The Philosophy of Rick and Morty

Hey guys,

You both just so happen to be posting while I was ready to post my analysis of the pilot. So I guess we’ll argue around that.

Trixie,

What you are calling “consciousness,” I consider an island in a sea of cosmic mind. The boundaries between “me” as my own consciousness and the outer world is illusory. We experience things in all kinds of physical systems all around us–we just can’t know it. It is experienced “unconsciously” so to speak. Of course, this very interpretation of mine has implications for what counts as “we”–“we” ends up just meaning all those experiences which we are consciously aware of having. ← But we are still connected through continuous experience with the rest of the universe.

Yes, inconsequential.

I mean that I don’t think of consciousness (i.e. qualia) as something that requires a functioning brain in order to be had. Consciousness (qualia) is something that comes with any physical system undergoing any kind of activity. The kind of activity it undergoes determines the quality felt in the quale. And whatever the quality, it will project as some aspect of a reality (experienced by the system in question) and will be meaningful to it.

I should say thanks first, I don’t get the show on the channel setup I have.

This is going to sound mad but when I was a glue-sniffing young punk, the onlooker would see me as a dribbling wreck. However, I remember clearly that I could think if anything more intelligently than normal. So the brain is mush, and the intellect is enhanced!

You see consciousness as ‘qualia’? Does e.g. colour experience itself? ergo we can surely think of the experiencing thing as categorically different to the class of non-experiencing things i.e. all qualia, qualities and info.

I think there is something else which communicates between categorically different things, and between one quality or qualia & another, …and between those things and the experience. Info in terms of language, is not the same as physical information, but for us to know it, again there must be a thrid party communicative aspect to the equation.

I don’t know how the projection could be everywhere, but perhaps as physical info is talking to us in English - so to say, that could mean that every perspective point in existence is a projector. but that would infer an observer ~ experiencer, is also at every point?
_

You’re welcome! Are you getting the videos here at ILP all right?

Drugs can perform either enhancement or degradation to the brain’s functioning. Drugs are sometimes prescribed to enhance certain brain functions. Think about the effect caffeine has on the brain. It enhances thinking.

Drugs have one of two effects on neurons: they either 1) increase the neuron’s sensitivity to firing or 2) decrease the neuron’s sensitivity to firing. They increase brain activity or they decrease it. Sometimes increasing brain activity is a good thing, sometimes it’s a bad thing. Same with decreasing brain activity. It all depends on whether you have too much of it in your brain or too little. Sometimes decreasing brain activity is a good thing in itself, other times it’s a good thing because it indirectly increases other brain activity, brain activity that you need more of. Same with increasing brain activity. ← It all depends.

In a manner of speaking, yes. Consciousness, qualia, color (the projection of qualia)–all these things are different conceptions of a single thing–it’s all rolled into one–at least for me. Being conscious of a color, feeling it, is part and parcel of the quale of color itself, essential to what makes it a quale. There is no quale which isn’t felt. So if there is a quale of the color red (say), that quale is felt by itself, it experiences itself. ← But this is to be contrasted with knowing about the quale. The quale of red will feel itself as the existence of red, but that does not mean any knowledge (i.e. any thought) about the existence of red will arise from that. Knowledge (i.e. thought) is a whole other quale and, at least with humans, does arise out of the perception of color, but that’s an artifact of how our brains are wired.

Well, as I said, the “experience” part is essential to what makes it a quale. It only exists by way of being experienced.

Ok, I appreciate your view. If you thought of all these things as separate–the qualia from consciousness from physical existence from info–then you would have to have some conduit in order for any one of these things to affect any other.

Yes, as “experience” is just a synonym of “quale”, but that’s not to be confused with individuation at every point–where “individuation” means a separate being at every point–it still forms a seamless continuum. Individuation in the case of human beings is another story–it has centrally to do with knowledge (as I alluded to above).

What i dont get, is if they are all active projectors at the same time…then what arbitrary mechanism divides and localizes it to me, instead of you?

clearly, they are not all active at the same time, they are only potentially active, and one of them decides to be active at a time, ala in a priority queue, inside of another metatimespace in which it can go backwards and reactivate the others, or none at all, if it so chooses, rendering all of you nonsentients.

