Writing non-emotion

[Teresa Edgerton]

Perhaps a more important question is why would readers care what happens in your story--that is, have an emotional investment in the outcome, if the POV character has none?

If the answer is that readers probably wouldn't care, then you either have to think of a way to make them care, or, yes, you have written yourself into a corner.

 

[THX1138]

This has a more 'Ghost in the Shell' or 'Ex Machina' feel to it for me. An Ai program self-learning and evolving to become sentient 'human being' AI, and not reveling this until the last moment. But you are taking an approach that has the potential for a twist to the theme.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

ckatt, your problem emerges from the same error that every SF author to my knowledge working in this area has made, namely to use the metaphor of spirit or soul - or whatever other word of "disembodied mental experience" you wish to employ - to describe your scenario. What you describe is impossible, so no wonder you're having difficulty with your character's motivation. There plenty of good books out at the moment describing the fundamental value of feeling to sentience, or consciousness. I'm reading a very good one at the moment, The Hidden Spring by Mark Solms. You could also try Antonio Damasi, and Nicholas Humphrey's new one, Sentience, too.
I might mention that I've made three rebuttals to SF's unfortunate trend in my novels Beautiful Intelligence, No Grave For A Fox, and The Autist.
Emotion is not tied to hormones, as you put it. Emotion is a cognitive evaluation which, owing to the critical importance of the knowledge it contains, always has physical components.

 

[Stephen Palmer]

PS. Altered Carbon is a particularly egregious example of the trend I mean!

 

[JS Wiig]

Why is a calculator compelled to give us the answer to 10+10 without any emotional drivers?

Perhaps your character, knowing their disembodied synthetic consciousness would be unable to pursue emotionally driven paths, introduced some kind of programming into the virtual environment (malware?) that would allow them to do what they needed to do at a time when they knew they wouldn’t have any reason to want to do it?

 

[Toby Frost]

This has a more 'Ghost in the Shell' or 'Ex Machina' feel to it for me.

Me too. I wonder if the effect of having "emotions" is that a person experiences an exaggerated or strictly unnecessary level of feeling in the circumstances. A robot might be very aware that a dog might bite it and should be avoided, but it wouldn't feel fear or worry about it the way a human would, especially when the dog wasn't there. Perhaps one definition of worrying is thinking bad thoughts about something where those thoughts aren't actually helpful.

 

[Montero]

Isn't this all a layered thing - as in you have millenia of evolution that created higher consciousness so at the base is the bit that controls involuntary functions like breathing and then you have the basic reflexes like flight or fright and the sudden release of adrenaline and then above that reasoning. (I'm pretty amateur on this, this is remembered fragments of documentaries.)

 

[THX1138]

Yes, it is pretty much so. But in this case in regard to @ckatt MC, we have a human trapped in a virtual environment with their emotions being stopped externally by the VR program (I think). There for, the MC has memories and experience of emotions. Thus, I would presume, a curiosity as to why they no longer have any emotions, and a drive to find out why? And being that the MC is in a VR environment 'Glitches' will happen that will allow the MC to experience emotions for that brief moment. Adding to the remembered need for 'fight or flight' and escape.

May not be scientific in base, but a possible way to solve ckatt's story problem.

 

[ckatt]

Good morning or night depending on where you are. here the sun is up and I'm reading all the things people have said whilst I slumbered.
I appreciate all the opinions people are bringing but I figured I should clarify a few things as I didn't explain much about my story itself.
This story is dual pov, and only one character is stuck in a virtual environment. This is also not the whole book just one or two chapters.
The one in the virtual environment was killed and now exists as a backup and is trapped in this environment awaiting a new body.

@Teresa Edgerton I hope readers will care because they have become invested in the character before she is trapped and wish to see her get out

Emotion is not tied to hormones, as you put it. Emotion is a cognitive evaluation which, owing to the critical importance of the knowledge it contains, always has physical components.

Thanks for this input Stephen. I think this may make my problem easier to handle. and thanks for the reading recs. I'll be sure to check them out.

 

[tinkerdan]

Aside from the list of resources from @Stephen Palmer ...
There are some things to consider.
If it were possible to separate the consciousness from the body and put it somewhere safe; and then download it to some VR; and then, when a body become available, return it to a body. There are some things that might need consideration.

One being that a lot of emotional reactions have to do with things learned over a period of time.
For instance:
When I was about 8 or 9 years old I witnessed someone in the playground getting smacked in the face by a bat while playing softball. Massively broken nose, yet probably lucky to survive.
Not long after that, another time, after everyone was told to cease activity; I myself ran between two who thought that didn't apply to them and was hit with the bat; I was too tall to get hit in the face but had a sore shoulder for a long time.

fast forward to little league and while up to bat I was struck by a speedball in my shoulder. The patented response to this was, walk it off. Which I tried to do. The next time I was supposed to go up to bat...I couldn't do it. I also had trouble explaining why. Anyway after that I quit little league and really have since never enjoy sports.

