loss.

Honestly at the end of System Collapse, i honesty expected MB to get possessive and a bit more emotional over ART-drone once it reconnected with ART-prime again and dropped out of the feed, cause like... the whole time, ART-drone has been ART in portable, physical form, something that could be held and touched and could touch back.

Then, when everyone was safe on the shuttle going back to ART-prime; ART-drone, which is still ART... was hurt, and damaged and basically dying. And even though it had some warning when the hand off happened, imagine you're next to your friend and suddenly its just not there anymore, all you have is just an inanimate empty husk beside you

I really love these thoughts and I have no idea how one merges two threads of the same post into one reblog stream so I’m just gonna also reblog this stream, lol.

Honestly at the end of System Collapse, i honesty expected MB to get possessive and a bit more emotional over ART-drone once it reconnected with ART-prime again and dropped out of the feed, cause like... the whole time, ART-drone has been ART in portable, physical form, something that could be held and touched and could touch back.

Then, when everyone was safe on the shuttle going back to ART-prime; ART-drone, which is still ART... was hurt, and damaged and basically dying. And even though it had some warning when the hand off happened, imagine you're next to your friend and suddenly its just not there anymore, all you have is just an inanimate empty husk beside you

"I create my own when I can"

MY HEART

Leila Chatti, “Tea”

— Here’s What Our Parents Never Taught Us by Shinji Moon       

[text ID: One day you’ll wake up and realize that you are too big for your own skin.]