What do you mean “localizes” it to you? You mean all the so-called “projectors” ( ← is that like another word for “monad”? ) being localized to you? Like you become all of universal consciousness?

What happens to me? Am I not in the picture?

I can’t really answer your question if you insist that you’re the only one who’s conscious here.

However, there is the question of our individuation. I feel like my consciousness is localized to right her, right now, in me, and anything beyond those boundaries is “other”, but I think these boundaries are an illusion. They are the effect of not all experiences in the universe being known. For example, if you feel pain in your finger, you know you’re in pain. Why? Because the receptor cells in your finger send signals to your somatosensory cortex (where you feel touch sensation and pain), and that in turn sends signals to the cognitive regions, essentially allowing you to think “Ah, I am in pain.” ← That is required for knowledge. But now what happens if a tree falls on the other side of the planet? Will any signals be sent to my cognitive centers to inform me of this? If you’ll grant my theory that subjective experience is had by any physical system, then we would have to say that there was an experience had, which corresponds to the falling of the tree, that did not lead to knowledge of that experience, such that someone could say “Ah, I am feeling X.” What this means is that we cannot be conscious of all the experiences we, as the universe, are having unless the physical activity corresponding to those experiences can directly stimulate our cognitive centers. ← That’s what creates the illusion.

Yes, given that all the projectors are divided and localized to you, this would follow.

Further to my theory that the strange end sequence is a “brainwashing” session on the part of Rick upon Morty, there is a bit more evidence to support it: remember the whole reason Morty was told he had to shove those seeds up his ass in the first place? Because Rick’s portal gun ran out of power. This was supposedly after he spent way too much time partying it up with young girls in the really advanced futuristic dimension, and by then his portal gun was drained (supposedly with enough left over to get back to Morty). But maybe Rick never planned on getting himself and Morty back home through a portal at all. Maybe this was just an excuse to get Morty to shove the seeds up his ass.

There will be a subtle hint of this in Episode 5, Season 2–“Get Schwifty”–where Rick pulls the same excuse about his portal gun being low on juice but this time Morty finds out it’s a crock of shit.

you and me are in different locations of the spiritual timeline, connected through the physical metatimeline.

if i am not you in a past or future life, it is impossible for you to be sentient.

also, you got no evidence trees experience anything in order for us to forget our knowledge of being a tree.

Gib

For sure. On the other hand conscious people are always still ‘people’, I mean that’s true even of severely mentally handicapped. You’re probably right though.

But my TV does have colour, and there is colour in the world which we are seeing, and yet those instances of colour are purely manifest of photonic light. I’d suggest that quale are manifest with respect to the given, and it doesn’t matter if that is human or a device. …they are part of the universe without [aside from] humans [and human experience].

I think the quale are the thing between the experience/r and physical information. Going out on a limb, i’d add that the experiencer is equally affecting - upon quale and possibly/probably info too.

When you say 'feel’? I would think it doesn’t know or experience anything et al, it simply is. You get the physical information denoting red in e.g. that part of a rainbow, and that manifests the quality of redness.

Yes there would have to be ‘something’ which is the third party betwixt all things, an universal entity. It may be simpler to think of it analogously that; the universe is one thing + all types of energy are interchangeable + all particles throughout the universe are communicating and interacting. Ergo there is ultimately one thing which can become all the variety of things, and that oneness must manifest the connectivity where one thing forms into another and so forth.

The ‘thing’ is informed by and informs all things. So you get photonic information which tells ‘it’ to manifest the quale ‘red’, and it does that on the TV screen and also in ones brain, and you see the red qualia.

so what’s on the TV screen and the rainbow?

It seams that the cardinality is at best vague. …but something makes things take shape and denotes limits e.g. of you/others, and there isn’t just space.
_

It’s not an evidence thing. It’s an opinion thing. This is why I don’t try to prove my view to you. I don’t know why you’re trying to prove your view to me. You got no evidence either. Is this something you’ve personally experienced?

A quale is traditionally defined as mental. It’s the seeing of color. No seeing, no quale. What you’re talking about is just the color of the object.