There was fear involved and the question is where did that fear reside--I can sort of guess where it came from, but not where it lived.

The point is that some of that might be carried in the consciousness along with some residing along the entire body; the nerves. Yes the body does tend to forget the pain over time, but some of consciousness tends to try to send memories out there sometimes.

Maybe all of this could be summed up with the question, "Why do some amputees' still feel the ends of their fingers or toes".

I would think that your scenario might be much like a dreamer--maybe lucid dreaming--where they at some point will notice something is amiss and wonder what it is and then realize they must be dreaming. At some point they might try to wake up and begin to wonder why they can't. However, VR would be different enough that they might realize it's VR--if they know of that possibility and then conclude that they might not be able to wake up(nowhere to wake up to except some storage unit somewhere). Then the question that might come in here is, "Where does panic reside". I'm not so sure you can take all the emotion out though you might take the feeling out(even so the mind might say, why didn't that hurt, or burn, or even tingle a bit)it might try to force some feeling and maybe at that point comes the panic because what is remembered no longer is.

Wherever the mind is--in a harddrive, in a complex quantum state, or still in the brain--all wired to either or both of those, the condition of that state might determine what they feel or don't feel. If there is no emotion and yet some sort of consciousness then eventually they might question what's wrong with them. Unless they are in some sort of induced dream state then they will try to wake up and if there is no body to generate the feeling of hands and feet and arms and legs they might panic or the consciousness' might try to lull them with some false feelings.
However, I think it will all be based on what their consciousness expects.

[I do think it might be better to store the damaged person in their body in an induced coma until another body is available--makes more sense. However that might negate the fun of having no emotions.]

The lack of emotions would be driven mostly by a lack of coincidence of something being wrong which would suggest that they are deluded by something similar to the effects of some drugs.

Anyway--not all readers will think this far--so good luck with however you decide to drive this.

 

[ckatt]

Thanks for the input

it might be better to store the damaged person in their body in an induced coma until another body is available

This is kind of what is going on. There's more to it but I didn't want this thread to turn into a critique of the plot so I excluded many details. I should point out that the character is aware of what is happening. they know they are in a virtual world. They were hit by a car and suffered major head trauma. Parts of their brain have to be regrown and a backup of their personality and memories is used to rewrite the neural pathways in these new sections. But the character suffers from doubts about whether they are themself or just a copy.

I think the bits of the story I reveal here may make it more confusing. It all makes sense in my head but it's more than I can post here.

 

[Yozh]

Hey, that's a great idea. thanks for the tip.


As I see it, emotion is deeply connected to hormones in our bodies and brains. But without them, would we still have emotional responses?

@Yozh the character is aware that they are in a simulation. But do you think, that is, when you say "a sense of wrongness" do you think that sense is not an emotion?

Ultimately I'm not looking for a solution to a story problem. More so, I want to know what people's off-the-cuff reaction to emotion and biology is. Do we see them as intrinsically linked or is the idea of an unbodied consciousness having emotions easily acceptable and scientifically sound?

I think you can have a sense of "wrongness" that is not an emotion e.g. if you have ever gotten off the elevator on the wrong floor or inadvertently got into the wrong car in the parking lot. The "wrong world" sense is pretty common in fiction also, off the top of my head, in Neil Gaiman's Coraline

Spoiler: Spoiler

when the protagonist starts to question whether "other mother's" house is such a great place after all.

But if your MC knows their in a simulation already, then maybe that whole concept is not relevant.

Personally, I don't think biology and emotion are so inextricably linked, like Mr. Palmer was saying, though the experience of emotion may be different without the usual somatic reactions. Quadraplegics surely have emotions equal to other even though they may be unable to "feel" most of their bodies.

Back in the last century, I took a psychology class where we learned about a study of psychomotor stimulants/depressants on emotional state. The outcome was that the drugs themselves (administered blind) just made a person feel "revved up" or "slowed down," but whether a person interpreted the feeling as, for example joyful excitement or fear or just jitters depended on the ambient circumstances and that person's underlying mood to begin with. That is, the same somatic cues track to different emotions based on personal context. I am sure there must have been more studies confirming or refuting that idea in the past couple decades.

 

[Wayne Mack]

Let's step back and look at this logically. First, the concern is not hormones, it is chemicals in the brain. What these chemicals do is either diminish or augment the reception of electrical signals between neurons. If one eliminates the chemical component in the proposed virtual environment, then the electrical signals would still propagate between neurons. One could still act towards a goal or desire and would not be dissuaded by negative or positive emotions. One still might analyze the danger or risk in a situation and choose or not choose a specific action, but the decision would not be colored by fear of the unknown nor attraction to alternate course of action. It might be interesting to determine how to choose between two equally viable alternatives in this situation.

Another consideration might be replacing the chemical interactions with electronic amplifiers or dampeners to achieve the same result.

I hope this sparks some ideas. This could be an interesting world to explore in a littel more depth than one or two chapters.