The color of objects in the world can persist from the projections of a mind because it doesn’t only project from the sight of color. It can also project from belief. If you are not looking at your television, you may still believe there are colors X, Y, and Z on the screen, and that belief will project as the colors X, Y, and Z.

Do you think of qualia like different colored bloches of light projecting on the inner surface of a mental bubble, so to speak? And the physical information, as you call it, is outside this bubble of qualia, streaming into it so to speak, telling us what qualia to perceive as parts or aspects of reality?

Yes, and part of what it “is” is feeling–you can’t have it without it being felt. You see, I’m tying consciousness into being itself–consciousness is being. There is no such thing as the unconscious Kantian noumena.

Well, that’s certainly the conventional view.

Exactly!

This part, I disagree with. I don’t think the quale red is added to the TV in addition to the brain. I think the quale red is represented by, not added to, specific brain activity (specifically in areas V1 and V4 of the visual cortex, if I’m not mistaken). Yes, brain activity is a representation of qualia–not a basis, a representation. Qualia (and what they project as) are what’s really going on, and the brain is merely a sensory representation of that (and it too projects as a real brain). As for the TV, it too is a sensory representation of qualia, but not the qualia you see, not the red–the red is already a part of the representation, the TV you see, and is projected by your experience of sight before you as the color on the TV. What the TV itself represents is a whole other system of qualia (the kind TVs experience :smiley:), and its qualities are far beyond our ability to imagine. But, if my theory is correct, the qualia other physical systems around us (like the TV) experience ought to project as whole realities unto themselves and be meaningful to the system in question.

Well, I touched on the TV above. Let me do the same for rainbows.

Rainbows, like the TV, are physical phenomena. As such, they are sensory representations of different systems of qualia being experienced elsewhere in the universe. Why we end up seeing a rainbow (with red and all the other colors) can again be explained by starting with the physics: We see rainbows because sun light diffracts as it passes through prism-like rain drops. Diffraction is the splitting of white light into its colors, thus forming a rainbow pattern. Some of these diffracted beams of light make their way into our eye upon when we see the colors of the rainbow. This process–light diffracting through rain drops–is a physical phenomenon like anything else in the universe, and so it represents a system of qualia being experienced elsewhere in the universe. What it represents specifically is a process by which a set of qualia, which at first is unimaginable to us, transform and metamorphosize, until it not only becomes imaginable, but we experience it as sight. In other words, we experience our senses because other experiences being had by the universe change and transform their qualities (they “flow”) until they just become the experience of our senses. The physical process by which light diffracts through rain drops is the symbol our minds have come up with to represent that process of qualitative mental change.

The you/other dichotomy is a very human one–it’s not intrinsic to everything in nature–it has centrally to do with the fact that we are epistemic creatures. The ability to know about our experiences creates the illusion of a “me”.

Gib

Sorry to make this thread a bit hardcore, if I have? It asks those kind of questions, but I actually think getting stuck into deep philosophy with good thinkers is fun, so I don’t intend that. :slight_smile:

Fair point. Perhaps the experiencer is experiencing photonic quale? [the brain is making what the TV is also making] We wouldn’t expect it to not have a physical presence? I think that if we cut out/off the optics in the brain, there would be no colour to experience, not even to dream of.

On reflection I was wrong in that sentiment, I now think the quality/qualia is directly in the physical info, the experiencer is something which observes that.

It must be something else being the communicative 3rd party, and perhaps that; if we don’t begin with a duality, then there is nothing to divide things to begin with. Ergo communication between the different elements/parties is inherent ~ they are essentially part of or variations of one thing.

Agreed.

no its just the same thing in both cases? Isn’t the brain simply an organic device doing the same manipulations of the same physics? Ok so a TV or computer doesn’t have all the same faculties, nor is anything like as sophisticated, but surely the brain is making colour? So the question is whether or not that product is the same as all other physics in the world, kinda how it all works?

Ah I see; the 'projected realities’are subjective to the given individual thing. So the colour quality we see and that the TV produces are not the same light entities? I think we experience the colour and the TV doesn’t, but I think future tech will have observers, by the same function as we do. Ergo I’d think that all colour properties are that of light, and the red you experience is the same colour property as that in the pixels of the TV, the specific difference would be that one device does not experience that colour property.

I think the rainbow has light properties the same as the TV or brain produces, and there is nothing generated by the observer, it simply observes existent things.

To your last point, the ‘me’ or self etc, contains a perspective based [subjective] observer, which is a reality and not an illusion [though I take your point]. Fundamentally observing is something every existent thing does, so I’d go right ahead and stink of the observer as a real quality of existence. Then with quale converted to properties [e.g. of light], that makes the entire mental process into an objective perspective based system?

_

No worries at all, my friend. I don’t mind my threads being derailed, so long as they produce fun conversation. Of course, I’ll continue to post my analysis of Rick and Morty around these conversation, but I’m not going to stop them.

For the most part, you’re right–no optic nerves, no vision; though there are cases of sensory deprivation in which the subject ends up seeing an amazing light show. I think the occipital lobe, where vision occurs in the brain, has a tendency to “light up” after a while of no signals coming in on the optic nerves. But the point is, there is always some brain activity going on to give us vision and all the qualia that goes with it.

Well, that would definitely be closer to my view–especially about the quality/qualia being directly in the physical info–this fits into my pantheism quite nicely. All physical info is, well, physical, and as I said about physicality above: it is a sensory representation of qualia going on somewhere in the universal mind–or, to put it another way, it is a sensory representation of qualia going on in the physical system itself (i.e. the qualia is the system’s mind).

Now if you take that phrase: qualia being directly in the physical info, and drop the “physical”, you’d be even closer to my view. Physicality is just a representation, remember, and it exists only in the human subjective reality (I shouldn’t say “only”–who knows what other conscious beings out there experience physicality). What it represents is a kind of mental substance (the qualia of other systems’ minds), and I define this substance as a trio: 1) quality, 2) being, 3) meaning. ← It is a “stuff” composed of these three aspects all wrapped up in one. You can see how consciousness ties into being here: it is the stuff of being. And you can also see how info ties into this: “info” is just another word for “meaning”. ← So you can do away with the physics (or rather leave it in its proper place–the human subjective reality) and keep the info. Info is everywhere, melded with being and quality–the stuff of reality.

Yes! What you’re talking about is “flow”–the tendency of mind to be in flux, for qualia to change from one form to another–this is essentially a communication process, mind talking to itself so to speak.

Meaning is always there in experience–it is the info you’re referring to–and it is responsible for the flow of mind. Take a rational thought process, for example:

All grass is green.
All men are grass.
Therefore, all men are green.

The above syllogism is a good example of the flow of thought. One thought enters the mind: All grass is green. Then another thought enters the mind: All men are grass. These two thoughts are qualia just like anything else in the mind. They definitely have a kind of “cognitive” quality (or feel) to them, and they project as something real (truth*) thereby showing that they have being, and of course all our thoughts have a meaning. But now notice that it’s only in virtue of this meaning that we can draw the conclusion in the syllogism above: the meaning in one thought is “All grass is green” and the meaning in the other thought is “All men are grass”, and this allows us to draw out a third thought: “All men are grass”. Meaning begets meaning. This is why our thoughts flow.

(Why flow feels like the passage of time for creatures like us is another matter).

  • I suppose “All men are grass” doesn’t always project as true.

Well, if we start with how I defined the “substance” of mind above, we know that everything is an instance of some quality, some form of being, and some meaning. Red is an easy one. It’s obviously qualitative, and it has being (it’s always experienced as the property of an external object), and it contains a meaning: “the object is red”. ← That’s what red is. If we start by thinking of it as a quale, as something in the mind, then all we need in order to understand it’s relation to red qua physical property is that the latter is simply the projection of the former. As for this quale’s relation to the brain, again, the brain which supposedly produces this quale is not really producing it at all. Rather, it represents the quale. The way this works is as follows: the quale red flows like any other quale (thanks to its meaning), and one of the ways it can flow is by transforming its quality (flow is just change, after all) until it takes on the quality of a specific kind of brain activity–that is, it morphs from the perception of red to the perception of a brain process (the very one that represents the red). And it does flow this way (not all paths of flow are conscious) as evinced by how it works with the physics. The way you end up seeing a brain is by way of light reflecting off that brain and entering your eye. This is a physical process that represents the manner by which the red morphs and flows into the perception of a brain. The transmission of light is the quale morphing.

Right. I would just add that the device has that color only because we project it from our perception of the color.

You mean nothing projected by the observer?

Well, you’re right, the self is ultimately real. If it is experienced at all, it must have being (right?). But my point is we define the self based on the experiences we know we’re having. As I said, it all begins with knowledge. If I have a pain in my hand, and I acknowledge that pain cognitively (Ah-ha! My hand hurts!), then I have just identified an experience and claimed it “mine”. It becomes “my” experience. The self, ultimately, is that which knows about (acknowledges) all its experiences. Not all experience can be known, and so there ends up being a divide between this self which is defined by way of acknowledging experiences and everything else which is not being acknowledged (because it can’t).

The mind generates this experience for itself–the experience of being a “self”–and as such, it projects like any other experience–existence suddenly acquires a “me”.

I’m going with the notion that quale are in the world and not only mental ~ they do exist on the TV screen. I’ve been having a look around at the science on light in the brain, and the links in the below thread, suggests to me that it is exactly the same thing in the brain as on a monitor/TV…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=190446

light may not be the universal medium, but it does a great deal of the communicating between other informational parties.

yes. :slight_smile:

lol did i write this #-o

Well, pretty much everything emits and absorbs photons. From a previous post, I gather you believe the color is “carried” by the photon, correct? With the TV, electron streams turn on tiny florescent lamps, giving off certain frequencies of light. So you believe the color is carried by the photons in this light? How do you suppose it gets there?

Well, I suppose this is where we differ then.

Yep. :laughing: It wasn’t hard to figure out what you meant though, given the context.

If there is a “physical TV screen” in the brain as Daniel’s book suggests…

Consciousness cannot simply “be” inside the neuronal electrical pathways themselves.

For such a thing…could not percieve the actual TV screen, only the 3 dimensional tunnels of the circuits…not the 2d dimensional image itself…Unless
time factored in and it was rendered…all of the microlayers, as an abstraction…
But there would always have to be some outside entity doing the conversion…Ultimately it could not be done by the brain, in the tunnels themselves…

There is a mystic cloud inside the brain…perceiving the brain…the orb, soul, whatever you like to call it…
That is the only rational geometric explanation.

Tv’s emit light waves, this is then converted into electrical waves. The material is different, but their shapefunction is the same.

Sounds emit atom waves, this is then converted into electrical waves. The material is different, but their shapefunction is the same.

The kind of electrical waves in the brain move through the nuerons. Through this method they can be able to be in a format compatible and read by the observer.

The question remains…if the observer is just but an inherent wisp…why is this inherent wisp localized to me…and if each inherent wisp is unique, and not able to be read by me…can it be read at all? Is it simply a case of wiped memory…or the memory never ever occuring? Because thats 7 billion supposedly unique localized wisps that will never read each other, supposedly active…yet only one is active…quite a unique puzzling fog…

I agree with this. Consciousness and all the qualia that compose it are metaphysical. They don’t take place in space, let alone physical objects. But we can say that certain experiences, like vision, correspond to specific neural events.

Yes, if we’re assuming that a conscious being exists in the tunnels of the neural pathways–like a man standing in an actual tunnel.

What do you mean by this? How does time being factored in result in an abstraction of the “conscious bits” (for lack of a better term) which would count as the perception of the image on the TV? Do you mean there would have to be a separate consciousness residing in/around the brain to do the abstracting? If so, it would have to be an unconscious abstracting, for I certainly don’t experience myself deliberately taking the little consciousness bits and drawing out an abstraction of them in order to perceive the TV.

Well, this sounds like what I just suggested. The geometry of your consciousness however (if what you mean is: where consciousness is located) is not really determined by where you experience yourself to be in time and space. Yes, it seems reasonable to suppose that our consciousness exists somewhere within the cranium, behind the eyes so to speak, because that seems to be the point in space where we look out and perceive the world. But this is just the point of view, the origin of our perceptual coordinate system. Our visual experiences need this in order to be, well, vision. But the spatial coordinate system in which we perceive the objects in our world are contained within the visual experience which in turn is generated by consciousness–in other words, consciousness doesn’t reside in space, space resides within it. I do think this is enough to say that the self is located here, but our consciousness, being metaphysical, has no location in space. It’s like a security camera setup in the stairwell of some building. ← Just because the point of view is setup wherever we put the camera does mean the security guard who is watching the stairwell through that camera also exists at that point. Only difference is that the security guard himself is physical, and thus must also reside somewhere in space, but our consciousness is metaphysical, and therefore is not the type of thing to have a spatial location.

What do you mean by “shapefunction”?

Still grappling with the ol’ question of other minds, huh Trix?

Gib

When physical things have a given behaviour, that act changes the energy. Like if you swing a ball on a rope and forces centrifugal/petal ‘appear’, then if you make photons behave at the given wavelength, then colour magically appears also. I can only conclude that the principles and qualities are all part of one thing. So you got colour quale because it is a facet of energy or whatever that one thing is, though strangely the innate or base colour is 100% transparency [e.g. photons themselves are transparent].

Mind I think is also transparent, and when it behaves in a given way perhaps those behaviours also create colour qualities/quale. Whatever the case, you got something affecting light and when that happens you get the respective quality. If mind could also do that then that may explain dreams, although that might also be the brain producing photons. I guess we will eventually have the sophistication of devices to know the answer to that, because that would be measurable.
I would go out on a limb and say that without any light e.g. with the optically blind [like e.g. Maia], then the brain doesn’t produce a light image for the consciousness, and then it appears that the mind equally cannot make its own? Hmm could be a thing of physical info/internal knowledge, the mind has to know what light is and observe its features/colours, such to make images manifest?

_

I would say the visual field has spatial properties, therefore it takes place in it’s own space.

Perhaps this space is not in the same 3d space of the brain, since I don’t think you could put a camera inside the brain and observe the conscious visual field. It could be in some other 3d space or perhaps another dimension branched off located from the same 3d space.

Yes it would be an unconscious mechanism. We aren’t conscious of the men in tunnels, we are conscious of the final result - the collection of the data of the men in tunnels compiled and arranged into a 2d frame format. Time is needed, since even though it is the speed of light it is not in all places at once, it must travel through the tubes.

Actually my original thing was incorrect - I assumed vertical scanline technology, when it could actually be more like a simultaneous projection…thousands of pixels appearing at once, which i shall call pixies. We are not conscious of any one pixie in the the tubes, but all thousands at once.

Could be 50/50. Consciousness might just be receiving. and it could be a fold in space branched off from the 3d space where our brain is that is why cameras cant see it.

They are both sinewaves which have the same functions. just different materials (one material is readable by consciousness, the other isn’t.)

Yes.

All the sinewave is a sinewave that is compressed in different amounts.
Color is a spiritual, not physical property. Same with taste…simply attranging sinewaves and compressing them in different amounts should not create taste…yet some how we taste. My hypothesis is that the spirit actually has an inherent property of taste, which is activated by different code structures. Ie…the sine waves are like codes that are fed into the spirit as input, then the spirit generates the taste. But then we are left at square 1 - what about the spirit causes the inherent property of taste?

The visual field generates its own space.

In my view, the 3d space we are familiar with exists in consciousness. The system of qualia that make up our minds consist of all the experiences you would need to behold a fully layed out spatial extent laying there before you.

That’s interesting. Kind of makes you think of a micro-unconscious.

True, this is possible, but I don’t think the real space “out there” would be anything like the space “in here”–though I believe they would be isomorphic.

So you mean the sinewave motions of neurons are readable by consciousness but the sinewaves motions of sound and light aren’t? Do you suppose sound waves and light waves could be readable by consciousness? ← Could that be what the hippies and astral projectors call “consciousness expansion”?

I’m in the middle of a discussion with Chakra Superstar that I think might help you out, particularly the part about the “density” of consciousness (reminds me of how you described the “locality” of consciousness).

Interesting. Why do you say that?

Well, if we’re done discussing the metaphysics of consciousness and the cosmos, let’s move on to…

Rick and Morty - S1E2 - Lawnmower Dog

Check it out: Rick and Morty - Lawnmower Dog.

This one’s not too exciting. The first few in the series aren’t. They’re kind of getting the point across that these are the kinds of adventures Rick and Morty are going to go on, but they’re kind of isolated and self-contained adventures at first. Later we’ll see some continuity between the episodes, at least continuity of themes and a thicker plot line.

In fact, Rick doesn’t use his portal gun until Episode 5: Meeseeks and Destroy ← That’s when things start to pick up. The first three episodes after the pilot feature other ways besides dimension hopping that Rick and Morty go on adventures, each different, sort of signifying that this isn’t going to be just about Rick and Morty’s crazy adventures through different dimensions.

The current episode, for example, is a spoof on Inception–Rick invents a dream device that, when stuck in Mr. Goldenfold’s ear (Morty’s math teacher), causes him to fall asleep and dream, and meanwhile, similar devices are stuck in Rick and Morty’s ears, and they too fall asleep and dream–the devices coordinating their dreams together such that they experience being in each other’s presence in each of their respective dreams. They go several layers deep in dreams, of course–5 layers deep to be exact (not sure how many layers deep DeCaprio went). ← All to convince Morty’s teacher to give him straight A’s in math so that Rick can continue to pull him from school behind his parents’ backs.

^ But that’s all we’ll ever see of Rick’s inception device throughout the whole series. ← An isolated episode.

While Rick and Morty are gallivanting through dream worlds, Snuffles, the family dog, is getting smarter. Jerry bargains with Rick and convinces him to invent a device that makes dogs smarter (maybe other animals too ← I don’t know). Jerry’s sick and tired of the dog being too dumb to figure out not to pee on the carpet. So after whipping up something in 5 seconds from kitchen utensil and such, Rick comes out with a helmet that, when applied to Snuffles, makes him smarter. Then they go on their inception adventure. While they’re gone, Snuffles gets smarter… and smarter, and smarter, like Lawnmower Man. He eventually invents a walking mobility contraption and a voice synthesizer so that he can speak to humans and possibly overpower them with electronic and hydrolic appendages:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGFev2BmnhE[/youtube]

This happens quite often in sit coms: there’s the main plot line (inception) and then there’s a parallel secondary plot line (lawnmower dog), and the two needn’t have any relation to each other, but in this case, I suspect there is a connection (I can’t quite put my finger on it). The title of the episode is “Lawnmower Dog” even though that subplot is the minor one (or maybe it isn’t, maybe that’s just my perception, but it would be odd if the main characters, Rick and Morty, weren’t involved in the main plot line). Also, after Rick and Morty come back from their dream escapades, securing straight A’s for Morty in math, they go on one more dream escapade into Snuffles’ dream in order to convince him not to enslave humans. ← So there is a connection, but not a “moral of the story” so to speak–they just happen to tie two plot lines together in a trivial/meaningless way.

Actually, come to think of it, the moral might be this: the theme of the Frankenstein Monster will recur more than just a few times in the series. This is one example: Rick invents the intelligence boosting helmet for Snuffles, and while Rick has his back turned, Snuffles becomes a monster. Just like young Victor Frankenstein, Rick completely neglects his responsibility for creating the monster–he obliviously allows it to go so far while he and Morty completely ignore it for the sake of doing something equally irresponsible: helping Morty cheat in school. ← But this is not entirely fair. At least young Victor was aware of the damage he created and ran away from the problem in order to escape his responsibility. Rick, on the other hand, was oblivious during his absence. On the other hand, when they returned, Rick did say to Morty:

“Well, it’s possible that your dog became self-aware and made modifications on the cognition amplifier then turned on Jerry, Beth, and Summer after learning about humanity’s cruel subjugation to his species, but your guess is as good as mine, Morty.”

…indicating that he might have been aware of this possibility all along, but then again, he only whips up this spiel after seeing the dogs surrounding the Smith’s house and shipping boxes in and out. But in the end, Rick does handle the situation (through inception on Snuffles), which, though dampening the theme of the irresponsible Victor Frankenstein, highlights the other theme I mentioned before, namely that for all the damage Rick causes, he still pulls through and saves the day in the end. So maybe the theme is that while Rick’s escapades seem irresponsible on the surface, they can be put to good use in solving the problem that they, in a sense, helped create.

Another major theme that shows up in this episode (unrelated to the Frankenstein theme) is Jerry’s arrogance–we catch a glimpse of Jerry’s character in this episode (presumably to set the stage for how we’re supposed to feel about Jerry throughout the series) as kind of having a “master” mentality with respect to Snuffles (and by implication, with respect to his entire estate–including wife and children ← You know, the man of the house). This is not to be confused with Nietzsche’s master morality, which might be more characteristic of Rick, master of his own destiny. But Jerry is definitely portrayed in this episode as the cruel master over a victimized Snuffles. This theme actually picks up and goes to extremes, touching on political issues like slavery and racism.

After creating a whole supply line of intelligence enhancing dog helmets, Snuffles manages to form an organized army of dog rebels, all of whom have, so to speak, awoken to the horrible truth of their state of slavery, and work almost effortlessly towards overtaking the White House and (we are to presume) all humanity. If Rick represents the Conservative’s hero: the capitalist, then Snuffles represents the typical stereotype of the Liberal (seen from the point of view of the conservative creators of Rick and Morty, or so I speculate)–in a position to righteously rebel against an evil oppressor.

In an effort to play the dogs at their own game, Jerry thinks he has a clever strategy. He walks in front of their guns, stock piled in the corner of the Smith’s house, whips open his fly and pees on them, saying “See that?! I’m peeing all over your special guns! That means I own them!” ( ← Kind of homoerotic, now that I think about it… wait til we get to Total Rickall). But this does nothing but subject his face to being shoved by Snuffles into his own pee, as Jerry did to Snuffles at the beginning of this episode. ← To me, this hinted at Jerry’s faith in stereotypes, adding to his arrogance.

Morty, on the other hand, is seen in this episode in a whole other light. While Jerry is pictured as the cruel slave-driving master, Morty is pictured as Snuffles’ only friend. He protects Snuffles from his dad when Jerry pushes Snuffles’ face into his own pee, and near the end, Snuffles tells Morty that he will spare his testicles while the rest of the world will be neutered and that Morty will be his best friend and sit by his side. Morty reluctantly accepts, on the one hand feeling relieved, but on the other, worrying for his family. ← Morty here is depicted as the only worthy person, morally speaking, and this will show in later episodes. If Rick is the hero we look up to and want to be, Morty is the character we love and want to praise.

Anyway, to wrap it up, Rick and Morty come back from their successful mission to get Morty straight A’s in math to find themselves stuck in the middle of a dog rebellion, and being kept hostage in the Smith’s house. Rick comes up with the ingenious idea of incepting Snuffles with the idea that the superior thing to do, the high road to take, would be to let the humans free and find a better world in which to live using Rick’s dimension hopping portal gun ( ← So I lied–Rick does use his portal gun in this episode, but not to go on one of his crazy adventures… and technically we only see the portal’s open, not Rick using his gun.) ← So there you go, Rick comes back to find the mess that he’s made and uses his inception technology to clean it up.

(Not sure what Mr. Goldenfold did with the inception device stuck in his ear, or Snuffles for that matter, or when they found it–assuming they did at all–and it makes me wonder: did they ever explain this in the actual movie Inception, or did people just wake up not noticing the thing in their ear.)

Finally, I just wanted to point out that while this episode counts as the first “isolated” adventure, it is continuous with the first in the sense that this one in particular is a kind of “preliminary” adventure. Rick has to find a way to fill Morty into the roll of side-kick without his parents finding out he’s pulling him from school, which is a condition Jerry and Beth imposed on Rick at the end of the pilot, and in reaction to which Rick sarcastically placated Jerry with the “you’re the man of the house” bit. ← Well, he had reason to be sarcastic. But more to the point, this inception thing turns out to be a preliminary necessity that got in the way because Morty’s parents found out he was missing school–Rick wouldn’t have done this otherwise.